Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Cody
Firearms Museum looking at a very interesting
prototype Winchester rifle that they have here.
Now, this is going to be a little bit of a
different video than normal because
I know nothing about this for sure.
Unfortunately one of the ... corollaries of factory prototype experimental type stuff
is it's often not very well documented.
If it didn't go on to become specifically some successful product,
often no one really wrote much down about it.
The company didn't have any good reason to spend time documenting it, or preserving it,
... companies generally aren't particularly interested in that.
Especially on things that they perceive as failures.
Put it aside, move on to the next thing that's actually going to work for us.
So this thing is really interesting and really cool.
And ... what I want to do is bring the camera up close, and let's go through this
and see what we can maybe deduce about it.
This will all be guesswork, but in light of there being no
documented information I can find, this is the next best thing.
And I think it's an interesting insight into how some of this sometimes goes.
Alright, let's start with a quick pan down the rifle.
This is .30 calibre, or at least very close to it.
We have a very tall, kind of unusual front sight there,
so that's an interesting element to take note of.
We have this green furniture, also interesting.
Receiver, magazine well, bolt, bolt handle, rear sight.
An actual pistol grip.
And then it is actually missing the butt plate.
So, now let's go back and look at some specific elements.
Alright, so the first thing I noticed is that this has a very Johnson-like rear sight.
This knob in particular, very much reminds me of the Johnson light machine gun, Johnson rifle.
And Melvin Johnson worked for Winchester in the ...
I want to say it was '49 through the early 1950s. So that's an interesting data point.
This green colour to me is very reminiscent
of some of the Winchester Project SPIW, Project SALVO work.
They had that green colour at that point.
... Oh, and I should point out we have a magazine well here, we don't have a magazine.
It would be really cool if we did, that would definitely tell us some things.
But this magazine well is .308 length, this is definitely not a 5.56 rifle.
However, .308 length doesn't ... tell us anything specific.
Now, I think the most significant, most interesting, bit that
... I see when I look at this is that I think this is the conversion of a shotgun.
Or at least this ... was built using a bunch of shotgun parts.
And of course Winchester had auto-loading shotguns.
The bolt, with this tapered rear surface, that's clearly based on a shotgun bolt.
Our fire control group here is clearly a shotgun fire control group.
We've got a cross bolt safety in there,
and just the styling screams to me that this was taken off of a Winchester shotgun.
Now unfortunately, I don't know that much about sporting shotguns,
I need someone like Othais here, who does.
But if you look there, for example, we've got a gap
where they used ... a couple of existing parts,
but mated them with a stock that wasn't a shotgun stock.
And it didn't quite fit ... all the gaps, this is, after all, an experimental rifle.
So that shotgun connection gets deeper when you actually look at cycling the gun.
... There's a gas port, it has a rotating bolt. In fact you can see that best through the bottom.
If you look at the bolt itself, right there, as I pull this back.
Actually, you're better off looking at it up there.
As I pull this back, you can see that the bolt rotates.
And it is a multi-lug bolt, not quite AR-15, but we got 6 big ol' lugs on there.
And remember, the Johnson automatic rifle had an AR-15-like multi-lug rotating bolt.
That's in fact where Stoner got it from, it was inspiration from the Johnson.
Now it took me a while to figure out how this thing actually works,
because I don't see any piston in there anywhere.
I don't see an op rod, I don't see a connecting rod.
The barrel doesn't move, so it's ... not a recoil operated gun.
And finally I spotted it, if you look in between the receiver and handguard here,
... as I move the bolt handle, you can see some movement.
There are a pair of action bars on this side.
You might be able to see it right there, but there's another one right here.
There are shotgun-style action bars, like a pump shotgun,
that come in and run right up flush in the receiver here,
where you can almost not even see them.
I think yeah, yeah, you just can't hardly even see them in there.
But that is an action mechanism style that comes straight off of a pump shotgun.
So looking inside with a flashlight,
I can see that there is actually a gas ... port built right into the front sight base.
There's a recoil spring inside here and it's ... an extension spring.
So as the bolt goes back the spring expands inside here along a central guide rod.
And then when the bolt runs out of energy,
the spring [contracts], and that pulls the thing back ... into battery.
So if we consider this.
We know that this is Winchester, we don't know much more.
My best guess is that this ... would have been made after Melvin Johnson joined Winchester,
so I'm going to go with in the 1950s.
It's .30 calibre, clearly, and a large magazine.
... Winchester was involved in a lot of interesting developmental programs at this point.
They were involved in the Light Rifle Program that would develop
ultimately a competitor to the AR-15 that failed.
But I don't think this is related to that,
that had a lot of Marshall "Carbine" Williams involved in it, and this doesn't look like that.
Winchester was also involved in Project SALVO, and then Project SPIW.
Project SPIW is too late, that's 1960s, and to my mind
that's too late to have the influence of the Johnson sight here.
Also, ... the stuff that Winchester was doing for Project SPIW was much more involved than this rifle.
It involved selective fire work, which this doesn't appear to be.
It involved grenade launchers.
... Project SPIW was getting into ... the deep end goofy ideas at that point.
Project SALVO was a little bit earlier however.
What we know Winchester worked on with Project SALVO
was actually multi-barrel guns, which is pretty cool.
But there were other entities in that project that were working on ... multi-projectile cartridges,
where you'd have one cartridge case with either 2 or 3 bullets in it.
I think there's a decent chance, maybe, that this
was actually a multi-projectile test-bed rifle.
For, say, a duplex or triplex .308 cartridge.
Or it's also possible that this had nothing to do with the military,
and it was just an experimental question of,
"Can we take a shotgun and some of our commercial shotgun production tooling,
and easily turn it into a self-loading rifle?"
The engineering work here points me in that direction,
but the colour of the stock really makes me think more military project.
So, if I had to put my money on one specific guess,
I would say this is a mid-1950s multi-projectile Project SALVO experimental rifle.
Whether it ever got to the Army or not?
Maybe it just was an internal Winchester project
that didn't work well enough to get to the Army, I don't know.
There is clearly some nice little gas marking on the gas piston.
Unfortunately it's just so deep in here I really can't show it to you on camera, you can't see it.
But there is some of that blue residual gas corrosion down in there
that tells me this was absolutely fired.
And it didn't blow up, so that says something.
Alright, well hopefully you guys enjoyed that video.
Unfortunately, I just don't know anything about this, so.
Not the fault of the Cody Museum, they only have the records that were provided to them.
We've looked up basically all the reference sources I'm aware of,
and there's nothing out there on this.
So a big thanks to Cody for giving me the opportunity to
bring this out and put it on film for you guys.
I really hope at some point someone does dig up some information on this
out of the archives, an archive, any archives.
That does happen, like every day people are finding weird pieces of information
and documents that everyone else had forgotten about.
So it'll be fascinating to me if someone ever does find anything,
any real documentation on this,
to go back, check back on this video, and see if
even the single tiniest thing that I guessed at turns out to actually be correct.
So hopefully we'll get that chance.
In the meantime, if you want to see cool stuff like this,
come on down, ... well, probably come on up to the Cody Firearms Museum in Cody, Wyoming.
They are, I would say, the best firearms museum in the United States.
So if you have the chance, don't miss it.
Thanks for watching.