[ Model 1874 Rimfire Gasser Revolver ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look
at a monstrous Montenegrin Gasser pattern 1874 revolver.
However, this is a kind of unusual one in that
well, it's been converted to rimfire, which
wouldn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.
In fact there are a lot of unanswered questions about this revolver.
Now, this particular one actually made a very brief appearance on
the C&Rsenal video about the Gasser Montenegrin revolvers.
If you're interested in the full history of where these came from,
I would recommend checking out Othais and Mae's video on those guns.
But what we are going to take a look at today is this kind of unusual outlier example.
So the 1874 ... well, yeah, hold on ...
So the 1874 Gass... hold on, it's still not there ...
The 1874 Montenegrin pattern Gasser is truly a monstrous revolver.
In fact, let me show you something for comparison.
This thing makes a 1907 Roth-Steyr look like a reasonably sized
"Well yeah, that's a fairly compact pistol, right?"
No, these things are ridiculous. 9.5 inch barrels on them, per dictate of King Nikola of Montenegro.
But this particular one, like I said, has a number of unusual elements to it.
So let's just dig right into those.
It has ... I think an Arabic letter "J" on the cylinder and the barrel
that is probably some form of Ottoman Empire property or proof mark.
Not really sure what that exactly indicates, but it is unusual.
We do have the crown over "NI" (or n-1) for King Nikola of Montenegro.
But that's something that was put onto these guns at the factory,
because any that were exported to Montenegro had to have it.
And they just apparently stuck it on all of them
so that they didn't have to worry, and they could just ship anything they wanted into Montenegro.
So that doesn't necessarily indicate anything.
We have a pair of numbers here.
The bottom one is the serial number which is repeated on the frame,
they're both repeated on the frame, but the serial number is also repeated
on the cylinder right there.
And then the top number is the proof marking.
So this was proofed in Vienna, hence "Wien".
It was proofed in 1905, and this is the 2,610th gun to be proofed in 1905.
So 1905 is a really late date to be making one of these 1874 pattern revolvers.
Now they did it, they ... would produce some of these into World War One, but it's unusually late.
Now on top of that we have this, which ... appears to be stamped later.
Whether this was stamped because of a European requirement,
some sort of legal gun ownership marking requirement,
or if this was done at the time of its conversion, I don't know.
But it's marked 11.75 "Ranefeuer",
which I believe is actually a misspelling of "randfeuer", which would be rimfire,
because this has been converted to rimfire.
Now normally a rimfire conversion you would expect to find on something like
a muzzleloading revolver or a pinfire revolver, where rimfire is an improvement.
In this case, these guns were centrefire from the factory
and someone has sort of retrofitted this back to being a rimfire firearm.
Rim firing I suppose.
So you got a big ol' long plate on the hammer there.
It wasn't a difficult conversion to do, you can kind of see what they did there.
They milled out the centre bit of the hammer where the original firing pin was,
and that's a little hard to see, but that centre section was
milled out and replaced with the ... blade of a rimfire hammer.
We still have ... everything about the loading system remains the same.
The chambers appear to remain the same, this would have originally been chambered for
the Werndl carbine cartridge, 11.25 or 11.3x36mm.
So the first question is what cartridge did they use?
And the second question is why would they convert this back to rimfire?
And the two are probably very closely related.
I suspect if we find out what the calibre is, that would explain the rationale for the conversion.
Now it's been suggested that this would be converted to .44 Henry, .44 rimfire
because the Ottomans, and this is presumably an Ottoman property gun at this point,
the Ottomans had a lot of 1866 Winchesters in .44 Henry rimfire.
However, I actually happen to have a .44 Henry cartridge here,
and if we drop that into the bore the bullet just kind of rattles around in there.
... I cannot imagine this would be a functional or an effective cartridge in this revolver.
Just the bullet is undersized for the bore.
And the same thing is true of the chamber.
(This is a dud round by the way, you can see it's been fired there.)
And if I drop that in, it drops way in,
and it really just doesn't take up ... nearly enough of the space in the chamber.
This would almost certainly split upon firing, it would probably be difficult to extract,
and you really wouldn't be getting a gas seal in the bore because the bullet's undersized.
So I ... have a very hard time believing that this was intended for .44 Henry.
The problem is I am at a loss to come up with what other cartridge it might have been.
I know the Ottomans liked rimfire stuff,
but I'm not sure what would have been used in this revolver.
If you happen to know something about these revolvers and their military use,
and have some idea perhaps of what cartridge they were actually used with,
what rimfire version of the Werndl carbine cartridge,
or something along those lines, I would love to hear from you down in the comments.
It'd be really cool to get a little more information about just what this was intended for.
If you don't know anything about it, hopefully you enjoyed watching the video
and you know more now than you did when you started.
Thanks for watching.