Reproduction 1877 "Bulldog" Gatling Gun
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video episode on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, and today we have a really cool thing in store,
we have a reproduction of an 1877 Bulldog Gatling Gun that we are going to
set up and do some shooting on.
Looking forward to this, should be very cool. This is in .45-70.
This is arguably one of the best versions of the Gatling Gun.
And we've got it here still in the crates because I think a lot of people don't appreciate
just how stupid heavy this stuff is. So we're looking at probably
250 to 300 pounds worth of gear here that we have to pull out. So we figured we'd
show you it packed up, and then get started with some assembly.
This is the cradle assembly.
So, this locks in with the ball inside this brass piece.
So to put it in, you have to slide it up and then drop the trunnions.
[inaudible]
There's your crank handle. Now one of the interesting things about the Gatling mechanism,
the way this is set up, is that this nut is actually what adjusts your headspace.
The tighter this gets, the farther it pushes the whole bolt and rotating assembly against the breech faces.
So we have this button right here,
push that down. We have headspace already marked on this gun, set it right there.
But if you get into a situation where the gun gets dirty or gets very hot, you simply push the button in
and unscrew ... It's set on a set of clicks, or notches,
and you unscrew to increase the headspace until the gun functions right again.
So, Dr. Gatling invented this gun in the early part of the Civil War,
and it's interesting that his very first model was put together really before
metallic cartridges had become mainstream. And the very first models, instead of using cartridges,
he used a series of reusable chambers.
So you'd have a steel chamber about yay long, and pack it with powder and ball,
and then you'd actually have a magazine feed of those chambers.
And after the gun fired it would drop the empty chamber out and someone would have to
pick those up and reload them in order to keep shooting the gun.
That obviously didn't work very well, it had a lot of problems with gas sealing,
and it just wasn't a real efficient mechanism. So pretty quickly
Gatling revised this to use the new metallic cartridges that were just coming onto the scene.
Now by this model, the 1877, they'd really perfected a lot of the Gatling system.
And so we can take a look here and see how it works. It's impressive that this is really a very simple gun,
and very reliable especially given its age and when it was developed.
This is the feed magazine. You can put a box [block] of 20 cartridges up here,
and the rims are caught in these two grooves. You put a box in, bring it down, pull the box off,
and then you have manually selected two columns of cartridges to feed from.
Inside the gun we have a latch right here that we can pull open.
And as I crank the handle, what Gatling did is he had a bolt for each individual barrel.
And as you crank the gun, the bolts all ride in cams,
and so each bolt is doing a different task at the same time.
The gun obviously loads here vertically from the top, where the magazine is,
and then it is over the process of about not quite half a revolution, the cartridge is chambered,
it's fired at about the 7 o'clock position down in the bottom of the gun.
For the next third of a turn or so, the cartridge is ... extracted,
and then right about here the empty case is ... ejected out the side of the gun.
There are a number of advantages to a system like this.
Primarily if you have a cartridge that doesn't fire, it simply continues through the process,
gets extracted and thrown out, whereas a gun with a single bolt would have a malfunction
often if ... a cartridge misfired. The Gatling just eats a misfire, throws it out and keeps going.
Now disassembly.
By 1877 they had added this slick system to make disassembly very easy on the gun,
a plug on the back of the case.
So you pull this plug out, and then we can line up
a bolt, and the bolt simply slides out the back of the gun, and this is all there is to it.
We have a firing pin (this one's nice and greasy), we have an extractor,
and a nice big guide rod that the bolt runs in. So really a very simple gun.
These were very reliable in the field, unlike a lot of repeating guns of the 1860s and 1870s.
The Gatling was quite the success.
In fact there was one military test done on a single Gatling that fired 100,000
rounds of ammunition in a 3 day testing period.
Basically without parts breakage or malfunction, which is impressive by anyone's standards.
Right, well let's load this up and see what it's like to shoot.
Alright so as I was saying a wooden cartridge block sets our ammunition up,
and I put it right there, slide it down, then we can pull the block off.
There we go, 20 rounds ready to go.
So normally while you are doing this you would have an assistant gunner loading,
while the gunner is shooting, to keep the gun fed.
We just have me in front of the camera here, so.
So, as you may have probably noticed, the Bulldog model here has the crank handle
on the very back of the gun, where most Gatlings are on the side.
This was done for mechanical simplicity. This can be connected directly to the whole mechanism,
where the side mounted guns had to have a gear reduction involved.
The other side effect of doing that is that these Bulldog guns are capable of a higher rate of fire
than the earlier side handle Gatlings, simply because there isn't a gear reduction.
So every revolution of that handle will fire five shots.
In theory, with a practiced operator, and assuming you have a loading crew that can keep up with you,
one of these guys can put out right about 1,000 rounds a minute, and
that was in 1877, which was quite a technological feat.
So I'm gonna go ahead and run this one as fast as I can smoothly, because it sounds really impressive.
Based on counting frames of film, this burst was going at 880 rounds/minute... let's watch it again
So once we're all done in order to safely clear the gun, it's important that like,
in fact, like some later machine guns, it's possible to have live cartridges in the gun
but not visible from the top, because they're part way through the cylinder cycle,
what you can do is actually crank the gun backwards
which will have the same extraction process in reverse, and it will not trip the firing pins.
Now this wasn't a feature on the original guns, but it is on these reproductions,
and it's an important safety factor as such.
So I have in fact shot this one dry. If I had not, cranking backwards like that
would throw any leftover cases out the side of the gun.
You should also be aware, the owner of this particular gun has a second one of these reproductions
that he is interested in selling. So if you're in the market for something awesome like this,
drop us a line and we'll put you in touch with him.
Thanks for watching guys.