Oh, hi, I did Nock see you there.
Sorry about that, that's terrible.
I'm Ian, I am here at the Rock Island Auction House today.
And I am once again taking a look at some of the guns that are
coming up for sale in their December of 2016 Premiere Auction.
And this of course is a Nock volley gun, sort of.
It's not the Nock volley gun you may be thinking of
which is a 7 barrelled piece that fires all 7 barrels at once.
Instead this is a 6 barrelled, rotary barrel, cluster gun
with a flintlock action that's self priming. And so it allows you six independent shots.
Now Henry Nock of London, a ... very respectable gun maker in the late 1700s, just into the very first bit of the 1800s,
he manufactured this. And we're pretty sure that it was manufactured in conjunction with a guy named Artemis Wheeler,
who was a gunsmith and inventor out of Massachusetts who would later have a lot of influence on Elisha Collier,
who was of course responsible for patenting the Collier flintlock repeating revolvers.
Now what makes this different from a Collier revolver is that while they're both hand rotated,
the Collier actually had ... a single barrel of course and a revolving cylinder.
This is more like a flintlock pepperbox. Still pretty cool, still a lot of firepower for the time period.
But with this you had to carry around the weight of 6 complete barrels, instead of just a short cylinder and one barrel.
Now this does ... have a self priming mechanism that's almost identical to what you see on the Colliers.
Which is part of the reason that some people are pretty sure that Nock actually made a bunch of the Collier guns for Elisha Collier as well.
Now Henry Nock ... died in 1804.
The company carried on under his name until 1818, it was being run by his son-in-law, James Wilkinson.
And in 1818 the company was renamed Wilkinson and Son, I believe, or sons.
It would eventually become the Wilkinson Sword Company, which stayed in business for quite a long time afterwards.
However this particular gun is marked "Henry Nock" and "H. Nock",
which tells us it was definitely made before 1818 when the company name changed.
And it might have been made before 1804, which is when Henry Nock himself died.
Whether he made this personally himself, or it was a product of the company still under his name, that I am not sure of.
So even though it's not a true revolver and is in fact more of a pepperbox,
it still is really interesting for this automated priming system
that it has here. So why don't we go ahead and just take a closer look at that right now.
So Nock's name is located in two places on this gun, one is this pretty obvious gold coloured brass inlay right there,
and the other
is up here on top of the action, H. Nock, London, and some pretty decent engraving there as well.
So this is the collar, we've got our barrel cluster up here and our action behind.
Now mechanically the most interesting piece of this gun is this self-priming mechanism here.
So of course this is the frizzen, the strike plate. And when this goes forward,
a rod, right here, connects to a little cam in the bottom of this, which is actually a hollow box.
So what you would do is flip this little door open, and you can fill this up with priming powder.
You would, of course, load all 6 of the barrels each independently and separately first.
Then you fill this with priming powder, close the little door, and
every time (you can see the connecting rod here), every time you cycle this backward it has a little rotary
(what the best word for it is?) kind of like a powder throw in reloading equipment today.
It will pull off just the right amount of priming powder, rotate it through, and dump it into the pan,
which it then promptly covers up to protect, so it doesn't blow away or get wet.
Then when you fire the gun, ... the flint comes down, knocks that out of the way,
ignites the powder and at the same time, when this comes up, it is resetting that powder throw
to put another charge in when you're ready to fire a second time.
Now the barrel cluster on this gun is a little loose unfortunately on this example, but it's hand rotated.
So it does snap into place with each shot, you know, for each barrel.
Lining up
you see we have these little brass cover plates for the ... fire holes there, and you would rotate it into position,
line that up, and you'd be ready to fire.
You fire, you to rotate it to the next one like so.
Collier's improvement to this gun had a two-part system. It both locked into place more securely,
and being a revolver it also had an early type of gas seal to it.
Now with this being a pepper box style, there's no need for a gas seal because each barrel is fully self-contained.
Now Henry Nock did a lot of other guns. He did kind of standard muskets, he did very nice muskets.
He is also in popular culture well known for his 7 shot Royal Navy volley gun, which was very similar in appearance to this.
It had a 6 barrel cluster like this one does, but then it also had a centre barrel.
So on this gun there is no seventh barrel in the middle, because you need that
middle as an arbour for this whole cluster to rotate around.
But the volley gun had 7 barrels in a setup like this, and they all fired simultaneously.
And that was used for marine purposes basically to destroy rigging and that sort of thing.
On this one you get 6 independent separate shots.
Really is a much more practical sort of thing.
Thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video. There are very few of these early repeating flintlocks out there,
and they're really cool to take a look at when we can find them.
So I hope you learned something interesting, I hope you enjoyed it.
And if you'd like to add this to your own collection, certainly it'd be the prize of most any collection.
Well, take a look at the description text below. You'll find a link there to Rock Island's catalogue page on the piece,
and you can look at their provenance, photos, description, and everything else.
And place a bid on-line or over the website, or come here live to the auction and participate yourself.
Thanks for watching.
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