Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video episode on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, today I have one of the older rifles that I've ever
brought out here. This is an 1879 Martini-Henry carbine.
Now the Martini-Henry was the first British Empire
breech-loading rifle designed from the ground up as a breech-loading rifle.
And it served all over the world for several decades, served quite well.
If you've seen the movie "Zulu", of course you've seen a whole bunch of these (or the rifle versions, not the carbines).
What the British decided is, starting in 1871, they decided that they needed a carbine version
of the Martini for use by artillery and cavalry troops.
They tinkered with different experimental models of this for five or six years.
1877 they finally came to the final version, which is basically this, sealed the pattern and started production.
RSAF Enfield produced about 25,000 of these in the very first year of production.
And this is one of those, this is an 1879 dated gun.
What's kind of interesting is that it is actually designated an I.C.1, or Interchangeable Carbine Mark I.
The idea was that they could have the same gun for both cavalry and artillery troops,
... just ... basically interchanging the stock to have different sling attachments.
These also used quite a few parts that were identical to the rifle versions of the Martini, thus making manufacture simpler.
This thing is pretty light, 7.5 pounds, fires the monstrous .577/450 Martini cartridge.
That was the .577 Snider necked down to .45 calibre.
The Martini action is basically a falling block action operated by this lever on the bottom.
Pull the lever down, the block drops open,
and at the very bottom of travel you have a pair of small spring-loaded ejectors that pop out the empty case.
Pull the lever up, breech closes, and you're ready to fire.
So the standard Martini rifle used a cartridge with a 480 grain bullet. For the carbines it was determined
that recoil was actually pretty brutal with them, and they lightened the cartridge.
They reduced the amount of powder, they lightened the bullet to 410 grains.
Now, I don't have any of that ammo. I have some 1940s production Kynoch,
so it's probably going to kick me around quite a bit. I'm anticipating this to be a pretty brutal rifle.
The Martini rifle is actually based on a design by an American firearms designer named Peabody,
who came up with the basic falling-block action that the Martini uses, but he had an external hammer for firing the cartridge.
What Martini came up with was an internal coil spring striker assembly instead.
That smoothed out the contours of the gun, you don't have a hammer sticking out, that sort of thing.
... Today Martini gets all the credit, but Peabody deserves a lot of it.
The Henry part of the Martini-Henry name is due to the rifling that was used,
which is Henry pattern rifling designed by the American, Benjamin Henry.
There were other versions of these rifles, you may have heard of like the Martini-Metford using Metford rifling.
Same thing with the Lee-Enfield and Lee-Metford rifles, the first part is the action, the second part is the rifling design.
... There's no safety on these rifles. One of the trials pattern guns actually had a thumb safety,
but they decided to get rid of it. What they have instead is a cocking indicator.
When this is back, it indicates that the rifle is cocked. When I pull the trigger
it snaps vertical, indicating that the rifle is no longer cocked.
Now on the carbines there were a number of changes from the rifle pattern,
one of them is that this indicator was made smaller so that it's less likely to snag on things.
The bottom corners of the receiver here were rounded so that it's simpler and smoother to run this into a scabbard.
One of the early changes that they made from the very first I.C.1 carbines was to add these screws to the side.
Those are attachment points for a leather sight cover that wraps around the rear sight.
It was found that the rear sight tended to snag and grab on things, so they came up with a leather cover to protect it.
Now this particular gun is missing its front band.
That's unfortunate, but that's not typical, it should have a front band here.
They only made these Interchangeable Carbines for a short time before they decided that
they really needed a different pattern of gun for the artillery and for the cavalry troops.
The cavalry didn't need a bayonet but the artillery did, and they started
diversifying into having special cavalry pattern and special artillery pattern guns.
But what makes this interesting is it's one of the very early ones, where they figured they could do both jobs with one design.
Alright, let's go ahead and fire this up.
Now this Kynoch ammo is reputed to ... fairly commonly hang fire. So if there's a click and then a bang, that's why.
Just take this guy, we slide it down this nice little trench there,
lock the action closed, and we're ready to go.
There was a little bit of a hang fire there that you heard, I'm sure.
And actually recoil on that's pretty significant, but not quite as bad as I was expecting.
Now to eject the case I'm going to give a nice sharp tug down on this lever,
and out it goes
You'll notice this is a paper patched bullet. That was because these were originally black powder cartridges,
and the paper patch helped clear away some of the fouling with each shot.
Allows you to fire longer before the gun started having trouble.
These are a modern type of case, solid brass, drawn, like a cartridge case should be.
The original ones are actually balloon head, and you'll see that they look funky,
they almost look like a brass foil crimped up together.
At any rate, go ahead slide that in. I think that thing freaking echoes when it lands in the chamber there.
Whoo, that one hurt a little bit more.
Alright, you want to see what this looks like from my perspective? Throw on the GoPro and give you a look.
Alright guys, hope you enjoyed the video. Not necessarily something you'd want to take out and shoot for fun,
but a very cool piece of British Imperial history.
Tune back into ForgottenWeapons.com for more early breech-loading single-shot rifles.