Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company
taking a look at some of the guns that they are going to be selling in
their upcoming December of 2016 Premier auction.
And we have a really awesome piece here today.
This is not just exquisitely engraved, it's also a breech-loading rifle,
extremely early breech-loading rifle. Now of course this didn't become
really common and popular and mainstream
until well after the advent of metallic cartridges.
But people were experimenting with breech-loading guns
hundreds of years in advance of that, back to like the 1400s virtually.
Never done in large numbers, they were always expensive,
they were always complicated, but they did get made.
Especially if you happen to be a wealthy sort of guy who
really appreciated the finer points of modern technology.
A breech-loading gun is going to be the sort of thing that would appeal to you.
Well, this is a perfect example of that.
This is a German target or hunting wheel lock that is breech-loading, and actually uses its own primitive type of cartridge.
So that you could actually reload and fire this thing pretty darn quickly for the time period.
Alright, this is a smoothbore piece, a nice heavy barrel on it. Note that it does actually have a front sight, it also has a rear sight.
And it's got just this fantastic level and amount of bone inlay combined with mother-of-pearl.
Alright, so here is the actual flint.
This is in the non-firing position right now. You would flip this forward into contact with
your priming powder right there. The pan cover is closed at the moment, we'll open that up in a minute.
As we get back onto the main action of the gun, you can see it's got a big metal side plate
there that has this gorgeous blue finish with
three dimensional metal - I don't even know what to call that, but it's really cool.
The amount of work that went into this gun is phenomenal.
Back here, we actually have a patch box, so we can take the cover off,
you've got a place to store some of your shooting supplies in there. And then that
snaps back on.
And some more of this elaborate
decoration down the other side of the gun as well.
We'll get to those two hinges there in just a moment.
Here's our rear sight. Again, unusual for these guns to have sights at all at this time period.
Clearly the guy who commissioned this piece knew how to shoot, and wanted to be able to take advantage of that fact.
There's our front sight again.
Alright, let's take a look at that breech mechanism. This is our breech mechanism, we have a pan cover right here,
so that is where the fire is going to go through when you have sparks
generated when you fire. Then we have this guy, which is our latch to release the breech.
Pull that back, this actually has a flat spring in here that puts tension on this breech block.
And then if we look in there, we'll see that it's actually solid.
Well that's odd, except when you realise that this
is a little handle on a steel self-contained cartridge. [Note the flash hole, just below the indexing handle.]
So presumably whoever had this manufactured ordered a handful of these
and you would pre-charge each of these with powder and shot, or powder and a round ball,
carry them separately on you, and in order to fire a second shot
all you had to do is take that out, put in a new one, line it up right there, take your breech block,
snap it closed.
And then rewind the lock and reprime the pan, and you're ready for a second shot.
And that sounds like maybe a lot of work today, but I'll tell you what, in the ... early 1600s
(which by the way, I suspect this is our manufacture date, 1625),
that was a massive amount of firepower at that point. This dude was... heeled.
Alright, we'll take another look at this. This is just a nice simple latch.
You can see that there is this hook right here, and then that latch is just a big block.
It's under spring tension; pull it back and it disengages. And then of course when this is down
force is pushing straight back on here, so there's no way that this will open when you fire.
Simple, clever, effective. The addition of these cartridges is a really cool thing for as early as this gun is.
So, in addition to not just being a breech-loading, cartridge firing,
repeating [?] gun, this also is set up with double set triggers.
So the rear trigger here is decoratively shaped as a heart, and then that's our main firing trigger.
And the idea here is ... a double set trigger is basically a way to get a very light and very short trigger pull
with an actual margin of safety.
So what happens is the front trigger ... it's literally a hair trigger, you breathe on it and it will fire.
However you have to pull the rear trigger first to set, so to speak, the front trigger.
So think of this as cocking the gun, which it doesn't but you can think of it that way, and then this fires.
That way you get your fantastically light trigger pull, but you don't have to worry about the gun firing just because you bump it.
So clearly whoever had this gun commissioned and manufactured
was a capable marksman and wanted to be able to make the most of it.
Thank you for watching guys, I can't imagine you didn't enjoy taking a look at this thing. It's a fantastic gun.
Very few of these things were ever made, very few of them survive today.
It's really awesome to be able to see a breech-loader from the 1600s. Really, really cool.
So if you'd like to own it yourself, take a look at the description text below.
You'll find a link there to Rock Island's catalogue page on it, where you can see their
detailed high-res pictures and their description. And you can place a bid on-line,
or over the phone, or you can come here in person, check it out and bid in the auction live.
Thanks for watching.