Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I am Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island Auction House,
I'm taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be
selling in their upcoming February of 2016 Regional Auction.
Now one that jumped out at me here in
the rifle racks was this 1870 pattern Berdan rifle.
Now most people in the US are probably going to recognise
Hiram Berdan for his involvement in the US Civil War.
He was a general, and ... he's well known for Berdan's Sharpshooters,
a group of early snipers. And frankly many other things.
Well, Berdan also dabbled in firearms design. And one of his major clients was Imperial Russia.
So Berdan had two major rifle designs, the Model of 1868 and the 1870.
Now the 1868 was, you could think of it basically like a Trapdoor Springfield style of rifle,
where the breech block pivoted open, load a cartridge.
It was a good design for converting existing muskets, that sort of thing.
It was never ... nearly as popular as what's come to be known as the Berdan II rifle, which was this 1870 pattern.
So this is actually a bolt action rifle.
Very much in the style of early bolt action rifles, it has a single locking lug, which is the bolt handle here.
We'll take a look at that a little more closely in a moment.
And these rifles were found and liked by the Russian Empire. The Russians actually,
probably a lot of folks in the US aren't familiar with it, but in the ... latter half of the 1800s
Russia was doing a lot of armament upgrading. And they sent some emissaries to the US to look for good
... small arms technology that they could adopt and use. And one of the famous things that they found was the Gatling gun.
Now the Russian ordnance officer who came to the US and who went back and set up production of a lot of these guns,
was a fellow named Gorlov. And in Russia the Gatling actually became known as the Gorlov Gun,
associated with his name. The Russians produced a great many Gatling guns.
Well, they also ... found the Berdan rifle here very appealing.
And in total they ended up making something like three million or more of these Berdan II 1870 pattern rifles.
This was the standard arm of the Russian Imperial Army until the adoption of the Mosin-Nagant in 1891.
So, couple things. This was a black powder rifle of course, dating from the 1870s.
It is a .42 calibre, so in Russian parlance we would call this a 4.2 line rifle,
the line being a unit of measurement equal to a tenth of an inch.
In metric, this would be 10.67x58 rimmed.
Like I said, it was a black powder cartridge. Standard loading on it was a 370 grain bullet
which was fired at a little over 1,400 feet per second. That's a 77 grain charge of black powder, so.
But a pretty typical early black powder, large bore, military cartridge.
Kind of an interesting historical amalgamation of figures involved with this rifle.
Of course, the design was from an American, Berdan.
... The first purchases actually came from BSA in the United Kingdom,
they bought about 30,000 of these rifles manufactured there.
And they also bought the tooling to manufacture these rifles from England.
And once that tooling came over several years later, then they were able to set up Russian Imperial factories
to start production of these rifles. So the first was the Tula plant which started production in 1874,
followed by the Izhevsk plant which started production in 1878.
And it was those Russian factories that produced the huge quantities of these rifles that would eventually be made.
So among all of these rifles there are actually three different sizes, three different variations.
There was the infantry rifle which is what we have here. And then there was also a cavalry version,
and a Dragoon version. Now Dragoons are basically mounted infantry.
So guys who use horses for transportation, but when they go into combat
they leave the horses behind and they march into combat.
So Dragoon rifles were typically an intermediate length gun, a little bit shorter for easier carry on horseback.
But they didn't have to be so short as to be fireable from horseback like a cavalry carbine.
So all three versions were made of the Berdan rifles. Like I said, this is an infantry pattern.
The infantry pattern is also interesting for having early volley sights on it.
... We'll take a closer look at those in a minute as I said,
but there's a notch here on the rear sight and there's a little front sight spike post
on the front barrel band that you use for a volley sight.
These were used heavily in a number of wars. The first one really being the Russo-Turkish war where, unfortunately for the Russians,
these didn't really turn out to work quite as well as the Martini-Henry rifles that the Turks had.
But of course they stayed in Russian service.
They were used in World War One, a ... large number of them were captured by
Austro-Hungarian forces, and sometimes used in their original 10.7mm cartridge,
some of them were also converted to the Austro- Hungarian 8x50 rimmed smokeless powder cartridge.
You're looking at kind of dubious strength of this action for doing something like that, but it was done.
After the Russians had adopted the Mosin-Nagant, about 200,000 of these
were actually converted in Belgium for the 7.62x54 rimmed cartridge.
That, if I can get my hands on one of those, that would be a very cool follow up video.
In order to do that safely they actually had to redesign a new two lug bolt head for these rifles
to allow them to stand the pressure of 7.62x54 compared to the original black powder loading.
So, these are fairly uncommon rifles to find in the United States, despite the fact that so many of them were originally made.
They have a pretty rich combat history in Russia, and I think they're a very interesting rifle.
Why don't I bring the camera back here, and let's take a quick look at the bolt up close.
It's got an interesting disassembly method that I want to show you.
Alright, so here is our Berdan rifle action. This is a cock on closing bolt.
So bolt cycles open, you would drop a cartridge in there and then close the bolt.
And at this point right here, the sear catches back here
and then the rest of the closing of the action is done against spring tension. So we push that forward, rotate it down.
It is somewhat unusual in that it only only moves about 45 degrees over to lock. This is fully locked.
So the bolt handle here acts as our single locking lug, which for an early black powder round like this is just fine.
You can actually see a bit of a gap there, that would be to accommodate the rather large rim of the case.
And then when you pull the trigger
the back half of the bolt drops, that drops the ... firing pin, and fires the cartridge.
Opening it is very simple, when you open this it cams the
firing pin spring open slightly, and then we can pull it back.
Now to remove the bolt you have to do something a little bit unusual, which is neat.
Typically it would be pulling the trigger and holding the trigger down while you pull the bolt out,
that's how this typically works.
However, I'm going to use ... once again my universal gun disassembly tool here,
What we actually need to do to pull this out is,
you can see we have this little hook on the bottom, the ejector there,
we're going to push down on that
with my tool here. And then the bolt slides out the back of the gun.
I'm not going to pull this all the way apart, you would do that by taking out the screws of course.
But we have our firing pin spring tensioned inside there. And you can see a nice mechanical safety
such that when the bolt is
straight in line like this. Which means
that the bolt handle would have to be upright, so not locked, the firing pin is cammed backwards
... inside the bolt head.
So the ... firing pin can only protrude out and fire the cartridge when the bolt handle is
rotated over about 45 degrees and locked.
That is the built-in mechanical safety for this rifle to prevent it from firing out of battery.
So our extractor is up here on the top, the ejector was on the bottom.
That's what the case hits when you pull it back, and that flips it out the top of the rifle.
Not a whole lot else going on here. There is no ... manual safety on the gun.
Because of course it's a single-shot rifle, so if you want to render it safe, take the cartridge out.
I have also mentioned the volley sights. Well, here is the rear notch for our volley sight.
What you do is take this sight, lift it up, and then you have graduations on the back of the rear sight here.
So this can be raised or lowered on the rear sight here. This goes out to 2,200.
By the way, that would be 2,200 arshins, which was the standard Russian unit of measurement at the time.
An arshin being equivalent to three- quarters of a yard [28 inches to be exact].
Now for the front end of our volley sights we have this spike on the side of the front barrel band.
Alright, so here we have the front volley sight in focus. And if I bring the focus back to the rear sight
(right to there), you kind of get an idea for what you're looking at.
Last but not least, I do want to point out that these rifles were made for the Russian Tsar,
and so they do have a Russian Imperial Eagle here on the receiver crest.
That's something you will see on most Nagant rifles as well, until 1917 when the Tsar was overthrown.
Well, thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed the video.
If you would like to own this rifle yourself, it is coming up for sale here at Rock Island.
It is part of a lot, as are many of the guns in the regional auctions like this one.
So if you take a look in the description text below, you will find a link to the catalogue page for the lot that
includes this rifle. Check out the pictures of it and the other guns that come with it,
and if you decide you'd like to have them yourself,
place a bid online, or you could even come down here in person to participate in the auction.
Thanks for watching.
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