[ Golden State Arms Mystery Pistol ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten Weapons.
I'm Ian. Today once again I'm at the Rock Island
Auction Company taking a look at some neat guns
for the September of 2014 Premier Auction.
And one of the guns we get to look at
I was very excited to see in the catalogue.
This is a very mysterious
automatic pistol - revolver - thing.
Pictures of this have been floating around ever since 1958,
when this specific gun (it is probably a one of a kind)
appeared in a catalogue from the Golden State Arms Company.
I actually have a copy of that catalogue, I've seen the original pictures.
Ever since nobody has ever really published any description of how it works,
so I'm excited to take a look at it today.
So overall we can divide this into basically two ... mechanical mechanisms that we can look at.
We've got the rotary magazine, and we have the locking and cycling system.
We do also have the trigger mechanism, but I can't take the side plate off on this,
so I can't really go into a whole lot of detail about what might be under there.
So instead let's take a look at the operating mechanism.
What's interesting is that this is in theory a short recoil system.
(Cock the hammer to take some pressure off of it.)
You can see that the entire barrel slides backwards, just slightly.
And then we also have again a bolt here that runs backwards.
What's unusual about this is that typically in order for a short recoil to do anything useful,
the bolt and the barrel need to be locked together during this initial bit of travel.
That gives the bullet time to leave the barrel
and pressure time to drop to a safe level before the bolt opens.
On this gun there is no locking mechanism.
You can see that I can open the bolt here with the barrel all the way forward.
So it's hard to say what, if anything, this actually did.
My suspicion is it basically worked as a blowback.
If these two components stayed together during recoil,
it would have been pretty much by accident.
And ... the designer (assuming the gun is safe, and we don't know if it is or not),
the designer would have had to make the weight and the spring tension in the bolt
sufficient to keep the gun functioning by itself.
So if I zoom in, you can see we have an extractor here,
it's a little bit over-tensioned,
so that when you start to move the slide back it hooks down,
grabs the case to extract it.
(Zoom back to the whole gun.)
There isn't really anything different going on on the other side.
You can see we have an operating rod right here on the top.
I can't take it apart to see, but I'm assuming that the recoil spring is inside this tube.
It's pretty much the only place for it to be.
And it's a pretty stout recoil spring in there, this takes some effort to open.
Now once we do open it, it does lock open on the empty magazine.
You can see we have a spring-loaded follower.
And that rotates on the central axis in there.
So like I said, it's a rotary magazine, it's not actually a cylinder.
There are no chambers, none of this rotates.
These are just cover plates to protect a circular magazine assembly.
In order to close this, what you have to do is hold the slide back slightly,
and then push the follower out of the way. Frankly just like many bolt-action rifles.
Except that the follower is rotary instead of moving up and down.
One other thing we can determine
is that we are missing a significant chunk from the gun here.
(Let me close this.)
(There we go.)
So if we look in the top of the gun, you can see there's a big open void for something.
And there's this area back here where something clearly was meant to fit.
When I drop the hammer, you can actually see the front of the hammer exposed
right there.
So when I drop the hammer (I'm holding the trigger back so it doesn't go to half-cock),
you can see the hammer comes through and hits nothing.
And the firing pin is located somewhere back in there.
I don't think we can actually see it.
In fact, yeah, we can't see it because there is no firing pin.
This currently opens straight into the chamber.
So what we're missing is the inside portion of the bolt that contained the firing pin.
If we look at the front of the bolt face you can see it's empty, there is no firing pin in there.
Without that, it's a little hard to tell entirely how the mechanism would have worked.
The purpose of this lever is unknown.
It doesn't have much play, that's pretty much as far as you can move it.
I kind of suspect that that would have operated a thumb safety working on the internals in here.
Can't prove it, but that's my guess.
Now, a couple of other interesting features of this guy.
(If we zoom in here.)
See we have a very small blade front sight.
We have a notched rear sight, which is actually located in front of the magazine.
It's a little surprising that they didn't mount the rear sight on here somewhere.
I suppose it's possible there was one that's now missing. ...
And this sight appears to be slightly off centre.
It may be an optical illusion, but I think it's actually slightly off to the right side of the gun.
Because ... when you line up the sights ... they don't seem to quite
match with the direction of the barrel.
Now the trigger mechanism appears to be taken straight from a revolver of one type or another.
But again, without being able to pull the gun apart,
which I can't because it is on consignment for auction,
I can't take a close look to see exactly what it's doing in there.
There is clearly a ton of ... machining that went into this.
If I had to take a guess, I would say this is probably an engineer's home project for fun.
This doesn't look to me like the product of any factory or military organisation.
So we really don't know anything about the origins of this pistol,
nobody knows who made it, or where, or even when.
The only clue we have to the date for sure is that of course it was in a 1958 catalogue,
so we know it at least pre-dates that.
Whether this came from the 19 teens or '20s in the early development of automatics,
or whether it came in the [say] 1940s or early '50s with some experimenter in his garage working,
there's no definitive way to say.
If I had to guess, I think my guess would be late '40s, maybe early '50s.
But that's just kind of a gut feeling, and I can't back it up with any facts.
It is however a very cool pistol.
I'm really happy that we had the chance to take a look at it.
Alright guys, thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed the video.
Enjoyed having a chance to take a look through this very exotic prototype pistol of someone's.
If you would like it to be your prototype pistol, you can in fact bid on it
at the upcoming Rock Island auction. It ... is lot 1589, and it could be yours.
This is definitely a one of a kind, and it's a cool thing to add to a collection of firearms weirdness.
Tune back in to Forgotten Weapons for more of the neat guns at Rock Island,
and more experimental semi-auto pistols.
Thanks for watching.