Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the James Julia Auction House
up in Maine. I'm checking out some of the guns
that they have coming up for sale in their
October of 2015 auction.
And they have an example of a very rare gun
that uses a very rare operating system.
This is one of the very few examples of
blow-forward automatic pistols that are out there.
Now the most common of them is the Schwarzlose 1908.
I actually have one of those, ... we've done a bunch of slow-motion video on those, they're pretty cool.
But the earliest of them is actually the Mannlicher Model of 1894.
Now Ferdinand Mannlicher, ... I've heard him referred to as the John Browning of Europe,
and that's not really a bad description.
He was an Austrian fellow, and he designed a whole slew of different guns, very creative mind.
The packet loading, what we call en bloc in the US,
is generally called a Mannlicher-style clip in Europe.
And of course that was his idea, put all the rounds in a single clip,
stuff the whole thing in the gun, and the clip comes out when it's empty.
... In some ways it's a better system than the Mauser-style stripper clip
that ended up getting used more often.
Anyway, Mannlicher developed straight-pull rifles,
he developed packet loading, he developed all sorts of stuff.
And one of his very early guns was this blow-forward automatic pistol.
So there were two versions of this made, they both work the same way,
but one is in a 7.8mm cartridge and one is in a 6.5mm cartridge.
This is ... an example of the 6.5.
It ... has a single digit serial number, and they only made about 100 of each gun.
... It was trialled by a number of countries.
In fact these were tested by the US military when they were looking for a handgun.
Nobody ended up adopting them though,
for reasons that we'll make clear in the next few minutes.
It is a blow-forward action.
So the ... friction of the bullet travelling down the bore pulls the barrel forward with the bullet.
When the barrel goes forward it pulls off the cartridge, that allows the empty case to eject.
A new cartridge pops up behind it.
When the barrel gets pushed back under spring tension it drops over the new cartridge,
and it's ready to fire again.
Now why don't I bring the camera back, let's see that in a little bit more detail,
and I'll explain why this thing ended up forgotten, basically, and unadopted by anybody.
So the cartridge that this guy used, in fact both of them, were kind of unusual in construction.
They are basically a straight-wall cartridge, with a remarkably large projectile for the calibre.
So in 6.5mm it used a 79 grain bullet, went about 735 feet per second.
So not a pipsqueak round, but nothing we would consider all that remarkably powerful today.
However, that 79 grain bullet ... that's pretty heavy for a 6.5mm pistol, think about that in a .25 Auto.
So these were made by SIG in Neuhausen, and they are extremely well-made guns.
Especially considering that all 200 of them are basically prototypes.
The action works pretty simply, it is single action or double action.
So I can cock the hammer if I would like, or I can fire it double action.
There is a hammer rebound, so that you can carry it safely with a round chambered.
And then we have this nice textured surface here on the barrel.
So what we would do is push the barrel forward like so.
You can see the magazine follower, right here.
You have a 5 round internal magazine, and there's a stripper clip guide here at the back.
Now one interesting dilemma that you run into with a blow-forward pistol and a stripper clip
is that you cannot use the clip to hold the bolt back,
because the bolt's not back, the bolt's forward. In this case the barrel.
So Mannlicher has this interesting little side note in the design
where, if I hold the trigger back, the barrel is locked open and stays open.
And I'm pretty sure that's there so that I can then load easily with a stripper clip.
So when I lock the barrel open, now I can put in a clip.
I can ... load all 5 rounds in.
So there's our follower, I would be pushing that down.
And then when I release the trigger the barrel snaps back,
it chambers a cartridge, and it's ready to fire.
So we have our hammer held back here.
That's a good safety mechanism so it doesn't slam fire when it hits.
... In that way, this gun is similar to the Schwarzlose,
where the Hino Komuro is ... effectively an open bolt gun with a fixed firing pin.
This has the firing pin back here on the hammer.
So once you've fired, the cartridge is actually held in place by the rim
on the little rails back here below the stripper clip guide.
It's kind of a hard thing to get a good view of.
And you then have a little catch on the top that prevents the cartridge from riding up
under the force of the magazine spring.
That catch is kind of like the catch on a Maxim lock.
Anyway, the cartridge head is held pretty securely
against the breech face here ... in these two grooves.
And of course once you fire, the barrel gets pushed forward off of it.
Then a new round is pushed up by the magazine spring.
And when I release the barrel, when the barrel comes back,
it simply rides over that new cartridge, forces it into the chamber,
and stuffs it back up against the breech block ready to fire again.
Now, ... the first problem was in US military testing they had some problems with the ammo,
they had some failures to fire.
And then on the 281st round of their 500 round endurance test
the barrel exploded, the barrel burst.
And they decided not to try and get a replacement barrel,
they just dropped the gun from the testing.
And the reason for that was even if it had passed that endurance test,
it had this major problem of the Army didn't find it to actually be any more effective
or faster of a gun than the standard revolver.
So to load it with stripper clips, they didn't see as that much different than reloading a revolver.
It only held 5 rounds instead of 6.
It was a double action gun just like the revolver.
... It's a little bit awkward, it's a little bit heavier.
They didn't see any advantage to it over a typical revolver of the day.
And you know what? It's hard to find any issue with that, they are kind of correct.
Cutting-edge technology, which this absolutely was in 1894,
isn't always better than the stuff that it's replacing
that has been perfected over the course of many decades.
One other thing I want to point out, ... this looks like a very awkward gun to handle.
I'll tell you what, the 7.8mm version is bigger and heavier, and is a little weird.
The 6.5mm here actually fits the hand fairly well.
It looks like it's very tall, but this back strap - it actually fits.
I have seen some suggestions that it was supposed
to be fired with the middle finger like this.
That kind of works too, but I don't really have any trouble dry-firing it anyway,
or mock firing it, just with a normal trigger finger like this, so.
A lot of these early pistols had kind of awkward looking designs,
because, hey, at this point nobody knows what an automatic pistol is supposed to look like.
Nobody knows exactly what's going to work the best.
The sights are kind of a holdover from revolver days there,
little bitty teeny sights there. They do work.
Well, thanks for watching guys, I hope you've enjoyed the video.
This is of course coming up for sale here at James Julia.
So, if you take a look in the text description below
you'll find a link to the catalogue page on this particular gun,
where you can see Julia's high-res pictures, their cataloguer's description and so on.
And you can go ahead and place a bid online for it,
or you can come up here to Maine and participate in the auction yourself.
You don't very often get a chance to own one of these guns,
and I think someone's going to go home very happy with this in October.
Thanks for watching.