[ 1780 Girardoni Air Rifle ]
[ Originally presented at the 2014 AFTE Conference ]
This is Luke Haag at my home.
And you're looking at an original 1780 Girardoni .46 calibre, 22 shot, repeating air rifle.
And I'm going to go over just a little bit of how this rifle works, and how you prepare it.
The .46 calibre lead balls would be loaded in this tubular magazine.
So they would be in this side tube, it has a flat spring.
There's no spring inside of the tube,
so gravity is used to bring the bottom ball into this position.
The shooter would then press this ... spring loaded lever, it's under tension at the moment.
That picks up the bottom ball.
Releasing it moves it into the firing position.
To fire the gun, there's two positions on the hammer.
And after that, it works like any normal true firearm.
Pulling the trigger, I'm going to dry fire it.
It's pretty loud. The shooter would then simply push this loading bar,
release it, cock it, fire it, ... load it, cock it, fire it.
And continue to do so until you've exhausted the ammunition supply.
And again, that could be as many as 22 projectiles.
Where's the air coming from? The stock is a reservoir.
So I'm going to take it off the rifle.
It's threaded on, there's a check valve obviously, or we would hear a lot of air escaping.
If you zoom in or come closer,
you can see this pin protruding from the back of the threaded area.
That pin (that protrudes toward the camera), when the hammer falls,
[it] pushes against a check valve, a one-way valve, in the reservoir
releasing by design and by timing just the right amount of air to launch the ball.
So let's look at the ... interfacing piece.
Here's the back of the air reservoir.
And the rifle is an original Girardoni, one of just a few in the country.
This is a replica [of the reservoir] made by Ernie Cowen.
The originals are too dangerous and too fragile to pressurise.
The pressure has been estimated to be about 800 to 850 PSI in the buttstock reservoir.
The next thing I want to show you is the interesting rifling,
if we can get around and see the muzzle.
It almost looks like a ratchet, what was called ratchet rifling,
but it's, for the most part, more or less conventional, it's twelve lands and grooves.
Casts would suggest it was a hook scraper method of rifling.
But still the lands have an unusual shape.
I have collected some fired projectiles, and it does look possible
to match them under the comparison scope, and we'll give that a try later.
If we can back off again, I want to talk a little bit about the ramrod.
Again, this does not use a patched ball, it's a bare lead ball that engages the rifling.
But there is a ramrod on it, and that's not only for ... the usual cleaning purposes,
but also if you get a stuck projectile.
You simply take the ramrod, push the ball back down all the way to the loading bar.
So that stuck ball would now be back in the loading bar.
And you could either push it over, tip the gun downward
and let gravity put it back in the loading tube, and remove it.
Or simply leave it in place, cock the hammer, and have another attempt at firing it.
If you could back out now, I want to show you the kit
that was provided to every Austrian soldier between about 1780 and
I think the gun lasted maybe about 10 years in service, and then it became a sniper's weapon.
Here's the kit. So what are we looking at?
This long side tube is the pump to charge the air reservoir.
So let's just take it out for a moment, separate it,
and we'll see how this works in a moment.
Set that aside.
Let's open up the rest of the kit.
Inside are such things as a ladle for melting lead.
There's a bullet mould to cast the nominally .46 calibre bullets.
So we pour the ... lead, open it up, dump it out.
And then we have to deal with the sprue, a little tit that's on the projectile.
Ah, this is the rest of the pumping system, we're going to come back to that in a moment.
Very ingenious.
It's probably very dark, but there are four what we would today call speed loaders.
These have as many as 20 lead balls in them.
You can probably hear them, this one isn't quite full.
Got a little latch here on the end.
So I can swing it aside, and I'll just bring them up to the point.
There we can see one of the .46 calibre, nominally .464 to .467, about 153 grain lead ball.
So let's see how you would use it with the rifle.
Let's go back to the rifle.
This also is an ingenious little latch,
you have to push it forward first, and then swing it to one side.
I would then take a speedloader,
and hopefully the audio picked that up.
And I'm just going to (back away a little bit), I'm just going to tip the gun ...
so we can hear.
There's quite a few in it, but not totally full,
otherwise there'd hardly be any movement.
Now if I were to move this lever, we'd put a ball in position.
Only one problem, I don't have the air reservoir.
Let's go back to the kit.
In that kit would be two extra air reservoirs.
... So let me bring this around a little bit, you can see the back end of them.
So we've got four speed loaders, casting material. ...
And of course in battle these would have been pre-charged.
So we take one out, take the used one, the empty one, off of our gun,
and simply thread this on and make it hand tight.
Let's look at how ... the Austrians pumped these up.
I'm going to set it aside for just a moment. Let's go back to the pump.
This also is ingenious. The U-shaped slot accepts this rounded piece.
And if you can see down in there there's a little impression, a well.
The tip of this is going to go into that.
Why? The reason is so it's free to swivel.
If this were a rigid system, we might break the pump.
(So if we can go on stand-by a moment, I'm going to set this down on ...
ah, I'm going to do it here, just keep it running.)
So what else do we need? We need an empty reservoir.
And we thread it on like so.
I'm not going to do it all the way, because there's still some air in this, it's not empty.
And I'm going to step back just a little bit.
I'm an Austrian soldier, really should put shoes on I suppose.
And pump ... 1,500 strokes.
1,500 strokes will give us about 800 to 850 PSI by calculation.
It's estimated that took about 20 minutes to complete.
So I've got that pumped up, somebody can count to 1,500 in German.
Unscrew it, it would be hot by then.
We've now re-pressurised it, and I can either put it back in the kit or assemble it on the rifle.
Hand tight.
Markings: this one has been buffed out,
as many of them I'm told that have been seen in Europe, have.
There's a faint vestige of a number "3" here,
but the serial numbers would have been in this area.
There was some information, proof marks, something in this area, that have also been buffed out.
If you get the light on it just right, there's a flat spot there.
You can see some sort of an indexing mark.
Open sights, a typical sight even today, iron sight.
A little brass front sight, that's drifted in.
We've already looked at the rifling.
There was arrangements for a sling, here and here.
Single-stage trigger.
That is not an adjustment for trigger pull, the little screw that you might see behind the trigger.
So there you have it, a ... general description of an original
Girardoni .46 calibre air rifle of the Austrian army.
Later used by Austrian snipers, and because of its complexity, ultimately abandoned.
And virtually all of them were to be destroyed, a few have survived.
You're looking at one of them, one of the very few in the United States.
This rifle and the accoutrements are owned by Mike Carrick, who's an arms historian.
And he's involved in the ...
we proceeded on journals quarterly for the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
He's, I think, the editor of Heritage Arms.
And an avid collector of rare, and very expensive, and very unusual firearms of all types.
I hope every AFTE member has an opportunity to meet Mike Carrick.
He has a wealth of information, knows a lot about old guns, how they work.
Where they came from, who used them, and especially the Lewis and Clark air gun.