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 beautiful
1895 Lee Navy rifle that is in their
upcoming September of 2019 Premier Auction.
Now I haven't talked about the Lee Navy before,
which I really should have because
it's a really interesting and unusual system.
So the backstory on this - we have two parts.
So first off, this was ... designed and developed and patented by James Paris Lee.
Who is probably best known, or ought to be best known,
for inventing the detachable box magazine,
which he did back in the ... late 1870s.
A huge, monumental, development in firearms history.
However, he went on to do a lot of other things. He'd been working with Remington fairly extensively,
Remington manufactured the Remington-Lee rifles which made use of his box magazine,
and were eventually turned into the Lee rifles of the British military.
And Remington actually manufactured some of the very first prototypes
of the Lee Navy rifle that would be used in Navy trials.
But we'll come back to Remington in ... a few minutes.
The Navy itself, in 1894 ... was still using the Trapdoor Springfield rifle.
Single-shot, .45 calibre, black powder, totally obsolete at this point.
... Most of the modern militaries in the world are using like Mausers,
if they're not using Mausers they're using Lebels.
They're using smokeless powder, modern small-bore rifles. And the Navy is not.
So looking at its various requirements,
the Navy comes up with at this point actually a very modern cartridge,
the .236 Navy cartridge, 6mm.
And it was originally designed to fire a 135 grain bullet at 2,500 feet per second.
Which may not sound like a lot to us now, but that's a pretty zippy little round in 1894.
This is a round that has relatively high penetration, which is important to the Navy
because of course a lot of times they are going to be shooting through ships.
This was a cartridge that they planned to use in a rifle and a machine gun.
They ended up adopting the Colt 1895 in .236 or 6mm Lee Navy.
And having designed this cartridge, they then set out a request for proposals for rifles.
And this went out to industry ... not arsenals, firearms companies, private inventors,
anybody who was interested could submit a rifle to the Navy trials.
And their first trial in fact had a whole bunch of different submissions.
Remington submitted five different guns, Lee submitted his early prototype of this,
there was a Daudeteau, and there were a bunch of other
small-scale inventors who submitted rifles to that trial.
Ultimately three of them came through as good enough for the second trial.
And those three were the Lee Navy (the Lee here), a Durst rifle, and a Luger rifle.
Interesting that the Luger rifle actually shows up in these trials,
and remarkably, it does really well.
However, Luger had not chambered it for the 6mm Navy cartridge,
he chambered it for his own proprietary 6mm rimless cartridge.
And the Navy needed it to run in their cartridge,
that was one of their basic requirements for the rifle.
And so they requested that he ... modify it to use their cartridge
and resubmit it for the third round of testing.
He declined to. Not entirely sure why at this point, something I need to look into more.
At any rate, Luger didn't submit a rifle to the third trials.
The Durst rifle that had done well enough to get into the second trials
kind of blew up a little bit and fractured its receiver in the second trials.
And basically that left the Lee rifle as the last man standing,
and it was formally adopted as the Model 1895 US Navy rifle.
So, let's take a look at exactly how this thing works, because it's not like most straight-pulls.
Alright, we'll start by taking a look at the markings up here.
USN, US Navy of course, a naval anchor, serial number, and "NCT".
This is Nathan C. Twining, and he was the Navy Inspector who approved this rifle.
There are a couple of different inspector markings that you'll find
over the time period of the various naval adoptions.
So serial number wise, this is a fairly early one. The initial order was for 10,000 of these rifles.
And those were ... manufactured and then delivered
in late 1896 through the mid-spring of 1897.
... The Navy changed a few things, it took some time to get production up and running at Winchester.
And anyway, first 10,000 delivered by May of 1897.
There was a fire in the New York Navy Yard
that resulted in a bunch of guns being damaged, and a bunch of them also destroyed.
And those were repaired and replaced in 1897 through 1898.
And then there was a second contract for another 5,000 guns that was placed in January of 1898.
So what's interesting about this is the serial numbers.
The first Navy contract was 1 through 10,000.
The second Navy contract was actually 15,000 through 20,000.
And then that batch in the middle, from 10,000 to 15,000, were Winchester commercial guns.
So some of them are in military configuration.
Some of them were replacements supplied to the Navy to replace destroyed rifles from that fire.
And some of them were in sporting rifle configuration.
So ... the serial numbers are not necessarily ... well, the serial numbers are a little bit odd.
On the side here we have the manufacturer's mark, this is Winchester Repeating Arms Company.
I did mention that there was a bit of a problem with Remington and Winchester.
Remington had traditionally worked fairly closely with James Paris Lee,
and Remington had made the prototypes for this rifle.
Well, in 1888 Remington had some serious financial trouble,
and Winchester ... bought a 50% stake in the Remington Company.
This would evaporate shortly after this rifle.
These rifles were produced in part because Winchester was able to snag
this contract out of Remington's hands by being the low-cost bidder for it.
And Remington kind of suspected that they used inside information
that they had because of their connection to Remington in order to beat Remington's bid.
It was a little bit ugly.
But this of course became known as the Winchester Lee Navy Model 1895.
Alright, now the operating mechanism. This is actually a tilting bolt rifle.
So we have a bolt handle here, which is locked because the striker is cocked.
You can see this little tab coming back.
That was done deliberately so that if you had the rifle in battery
and you accidentally bumped it, you wouldn't bump the thing out of battery.
So once I dry fire, now I can open the bolt by lifting this lever.
And you kind of ... pull the lever backwards,
but because it's pivoting here and it's got this cam up here,
what it's actually doing is lifting the bolt vertically up.
Because this is a tilting bolt, lifting it up is going to disconnect
the bolt from its locking shoulder, and then we can cycle it backwards.
And it's got this interesting floating extractor mechanism in there.
So when the bolt's closed and in battery,
the extractor is of course underneath the rim of the cartridge.
When you open the bolt, it comes all the way back to right here
before the extractor actually catches, and starts pulling the cartridge out of the chamber.
That lets you get a little velocity to make sure you can extract the empty case.
It then comes back.
It's going to stop there, there's a little spring detent for it,
because when you ... cycle the bolt forward to chamber a new round
it's going to move forward with the bolt until right there.
Then the extractor stops, the bolt head has picked up a new cartridge,
it's going to push the cartridge up onto the extractor like that, and then chamber it.
Now I'm going to take the bolt out in a moment, but first I want to point out that
there's another interesting element to this, which is the en-bloc clip that it uses.
In addition to inventing the detachable box magazine
James Lee also invented an en-bloc style of clip.
Now it's interesting that he did this basically simultaneously with Mannlicher,
and the two didn't know about each other's work.
Lee's clip is such that ... it looks very much like a stripper clip.
You load a clip of 5 rounds into the magazine of the gun,
you kind of give it a second push.
And when you chamber the first round, the clip falls out the bottom of the magazine.
With Mannlicher's clip, the clip was actually
an integral part of the feed system and it provided the feed lips.
And the clip didn't come out of the gun until the last round was chambered.
This was actually viewed as really kind of the best of both worlds
by at least one Army commission that looked at it.
Because you could load this ... with a single packet of ammunition all at once, nice and quickly.
However the clip was not an integral part of the feed system,
you could also load this one at a time.
The feed lips are built into the receiver, not into the clip.
So ... Lee's clip as far as I know didn't appear in any other production rifles,
and it's kind of a really interesting system.
Anyway, now we can go ahead and look at one of the other controls,
and then we'll pull the bolt out.
So we have three different things going on on the side of the rifle here.
This one is the safety, you lift it up to safe the rifle.
This is the bolt release, which allows you to take the bolt out of the gun
by pushing out and down, like that.
So in this position the bolt can come out.
And then this is actually ... also a bolt release.
Because the bolt cannot open when firing pin is cocked,
you need some way to be able to open it if you've got a round chambered but you don't want to fire.
And that's this button, so if I push this down it pops the bolt out of battery,
and allows me to open it and remove the chambered round.
With this open and the bolt release down, I can just slide the bolt right out of the gun.
And there you see one of the issues that this had in the field,
which is that the extractor is not actually physically connected to the bolt in any way.
So the extractor just sits right there on the side of the bolt.
And as long as it's in the rifle, it can't go anywhere and can't fall out.
But when you take the bolt out that - oop - falls off.
You've got a little spring here riveted onto it to keep it tensioned out against the cartridge.
If we look at the bolt here, this is the striker and firing pin
which is currently in its forward position under spring tension,
so we're going to leave that alone.
Notice that the handle here is connected to the striker.
... That little tip, right there, is locking the striker back slightly.
That happens when you pull the bolt handle back like this to begin opening the bolt.
It pulls the striker back, locks it in place like this,
so that you can't have the firing pin exposed when you're opening the bolt.
That's an important safety to prevent an out-of-battery discharge.
So like I said, I'm not going to mess with that
because I don't want it to snap into the wrong position.
The locking surface for the rifle is right here, this guy,
about two-thirds of the way down the bolt.
So this is unlocked. When you drop it into position, this
locks up against this big ol' block in the receiver.
So a very large locking surface, nice and safe in that regard.
Notice we also have our spring-loaded follower here ... which is going to go down.
This of course holds 5 rounds as I mentioned, or at least alluded to.
And that's pretty much it. This is one of the earlier rifles produced.
This one does not have one of the updates that was made later on.
You'll notice there is a hole in the top of the bolt there, that is a gas relief hole.
Later on they would go ahead and add a gas relief hole to the receiver as well,
just as a safety mechanism in case you had a blown cartridge, a case failure.
Which, by the way, can be an issue with these rifles.
Do not shoot these with hand-loaded cartridges
unless you are intimately familiar with what you are doing.
There have been a couple of detonated rifles in the last few years, so be very careful with that.
Just a couple of little elements still to look at.
We have the rear sight here, it goes out to 2,000 metres.
The original spec on this cartridge was 135 grains at 2,500 feet per second.
That was actually by 1897 changed a bit. They reduced the bullet weight to 112,
bumped the velocity up just slightly to 2,560 feet per second,
with the intention of reducing chamber pressure and reducing throat erosion.
That was one of the big problems with this rifle.
With that original loading the barrel had a life of about
3,000 rounds, which is terrible. Very, very short.
With the new loading they were able to up that to about 10,000 rounds, ... that made a big difference.
That lightweight cartridge, by the way, also had a real benefit
in terms of allowing troopers to carry a lot more ammunition.
So standard Army loading was 100 rounds for the Krag,
standard Navy loading for ... the Marines and sailors, was 180 rounds on a person.
So almost twice as much ammunition they could carry.
The front sight is a nice narrow squared-off post, with this really quite narrow sight hood over it.
So this was a quite accurate rifle, it had a quite flat trajectory.
The Marines did really well with it.
Unfortunately for Winchester and Lee
the 1895 Navy would have a very short service life, barely more than five years.
Almost as soon as it had been adopted, a joint military commission came to the conclusion
that the Navy and the Army, all the service branches,
really ought to standardise on the same cartridge.
And that would end up being the .30 calibre .30-03,
and then .30-06 government cartridges.
So the Navy bought a few Krag-Jørgensens as early as 1899 and 1900.
But when the 1903 Springfield came out
that was adopted as the new naval standard rifle, replacing the Lee Navys.
So these actually got into soldier's hands starting in 1897.
By 1903 they were replaced, so a very short service life.
During that time however, they actually performed quite well.
They were reasonably well liked. You can certainly imagine the Marines who got these rifles
as ... replacements for Trapdoor Springfields probably loved them.
They kicked a lot less, they could fire a lot faster,
they had a far greater effective range, they weren't shooting black powder.
A magnificent improvement over the Trapdoor Springfield.
They were used in the Spanish-American War, they were used in the Marine expedition to China,
along with most of ... the other major military powers of Europe.
It's a fascinating little niche bit of history.
In fact in China there were a couple of instances, and this actually happened in Cuba as well,
where the advantage of lighter ammunition
really actually made a difference for the guys carrying these Lee Navy rifles.
There was an incident in China where a relatively small group of Marines were able
to resupply 10,000 rounds of ammunition to one of their Colt machine guns
in a way that had it been heavier ammunition, they would not have been able to carry all of it.
That sort of thing makes a difference.
There was an incident ... when Marines were fighting in Cuba when their supply was disrupted.
And the fact that the Marines each had a standard load of 180 rounds
compared to 100 rounds for Army troopers with Krags,
they were able to keep fighting actually past the point
where their Cuban opponents ran out of ammunition and had to stop shooting.
So kind of a little foreshadowing of what we would see with the
adoption of the .556 cartridge 60 years later.
At any rate, Winchester had hoped to also sell this rifle on the commercial market as a sporting rifle.
And they did a little, ... they did reasonably well for a very short time,
until, interestingly, in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War a huge number
of surplus Spanish Mausers came into the country that were dumped on the surplus market.
They were chambered for a very similar round, 7mm instead of 6,
but a similar round, far cheaper rifles because they were available as cheap surplus.
And that kind of killed the market for the Lee Navy.
There were not a ton of people who were interested in
paying full retail price for one of these when they could get something that was
a little more familiar without the weird straight-pull action
in a similar cartridge for a tiny fraction of the price through someone like Bannerman.
So, these rifles would be assembled up through the beginning of World War One
and by 1914, 1915, 1916, ... just a couple per year.
And after World War One that was it, so.
In total just over 19,000 of these manufactured,
... more than 15,000 for the military, and only a couple of thousand on the civilian market.
So, they remain a very cool rifle today, ... the only straight-pull the US has ever adopted,
a cartridge ahead of its time, really cool Marine Corps connections to these rifles.
There's all sorts of great stuff going on with these.
So, if you would like to know more about Rock Island,
take a look in the description text below.
You'll find links to their YouTube channel and their Instagram page
where they highlight a lot of the stuff that they have at various auctions.
Thanks for watching.