Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction House taking a look at
some of the guns they're putting up for sale at the end of June 2015.
And yesterday we took a look at a Dreyse needle rifle, and so today
I want to take a look at its French counterpart, the 1866 Chassepot needle rifle.
Now it's really interesting handling these two guns side-by-side, because you can really get this impression
that the Dreyse is like the last of the muskets, just in general feel and handling and character.
And the Chassepot is the first of the modern rifles. There are a number of elements to this that
really are very familiar to anyone who's handled French rifles all the way up
through the end of World War One even.
For example, the sights stayed pretty much the same,
the bolt, the feel, this just has the handling of a much more modern rifle than the Dreyse.
Now this was developed in 1866 and it is a needle rifle like the Dreyse, but it has a number
of significant differences. First off, the Chassepot has a set of rubber obturators.
So those function to seal the bore so that gas only goes out the muzzle end
and doesn't come back into the shooters face.
And it's not a perfect system, and it does wear out reasonably quickly. This is rubber
we're talking about next to a gunpowder firing chamber, but it does work.
It also has some smaller technical improvements. For example, the Dreyse cartridge you have
a bullet and a primer right at the base of the bullet, and then all of your powder within a paper case.
The Chassepot cases instead they have a bullet at the front, powder in the middle,
and they actually put the primer at the very back.
So instead of the needle having to poke all the way through the entire powder charge to hit the primer,
which is how it is on the Dreyse, on the Chassepot the needle only has to basically poke
into the very back of the cartridge, and the first thing it runs into is the primer.
Now that needle still suffers from every firing, and it is getting scorched and burned and
damaged, and they do wear out over time. And they break as well
because they're very thin, they are in fact very much like needles. I'll show you in just a minute.
But there's a lot less exposure in the Chassepot system than there is in the Dreyse.
These rifles are also lighter, the Dreyse is about an 11 pound rifle,
that thing is heavy. That's heavier than a Garand. The Chassepot is much lighter.
This also fires a smaller calibre, higher velocity projectile. The Chassepot's about a
370 grain bullet traveling at about 1,400 feet per second, it's .43 calibre, or 11mm.
The Dreyse was a .53 calibre bullet, and it was more like a 480 grain projectile running at about 1,000 feet per second.
So the Chassepot was higher velocity, ... which gave it, of course, a bit less drop at range.
It was also a more accurate gun. This has a traditional projectile being normally rifled,
hitting the rifling and spinning, compared to the Dreyse's sabot system.
There is one interesting quirk to the bolt here that you might not expect.
So why don't I bring the camera back and let's take this apart and see how it works,
and get a better feel for the gun.
I do want to point out at first this is a Model of 1866, it was made at the Tulle Arsenal
(I may have mispronounced that and I apologise),
... the French arsenals were all government owned and run.
And this particular example was manufactured, as you can see here, in 1868.
Now these were manufactured from 1866 when they were first adopted, until 1875.
And while the Dreyse was replaced by a completely different gun, the 1871 Mauser,
the Chassepot ... they started to convert these to
centrefire cartridge guns in 1874, that was called the Gras, the 1866/74 Gras.
Now the interesting thing about this bolt is after it's been fired, and it is currently in the fired state,
normally you'd expect to just lift the bolt handle. Well in this the bolt's actually locked,
and you have to manually cock the gun,
like so, then we can open the bolt.
Once it's open we get a look at the needle assembly.
Now this particular one has seen a long and fairly hard life, so it's pretty worn inside, but
this punches into our paper case.
This is the remnants (and this is very hard now), of a rubber obturator ring, actually two rings back-to-back,
and our needle sticks out the front of this. Now because this, the bolt here,
is in the cocked position (there's spring tension on the ... needle), we can't see the needle.
It's only when we pull the trigger and drop the cocking piece that the needle will protrude out.
So let me go ahead and pull the bolt out and we can take a closer look at that.
In order to take the bolt out, I need to remove this screw.
Alright.
So this screw just runs in a track on the bolt.
(Pull the trigger.)
This track is what this screw runs in and just prevents the bolt from coming out the back of the rifle.
Alright, so here's our bolt. It is in the cocked position currently. In order to show you what it would look like fired,
I can drop it like that. This is what it would look like fired, and there is our needle sticking out the nose of the bolt.
So as you can see, that really is very much like a needle,
they didn't name it that for nothing.
Now this front assembly of the bolt will come out after you take out this screw.
I'm not going to do that because this hard rubber obturator is in really poor shape,
and I don't want it to just fall apart on me if I take it out.
So, I will point out you can get new replacement obturators and needles.
I'm not sure if this needle is full-length, ... they do get worn down and sometimes the tips break off, so.
Thanks for watching guys. I hope you enjoyed the video. Like the Dreyse,
there are actually a fair number of people out there who have gone to the trouble of figuring out
how to properly recreate their own Chassepot ammo and actually shoot these guns.
There's nothing to say you can't go out and shoot something, even though it is this old.
This is about a 150 year old gun here, and you know what? I bet it'd be a lot of fun to shoot.
If you'd like to shoot this one yourself, or just add it to your collection as a cool piece of history,
it is of course coming up for sale here at Rock Island. If you check out the link in the text description
below, that will take you to Rock Island's catalogue page. This is in a lot, it comes with
a couple other guns, so you can take a look at them as well. And if you decide it's something
worth having you can place a bit right there on-line. Win it, ship it to you, and have a lot of fun.
Thanks for watching.