Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're taking a look
at a four-shot Indian repeating matchlock.
A "toradar" I think is the pronunciation.
And in the ... early development of firearms,
repeating arms, or multi-shot arms, came about
virtually as soon as single-shot firearms.
And they were always there side by side together.
Now repeating or multi-shot guns have always been a lot less common
than their single-shot counterparts,
simply because they were more complicated and more expensive.
And a lot of people didn't think that the trade-off was worthwhile.
However, they've been around just as long as single-shot guns.
So what we have here is a cylinder of four chambers, each with its own pan cover.
And you can fire one and then rotate the whole thing, kerchunk,
and have another shot lined up and ready to go.
Firearms like this actually were popular in India longer than most other places.
Or I should say, matchlocks in particular.
This particular one dates to probably the late 1700s, maybe the early 1800s.
By which point of course matchlocks were technologically obsolete,
but they were still relatively cheap and easy to make.
And they were still in fairly common use in parts of India.
These originally showed up as early as the early 1500s,
and the repeating varieties show up as early as the 1600s in India.
So this is pretty distinctive of an Indian pattern matchlock,
although the buttstock is a bit of a different style.
So let me go ahead and show you some of these elements up close.
The matchlock is really the earliest and simplest style of firearm.
And the way it works is just that you pack gunpowder and a projectile into the chamber.
You then have a pan with some ... finer grain priming powder.
And then you literally have a burning match or wick.
And when you pull the trigger, ... we have a trigger down here,
it's going to push that wick into the priming pan, set off that powder.
And that powder will detonate the main charge which fires the projectile.
There are a couple of different styles of these.
So the European ones tend to (and this is all very generalised),
the European ones tend to have the match held out here.
When you pull the trigger it comes down towards the shooter.
Where the Asian styles tend to have the match held back here,
and have it move forward upon pulling the trigger.
There are some slightly more sophisticated versions of matchlocks
that have a setup more like a flintlock, where there is a spring on the cock here.
And when you pull the trigger it releases that, which snaps down under spring pressure.
This one , ... there is a flat spring inside here, but ... it's just a lever.
The ... farther I pull the trigger, the farther down that wick goes. So very simple.
Now with this particular repeating design,
we have a central arbour, axis pin, running through the middle of this.
This is, by the way, really huge. I don't know what powder charge
they were planning to put in this, but it may have been pretty substantial.
Or, it may have been designed around relatively poorly made and not very powerful gunpowder.
At any rate, each one of these chambers has a little gate
so that you can put a priming charge in it,
and then close that pan cover to keep it protected.
Also because at any given time two of these are on their side, and one of them is upside down.
There is a flat spring out here that sits into one of these little rounded notches.
You don't have to try to lift it up,
when you go to rotate the chambers it just lifts up out of its notch.
So you can rotate that, that spring will snap it into position behind the barrel.
And you can then open the next pan cover, fire the next charge.
Rotate it again, and so on.
There is a bit of decorative embellishment that was done on here, which is kind of cool.
So mostly just on this rotating chamber assembly, right there.
And pretty much the same thing on each of the flats between.
We have a little bit of decorative metal work around here.
The barrel itself is just plain.
We have a bit of sort of a canon style of muzzle out here.
And it does actually have a front sight on it.
This is .60 calibre and smoothbore.
The barrel itself is a significant, whopping, 40 inches long.
The buttstock is a little different than most of the Indian matchlocks
that you will see in museums and collections.
Typically they actually have just a very simple, straight,
almost a spar sort of a stock, coming off the back.
This one has a curved, very much ... an Afghan jezail style of stock.
Of course there were many influences on Indian firearms production
from both East and West, and this sort of thing is not surprising to see.
Now there are what appear to be rear sights on each of the chambers,
but I'm not sure how those are actually supposed to work.
Because if you try and get a sight picture with those,
you are staring straight into that latch spring that holds the chambers in place.
Now there is what appears to be
something like a buckhorn style of rear sight on that spring latch.
But ... I don't know exactly what your sight picture is supposed to be.
The front sight is just a ... simple bead.
Where exactly you line that bead
in that rear sight, ... well, I don't really know.
But this probably isn't the world's most accurate weapon anyway.
I always enjoy taking a look at what would be considered the
heavy-duty firepower from the early age of firearms.
Pretty cool to look at things like this, which then led to
things like Collier flintlock revolvers,
which of course ultimately led to Colt's self-indexing revolvers.
So hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.