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 are going to be selling in their upcoming
May of 2019 Premiere firearms auction.
Today we are taking a look at a Genhart ... horizontal turret rifle.
Now the turret rifle or turret concept is... it's kind of the natural outgrowth of
well, ideas being thrown up against the wall. So, we have revolvers where you have a
bunch of chambers that are all parallel to each other and they rotate around a central axis.
This seems to be a really good system for having multiple shots.
So someone's going to see that and go, "Aha, what if we rotate it around
the axis perpendicular to the barrel?" So instead of rotating a turret like this, pointing that way.
What if we rotate it this way while we're pointing the barrel that way.
And that would be different and thus perhaps marketable, or at least patentable.
Now the problem with turret style revolvers is...
Well, there are a couple problems. The one that first comes to mind for most people is safety.
So with a standard typical revolver, if on a muzzle loading revolver
you have a multiple discharge and more than one chamber goes off,
presumably you are pointing the rifle at something you intend to be shooting at
and all of the rounds are going to go down towards that target.
It won't be good for the gun, but it shouldn't be an immediate safety problem.
Well, if you've got a turret system where you've got chambers pointing in all the radial directions
and you have a multiple discharge, that could be potentially very bad, because you could be firing
to the side, towards the back, to yourself, any number of bad options.
So this system did not last long. As soon as there were really good viable revolvers,
turret guns kind of went away. They became old fashioned, and as soon as people got tired of
deliberately using a, you know, old-fashioned style of gun, boom, turret guns were gone.
So Genhart here is actually one of the more prolific of the designs, in that he made over 1,000 of these.
They were manufactured in Belgium, they're proofed in Belgium.
And they were made primarily for export to the United Kingdom for sale there.
And this one actually has a bunch of really interesting good design features.
So let me go ahead and show those to you.
A word to any aspiring firearms designers here. If you want to be sure that someone in the future
will be able to identify and document your work, put your name on it. It's really a big help.
And you can see here we have H. Genhart. That is Heinrich Genhart by the way.
He did this work from basically through the 1850s.
This system was patented in Belgium in 1853. It was patented in the US in 1857.
By 1860 he was pretty much done, these had become obsolete.
So a basic overview here. We're gonna be looking at the system today,
not necessarily this specific rifle, because I believe large elements of this have been rebuilt.
This lever does not match anything that I've seen on other Genhart guns on-line.
I believe it is a replacement. Originally, I think it would have been a long lever that came back here,
but the mechanism still works the same so we'll go ahead and show you.
To start with this is approximately a .38 calibre bore. It has a 10 shot cylinder to it.
And first, and perhaps most interesting, you'll notice there's a little bit of a gap here.
And when I operate this lever
that gap opens and closes, this actually cams the barrel back and forth.
By pulling this all the way back we can cam the barrel all the way forward, and we can then lift
the cylinder out.
Taking a closer look at this, you've got your 10 actual chambers there.
There's our Belgian proof mark, these were made in Belgium, obviously.
And you'll notice that each chamber actually has a little recess at the mouth.
The reason for that is so that the barrel can actually cam over the outside of the cylinder.
So when I push this down the barrel cams backward and that is going to lock it into one of the chambers.
That prevents the turret, the cylinder, from rotating and it also does at least a bit of a job of
eliminating flashover. So that you're not going to have muzzle flash sparking over through the cylinder gap here
and igniting cartridges on either side. However, just in case as an extra safety precaution
you can see that the whole turret is surrounded by a relatively thick sheet of metal here and
the two positions to either side of the firing position are left open so that should you get a flashover,
it's most likely to happen to one of these two, and that can discharge,
not perfectly safely, but more safely than any other position. And it's left open
so that it can vent like that without seriously damaging the gun.
Now we have a couple other elements in here that you can see. One of them is this little pin
which is connected to this button. That is one of your cylinder locks.
So when the barrel's back that's going to lock the cylinder in place,
that pin is also going to lock into one of these holes at the outer periphery.
The centre holes are connected to this guy, which is actually your hammer.
So we need to talk for a moment about the cartridge that was used in this thing, because it really was a cartridge.
Not a metallic brass cartridge like we're used to, but this system, this rifle, was actually sold with a
set of tools to manufacture cartridges out of either lead or tin foil.
Basically, you would have a little mandrel and you would wrap a piece of foil around your mandrel
and and put it into your mould, which would form it to the same shape as these chambers.
You could then fill it with powder, seat a bullet in the top and there was a bullet seating tool as well.
And then the ignition on this was ... basically a form of Manton tube lock, or tube primer.
Joseph Manton came up with this idea, (for which by the way, he was successfully sued by Forsyth,
the inventor of the percussion cap), he had a short copper tube full of fulminate,
And the original idea was that you could take that tube and put it into the flash hole of, say, a flintlock
style of gun, and then when a hammer hit it, it would crush the top of that copper tube.
It would ignite the fulminate inside as a primer, and it would also seal the top of that tube.
Which kind of does everything you would want in a primer. It didn't work perfectly,
sometimes it didn't fully seal and you'd get some flash back into the shooter's face.
Occasionally it would really fail badly and the whole tube would
go shooting out the flash hole and potentially hurt someone.
But what Genhart did here is adapt that system, where he has a tube primer that sticks out the back of the cartridge
into these holes. Each cartridge has its tube primer extend back into there, and
when you pull the trigger here this cylinder jumps straight upward
into one of these holes, whichever one's in line with the chamber in the barrel.
That's going to crush that copper tube and fire that cylinder.
So this really is a pretty clever, effective system.
... I've got the barrel forward so I can drop this in, I'm gonna just rotate it till it pops into place,
with one of these locking pins. You can lock the barrel all the way back,
this cylinder is now firmly locked in place, go ahead and fire it.
Which I'm not going to do because I don't want to damage the ... hammer.
When I cam the barrel forward like this to open it up so I can get to my next shot,
that also re-cocks the hammer which is nice.
Then I'm gonna push down on this button, rotate this until it gets to its next position,
cam the barrel down again, fire again,
unlock it, rotate to the next position,
lock it, etc. We've got ten quick shots. Once the cylinder is empty, unlock the barrel,
it's a simple matter to take this off and replace it with a new one if you would like.
And then you've got another 10 shots ready to go.
I can show you the underside here. This is the hammer mechanism.
I said I really I don't want to fire that because I'm not sure how fragile these parts are inside,
and I don't want to damage anything. But all it's effectively doing is pushing a
cylindrical hammer straight up where it would crush that tube primer and fire off the cartridge.
Now, I'm pretty sure that all of this brass, in fact, I suspect this wood is all replacement,
because it's quite a bit cruder than I've seen on other examples of the guns.
So I think someone has attempted to rebuild this from a damaged example.
That butt plate with its serial number may or may not be original.
I don't know if this stock is original to the gun or if it's a donor that was fitted to this gun. However,
Genharts with serial numbers up about this high, certainly in the 1,100s are documented, so he did make quite a few of them.
Unfortunately, this rifle overall is pretty rough.
It looks to me like the stock has been reworked substantially. It's missing the front sight.
There's some big chips out of the turret itself. But it's a really cool example of one of the better
(by which I mean, like, less awful), turret rifle designs that I've seen. This thing's actually pretty cool.
So if you'd like to have it yourself it is, of course, coming up for sale here at Rock Island.
Take a look at their catalogue page on it, it'll show you their description,
their pictures, their price estimate, all that sort of stuff.
You can place a bid on it on-line and check out everything else they've got in the sale as well.
Thanks for watching.