Hi guys
Thanks for tuning in to another video on forgotten weapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum and I'm here today at the Rock Island auction Company
Taking a look at some of the guns and flare guns that they're going to be selling in their upcoming
september of 2017 Premiere auction this one is a very rare and very
Impressive German World War one four-barrel flare launcher now
There's some misinformation floating around the web about these
this was actually a design that was contracted for in late 1917 and
It was designed specifically for illuminating
airfields if you think about it if you're going to be landing aircraft at night on these sort of primitive
Airfields that were used a lot in world war one you need some way to actually light the place up
and it's not like they had a lot of
you know power poles and streetlights that running just everywhere that they could hook up to nor did they really have a lot of
portable electric generators like we do today sure some of that stuff existed
but
Much simpler to just have a really heavy-duty flare gun
that you could either shoot by hand or bolt to a fixture so is always pointed in a predetermined direction
You've got four flares on tap and and then this thing actually was designed with detachable
replaceable magazines so you can hit the button here, I'll show you this up close in a minute, but these are
interchangeable, so you would get bunch of them and that allows you to quickly reload the thing and maintain a steady
stream of flares illuminating your airfield so that the the airplanes don't crash
Like I said these were contracted for in 1917 a total of 2,500 were ordered
I believe about two dozen are known to still exist today
They were manufactured by a total of seven different companies this particular one was made by a company called Gebruder Rempt
R.E.M.P.T., and it's marked there on the side so just...Man..
It's a flare pistol, but holy cow is it a pretty cool fire pistol. Let me show you up close
This thing is huge, but it's mechanically actually quite simple
The trigger is really pretty obvious
It's a two or three finger affair because this has a really quite heavy trigger pull you can feel that. There's a very heavy
spring. I'm sure it's a flat spring in the back here behind the striker or the hammer
There is a safety lever here fire and safe and on safe
locks the trigger
Of our markings here G.R. is for Gebruder Rempt, the company that made this particular one, and this is serial number 123
Interestingly the other one of the other ones, I'm aware of was in Jeffery Sturges' collection
And it was a Gebruder Rempt serial number 124 so the one right after this anyway
There is a latch right here, which detaches your barrel cluster
so push that in and
This comes right out the top of the gun
and of course takes four flares
twenty five millimeter flares, and the guns actually shipped with eight of these per flare gun, so you have a good supply of
pre-loaded flares to keep up a steady illumination
We have a few proof marks there on the side of the clip. I guess you call. It clip or magazine one of the two
Once you had a magazine or a clip of flares in place there are four firing pins
one for each flare and the trigger is just a progressive unit, so
it fires one two three four, one two three four, one two three four, and so on so
depending on
If you drive fire did a couple times you may not start at the top you'll start somewhere
But it'll just cycle through all four. So once you fire the fourth round, you know the clips empty, and it's time to reload it
this big mounting bracket
was probably... Well I've seen some people say it was for a shoulder stock which I'm pretty sure is not the case
I believe that was there to give you an option to mount this
to the side of a building or a pole or a fixture of some sort
Because it was intended for illuminating airfields. You would generally have a specific
direction that you would want to be firing flares. You probably have a number of these flare launchers arrayed around an area
You know you want both ends the runway at least for example
so this allowed you to set them up in position, and then just not have to worry about where they were being aimed.
A lot of people may not think about it
if you're a typical gun collector
but there some specialty areas of collecting like flare pistols where there's quite a lot of interesting variety and
frankly just as much historical
relevancy in context as there are for true firearms
So something like this really would be the centerpiece of an awesome flare gun collection if
You don't have one and you'd like to have this one
take a look at the description text below
you'll find a link there to Rock Island catalog page on this guy you can see their pictures and description and their price estimate and
everything like that, and if you decide you'd like to make a try at it
you can place a bid over the phone or through the website or course live at the auction. Thanks for watching