[ North & Skinner Revolving Rifle ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Rock Island
Auction Company taking a look at a few of the guns
they are going to be selling in their upcoming
May of 2019 Premier Auction.
Today we have a North & Skinner Revolving Rifle,
sometimes called a North & Savage Revolving Rifle.
And ... what I really like in firearms are the intermediate, experimental technologies.
The things that people tried out, they seem like a good idea at the time, but they didn't last.
And revolving rifles are really a good example of that sort of thing.
Even today, we see revolving rifles really being this not really very successful type of firearm.
However, back in the 1850s,
the whole concept of the revolver was just starting to really flourish.
And so a lot of people experimented with ways of making a revolver rifle.
Now they typically had a couple of problems that they all suffered from.
And the significant one is cylinder gap.
So you have to have some way that the cylinder can rotate without interference.
So you've got a barrel and you've got the cylinder rotating.
But then when you fire it, ... you don't have a seal, generally speaking,
between the cylinder and the barrel. And that means you are going to get flash,
and maybe little bits of lead if the line-up isn't perfect,
spitting out around that cylinder gap.
This is why you don't put your finger alongside the cylinder gap with even a modern revolver.
It'll hurt, it can seriously injure you on the large magnum revolvers.
So how do you deal with that on a rifle
where you have to have your front hand forward of the cylinder gap?
Well, on this guy they came up with an interesting way to address that problem.
So we'll take a look at that in a moment, but first I want to address
what this company is, because it has really got a kind of interesting background to it.
So, the company that manufactured this rifle was North & Savage.
And this company's origins go back to 1799 when Simeon North and Elisha Cheney
got a contract to manufacture pistols for the US government.
And then this got followed up by a couple more contracts in 1806 and 1811.
And then in 1813 they got a really huge contract to make 20,000 pistols for the military.
And at that point Simeon North realised, "We're going to need a bigger factory to do this."
And so he starts looking specifically in Middletown, Connecticut.
Well, he runs into a guy in Middletown by the name of Savage, Josiah Savage.
Josiah Savage is an interesting character, he was born in 1761.
He enlisted in the American revolutionary army as a teenager, fought in the Revolution.
Ended up serving on privateer vessels in the ... West Indies.
Got captured at one point as a privateer, escaped.
Ended up making a substantial fortune, became quite wealthy as a merchant trader.
... Bought himself a nice mansion in Middletown, as well as owning a couple of wharves.
He was very well off.
And so he ended up partnering with North to create this company.
North was the firearms guy, and Savage was the financier.
And that's often how these sorts of relationships work.
Now we can fast-forward a couple of decades
to the early 1850s when both North and Savage have died,
and both of theirs sons are now running the company.
So same name, it's now a second generation company on both sides, which is kind of cool.
And there are actually two sons of North,
there is Edward North who is actually running the company, he's a partner in the firm.
There's Henry North who isn't. It's not clear why, maybe he didn't want to,
maybe he wasn't very good at the management side of things.
What we do know is Henry North and a guy named Chaucey Skinner,
who had been an employee of the company for a long time
(in fact he had started working for the original Simeon North when he was a kid),
the two of them get a patent on this revolving rifle design.
So they come up with the concept, hence the name North & Skinner,
those are the two guys who designed the gun.
And then it gets put into production by their company, which is North & Savage.
Although, again, it's a different North, Edward North is the company guy,
Henry North, his brother, is the guy who designed the rifle.
So, North & Savage produces about 700 of these guns in the mid-1850s,
between 1852 and 1856.
So with all of that background now in mind,
let's take a look at what it was that they designed.
North and Skinner's design actually has a couple of elements to it that are pretty cool here.
So, first off, it's actually a lever-action system.
And when you pull the lever down,
it's going to re-cock the hammer and rotate the cylinder into position.
Then, when you push the lever forward, it locks the cylinder in place, makes it ready to fire.
Pull the trigger and the hammer will drop.
You many notice that the hammer is right on the centreline,
it's actually not quite, it is just barely offset to the right.
Which means you can just barely see your sights to the side of the hammer.
But we'll ignore that for the moment.
What is happening here when the action cycles
is that the cylinder is actually being pushed slightly forward.
This plate is not a parallel plate, it is actually a wedge.
You can see the gap here for the cylinder.
That tightens up a bit when you push the lever up.
On top of that,
the chamber mouths actually sit slightly proud
of the front face of the cylinder, and they are bevelled.
There is a matching bevel on the barrel, and so what's happening here is
this is actually being pressed up into the barrel to achieve, more or less, a gas-tight seal.
Now it's not a perfect seal, but it will prevent most of the flash
that you would normally expect from the cylinder gap.
There is still a bit of a risk of a chain fire,
of you pulling the trigger on one chamber and having multiple chambers fire.
Note that every single one of them actually has an exit hole.
So the one at the top obviously is the barrel.
And then this cover shield has holes in it for these two cylinders,
so that if they fire unintentionally they won't blow up the gun,
they won't hurt the user, they'll just fire down parallel to the barrel.
These two are set up so that they are not interfered with here.
And then of course, you've got the bottom one which lines up with the ramrod.
So that's probably the worst case scenario for a chain fire is to have the bottom chamber go off.
But even then, you'll damage this, but probably not hurt a whole lot else.
In order to make sure that the cylinder does in fact open,
that it does push back so that it unbuckles itself from the barrel,
there is actually a little spring in the front of the cylinder, so that's always pushing it back.
The wedge of course locks it forward.
Now we can take the cylinder out and I can show you a little bit more.
In order to do that I do need to take off one of these links in the locking lever.
So, we'll take out that screw.
This allows that to come all the way out,
and then I can actually take out the cylinder axis pin with a cross bar here.
Push this through from this side, I can then pull it out.
This is captive, there's a little groove in there and a detent.
Once that is out,
then I can take the loading lever, and it is connected to the cylinder axis pin.
I can pull that whole thing out.
You can see the little notch there where that bar locks it in place.
Now, because I've got this disassembled, we can pull out the entire cylinder.
So, here's the spring that I have just mentioned.
That sits right there in the front.
Got your 6 chambers. This is approximately a .48 calibre rifle.
On the back we've got this cool star pattern.
That is how the wedge actually rotates the cylinder.
There is a lug on that wedge,
and that lug interacts up and down these surfaces to rotate the cylinder.
We then have cylinder stops right here, so they can slide in and then lock.
That locking surface is this little lug right here,
which is this guy right there, so it's just a little piece of flat spring.
And you can see the mouth of the barrel, right here.
And in fact you can see it is a little shiny there because that is the mating surface
where each chamber actually seals into the mouth of the barrel.
There are a couple of markings we can see on the outside.
"The World's Revolver" on one barrel flat.
Then we have: North & Savage, Middletown, Connecticut, and "Cast Steel" there on the top.
And 1852, that is poorly stamped, and a patent date there which is pretty lightly stamped.
The rear sight is this tiny little V notch.
And the front sight is kind of a normal post,
dovetailed into the barrel, so you could adjust it for windage.
And the barrel itself is this kind of cool half round,
half octagon, with a little bit of a decorative flourish there at the joint.
The reason they did this, by the way: barrel material came in square stock,
and so the cheap ... way to do it was to just cut the corners down and make it octagonal.
Making the barrel round actually took more work.
So the half round is done partly for aesthetics,
and partly because that's cheaper than making the full barrel round.
Being a muzzleloader of course you need a loading lever so that you can actually reload the cylinder.
People always ask about carrying spare cylinders for this sort of thing.
It could be done, it probably wouldn't be.
You saw you have to remove a screw to get the cylinder out.
... Most people wouldn't do that, they just used the loading lever, reloaded the gun in situ.
We can pretty well figure that production of these ended in 1856
because that's the year when they got a ... follow-up improved patent,
which replaced this wedge system with a toggle system.
Which was definitely the better way to do this.
And that toggle system they would then develop into a handgun instead of a rifle.
And that would become the Savage & North "Figure 8" revolvers.
So that is a story for a separate video,
but I always think it's cool to take a look at these early revolving rifles.
In fact, those of you who have been watching the channel for a long time
know that I did a very, very early video on one of these.
And ... it's one of the ones that I've been kind of wanting to redo,
do a little better, show you guys a little bit of disassembly on the gun.
Hopefully you enjoyed the video.
If you really like the idea of this rifle and would like to add it to your own collection,
it is of course coming up for sale here at Rock Island.
You can check out their catalogue page for their pictures, description, prices, all that sort of stuff.
And not just on this rifle, but everything else that's coming up in the sale.
Thanks for watching.