[ Needlefire Knife-Pistol ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning into another video on Forgotten Weapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today I am at the
Rock Island Auction House taking a look at
a couple of the guns they're going to be selling
in their upcoming December of 2017 Premier Auction.
Amongst them, this combination knife, pistol and corkscrew.
You can probably guess what country it's from.
What's really interesting about this is
most of the time when you find this sort of device
of this vintage, and this ... one is
late 1860s into early 1870s period,
usually when you find these they're pretty much always percussion-fired pistol barrels.
This one however is a needle fire. It is a little tiny miniaturised Chassepot bolt-action
on a pocketknife. You want to see it up close?
A lot of the guns of this sort of style are really pretty cheaply made, pretty flimsy sorts of things.
Even if they ... were well made in the first place
they're all close to 150 years old (100 years old at least), and many of them have not aged well.
This one is actually kind of an exception to that.
This thing was obviously very nicely made in the first place, we have polished horn,
we have mother-of-pearl, steel, and German silver here in the construction.
And it's actually a remarkably robust-handling piece even today.
Now as a Chassepot system, the Chassepot was adopted by the
French military in 1866 and it was replaced in 1874.
So we have a pretty narrow period from which this most likely was manufactured.
Because it didn't take long after the Chassepot had been replaced by a cartridge-firing gun
that something like this would have been definitely obsolete.
Now the way this works as a gun is we actually have this corkscrew, which is the trigger,
fold that down.
And then an interesting quirk of the Chassepot system,
you cannot open the bolt once it's de-cocked.
You have to manually cock the bolt (and this is the case on the full-size military rifles as well),
once that's cocked then you can open the bolt.
And inside here we see this interesting little system.
This was designed for a paper cartridge, ... so the paper contains the charge of gunpowder,
which in this case would be a very small charge of gunpowder,
a bullet at the front, and then there is a primer in the base of the cartridge itself.
And you would put this paper cartridge here in the tray, you then close the bolt, lock it in place.
This bolt handle lug is the locking lug.
Lock that down all the way.
And then you can fire it by ... pulling the trigger.
This is called a needle fire because the way it actually fires
is not with a firing pin hitting a percussion cap at the bottom of the cartridge,
but rather a needle that has to go through the base of the cartridge and impact a primer inside.
And if I take this and rotate this as if it was firing,
you can actually see the needle, right there.
It's a very small needle in a very small bolt, but there it is.
So remarkably the needle and this little black disc, that's an obturator,
... I should say it's very remarkable that
both the needle and the obturator are still intact in this thing.
When you do fire, the pressure of firing is going to push back on this metal disc,
it's going to cause this hard rubber obturator to expand and create a gas seal.
So that's how this actually works, as far as the bullet-firing part.
It does have a front sight on it there, a very small one, but still a front sight.
No rear sight though, you don't really have a sight picture,
you just kind of have that front sight stud out there as a reference point
for ... what vague direction you're pointing this in.
To be fair, this is not a long-range weapon, this is across the table sort of distances.
However, it actually has a remarkably comfortable grip to it.
I'm impressed and surprised, usually this style of thing is very awkward to handle.
There is a compartment here at the back, presumably for storing a couple of cartridges.
And then of course you also have a knife blade.
Now the knife on this one is kind of tricky to get out, it's a really stiff thing.
There's a safety latch right here.
What I need to do is push the knife in, the knife blade is under spring pressure.
So I push the knife in, and then I can open the blade all the way up,
and it's going to lock in the extended position.
Not exactly quick-draw.
Once again though, unlike most knife-gun combination sorts of pistols, especially of this age,
usually this blade is a really flimsy and worthless blade.
This one is actually ... a relatively firm blade.
... It's not exactly razor sharp, but it certainly could be.
And it's pretty darn firmly locked in place,
so this is actually a functional knife, either as a weapon or just as a tool.
If we look closely on the blade, we have a manufacturer's name and location.
Not sure who Berthod was, however 39 and 41 Passage Jouffroy in Paris
was, and I believe still is, a rather fancy little shopping district.
So this was a pretty high-end piece of equipment in its day, in probably about 1870.
It's always interesting looking at the variety
of this sort of little combination weapon that has been around.
And you know what, they've even made these things in the last 20 years, guns like this.
So this concept has been around for a long time, and shows no sign of going away,
despite the fact that they are never actually really practical self-defence implements.
They're more cool gadgets because, well, who doesn't like cool gadgets.
If you need this cool gadget yourself, take a look at the description text below the video.
You'll find a link there to Rock Island's catalogue page on it.
And there you can see their pictures, description, price estimate, etc.
You can place a bid through their website, over the phone, or live here at the auction.
Thanks for watching.