[ Rotary Single-Shot Percussion Rifle ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to Forgotten Weapons' sister channel:
"Hey guys, come take a look at this weird thing."
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
with this weird thing.
Check this out, this appears to be a turret rifle.
I should say, I have no idea who made it, there are no markings on it, there is no provenance to it,
it's just mechanically rather strange.
Anyway, it looks like a turret rifle, it is actually a single-shot rifle.
And in order to load it, you do ... that to it.
Like I said, let's take a look at this strange thing.
At a glance it really does look like a turret rifle, especially from the top.
I mean, why on earth would you have this big round thing,
if it's not a turret full of multiple charges?
Well in fact it is not. This is a single-shot, under-hammer, percussion rifle.
So the forward trigger here is actually used to cock it, that is the hammer.
You'll see the percussion cap nipple down in there in a moment.
But to cock it you pull that back and it snaps into place.
And then this one is your firing [trigger].
I don't want to drop that on the cap nipple.
We've got a nice long trigger guard to protect both of those.
We'll get to the mechanical bits in a moment, but we'll knock this out of the way first.
Sort of a Kentucky long rifle style of stock.
One of these very aggressively pointed butt plates, nice pattern to the wood.
... Got some repairs there to the stock.
And then the barrel has a rear sight here that flips up.
That is very much just a big ol' V notch.
And one tiny little octagon section. ...
Barrels in this period were, often as not, supplied as ... square bar.
And you could cut the corners off, turn them into octagons fairly easily.
If you wanted a round barrel, that required a lot more machining
because you had to turn the octagon down to be round.
And so someone actually wanted that on this barrel, but they left this little chunk
octagonal so that they had a nice flat place to mount the rear sight.
There is nothing else on the barrel until we get to the very end,
where we have this little blade of a front sight.
It is smoothbore,
and it is approximately .44 or .45 calibre.
But what we have going on here is a separate metal cylinder that's inside this.
I'll take this apart in a moment, but to give you an idea here before we do,
it's currently lined up with a chamber facing the barrel.
This is the loading port. So the reason for breaking the gun 90 degrees like this
is so that I can line up ...
(let me show you this a little bit better, there you go).
Now you can see right there, that is the actual chamber in the gun.
So when you have it at 90 degrees like this,
your loading port gives you access to the chamber. You can drop in your powder charge,
press in the ball or bullet,
and then you put a percussion cap here on the nipple.
And then you can pivot this back into position.
That has now sealed off the chamber so it's pointing that way down the barrel, and you can fire.
So, let me pull these two screws out, and we'll take this apart, and I think it'll make a lot more sense.
Alright, so there's our second screw.
We have this little spring cover plate that's going to come off.
And then ...
there we go.
So now here is the actual base of the gun with these two plates, top and bottom.
And then this guy is our actual breech.
So there is the hole that you would load with powder and ball.
These two holes are what our two screws go through
so that this is always locked in position relative to the frame of the gun.
It's always sitting like this.
You then rotate the barrel, and its access port, and its percussion cap hole here.
This you rotate around this central cylinder.
So that's where you load it.
Now the percussion cap hole is actually open clear through the back of this thing, right there.
So the percussion cap is there, it's going to ... shoot some fire through here into that,
set off the main charge, which then goes down the barrel.
So a rather convoluted way to do a single shot rifle, but OK, there it is.
Now, where this gets a little more interesting is you can see this lug on the frame here.
And there's no point to it, it's just capped off with a screw and it doesn't do anything.
It does go all the way through to the top.
And then on the bottom of this cylinder there are these four holes,
which also do nothing at all that I can discern.
However if we put this in - our main cylinder lines up like that,
guess what: those holes, one of them at least, lines up very nicely with this lug.
I suspect that this was a gunsmithing project
that was originally going to be some sort of turret-ish, multi-shot thing of some sort.
And I think the gunsmith got working on this part
where you would have four ways that you could index this thing.
And then decided that something wasn't going to work quite right.
Exactly what I don't know, maybe he didn't make this large enough in diameter
to actually accommodate four chambers of any useful depth.
That actually seems pretty clear.
This one chamber is deeper than you would get on almost any turret rifle,
and it would be reasonably powerful.
But if you tried to have multiple charges in this they'd be very wimpy,
because they could only go in about that far.
Or maybe there was some entirely other purpose to this.
But it looks like this and this plug were originally intended for the same purpose.
Not sure what that purpose is, but something.
And when that failed, they kind of went back and accepted just a single-shot system instead.
A very interesting, very unusual, single-shot system.
But I think that is what was going on there.
Anyway, ... let's see, line this up, you want the little divot in the front there.
When you rotate this: there's access to your chamber, and there it is sealed up.
Well, if you've ever seen one of these before, please let me know down in the comments
if you have any idea what its provenance might actually be.
Barring anyone showing up with a really cool,
detailed, documented story behind something like this,
it will unfortunately remain a complete mystery.
But it never ceases to surprise me how people always come up with
different ways to achieve this end of firing a projectile out of a barrel.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.