Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on forgottenweapons.com. I'm Ian,
I'm here at the James D. Julia auction house up in Maine taking a look at some
of the guns that they're going to be selling in their upcoming October of
2016 firearms auction, and what we're taking a look at today is one of the
versions of the LeMat revolver that I didn't have a chance to take a look at
in a previous video I did covering the whole development of this series of
interesting grapeshot revolvers. Now I know what you're thinking--it's not
"did he fire eight shots or nine?", it's "that looks awfully small for Lamont or
LeMat revolver", and you would be correct. The one most people are familiar with is
this guy which is substantially larger, leading to today's video subject being
called the "Baby LeMat". Now these were originally developed actually for the
the Confederate Navy, believe it or not. The Navy didn't really need quite the
gigantic horse pistol of a gun that the Confederate Army did, and they actually
contracted to buy 2,000 of these pistols from LeMat in Paris. Now these are
shrunken down, they only have a four-and-a-half inch barrel and the the
main cylinder--the main revolver bore--is a .32 caliber barrel instead of .42
caliber like the original LeMats, and the center shotgun barrel has been
brought down to .41 caliber and what's interesting is on this particular one it's
also rifled. Now originally on the full-size pistols that was a .63 caliber
or roughly 18 gauge smoothbore shotgun barrel. These, they brought that down to
.41, however you still had nine rounds in the cylinder plus the center barrel so
quite a lot of firepower in a small package. So it was April of 1864 when
these guns were originally ordered by the Confederate Navy and they were
supposed to get them in batches of 500 guns starting just a couple months later.
LeMat had problems, and frankly was completely unable to meet the schedule
in fact he was unable to meet any deliveries of any kind. He was too busy
building other guns, having payment trouble with other parts of the
Confederate government, and by February of 1865 the Confederate Navy wrote back to him
and canceled the contract. They hadn't received any guns at this point, the war is going
really quite badly for them by February of 1865, they didn't have a lot of money
lying around, and they just said, "Forget it. We're done.
Don't bother." And at that point a hundred of the guns had been manufactured and
were ready for inspection. Of course, due to the terms of the contract they
in theory wouldn't have sent them until there were 500, but when they get this
letter canceling the contract LeMat comes back and says, "Hey, you know, we've got
a hundred" and the Confederate Navy kind of grudgingly accepts that they'll go
inspect those guns, and assuming that they pass inspection, will pay for them,
but that's it.
Don't bother making any more. So, they're really quite scarce, only no more than a
hundred were ever originally made, and only a handful of those are still known
today. This is serial number 31, and let's take a closer look at it.
Alright, there's our size comparison again. You can see, really, the original
LeMat in .42 caliber is a massive handgun. This is much more the size of a typical
handgun of the period. It's quite comfortable, it's a lot lighter, its honestly a
really nice gun.
So these Baby LeMats were made in the mechanical style of the very first LeMat
guns, so we'll take a look at the mechanics in a moment, but first the
markings.
There you go, "System LeMat, Brevet SGDG Paris". Now where most of the LeMats very
quickly had their production moved to England, the Baby LeMats were all
manufactured in Paris, so they'll all have this script on the top of the
barrel flap. I mentioned this is serial number 31, you can see the number here on
the barrel, here on the front of the frame--that LM star is for LeMat,
that's kind of his his trademark inspection mark. We have a 31 here also
on the cylinder, and we have a "B" marked right there on the front of the cylinder.
So of course, if you're not familiar with the operation of the LeMat, you've got a
cylinder with nine rounds of .32 caliber muzzleloading ball, and nine percussion
caps there, and what you would do
is cock the hammer--these are all single action guns--and when you fire, the
hammer hits the percussion cap, and fires the gun. Now you've also got this center
barrel which acts as the the cylinder axis. You load that separately, and when
you want to fire that one you put a percussion cap here on this nipple and
then you would flip the firing pin down, or the front of the hammer, and when you
do that, then it hits that center cap and fires the center barrel. Now this does
get a little bit awkward in some ways in that when you cock the hammer it's going
to rotate the cylinder of position, and it doesn't know or care if you're
planning to fire the middle barrel or one of the cylinder chambers.
So if you don't fire this [center barrel] last, you will skip a chamber. So disassembly here is
also just like the full-size LeMat's, although it's slightly, slightly simpler
to do, actually. We have a plunger pin right here which locks the barrel
assembly onto the frame, and it's held in place just by a little tension spring
there. So if i pull that out, then I can unthread the barrel. The end of the
center axis barrel is threaded, as is this support on the main barrel. So that
comes off, and then we can pull the cylinder off the front. You can see here that
we've got these plunger pin holes in the cylinder. Those were for--that was
what locked the cylinder in position on the early style of LeMat. There's a pin
right here, and when I cock the hammer that pin is going to retract in, then the
hand lifts up, indexes the cylinder by one position, and then the pin comes out
and locks the cylinder in place. That was a complex and expensive system that LeMat
changed later in production, but not until after all the Baby LeMats had
been manufactured. So I mentioned that the center barrel on this particular
Baby is rifled,
and I'm shining a flashlight through the fire hole there--through the
percussion cap hole--and you can see a bit of the rifling right there. It's a little
tricky to get a camera angle on this but this is, in fact, a rifled .41 caliber [barrel]. Now,
reloading the LeMat gives us a little bit of a pause. We have a loading lever
here, on the side of the barrel, this again an early style of loading lever,
and in order to load the cylinder chambers, what you do is pour in powder,
set a ball on top, and then you have this loading lever which allows you to ram
the ball down into place.
However--well, and then--you also have to deal with the center barrel. So, as is typical
of LeMats, there is a removable ramrod right here which sits in there under a little
bit of tension, and we use that to ram the center except--oh ,we have a problem.
The Baby is short enough that you can't fit a long enough ram rod on the side of
the barrel to load that center barrel, so there's a separate solution, and that is
this decorative stud on the pommel, which is actually a ramrod extension threaded
into the grip. So we have a tube there that is only hollow a little ways down
as you can see, it goes about that deep.
Once that's in place, then, we can set that in place and now--so at this point
it's all the way down at the base-- that gives you plenty of length with which to
set your center charge.
Thank you for watching guys, hope you enjoyed the video. It's cool to be able
to add one more very scarce version of the LeMat revolver to the archive we
have going, showing the whole sphere of LeMat grapeshot revolvers from the very
earliest Belgian made guns up to the very last centerfire cartridge guns. Now
if you have a LeMat collection or you just want--you know, these things are big,
they're bulky, they're heavy,
they're kinda awkward...this Baby LeMat is a much more comfortable gun in the
hand,
and it's really quite cool. Honestly, if they had made made them in this pattern
to begin with, they might have sold a whole lot more of them and a lot more
successful.
Well, if you'd like to have this one yourself, make sure to check the
description text below. You'll find a link there to the Julia Auction catalog
page on this pistol, or you can take a look at their pictures and their
description and place a bid over the phone or come up here to Maine and
participate in the auction live.
Thanks for watching.