Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we have a cool unicorn gun
of a revolver to take a look at. This is a
Mateba (or Mateeba, heard it pronounced both ways) MTR-8
revolver. Now Mateba ... is best known for their semi-
automatic revolver designs, and this is the forerunner
to those. And I think there are a lot of people out
there who think that this is also semi-auto.
It's not, this is a standard DASA (double action or single action) revolver.
It is chambered for .38 Special, in this case. They did also make them in .22, .32
(I believe it was .32 Smith & Wesson), and .357 Magnum. Now the inventor was a guy by
the name of Emilio Ghisoni. He was an Italian, born in 1937, and his father
actually ran a manufacturing business that did, I think, mostly culinary equipment,
like serious commercial kitchen machinery. And Ghisoni ended up
working for the business when his father died, at about age 20. And continued the
business, became a mechanical engineer and, well, he was really interested in
firearms. So he started designing some guns that the company, Mateba, started
producing. Now this one, they only made about 500 of these total,
in a variety of configurations. The four different calibres,
they also made some carbine versions of the gun.
Not very many, there's maybe something like a dozen of these in the US today,
so they're pretty obscure guns.
Now of course, the interesting mechanical
element to this, is that the cylinder has been located both forward and down
compared to what you would normally expect on a revolver. And that was
because this was designed primarily for competition, and the idea was to reduce
the time in between follow-up shots. So having a very low axis, the line of
recoil is pretty much right in line with the top of the shooters hand, and a very
forward, heavy, weight balance. The theory is this helps keep the bore, the
muzzle, from climbing much with each shot. Now unfortunately I haven't had a chance
to shoot one of these, and I can't take this one out to the range, so I haven't
been able to test that out myself. But hopefully someday I will be able to.
Now there are a couple other interesting things about this, so let's take a closer look at it.
Definitely an interesting and distinctive looking gun.
And we have some markings we can take a look at.
So here on the right side of the receiver we have the Mateba marking,
and Mateba is actually an abbreviation (two letters at a time)
for Macchine Termo Balistiche (that's probably not pronounced right),
but MA TE BA. Made in Pavia, Italy. And then there's a little bit more
on the left side. This is a caliber .38 gun, as opposed to .22, .32 or .357.
And it is serial number 84 in this case.
And lastly, up on the front of the barrel we have the Italian proof marks.
An interesting incongruity with this gun is
it's designed for competition shooting and yet, it literally has a three inch barrel.
Because the cylinder is out this far forward, that's it for the barrel, 76mm.
However barrel length, it does not correlate with accuracy
in any mechanical way. As long as you have just enough barrel length
to get the bullet spinning appropriately, it all comes down then to barrel quality,
and a longer barrel does not make a gun more accurate.
What typically does make it more accurate, in practical terms, is a long
sight radius. Because the longer the sight radius, the less margin of error
there is when you line up those sights on your target, and the more likely you
are, as a practical matter, to actually hit. And on the MTR-8 here, the sight
radius goes from here, all the way back to there. So it's got like a 10-inch
sight radius, despite having a three inch barrel.
The front sight is a big square post there,
and that drops into a square notch on the back.
Those sights aren't aren't bad, maybe not the greatest that they possibly could be, but not bad.
The grip looks a little bit thin, but I think that's largely because of
just the shape of the rest of the gun. It actually feels really quite good in the hand.
Now as a double action revolver, this is
hammer fired, and the hammer is entirely
shrouded back here. However you have these two levers on each side which
allow you to manually cock the hammer to single action.
And again, because the hammer is back here, but you have to have the hand up here to rotate the cylinder,
that hand mechanism is all external on the gun. So when I go to manually cock
the hammer, you can see it operating this mechanism, and rotating the cylinder like
so. Now the single action trigger pull isn't bad, again it's not great, but not bad.
And then the double action trigger pull is actually quite long,
but it's pretty smooth, it's a nice trigger pull.
Now one of the final unusual elements is
the cylinder release itself, which is kind of like a typical revolver, but not
where you would normally look for it because of the placement of the cylinder.
There is a catch at the front, right here, pull that down, and then we can tip
the cylinder out and then this thing falls off of it.
So if it doesn't fall off, if you had cartridges in it, you have an ejector rod
here, that is going to push this off the back of the cylinder. And this is your
speed loader, which you cannot fire the gun without. This does not just hold the
cartridges steady so it's quick and easy to load, it also acts as a spacer and
holds the cartridges back from the face of the cylinder. So if you don't have
this, the firing pin isn't long enough to fire the cartridges.
Now in order to load this we're going to take this little plug, rotate it 90 degrees, like so,
and then this opens up like a clamshell. So what you would then do is load your
eight cartridges in there, close this plate over the back, we have holes here
for the pins that line it up on the cylinder. And these holes are in line
with the primers on the cartridges and then ... you lock it
back into place like that, and then you're ready to go.
And when loaded that's going to look like this.
This is actually kind of cool, this holds cartridges
a little more steady than most of the actual speed loaders I've used.
There's really not much rattle at all in there.
And then that
drops right in, like so.
And to eject it, we just push on the front,
that's gonna pull it out far enough that we can remove it.
Once you've fired, this would take all of your spent cases out as a unit.
So nice and clean, easy and efficient.
These are a little bit of a pain in the butt, slow to load the clips themselves,
but once you have them loaded, they are very fast to load into the gun.
So you can see the hand moving here as I start to manually cock
the hammer, that finger right there, the hand, is acting on these alignment pins
right here. And then there is a cylinder stop at the back, right there, which is
located up at the top of the frame.
So if we look through the side here with the
speed loader removed, as I cock it you can see the hand come down, push on that pin
until it has rotated one full notch and locked in position.
The hand is now down until I drop the hammer, and then it retracts back up.
In addition to the recoil absorption and the bore axis, one of the other mechanical advantages
to Ghisoni moving the cylinder out in front like this, is it decoupled the size
of the cylinder ... basically from the rest of the design of the gun. So he was
able to make the cylinder larger in order to accommodate larger capacities.
So on the .32 ... like I said, I think it was Smith & Wesson, the .32 design
which by the way was the MTB-12, that had a 12 round capacity. And the .22 rimfire
version had a 14 round capacity. Then there were also some carbine versions of
these made and those had potentially even larger cylinders, because again the
size of the cylinder didn't really impact any of the handling aside from
adding some weight. My understanding is the .22 caliber carbine versions could go
as high as 20 round capacity, in .22 rimfire.
So the designer, Emilio Ghisoni, not only did this and the semi-auto Mateba revolvers,
he was also responsible for designing the Chiappa Rhino, which is a gun that more
people are familiar with. The Rhino is another revolver which attempts to
mitigate muzzle climb, in that case by firing out of the bottom chamber in the
cylinder instead of the top one. So that of course brings the recoil axis
down, and another interesting revolver to take a look at. So a bunch of cool,
different stuff all from this same designer. Unfortunately he passed away in 2008,
so we won't be seeing any new designs from him, but ...
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, hopefully I'll get a chance
to take one of these out and do some shooting with it at some point. Until then,
thanks for watching and stay tuned for another cool Forgotten Weapon tomorrow.