Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island
Auction Company taking a look at some of the guns
they're going to be selling in their upcoming
May of 2019 Premiere firearms auction.
What we have here today is kind of a mystery rifle. This is a bolt action
conversion of a much older French 1822 rifle.
Unfortunately, I don't know who made this. They didn't have the thoughtfulness to stamp their name on it,
so I can't really tell you anything about who did it, or exactly when, or exactly why.
But we can take a look at exactly how it works, because it does have a couple
- or one in particular - unusual feature to it.
I will just mention at the beginning that the 1822 was a firearm, a musket,
originally in French service that started off as flintlock. A great number of them were upgraded,
updated to percussion guns and then updated to Tabatière systems.
And this was kind of like just there's
always piles of these things around.
So anytime someone wants to do a conversion,
they're cheap, get one of them, try out your new system.
So this one has an entirely new receiver on it,
with the barrel screwed into the new receiver.
So let's take a look.
Just a quick look at the outside of the gun.
We do have this cool scalloped cut on the stock that is typical of the French 1822.
We then have some iron fittings here, as well as a brass trigger guard.
And then the rest of the furniture is also brass,
going all the way out to the muzzle. Front sight there, cleaning rod, all the standard things.
The rear sight here is a flip-up piece with three notches. And in particular this 200 [metre]
setting is a really deep V notch. And then we can flip that
up, and we have a 400 and a 600 metre setting as well.
Note that those go way high up because this is a very large diameter, 17.5mm, black powder cartridge.
It's going to be moving slowly and it's going to have a lot of drop at range.
Now the action itself.
You can see where the side plate, the lock plate, was originally mounted on the rifle.
That has been filled in on both sides with some new wood.
And this receiver is completely new for this conversion gun.
So this would have been a fairly expensive piece to do
compared to the conversion systems that use the existing receiver.
And one last detail, we have this really incredibly crisp intact stamp in the stock.
And it's a little hard to read but that says Pihet Freres, Paris.
So this is the Pihet brothers in Paris, it's dated 1832,
and the traditional French rooster there in the centre.
... The Pihet Brothers were a company that manufactured 1822 rifles for the French government,
so this has nothing to do with the conversion, I don't think.
It's just a remnant from the original rifle that was converted.
Now this is going to work like a traditional bolt action rifle really.
Lift the bolt up, 90 degrees, comes back.
There is an extractor right in here that's going to travel forward and then get pulled back by the bolt.
Single shot, of course. Drop your cartridge in, close the bolt.
Has only one locking lug which is the root stem of the handle.
It has a really stiff firing pin spring. So that's locked ready to fire.
When you pull the trigger that snaps forward.
Now the most unusual element to this is this little wheel right here.
You can lock the bolt, well, put the bolt about halfway up, and then this wheel rotates
(if I have it lined up just right, there we go),
that wheel rotates around and allows us to lock the bolt in that position.
Now this is a little bit unusual in that it doesn't act as a safety,
because you can still drop the striker when it's locked.
So if I do that, bring it back to
here. Now I can lock it and it'll still fire. Not entirely sure what the purpose of this was,
except perhaps just a lock to prevent the thing from coming open during
movement, I guess. I really don't know. It's I think the first time I've seen something quite like that.
Now I can show you the inside of the bolt.
In typical French style we have a locking screw here that prevents the bolt from coming out.
So we pull that out,
unlock it, and then pull the bolt back, pull the trigger and it slides out.
That little guy was our ejector extractor, which just sits along the side of the bolt here.
So it's not broken. It just is retained by the bolt when it's in the rifle. When you take the bolt out, it falls out.
You can see the groove here on the inside of the receiver where it travels.
You can see the sear right there, that goes down when I pull the trigger.
Not much else in the receiver to show you.
Once we have the bolt out, I can unscrew the back end here.
It's got quite the hefty firing pin spring.
And then that's pretty much it.
When you actually cock this thing in the gun, this gets held back on the firing sear.
So it sits back slightly like this, and then when you pull the trigger it snaps forward
and the tip of the firing pin protrudes out the front and fires.
It really is unfortunate that we don't have more information about exactly when and where and who
this came from because, honestly, it looks like a pretty decent conversion system.
It wouldn't surprise me terribly to find out that this was a relatively late production sort of thing.
Something in the 1860s or '70s. It's hard to see it going into the 1880s, by that point
this bore diameter was really on its way out. Much smaller diameter bores,
you know, instead of a 17.5 or 18mm, you'd be looking at more like 11 to 12mm.
And quickly on its way down to more like 7 or 8mm once smokeless powder became a thing.
So it looks like it's actually pretty well put together.
But of course this never went into any serious production, because, if it had, we would know more about it.
Very cool to get to take a look at some of, you know, interesting conversion guns like this.
It's the creativity and the different ways that people take to get to new technology
that I think is one of the most interesting elements of firearms history.
So this one, of course, is coming up for sale here at Rock Island.
If you have a collection of this sort of thing and you'd like to add this one to it,
you can check out their catalogue for their pictures, and description of this rifle,
as well as everything else that they have coming up for sale.
Thanks for watching.