Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Galerie de Mars
in Paris, France, taking a look at this Gatling Dimancea revolver,
a really quite unusual, very strange, and very difficult to disassemble,
which we'll get to in just a moment, revolver.
Now this was designed by a Romanian military officer by the name of something like Haralamb Dimancea,
I'm sure I'm butchering that, I apologise. But patented by him in the United Kingdom in 1885.
And then he actually contracted with the Gatling Arms Company of Birmingham to manufacture it.
So these were made in the UK, they were made for trials in Romania,
a full 1,000 of them were made, apparently.
And ... this particular one is a 6 shot model in .38 calibre. The French military also tested these.
They were looking for a new revolver to replace their 1873 revolver. They ended up adopting ... the Lebel Model 1892.
But this was something that they had tested, and they didn't end up adopting it,
nor did the Romanians, and you'll see why in a moment.
So this is quite a large revolver,
it is double action only, and it is hammerless. In fact it is actually really hammerless.
Let me go ahead and pull this apart and show you that.
As I said, this is double action only, and it doesn't feel anything like a traditional double action revolver.
And in fact, you can hear there's no reset to the hammer, because there's not actually a hammer inside there.
We do have this lever on the back, and that is used to open the gun up.
So you pull that down, and then you can pivot it open like so.
Now this particular example is really stiff and it's pretty much stuck.
The cylinder will rotate, but normally what you would do is push this whole assembly in
to bring out that extractor star and extract all the rounds.
And I can't demonstrate that for you on camera just because this one's kind of locked up.
However, you can see how that all works. In fact, if I open this you can see,
well, it's going to snap back in position when I close it, but there's a little lug right there that locks into this
to hold the whole thing shut.
We can take a look at the sight picture there.
Actually pretty decent sights for the time, got a fairly large rear notch there, and that's kind of nice.
Alright, we're going to do some disassembly here, we are going to take all the guts out of this,
but I've cheated a little bit by already taking out the opening latch and this awesome double sprocket.
So these are held in place by this screw which goes through the frame right there.
And taking that out just really simplifies taking this thing apart.
So this is actually two separate sprockets.
They kind of work ... Well, this small one,
(there we go), this small one activates the ... hammer [striker], this large one acts as the hand.
So with those out I can move along here, and actually get this done with some reasonable efficiency.
So that latch acts as both the top and rear cover to the cylinder.
So once we've got those out, I'm going to go ahead and pivot this open.
And then we have a rear cap piece here,
and then we have three parts inside. We have this guy,
and you can see when this is in here we've got this angled surface up top.
That engages in the other half of the frame and that's what actually locks
the frame together so that it doesn't pivot,
And when you are pushing this latch, here,
forward what you're doing is pushing this forward and it goes
... goes in like that, which allows the gun to pivot open. So I'll pull this guy out, right there.
The piece underneath it has a return spring for it,
and before we can take that out we have to take out the bottom piece as well.
Just get all of these together.
So we have the spring for this guy,
and then we have this which is the actual firing pin, and the mainspring of the gun.
We'll get back to those in a moment, but first we can take this apart a little bit further by unscrewing
the thing at the bottom here.
This has possibly one of the most annoying lanyard loops ever,
because it's not permanently attached to this screw, it just sits in like that.
And then it stays in as long as this thing's screwed all the way in, but when we go to take this out that just falls off.
So we get this guide rod unscrewed most of the way, there we go, then just pull it out.
That goes all the way up into the frame there, and allows us to then
take out this little locking block which the guide rod goes through. That locks the ... trigger frame in place.
We can then take off the grip assembly, which is solid wood,
so there's no real tang to it in here, it's just held in place by that rod.
Then we can take out the trigger group, which is much like a rifle, a fully self-contained trigger group.
It's got its own spring built in there, and that's that.
See we have this basically, you know, two frame plates there held together by this piece at the front.
This appears to have all been milled from one block, so
this was all hollowed out, except for the block back here. So that's the threaded hole where the grip screw attaches.
And then we've got all the bits up in there. Now, I should mention
before we go farther we do have some basic markings on the top strap here.
Gatling Arms Company, Birmingham, and Dimancea patent.
That's it for proof marks, or for markings at all. There's nothing on the frame,
there are no proof marks that I can see. Just that.
It comes as absolutely no surprise that this would not actually be adopted by the Romanians, or by anyone else for that matter.
So what's ... most interesting about this, I think, is you can see that this is truly a hammerless revolver.
Typically when someone says hammerless revolver, what it really means is the hammer is shrouded
inside the action somewhere. And thus it doesn't stick out and snag.
In this case, ... there is in fact no hammer.
Instead what you have is a six toothed sprocket here that is going to interface with this guy.
It's difficult to even hold all of these parts together to show you how they work,
but we can sort of do it. So this is not the firing pin, this is just one reciprocating part. This is...
Alright, so it's difficult to even hold all these bits together to show you what they do, but what we have here is basically
... This bit reciprocates and resets the striker, because that's really what this is, it is a striker fired revolver.
This, right here is the firing pin, so you can think of this part as the striker.
And it's got its mainspring in there in the back, and then there's a cap over that, that holds this all in place in the frame.
So every time you pull the trigger, what you're doing is pulling this back using
this two part sprocket, so this is going to...
As the trigger pulls on the large tooth of the sprocket, the small one is actually pulling back on this.
Once it gets far enough back, which (I'm sorry I believe it's going to be pulling back on this guy),
once it gets far enough back it's then going to slip off of this. This is going to snap forward,
fire a cartridge in the cylinder, and then...
Well, once it's snapped forward and fired, then your next trigger pull is going to rotate this again,
reset the trigger, pull the striker back again, and fire a second time.
Even the main parts on here are really more complicated than they should be.
So we have a basic frame into which all the bits go. You can see that there are a bunch of grooves in here,
and most of these parts have matching rails basically that they'll slide in on.
I've got the barrel and it's matching assembly up here.
This is a .38, of course, with a 6 shot cylinder. There was also a .45 calibre version experimentally built,
I believe that had a 5 shot cylinder to it.
So when the gun is locked up, you've got a big ol' lug right up there to hold everything together.
And then you can pivot the thing open and eject all six cartridges simultaneously, like so.
And then of course the break open latch is going to sit up at the top.
All of this is held together by two relatively small screws.
One goes through right here,
and the other goes through right there, locking the cylinder in place.
Alright, now this is difficult to kind of try and hold all the pieces in place,
this isn't quite as far forward as it should be, because these
have to go actually through the breech face to cycle the cylinder.
However, when we also put the trigger group in roughly its correct location,
we can see how some of this is going to work under use.
So the front of the trigger up here, this part of the sear, is going to actually push
this around and the back, right here, is going to act as a stop.
So normally you ... have the hand that rotates the cylinder one increment,
and then you also have a stop that engages to ensure that the cylinder is properly indexed when you actually fire.
Well your stop on this is actually the back of the sear, right here,
which is going to lock up inside, like that.
So the front end pushes one tooth up, the back end locks this in place.
At the same time the top of this is actually acting on the firing pin, or what is effectively the firing pin
(... get that in position),
It's going to sit in that little notch right there. And it's going to push the firing pin back until it pops out,
the firing pin is going to snap forward and actually fire the cartridge.
So this is truly a hammerless revolver. Typically when you hear that, what it actually means is that
... you've got a hammer, but it's hidden inside the mechanism, the frame of the gun,
so that it doesn't get in the way and drag on things.
In this case with all the sprockets and weird bits, this is actually a hammerless revolver.
So really quite the interesting mechanism.
We have the mainspring back in here, of course, that's pushing on this all the time.
But, of course, incredibly obvious why this wasn't adopted by the Romanians or the French or anybody else,
because just, holy cow, that is about the most complicated revolver I think I've ever seen.
That for some reason... Like you'd think this system makes sense
if it does something more than just a double action only revolver, but that's what you had.
Alright, I think you can probably tell now why this wasn't adopted by anybody.
Really this ... tremendously expensive and complex machinery inside,
it doesn't actually get you anything better than a traditional double action revolver.
In fact it some ways it's hampered compared to a double action revolver because
there is no way to manually cock it for a single action shot.
And if anything in here malfunctions or breaks, or it gets dirty, just basically forget it.
It is quite tricky to to get back together. Now it gets a little easier with some practice, once you understand how it works.
But still compared to ... all the other revolvers at the time, this is really quite crazy.
So, manufactured ... 1888 until about 1890, which was when the Gatling Arms Company of Birmingham ceased to exist.
So we can actually nail down the dates on this really quite accurately just by how rare of a gun it is.
A big thanks to Galerie de Mars for letting me not just take a look at this,
but actually go through the process of disassembling it to use on video.
We spent a significant amount of time getting it apart and then getting it back together for you guys.
So hopefully you enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.