[ Manville Gas Gun ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video episode on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, today we have something a little bit out of our normal area of focus.
I've got a steamer trunk full of awesome here.
So this is the original case that this sort of gun came in.
And ... those are pretty rare to see any more.
What we have is a Manville gas grenade gun.
These I think actually probably got more use in movies than they ever did in real life.
Usually when you see them in movies they are shotguns,
or machine guns, or something big and scary.
In reality, this is actually a 25mm gas grenade discharger.
And it was intended for things like prisons and riot control use.
The chambers on this are far too thin and far too weak to use
large-scale shotgun-type cartridges, they are just for launching gas grenades.
And they had tear gas, they had a nausea-inducing gas,
a number of different cartridges available for it.
18 rounds in a really big cylinder, the whole thing is spring loaded and wound up.
Extremely simple mechanically, it's much more impressive visually than it is mechanically.
Trigger back here, just a simple striker.
We have a safe position and a fire position.
This one unfortunately has a bunch of hardened grease in it,
so it doesn't quite function reliably right now.
Normally what you would do is pull the trigger and it fires the round in,
and rotates and locks into the next chamber.
Pull the trigger, you can see it just tries to move.
Pow!
You may be wondering how you reload this thing, because these don't move anywhere.
In order to reload it you actually have to disassemble the gun.
You loosen these two screws on the front.
Put the gun on safe.
And pull it apart.
So to reload the gun ...
you would just manually put a cartridge in each one of those chambers.
And then to wind the gun (put this down for a moment),
If you look inside here you can see that there's a toothed wheel,
and ... spring-loaded firing pins at each position.
So when you pull the trigger it releases this catch,
allows this plate to rotate one position, and fires the cartridge.
So really very simple.
You wind this up before you start shooting, and then it unwinds just like a watch.
So reassembly is just like disassembly,
we're going to line up the centre pin and this top bar,
slide it back together.
Tighten these guys down, and those only go thumb tight.
And then we can put the gun into its fire position, and away you go.
It was meant to be fired from the hip, kind of like this.
And that's it, riot control.
Although in the movies it shows up as a grenade launcher, or a shotgun, or a machine gun.
So we didn't expect to be able to take a look at these,
but it's really cool to find one and be able to see it.
This one also still has the original Manville decal on it, which is a bit rare to find.
Thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed it.
A little piece of interesting firearms curiosity here.
Tune back in to Forgotten Weapons for more like it.
[Thanks for watching.]