Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Morphy
Auction House taking a look at some of the guns
they're going to be selling in their upcoming
April of 2019 Premiere firearms auction.
What we have here today is a Carcano.
Of course, it's not the Carcano you might be expecting.
This is Salvatore Carcano's first major substantial
firearms invention, and it is a needle fire conversion of existing Italian muzzle loading rifles.
This came about basically because the Prussians beat the Austrians at Sadová ... in 1866 in the
... Austro-Prussian war. The Prussians had Dreyse needle fire rifles and the ... Austrians had muzzle loading rifles.
And the needle fires were able to fire substantially more rapidly than the muzzle loaders.
And, kind of like the Battle of Plevna, Sadová would have
repercussions around the world for military arms decisions.
Even if the facts are debatable as to what actually happened, the people's impressions
of them had a very real impact on military decision making. So, in particular,
we're addressing Italy's reaction to this, but it's worth also looking at France's.
And part of France's reaction to this battle is to go, "Well,
we really need to stop screwing around and pick a new rifle". And they adopted the Chassepot needle rifle.
The Italians had the same concern, like, "OK, our muzzle loading rifles are clearly inferior.
We're behind the curve. We're in big trouble if we get into a war with these guns.
We need to come up with something new". But the Italians took a little bit of a different tack.
They were, yeah, they were actually much wiser in that they recognised,
"Look, technology is changing very rapidly, and ... we don't want to run the risk of sinking
a whole bunch of money into buying, you know, a ton of brand-new rifles in some cutting-edge
technology for our troops only to discover in another couple years
that they've been rendered completely obsolete by yet another new technology".
Which is in fact exactly what would happen to the French, their ... Chassepots would be very quickly
... eclipsed by metallic cartridge firing rifles. And they ... built millions of Chasspots,
and then have to turn around less than 10 years later and build millions of Gras rifles.
So the Italians wanted to avoid that. So they ... were trying to do two different things at the same time.
...They wanted to come up with a new technology for a brand new rifle that they could make in
small numbers for, you know, frontline troops, shock troops. The guys, you know, buy just a small number
of rifles for the best units. And then they also wanted some cheap thing that they could do to their
existing guns to convert them into something more modern. And by cheap
they wanted like no more than 10 lira per gun for whatever conversion they ended up using.
So they looked at a couple different types of guns. They looked at
separated primer types of systems, where you've got a cartridge and a separate primer,
Manceaux systems, Albini systems, the Lindner system among others.
And then they also looked at needle fire paper cartridges, like the Dreyse.
And then they looked at modern, you know, self-contained metallic cartridges. And as far as
conversions, they came to the conclusion that the metallic cartridge wasn't ideal because
their guns were all like 17mm or 17.5mm bores, and metallic cartridge ammo
for that was gonna be pretty heavy, and this is still a technology that's in its infancy.
So, they kind of ruled that out, and they ruled out all of the separate primer systems,
probably ... because they just were a little too old-fashioned, and they settled on a needle fire system.
So Salvatore Carcano came up with a way to convert the existing muzzle loading rifles into needle fires.
And he looked at the different needle fire systems out there, and he ended up choosing the
Doersch-Baumgarten system, which is one that we've basically never heard of anymore today.
Those guns are extremely rare but it was basically an improved version of the Dreyse.
And he chose that as the basis for his conversion. So let's take a look at exactly what he did.
I think the first thing that's important to remember with the Carcano needle fire, is that it is not a ground-up new rifle.
Both of the other major systems, the Chassepot and the Dreyse, were brand new guns made
from scratch as needle fires. This is actually a conversion of a muzzle loading musket (or rifle).
So what we have here is the existing barrel that been basically sliced up, and a bolt added to it.
All of the accoutrements from the original muzzle loader have been maintained, so you've got this
kind of funky bayonet lug out here. Cleaning rods were left on the artillery guns,
but most of the other conversions had the cleaning rods removed. And I should say this is an artillery musketoon.
Original hardware on here because they kept the original barrel, that helps keep the cost down.
We have a sight here. The markings are long obliterated, but it was basically a
100, 200, 300 metre adjustments on here for your sighting.
The only real marking visible is the serial number here on the butt-stock. And even that is a little bit hard to read.
Overall, this is a very light rifle. Much more so than you would expect picking it up,
largely because (largely, haha), because the bore is 17.5mm. This is a huge projectile by today's standards.
And so while the barrel looks very thick, it's actually mostly hollow.
Now the operating system for this rifle is a little bit quirky and unusual.
So we have basically a safety lock down here in the trigger guard,
and in order to open the bolt you have to pull this down.
This is basically a plunger that locks up into the bolt and prevents you from lifting the bolt handle.
(So this is the fired position of the gun, by the way.)
The ... locking system is simply the root of the bolt handle locking against this bit of the old barrel.
You can notice this lug here is where ... the percussion nipple originally was, and it's been basically just milled off.
Now to open the bolt, we're going to pull this down,
(which is a little hard for you to see), then we can actually lift the bolt handle,
pull this back, and it'll open only this far and then stop.
If I want to pull the bolt all the way out, I can do that by pulling this lug down
again, and pulling the trigger and pulling the bolt out.
With that out you can see the plug right there. And that is the button
connected to the front of the trigger guard, so that's ... basically your safety lock.
And then we have two bits here that move when I pull the trigger.
So the rear hook goes down and this front plunger comes up.
That is actually the firing sear. This is a fairly unique firing system.
If we look at just the bolt here there is a flat spring with a little locking shoulder
on it right there, and that's connected to our needle. So when I pull this back,
that flat spring is going to come back and it's going to pop into this little hole.
When you're ready to fire this hole is pointing straight down, and when you pull the trigger
and this plunger comes up, right here, what it's actually doing is pushing that in.
(I don't think I can really do it, I can sort of do it by hand here ... there we go.)
Once that goes all the way in, it releases the striker to actually go forward and fire.
Now we also have a decocker here, which I have to put the bolt in the gun to show you.
So going back a step, once I've got the bolt in the rifle, and I go ahead and open the bolt,
right here, as I pull the bolt back, this cocking piece is going to trip over that hook.
Right there, you saw the hook pop up.
And now that's going to hold the back end of the cocking piece in place when I pull the bolt forward.
So I can open the bolt all the way out like this, that gives me space to load a cartridge in here, a paper cartridge.
These used a Minié style of ball, so a hollow base bullet. You would then have a primer in the base of the bullet
and powder behind it all wrapped up in a paper wad. And these actually used a heavy rubber
basically a rubber base plate on the cartridge, and that was the obturator.
so where the ... Chassepot has a rubber obturator built into the bolt,
and where the Dreyse has a pair of mating ... mechanical fit cones,
this depended on relatively close tolerances for the machining
plus a rubber plug on the base of the cartridge to provide a gas seal.
And it was tolerable, not great, not the best system, but not the worst maybe either.
So when this goes forward our striker is caught here,
I can then push this, that'll half compress the firing pin spring,
drop that down. The bolt handle is now locked in place.
I then have to cock the striker the rest of the way, and then when I pull the trigger
this safety hook is going to drop and our sear is going to rise so that the gun fires.
What's cool about this is in this position, if I don't pull the trigger,
I've got a hook that's holding the striker in place so that it can't go forward
and unintentionally fire, say when the gun's not locked up. That's good.
I can also cock this fully and then take this safety tab and work it very much like a Carcano
bolt-action rifle. That has just de-cocked the rifle.
It's taken the spring tension off of the needle so that nothing happens here at all
if I pull the trigger, there's just no spring tension left in the system.
So you can have the gun locked closed with a cartridge loaded,
but totally safe because there's no spring tension on the striker.
And then all you have to do to re-cock it, is push that in, and rotate it shut, and then it's ready to fire.
The other cool thing I can do here is I can de-cock this, and then if I pull the trigger
I can actually pull this completely out of the gun.
I can then also unscrew the face of the bolt,
got that, and then we've got our bolt body
and the main mechanical guts of the bolt.
So you should be able to see how this works fairly well now.
This is a little flat spring that is dovetailed into the head with the needle,
and this ... is what holds the firing pin in its cocked position.
And we've got our spring captive between the needle head there and the base of this tube.
So I can pull this back to put on spring tension. When you have this in the bolt
it's going to come all the way back, lock there until you push up on this spring,
in like that, that releases it and it fires.
So the first of these conversions were actually produced in 1867,
and that was 18,000 of them for the Bersaglieri.
After that, they would follow up in 1869 with conversions for the Carabinieri, the military police sort of units.
And then in 1871 they would go ahead and do a lot of conversions for their Artillery Corps.
This is an Artillery Corps artillery carbine. It's an 1844/67.
That's the 1844 artillery, well, musket, musketoon really,
converted with the 1867 Carcano needle fire system.
And most of the examples of these that survive today are in fact these artillery pieces.
A lot of these were converted into shotguns, they were scrapped, ...
It's important to remember that these still have iron barrels on them for the most part, not modern steel.
You know, they were cheap conversions. At the time they were better than muzzle loaders,
but they pretty quickly became very obsolete. Italy selected the Vetterli system for its new
bolt-action system, and then the Vetterli-Vitali update in 1887.
And it wasn't very long before they really didn't need these.
They were never used in any significant conflict. So they're pretty unknown guns today.
And I think they're really cool, they're like the third-best needle fire system
(the Italian is the third best needle fire!),
behind the Chassepot and the Dreyse. And it's pretty cool to get a chance to take a look at this one.
If you have a collection of antique rifles, or needle fire guns, or Italian rifles, and you would like to
add this cool piece to it, it is of course coming up for sale here at Morphy's.
So take a look at the description text below the video, you'll find a link there to ForgottenWeapons.com,
from whence you can click over to Morphy's catalogue, take a look at their pictures,
their description, their price estimate, all that sort of stuff, and place a bid
right there through their website if you're so inclined.
Thanks for watching.