Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at RIA with
a Trapdoor Springfield that has a tubular magazine.
This is a sort of unidentified
prototype repeating version of a Trapdoor.
And before we get into the mechanics of how it works,
which are really pretty cool (it even has a magazine cut off in it),
but before we get to that I want to talk briefly
about the guy that we think designed this.
There was a fellow named Augustine Sheridan Jones
of Menno in the Dakota Territory (it's now a town in South Dakota),
who submitted a rifle to the US Army's 1882 repeating rifle trials.
By that point the Trapdoor Springfield ... actually had been adopted for several years
as the standard infantry rifle. But the US military was still curious about improvements.
And they were looking for a magazine rifle, a repeating rifle.
So there was kind of this continuous sequence of trials that were going on during the 1870s and 1880s.
... Most of these trials adopted nothing. They looked at a bunch of guns and went, "Nyaaah, meh."
And this 1882 trial was one of them. They got like 40 different guns from 13 different inventors.
Most people were sending in like three different versions of their idea,
hoping that something would pass the trial.
Well, one of these came from Augustine Sheridan Jones,
and it was a Trapdoor Springfield with a tube magazine in the buttstock.
And he has a patent for this and you can see it.
We don't have any hard evidence that this rifle is also his.
This did not go into the 1882 trials, but there are a lot of similarities:
the basis of a Trapdoor Springfield,
this rifle came out of a collection in South Dakota where it had been for many decades.
Which again isn't definitive, but it's circumstantial evidence.
At any rate, that's what we know about what we think is the guy who invented it.
So now let's take a look at how this thing works.
The Trapdoor Springfield is not the rifle that would probably come to mind first
as a good base for a repeating or a magazine fed conversion.
We have on our lock plate here: US Springfield 1873. This is a pattern of 1873 Trapdoor.
And we've got that US marking and model designation on the breech block as well.
And a US stamp on the butt plate. This was a surplused US military Trapdoor carbine.
Now what has been done to it is the installation of a magazine tube under the barrel.
And you can see it's fairly crudely brazed on there.
This is probably a magazine tube from one of the Winchester, or maybe
Whitney, pattern of tube-fed lever action rifles.
And the work has been done a little bit crudely.
I suspect part of this is the work was done a little crudely and part of it is
it's a fragile gun, and it's a one-of-a-kind gun.
And as ... whoever built it, as he tested it, well, it got a little damaged.
So, not in the greatest shape up front, but
you can see here the end of the magazine tube and ... this is actually going
to give us a good insight into exactly what the gun's doing.
Now, the way the trapdoor originally worked is you would cock the hammer, and then
this unlocks the breech and allows you to lift up the breech block, there's your breech face.
You would then set one cartridge in here, push it into the chamber,
close your breech block, fire it.
That's the firing pin right there, which ... comes out right there.
Now what this design does is add a tube magazine below.
And it's equally important to point out that we have this little leg on the breech,
and this acts as your magazine cut off.
So if you want the gun to work as a repeating rifle, you have to put the leg in this position.
If you want it to be a single shot you snap that leg back up.
Because what we have going on in here is a lifter. This is similar to the Kropatschek style of lifter.
On the Winchester rifles the lifter was kind of an elevator, and it would lift a cartridge straight up.
With the Kropatschek, as used by the Lebel, the Gewehr 71/84, and a number of other major military rifles,
the elevator is just an angled piece, so it pivots.
It's fixed back here, and it will drop down where a cartridge can slide out of the tube magazine onto the lifter.
It then pops up and slides into the chamber.
Now typically this is paired with a bolt action
where you can control the lifter based on the movement of the bolt,
and ... when you're pushing the bolt forward, that chambers the cartridge.
With a Trapdoor you don't really have any of that to work with, so how did he do this?
Well, the answer is first off,
we have a little catch right down there underneath the follower,
and that's what you see sticking out, right here,
is a follower. So that's going to push your stack of cartridges up.
And if you push the elevator down, just slightly, it's going to drop that little catch,
and it's going to allow a cartridge to pop out of the magazine tube onto the lifter.
If you look at the underside,
this is a little flat spring that is putting pressure on that cartridge stop.
So when I push the elevator all the way down, you can actually see it operating right there.
And I suspect someone got a little over-excited operating the rifle,
and that's why there's a hole missing out of the bottom of the stock right here,
is because they pushed down a little too hard a bunch, and cracked this piece of the stock out.
Anyway moving on with the system.
Once this goes down, gets pushed down, a cartridge is going to come out onto the elevator.
And what's actually going to push that down is this leg.
So when I close the breech block, that leg is going to push the lifter down.
And we can again see it on the underside here, right there.
Now because that leg is right about in the middle ... of this section,
the cartridge is going to pop out of the magazine tube, and come about halfway out,
and then hit that leg and stop.
So when I open the action
the lifter is actually going to be held down until
I give this the last bit of travel, which is going to kick the extractor and push the empty cartridge out, like that.
... So that will kick the empty case out.
It'll slide off the top of the next cartridge in line and come out of the action.
The lifter then is released, which brings the next cartridge up in line.
Now with a bolt action you would then just close the bolt, and that would push the cartridge into the chamber.
With this, because it is a single shot rifle originally,
you would have to manually push that cartridge into the chamber and then close the breech block.
And as long as you have this leg down, as soon as you close the breech block
it's going to push that elevator down again. It's going to pop the next cartridge out,
and it sets you up to repeat the cycle.
Now because there is spring tension on this elevator all the time
if you don't actively push it down, it's going to stay in the upward position.
So you could drop it down, load the tube magazine, which I think will hold probably 8 rounds,
and then let go of it. And so your cartridges are retained by that little stop latch.
And as long as this is folded flat, the [breech] doesn't actually push on that elevator when you close it.
So nothing releases a cartridge from the magazine, and it remains full.
You can then run this just like a ... single-shot gun with a ... magazine cut off.
Really a very clever system.
Clearly it didn't work all that well. The problem is if you put something like this into trials,
even if it runs absolutely flawlessly, it's going to have this inherent disadvantage
of you have to manually push a cartridge in every time.
And there are lots of designs out there that are basically bolt actions,
where the ... equivalent of closing the breech block chambers the cartridge for you.
So this is going to have an extra step in its operating cycle, even if it works perfectly.
And for that reason, I don't think it would ever actually get accepted by the military.
That said, it's a very cool mechanical development.
And ... I could see someone building this just for their own use, and being really quite happy with it.
Unfortunately, I don't think it ever would have had legs in a trial,
and that may explain why we don't see records of it in any military trial.
Also, obviously, it adds some fragile spots into the gun.
You'll notice the front screw on the lock plate is missing.
That's because there's a bunch of stuff in the way now, that's where it would normally attach.
When this was just a Trapdoor Springfield, there was nothing down here except
stock and you could just run a screw through it.
Now, that's where the whole elevator mechanism is sitting and working, so.
There are a few issues with this rifle, but the fundamental system, very cool.
I really enjoy looking at experimental prototype rifles like this.
I think two of the most interesting periods in firearms development are
the development of magazine rifles and the development of self-loading rifles,
because both of those time periods you'll get this initial influx of really interesting ideas
where nobody knows exactly what's going to work best. And so people just try everything.
And people are getting patents for all sorts of ideas.
And once one thing's patented then no one else can do that,
so you've got to find a different idea and try a different idea.
And that's exactly what we have here.
So I wish we knew ... a little more firmly who designed this exactly,
but I think it stands on its own very well as a really cool mechanical system.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]