Hey 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
where they have a lot of experimental firearms from the Winchester company
and the Winchester company took over the Henry company
and as a result one of the things they have is this really interesting prototype Henry rifle.
And this kind of proves that some of the ideas that we think are novel today like
"Oh let's put multiple magazine tubes on that pump-action shotgun".
Well, those aren't the first people that come up with that idea.
Right here we have a Henry rifle with three separate rotating useful magazine tubes
So there's basically no information about the specific exact history of this particular rifle
this is one of those things that a company, an arms company like Henry or Winchester or any of the others would experiment with internally like:
"Hey, someone got the idea, maybe we can increase the magazine capacity with this interesting system, let's try it out"
and they build one and they have to decide, is this cost-effective, do we think that it'll actually succeed on the market? Can we do it reliably?
And many of those ideas never end up coming to actual market fruition and the result then is one leftover
experimental gun that goes back into a vault somewhere
usually never to see the light of day again.
This one has so let's take a closer look at it.
[I think he forgot to edit out this shot of the intro so there will be a repeat of the intro]
At the back end this really is just a pretty basic Henry. Although as is typical of prototype rifles like this. There's some stuff missing
you know, non-critical components that they just didn't bother with or experimented further on.
At the back end of the rifle. This is just a typical standard Henry as is not uncommon on
toolroom prototype sorts of guns like this, it is missing a few bits
But not not a big deal. The interesting part for us is going to be moving up to this
rotary magazine tube contraption
so it is all made out of brass. These are right about 10.5'' long
If we extrapolate from the original Henry capacity, which was 16 rounds in a 24'' barrel
That's gonna give us probably a capacity of 7 in each of these tubes
unfortunately, I don't have a bunch of dummy Henry rounds or or any other way to actually load this up and test it and I
don't know that I'd want to compress those magazine springs on a prototype anyway, but
Hey, it's pretty good guess that this is 7 in each tube
giving it a total capacity of 21 rounds compared to the original Henry's 16.
The way this works is actually really quite simple. You have a loading port right here
This flat spring prevents cartridges from popping back out of the magazine tube
When you want to switch tubes this just rotates free
it's got a little spring detent that will lock it in position or hold it gently in position
lined up properly, but you'll notice as I rotate this you've got a spring-loaded follower there
the rim of the cartridges would be retained by this piece of brass here
and the same thing here so you don't have to worry about the cartridges coming out anywhere else
other than where they are supposed to
which is the tube here that feeds into the elevator to allow cartridges to actually cycle through the action.
The front end of this is a brass boss(?) that is fixed on to the barrel. So it's just
the three magazine tube set up here that's actually rotating.
You can see they actually constructed this with three round tubes and then braised in these brass fillets in between
So not as that- they didn't have to make this as a single casting. Although had they put it into production
they probably would have because for a large-scale manufacturer
probably would have been easier to cast this than assemble it from a bunch of separate pieces.
So there's actually more to this than just the idea of increasing the magazine capacity
A couple things that occurred to me when I was taking a look at this are a few of the faults of the Henry rifle.
One of them is that you have a follower tab
that's always sliding down the bottom of the magazine tube and you have to be aware of it and move your hand around that follower
when the magazine is getting close to being empty
Colloquially called the Henry hop move your hand from here to in front of the follower and then back
With this you don't have to have a separate follower tube
Or a follower tab because it loads from the back instead of the front like a traditional Henry
So that's a nice improvement
one of the other issues with the Henry is that it didn't have a handguard and
with just one magazine tube on the bottom of the barrel
you actually have a very small area of space that you can comfortably hold the gun once you start shooting and get the barrel hot
This would actually solve that problem
This is going to act as a pretty darn effective
front handguard because this is wrapped around the barrel and effectively insulates you from the barrel, maybe not
you know
not perfectly
but it will certainly take a lot longer for this brass to heat up
than the barrel itself and that allows you to use it as a handguard
It's a little bit wider because it is three magazine tubes and it actually worked for that, seems to work for that purpose
just from some dry handling here seems pretty nice actually
There is the potential of course to extend these magazine tubes out much longer
Presumably they did this shorter as an experiment
because it's easier to get the magazine springs nicely tensioned and you know
Why try biting off too much?
Make this as a proof-of-concept first
But you know in theory you could have extended this thing out probably double and had something like 40 or 45 rounds on the gun
Now there are downsides to that as well. The whole thing gets really front-heavy
That's a tremendous weight of ammunition to add to the weight of the gun
so all things are compromised but
overall a very cool
multi mag tube
Henry prototype.
Well, I hope you guys enjoyed the video
This is a really neat prototype Henry really cool that they were
considering things like this not excepting that having the largest magazine capacity rifle at the time. Well, maybe that's not enough
Maybe we can make it even bigger
so a big thanks to the Cody Firearms Museum for giving me access to this to film and bring it to you guys
They have a fantastic firearms museum here up in beautiful Cody / Wyoming
and if you ever have the chance to stop in and see it you absolutely should.
Best of its type in the country.
Well, thanks for watching.