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 that they're going to be selling
in their upcoming June of 2017 Regional Auction.
And today we have reached the conclusion of our saga
on the development of the Winchester lever action rifle.
Today we're looking at the last one,
which is the Winchester Model of 1895.
So only one year after the 1894, John Browning is back
at it again with another new design for Winchester.
Now what he did in this case was basically take the 94
and replace its tube magazine with a box magazine.
This was important because at this point we're starting to see the introduction of spitzer cartridges,
pointed cartridges in other words.
You'll see these in military applications throughout Europe, and even the US is getting in on it.
The US has now the .30-40 cartridge, also known as the .30 Army, or the .30 US, or the .30-40 Krag.
And it's got a pointed bullet. Well, a pointed bullet is a problem in a tubular magazine, because in a situation like that
you've got the tip of one bullet resting flat up against the primer of the cartridge in front of it.
And under recoil that has the absolute potential to lead to a detonation of cartridges in the magazine tube.
Which is really bad. The solution to this is to have a box magazine,
so that instead of being set up end to end, the cartridges are stacked one above each other.
And there's no way for them to actually detonate each other. And that's what Browning did here.
So this rifle was really designed around the .30-40 cartridge, the new US military cartridge,
but when it was introduced it was also introduced in two black powder calibres, the .38-72 and the .40-72.
And this really kind of was just Winchester hedging their bets.
Those were established existing cartridges,
people knew what they were, and they ensured that there would at least be some market for this rifle.
While the .30-40 was a smokeless powder cartridge, spitzer bullets, metal jacketed, lots of new elements to this cartridge.
And just in case something went catastrophically wrong, Winchester would have a bit of a backup on the rifle.
Of course it didn't go catastrophically wrong, in fact they dropped the black powder cartridges fairly quickly,
you know, within 10 or 15 years of introducing the rifle. And instead they started introducing more smokeless cartridges.
So this would be fairly quickly introduced in .303 British calibre,
which was a popular rifle up in Canada where there was ... obviously more British influence.
... They would bring in the .30-03 and then the .30-06 cartridges in the Winchester 1895.
They would introduce the .405 Winchester, which is a big large game cartridge
which would be famous for being used by Theodore Roosevelt.
He called it his "big medicine" for one of his African safaris.
And of course having former President Theodore Roosevelt talk about how great your rifle is ...
Winchester couldn't have asked for any better publicity than TR loving their firearms.
The Model 1895 would stay in production until 1936,
although they were still assembling rifles from existing parts until about 1940.
And in total they'd make 425,000 of these rifles, which seems like a lot.
That's a lot more than they did of say the 1886, which is kind of a ... rifle for a similar demographic.
And the reason the numbers were so much higher for the 1895 is that they are kind of skewed by World War One.
In 1915 the Russian government was in desperate need of firearms, and ... Winchester convinced them
that they could get Winchester 1895s to the Russians almost immediately upon the signing of a contract
because they already had this production line set up. And so the Russians placed a couple orders for 1895s
chambered for the 7.62x54 Russian military cartridge. They modified them slightly by adding stripper clip guides.
And Winchester would produce something like 293,000 of these rifles.
So, well over half of the production of the 1895 was on Russian military contract and got shipped off to Russia.
That's what skews the numbers of production to be so high for this rifle.
As with all of the other Winchesters that we've been looking at, the 1895 was available with a wide variety of custom options.
Although it's interesting that one of them that they specifically dropped was the pistol grip stock.
Previously ... for an extra fee you could get a fancy pistol grip stock on pretty much any Winchester.
And they carried this through to only the very first model of 1895.
After that the pistol grip stock just wasn't an option on these rifles.
Now I mentioned the first model. About the first 5,000 of these rifles that were made
are kind of distinctive in a number of significant ways.
They had a flat sided receiver, which is what makes them easily recognisable.
And they didn't have the lever safety that was later added.
So we'll take a look at that safety in just a moment.
In fact actually why don't we take a look at that right now?
And we'll also compare this to the 1894 and you can see how similar they really are.
While the pistol grips may no longer have been an option, with the 1895 you still have that same trio of standard barrel lengths,
carbine, rifle and musket. And of course custom barrel lengths as well, custom hand guards.
But one thing that obviously you would not see any longer is the variety in magazine tubes.
Of course magazine tubes were gone, all of the magazines were now of this fixed box variety.
Typically 5 rounds, although in a couple of the chamberings you can only cram 4 of them in there.
We have of course a carbine and a rifle here. We have round barrel, we have octagonal barrel.
This one has a really cool Lyman aperture sight which we'll take a look at in a moment.
Upper handguard on the carbine, we have a saddle ring on the carbine.
But you kind of are going to be getting a little bit less variety in the look of the 1895s
compared to some of the earlier models. Because the front half of the gun there's less going on
because you don't have that magazine option.
You then of course don't have the pistol grip option, so a little bit less variety.
Main markings are going to be here on the side of the receiver.
Pretty much, you know, pretty standard compared to all the previous Winchester lever actions.
We do have some new patent dates on this one.
You can see this has some upgrades to it. There are patents here that go all the way up to 1907,
beyond just the original 1895 patent that the design was based on.
Calibre markings will typically be on the barrel, although if the rifle in question was a carbine with an upper handguard
the calibre markings would be put on the front of the receiver instead, because the barrel was covered.
So this is actually a quite early production gun in the early .38-72 Winchester Centre Fire cartridge.
Here's an example of the early model marking on the tang, Model 1895.
And here's another example of a later variation on that model designation.
Serial numbers on the 1895s are located on the lower tang underneath the lever.
So if we lift the lever out of the way you can see we have a serial number right down here.
Here's one more calibre marking that I do want to point out briefly because it's interesting.
As I said, this rifle is really designed around the .30-40 cartridge.
And when it was first introduced it was ... designated the .30 US because it's a .30 calibre cartridge,
and it was the first US military formally adopted .30 calibre cartridge, so .30 US.
However, it wouldn't be that long before the .30-40 was replaced with the .30-03 and then the .30-06.
All of a sudden now we have a couple of .30 calibre military cartridges,
and to avoid confusion Winchester ... changed their marking for the .30-40 to now be .30 Army.
So both designations are the same cartridge, just they changed when the US military adopted the .30-03.
With these fancy new long-range, high-velocity, smokeless powder cartridges
this style of adjustable Lyman peep sight actually became fairly popular on the 1895 in particular.
So it pivots here. We have a locking lever. Open that and then adjust it here, and the hash marks are in hundreds of yards.
So we've got a mark denoting 300 right there that I'll just leave it at. Lock the sight back down,
and then you have this nice precise rear aperture to shoot with.
In conjunction with a nice fancy globe front sight, and this is actually a folding front sight.
So when you're not using it you can fold it flush on the barrel to help protect it.
Now let's take a moment to compare the mechanical action, I have an 1895 here, and an 1894 up here.
And you can see some similarities between the appearance of the bolts and the locking system,
but the changes are a little bit hidden.
On the 1894 the locking block is visible right here at the top,
on the 1895 it's actually kind of hidden a little bit more inside.
As a refresher, on the 1894 when you open the lever this locking block drops down.
Once it's out of the way it no longer holds the bolt into the receiver, and the action can cycle.
The 1895 uses the same system, except you can see that the locking block is
located underneath the ... rear of the bolt back there. So it's doing the same thing, but it's a bit hidden from view.
So the locking block is going to come up into this area instead of being completely behind the bolt.
On the 1894 we also have this whole surface that drops down when you cycle the action.
Couldn't quite do that with the 1895, because now it has a box magazine in the way.
So now this system is kind of cut out so that it straddles both sides of the magazine
in order to do the same job. So this was not just a trivial redesign, it was much more.
Going from the 94 to the 95 was a much more significant redesign than going from the 86 to the 92.
One other element that was added (and this was introduced at something like 5,000 guns into production),
a two-piece lever. So we now have a safety built into the lever itself.
The lever has a spring-loaded component, the bottom surface of the lever right here
has a latch that locks into this hook.
So ... if you just grab back here, you can't open the lever. That's kind of an automatic safety.
When you grab here, you can pivot this piece down just slightly, and that unlocks the system and allows it to cycle.
So the Kings Patent Loading Gate is finally gone because of the box magazine.
But there is a separate trick to loading an 1895 magazine,
you'll notice that you have feed lips back here and there's a nice cut out section right in the middle.
In order to load this, what you do is actually stand the cartridge up vertically,
push the case head down onto the follower, slide it back under these feed lips,
and then pivot the cartridge down ... in line with the bore, and push it down into the magazine.
So unless you have one of the Russian model guns that actually uses Mosin-Nagant stripper clips,
that's how you do it. Put the cartridge in, back, and then pivot it forward.
As with many of the previous Winchester designs, the US military would never actually really use these guns.
They came closer than with most of the others. There was an order placed for 10,000 of these in the late 1890s,
but after the first 100 were delivered they were rejected and the whole order was cancelled.
Those guns ended up being sold to Cuba I believe instead.
There was some use of these by US Volunteer Corps and by US state militias and national guards,
but the US military, again, just never came around to see the virtues of the lever action rifle.
Other militaries did. They did see foreign service, and of course
... more than half of the total production of these rifles was for the Russian military.
And in Russian service these were very well liked because whatever the downsides of a lever action in combat
(and to the US these included things like the lever being awkward to operate when prone,
and the potential for a lot of dirt and debris to get into this action when it's open),
well, despite all of that it is a far better combat weapon than a Mosin-Nagant bolt action rifle.
And these things were very highly valued by the Russian troops who were able to acquire them.
The 1895 was the last of Winchester's developmental lever action rifles.
Obviously they would continue to sell lever actions, and they would continue to, through the next 100 years or more,
reintroduce older designs with new model numbers and bring them back onto the market in different cartridges,
and continue to exploit the demand for them.
But after the 1895 there weren't really any new designs from Winchester, so.
This was, however, not the end of Winchester's work with John Browning.
... Right around the same time period he is already getting into the pump action shotgun field,
the Winchester 1893 pump shotguns. And then that would be refined in 1897
to create one of the classic pump action shotguns ever created.
The cooperation with Browning would run until about 1903, 1905, when Browning decided to change his policy.
He came up with ... what would be the first successful semi-automatic shotgun,
and when he took it to Winchester he told them that instead of a lump sum payment
as he had gotten for everything previously that he'd done with them
instead he wanted a royalty payment on every unit sold.
And Winchester was not, ... Winchester didn't like that idea and so they turned him away. They thought,
"You know what, we're doing really well, we ... don't need to bother with this any more."
And Browning would take the design over to Fabrique Nationale in Belgium,
and that would be kind of the start of a brand new world of John Browning designs.
And he would work with FN there until the end of his life in the mid-1920s.
Well, I hope you've enjoyed our tour here through the development of Winchester lever action rifles.
It's been pretty cool to be able to get pretty good examples of every single model of them to bring to you guys.
So hopefully you learned quite a bit.
If you're interested in adding one of these 1895s to your own collection,
take a look at the description text below. I have links there to ... Rock Island's catalogue pages for these two rifles.
And if you do some browsing through the catalogue you'll find a number of other 1895s in there as well.
Thanks very much for watching.
[ cc by sk cn2 ]