Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island Auction House
taking a look at some of the guns that are coming up for sale
in their April of 2015 Premier Auction. And I picked out this one.
Now, this may look like a typical, standard, unassuming M1 Garand.
In fact it does. There's no obvious outward sign,
unless you look at the muzzle, that it's something unusual.
What this is, however, is a .22 calibre M1.
But it's not a training rifle, and it's probably not the .22 you are thinking of.
This is .22-06 Duplex.
So in the 1950s the US government, the Army,
was trying to come up with ways to make small arms fire more effective.
They had these studies from World War Two that showed numbers like
50,000 rounds of ammunition expended per enemy casualty.
And they really wanted some way to improve that.
So various different groups came up with a couple of different potential ideas.
One of them was firing several rounds very quickly.
This eventually led to guns like the H&K G11,
which would fire a 3 round burst at something like 3,000 rounds per minute.
The idea there is all ... 2 or 3 bullets have left the barrel
before the recoil starts to affect the shooter's aim.
Thus giving you a higher hit probability, makes sense in theory.
One of the other ideas was to load multiple projectiles into a single cartridge.
They did this with both 2 and 3 projectile ideas, these being called duplex and triplex rounds.
And they experimented with some of this.
The idea being you would fire one shot. So you take one sight picture, fire once,
but then you get two projectiles, which gives you two chances to hit your target.
Now the questions were, of course, are the projectiles going to hit in the same place?
Are either of them going to hit exactly where you're aiming? What kind of velocity?
Are they going to hit each other on the way out of the barrel and tumble?
What exactly is going to happen?
So through the 1950s, late 1950s primarily, this was experimented on.
And they were testing this through a project called SALVO, SALVO I and SALVO II.
This is one of the rifles that was used in Project SALVO as an experiment.
This particular one, like I said, is .22-06 Duplex, the barrel is marked as such.
You can see at the muzzle that it's a .22 calibre bore.
And they determined that the Duplex rounds actually gave a significant improvement.
Duplex rounds were something like a 65% improvement in the chance of hitting your target.
Which is pretty impressive, frankly.
Ultimately they ended up going in another direction,
and ultimately the whole project finally failed.
It went on for literally a couple of decades
under different names and different titles.
It involved a whole ton of different rifles being experimented with,
different actions, different designs, burst guns,
these multiplex cartridges, flechettes were also tested.
And ultimately none of it came out as being both cost-effective,
and practically an improvement over standard one bullet, one cartridge, regular rifles.
So that's what we still have today.
But it's really cool to get a chance to take a look at a rifle like this,
that was an artefact of that testing, where they were trying to find a better way to do things.
So, this rifle is for sale here at Rock Island if you'd like to add it to your own collection.
I don't know if anyone's selling or manufacturing .22-06 Duplex ammo,
but that'd be an interesting project if you are an experienced and liability safe hand loader.
If you go ahead and click the link below,
that'll take you to the ... catalogue description of this rifle on Rock Island's website.
Take a look at their pictures, their text,
and you have everything you need at your fingertips there to create an account and bid online.
Or come down here to the auction house and bid in person.
Thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed the video,
got a chance to take a look at something we don't normally see.
- You're so drunk you can't hit nothing, in fact you're probably seeing double.
- I got two bullets, one for both of ya.