[ Savage & North "Figure 8" Revolver ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at RIA
taking a look at a very scarce
pre-Civil War American martial revolver.
This is a Savage & North "Figure 8" revolver.
So named for the very obvious figure 8
thing hanging off the bottom of the gun.
Now, this ... comes from one of the older firearms manufacturers in the US.
The company started as Simeon North in the 1790s,
it started manufacturing guns in Berlin, Connecticut.
In 1811 he moved to Middletown, Connecticut, and he took on a partner,
his brother-in-law Josiah Savage, thus forming Savage & North.
Now they would go on making guns, in 1831 Josiah Savage died
and at the same time Simeon North decided to retire.
And that left the company in the hands of their two sons, Edward Savage and James North.
... Well, the two of them would run the company until 1856 when James North died.
By that time his son, Henry North, was also working for the company.
He wasn't a partner in it, but he was working for them.
And he patented this sort of toggle-action revolver system.
So let's go ahead and take a closer look at this.
... Because it's a mechanically very interesting gun.
Fundamentally what we have here is a 6 shot, .36 calibre revolver.
It has just over a 7 inch barrel, weighs in at 3 pounds 6 ounces.
And it is single action. But where with a Colt revolver you have to reach up,
typically break your grip, and manually cock the hammer between shots.
And cocking the hammer is linked to a function that rotates the cylinder.
On the Savage & North, you pull the bottom section of this sort of figure 8 ring setup,
and that rotates the cylinder and cocks the hammer
(or it would if it weren't already cocked).
You then use your index finger to pull the trigger, which drops the hammer.
So you would actually fire it with two [fingers], and this allows pretty rapid fire.
So that rotates the cylinder and cocks the hammer, and then pull this trigger to fire it,
and then cock it, fire, cock, fire, and so on.
Oops, and I didn't quite get it all the way.
There is a bit of a hefty recoil spring in the cylinder,
and so you have to exert proper force to fully rotate the cylinder.
So it's worth pointing out that North's patent
has basically a sealed interface between the cylinder and the barrel.
So when I pull the cocking lever, it's first going to actually slightly retract the cylinder,
then rotate it, and then allow it to slip back forward, there we go,
and ... these sort of interlocking cones nest onto the barrel.
And that will ... seal most of the flash from the cylinder gap.
There's a nice spur on the back of the grip to hold your hand in position
because you never have to break your grip firing this guy.
Because you've got your cocking lever here, and your firing trigger up there.
And so this allows you to have nice in-line recoil impulse.
I haven't fired one of these, but I imagine they would actually jump
quite a bit less in the hand than a Colt. Which is sort of kind of designed to rock up
in the hand to give you easy access with your thumb to cock the hammer.
Now to disassemble this we are going to first take out this screw at the front.
The cylinder access pin is actually one contiguous unit with the loading lever.
Which, by the way, just comes down there to allow you to load cap and ball into the cylinder.
So I can pull this screw out,
and then we can wiggle this guy out.
Note that we've got grooves cut in it here, and that's to give some place
for powder fouling to go before it really stops the gun from working easily.
With that out and with the hammer cocked,
so you don't want the hammer actually engaged into one of the percussion cap nipples there.
Now I'm going to pull the trigger to pull the cylinder back,
and then I can drop the cylinder out.
And then I can pull out this half of the cylinder plate.
Notice this is our little spring that sits in the front of the cylinder.
And this is what is putting spring pressure on the toggle system.
Now, you ... can't see the toggle system because I haven't opened it up yet.
So next up I'm going to take this screw out so that I can remove the side plate.
And there is a brass side plate, the whole gun here has a brass frame.
So what's going on inside the action, and actually you can't quite see everything right now,
because there's no spring pressure pushing back on this.
So we'll show you this with and without the cylinder.
When I cock this, you can see that there is a lug right back there
that is going to push the hammer to first the half-cock notch, right there.
And then all the way to the fully-cocked notch.
We have this arm right here, which is going to act on the back plate of the cylinder.
It's going to push on one of these teeth.
That is the hand that rotates the cylinder one position per pull of the lever.
And then this end stud fits into the socket right there on what is actually a toggle.
So you can't really see the toggle ... (there you go, now you sort of can).
Let me put the cylinder back in,
and you can see a little better idea of how the whole thing actually works.
Looking at just the cylinder itself we have a little notch and peg here,
which ensures that these always stay lined up.
So that when this rotates in the gun, it rotates the cylinder with it.
There's just a little recess for the spring there.
The percussion caps are on the side of the cylinder instead of the back.
That's really just sort of a stylistic thing, which is required here
because of the rotating mechanism being in the back.
And then we have these notches that are cylinder stops
to lock the cylinder in place so that it doesn't move while it's being fired.
They are held in place by this little spring detent right there.
That prevents the cylinder from rotating backwards, and it's just part of a little flat spring.
So you can snap forward past it, but you can't push back.
Now that we have the cylinder installed and proper spring pressure in the system,
you can see how the toggle actually works.
It's going to bend right here in the centre
to allow the cylinder to come backwards under spring pressure.
Because it has to come back to disengage from the barrel, then rotate,
and then be pushed forward to re-engage with the barrel.
So you can see how this screw cams upward there.
That screw is the hinge in the toggle, and you can see how this
thin arm is acting on that tooth to rotate the cylinder one position.
And when I let the lever forward, the cylinder is able to go forward.
And there you have it.
Now what actually happened to these? Well, in June of 1856
the company sent one of them down to the Washington Arsenal for testing, like,
"Hey, we've got a cool revolver! I bet you'd like it, try this one out."
They put all of 50 rounds through it, it performs pretty darn well, and they go,
"That's a nice revolver, we'll buy 100 at $20 apiece
with all the accoutrements, the loading tools, and everything."
Those 100 are delivered almost exactly a year later in June of 1857.
They are eventually issued out to the cavalry, and the gun actually performs pretty well.
They do eventually do a more substantial test on it,
something like 1,000 rounds, and it actually runs quite nicely.
It doesn't break parts, it's reliable, it's pretty good.
In total about ... 450 of these would be manufactured by 1859.
And what happens by then is ... first off, the company
reorganises as the Savage Revolving Firearms Company,
now that there is no longer a North as a partner in it.
And they iterate this design into something that's a little bit better.
And that would be the Savage Navy revolver, which I have a separate video on.
The Savage Navy would go on to sell something like 13,000 copies to the US military.
And another 11,000 on the commercial market and be really quite successful.
And actually ended up being used on both sides of the US Civil War.
So if you're interested in following this story,
I will have a link to my Savage Navy video in the end cards
immediately following this conclusion, as well as down in the description.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed taking a look, these are obviously very scarce today.
Thanks for watching.