Hmm, this might be a problem.
Hi guys, thanks for tuning into another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Morphy Auction Company
taking a look at a Bavarian Model of 1869 Werder pistol, or Lightning pistol.
This is one of the guns that they're going to be selling in their
upcoming February Field & Range auction.
And I thought it would be a great chance to take a look
at what is mechanically a really cool gun, that kind of
got short shrift for reasons that are not its own fault.
So a brief history of the development of this gun.
It was developed by Johann Ludwig Werder, went into military trials in 1868.
These were military trials in the Kingdom of Bavaria.
Germany did not exist as a unified nation state at this point,
that wouldn't happen until after the Franco-Prussian war in 1871.
And so Bavaria had its own army and its own equipment.
They tested this against a couple of other competitors of the day,
including the Werndl, not to be confused with the Werder.
The Werndl was sort of a rotary drum trapdoor type rifle.
They also tested it against the Berdan rifle from American Hiram Berdan.
The Berdan rifle actually was really pretty good, it was an early kind of a typical ... rotating bolt bolt-action style of rifle.
And the trials came down pretty much neck- and-neck between the Werder and the Berdan.
And it ultimately came down to a personal decision by the young 23 year old King Ludwig of Bavaria.
Who, taking a more personal interest in the trials than was typical of royalty in the day,
specifically chose the Werder rifle for Bavaria's armed forces.
Now they would adopt this in three different forms,
a standard infantry rifle firing a standard infantry cartridge. And then a carbine and a pistol,
both chambered for a slightly reduced cartridge because
firing the full power rifle load in a handgun like this would have been unpleasant and not very practical.
The idea was this breech system lends itself reasonably well to being shrunk down to a handgun size,
Which gives you a gun both potentially for cavalry, if you want holster pistols,
and also for some of the ... ancillary troops. For example, this one is unit marked to the 2nd Artillery Regiment.
Artillery troopers need to be able to defend themselves, but maybe give them a pistol instead of
a full-length rifle since their normal day job doesn't require them to tote around a full-length rifle.
Anyway, we'll get into some of what happened to these in a moment.
But first I am excited to show you how this thing pulls apart, because it's really neat.
So just for reference sake, the Werder rifle cartridge was 11x50mm, and it used a 386 grain
bullet over 66.4 grains of powder. The pistol round was 11x35, so substantially shorter.
And it used the same powder charge, but it used a 340 grain bullet, so a substantially lighter ... bullet.
The way that this actually works is we have this currently ready to load.
You would load a cartridge into the chamber, and then manually cock the hammer.
Doing that lifts the breech block here. This is basically at its core a tilting block mechanism.
Now this is actually cocking two springs inside, because the first spring is the hammer spring.
And when we pull the back trigger, it fires, Notice we have a spring-loaded firing pin,
so the hammer rebounds. Nice safety mechanism there.
Then you're left with this, and well, how do you get the empty case out?
The answer is the front trigger, because there is a second spring in here that has been
tensioned and is just waiting to be released, and it will pop the breech block down.
When that drops down it pops the extractors
backward, just like that. And it rather energetically flips the empty case up and out of the gun.
That leaves the gun back in this configuration where you can slot another round into it,
cock the hammer again, and you're ready to fire again.
And in trials in Bavaria (with the rifle, granted, not the pistol) the rifle of the same system,
the Bavarian committee was able to get 20 to 24 rounds per minute out of their rifle,
compared to 12 to 15 rounds a minute for a Mauser 71 (which, granted, came a little bit later), but
more than 50% greater rate of fire. Hence the nickname that this got of the "Blitz" rifle, or Lightning rifle.
It really is a very cool mechanism.
Now the coolness doesn't end there, because we're going to go ahead and take this apart.
I will start by mentioning that to do this we want to start with the breech block down,
because that de-tensions the springs. We are then going to take out this screw.
There are a bunch of screws in this gun holding various parts together,
but the only one we're concerned about is this one at the front of the trigger guard. Pull that.
We can then pop the trigger guard backwards, and it comes off.
And then, pushing the lever down just slightly, the whole thing comes out as a unit,
leaving this nice empty shell of a Werder pistol.
Looks a lot like a modern HK fire control pack, doesn't it? Well, this is from 1869, so it slightly predates H&K.
I can then take this side plate and just pop it off the side of the action and, presto, here's the whole thing.
So I'm gonna show you a little bit of this with the springs,
but then I'm gonna take the springs out before I try to do the whole thing,
because if I try to actually cock this with the side plate off, parts will go flying.
What we have here, you can see when I pull the hammer back
I'm compressing this round, or omega, shaped spring. And when I lift the breech block
(just take that out of the way), when I lift the breech block I am compressing this V spring.
So, those are the two springs that you have operating.
... Oh, and I should point out, there is a third little flat spring right here.
That's ... a trigger spring, and it also puts a little bit of force on the extractor here.
But that one's less important. Pull that out, pull this out, and then I can show you the way this whole thing works.
So when you cock the hammer ... these parts are going to interface, and that's going to pull
the breech block up. That locks it in position
with the breech face here right behind the cartridge. The firing pin is in there, I'll show that to you in a moment.
This is also, you'll notice, bringing this lever down so that this bar and this bar are touching each other.
That is what's locking this in position. However, we have tension, we've squeezed this V spring
significantly together, and we have also tensioned this spring,
giving us force on the hammer and force on the breech block. When I pull the trigger
(Oops, I forgot, I have taken the trigger return spring out.)
We have two ... sear notches on the hammer.
So there's my full cocked sear notch, when I pull the trigger that comes up, which allows the hammer to pivot down.
Notice that the breech block is still locked in the upward position by this.
The hammer goes forward and it hits the spring-loaded firing pin, which you can see right there.
And you can see the firing pin projecting out the front of the breech face.
So that's going to fire the gun. And then you're in this configuration.
In order to eject the round (woops, I just did it accidentally).
In order to eject the round, when you push this trigger forward
you're going to get to that point where this bar is no longer supporting the breech block,
the V spring back here is going to expand, which will push this down,
which pops that down there (and I took off my extractor, let's put that back on).
So this was up like that.
This comes down, and when it comes all the way down it hits this bar coming off the extractor,
which pops the extractor back like that,
which throws the empty case up this little ramp now and out of the gun.
It is truly a really cool little system.
So there are a couple other little things that I want to show you briefly.
One of them is that we have a serial number on this gun, 2002.
And then we have a different serial number on all of these parts,
and the reason for that is that this is an assembly number.
So before the gun was actually ... finished and serialised, these trigger mechanisms were
manufactured as units. And you'd want to put them together and make sure that
all the parts fit and they all worked properly, do any hand fitting that was necessary.
And once you did that, you would then number all of these parts so that they all stay together as a unit.
Then when this unit is mated up with an actual gun frame, that's when the whole thing gets its actual serial number.
So this whole serial number versus assembly number being different is
not particularly uncommon with military firearms.
... Like some of the Arisaka models do this exact same thing.
If we look at the outside of the actual pistol here, you'll see
the 2002 on the barrel, the upper frame and the lower frame.
And then we actually, this is kind of cool, we have a unit marking here on the right side. This is the 2nd Artillery Regiment.
And then I believe that would probably be second company, 48th gun in the company.
And just to recap for you, now that we have this all back assembled. Cocked, ready to fire,
breech locked upward, fired, ready to eject,
opened and ejected.
One last thing to point out, there is no safety on this design.
This is, I believe, an aftermarket added safety. Not sure when those were put on, but there it is.
And what that does is simply prevent you from cocking the hammer far enough to catch on the sear.
So you have to pop that out of the way, then you can actually cock and fire the gun.
Through no real fault of its own, the Werder would actually have a pretty darn short service life.
Only four battalions of Bavarian troops were equipped with these guns in time to use them in the Franco-Prussian war.
They worked very well in service there, but they weren't there in particularly large numbers.
After the unification of Germany the Prussians, who pretty much ran the place at that point,
wanted all of the military forces under their control to standardise on some infantry weapons.
And for an infantry rifle cartridge that meant 11mm Mauser,
which was substantially more powerful than the 11mm Werder round.
They ... did in fact rebuild the guns in 11mm Mauser. The problem was
... the action simply hadn't been built for that in the first place.
It could have been, but it wasn't, because it wasn't of course designed around that cartridge.
And they had significant reliability problems once they made that re-chambering.
Cartridges stuck in the chamber, the extractor wasn't powerful enough to pull the brass out,
it had a lot of problems. And ultimately the Werder rifles were replaced with Mauser 71s, so.
The pistols of course never went through that re-chambering because they were initially made for this shorter cartridge.
And ... there's no reason to re-chamber them, same goes for the carbines.
So ... if you have the pistol or the carbine (a pistol like this one), you don't have to worry about it
having been re-chambered. It's still using the original short Werder pistol ammunition.
At any rate, I think these are one of the coolest and least appreciated of the early single-shot mechanisms,
because they really are better than most of the other stuff that was out there.
Of course, they'd be quickly supplanted by repeating rifles instead of single-shot rifles.
But for the time being, this was a cool gun.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. You can see some more details on this,
as well as a whole slew of other guns that Morphy has
by tracking down their website and taking a look at their catalogue.
YouTube does not allow me to put that link in the description, so you'll have to go find it on your own.
But it's Morphy Auctions, it's not that hard to find.
Thanks for watching.