Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're going to look at
the major patterns of Cooeys, rifles and shotguns both.
Now if you're in Canada, you are at this very moment
shouting at the monitor,
"What on earth is Cooey doing on Forgotten Weapons?
Cooey is like the least forgotten weapon of all time,
like every other house in Canada has a Cooey in it of some sort."
However, those of you who aren't in Canada have probably never heard of the company.
Cooey manufactured a line of very inexpensive, very practical, very rugged,
simple .22 calibre and .410 calibre work, practical tools, sort of firearms.
So the company was founded in 1903 by its namesake, Herbert Cooey.
He was a machinist, set up his own shop to do machining work,
whatever sort of machining work you needed.
And he was in fact quite talented, and did quite well for himself.
Within just a couple of years, by 1907, he had introduced his own pattern of automobile.
By the time World War One began he had started making
small parts for firearms companies, in particular the Ross Company.
... Ross subcontracted a lot of his small parts, and some of them were done by Cooey.
This brought him a lot of business during the war, obviously.
And after the war he saw the potential in the firearms business,
and decided to introduce his own first firearm.
So in 1919 he introduced a single-shot .22 calibre rifle.
It would be known by a bunch of different names, it was the Ace,
it was probably most commonly the Model 39.
Also known as the Model 75, that's like the heavier barrelled adult version,
where the 39 is a little bit more the light ... stocked youth version.
He made these things under contract for a bunch of other retailers.
You'll find them with a ton of different names and designations on them.
But ultimately we're going to go with the Model 39 Cooey.
It was a single-shot .22. It was advertised, among other things, as being a great youth firearm.
It was an exceptionally safe gun, basically impossible to fire accidentally.
And we'll take a look at it in just a moment, and I'll show you why.
It introduced a system that we would think of today as very commonplace and obvious
and all over the place, but it was innovative at the time.
So, during the 1920s and '30s Cooey is doing really good business.
In 1924 his single-shot rifle actually wins a prize at the British Empire Exhibition, Wembley.
That same year Cooey, presumably having done fairly well for himself,
supplies all the firearms for the Canadian Olympic ... shooting teams.
And he actually participates, he's on the Canadian men's trap team.
And they managed to win silver at the 1924 Olympics.
So he's not just a business man, he's not just a machinist, he's also a shooter himself,
and can appreciate the practical applications of some of the guns here,
that we would think of as very simple, and yet also very practical.
So, in 1939 he introduces a repeating firearm,
he has a tube-fed bolt-action rifle.
It will hold 11 rounds of .22 Long Rifle.
Although it is chambered ... to take the .22 Short, Long or Long Rifle cartridges,
whatever you can stuff into it.
... This is actually kind of common, that triple chambering at the time,
because all three cartridges were available, and it wasn't really clear
which one was going to end up being the most popular.
So that repeating rifle is designated the Model 60, introduced in 1939.
During World War Two, which broke out just shortly afterwards,
Cooey would go back to making a lot of small parts under contract for military firearms.
He also made about 35,000 training rifles for the Canadian military.
After the war ... business continues to do well, Canada's growing.
And in 1948 Herbert Cooey's son, by the name of Hubert Cooey, has joined the business.
And he designs a single-shot shotgun for the company line.
This is the first time they've done shotguns, but
a single-shot .410 shotgun is again a very practical, very inexpensive,
... a shotgun for the farm, a shotgun for the field, for small game, for protecting a garden.
It's a very practical, multi-purpose sort of thing.
And Hubert comes up with a legitimately pretty darn clever, simple, and cheap shotgun.
So in 1948 they introduced that as the Model 84.
Not sure if that's coincidence, it probably is.
And at this point Hubert is really taking over the management of the company.
Herbert, his father, is getting up there in years,
and eventually steps down and leaves Hubert to run the company.
Unfortunately Hubert dies unexpectedly in 1957,
and that forces his father to come back out of retirement.
And he runs the company for a couple of years,
but it seems pretty clear that he's not really interested in doing this.
He was retired, he wanted this to be a family legacy.
That's unfortunately not going to happen at this point.
And ultimately in 1961 he sells the company to the Olin Corporation.
Olin at that point owned Winchester,
and Cooey became basically a Canadian division of Winchester.
So they would go ahead and introduce
the last Cooey designed firearm under Winchester ownership.
That was the Model 64, introduced finally, logically, in 1964.
And that was a box magazine fed semi-auto .22 rifle.
And that ... rifle was actually largely designed by Hubert before his death.
And Winchester decided to take that project, finish it, and introduce it onto the market.
And they did that to compete with the Ruger 10/22 that was introduced the same year,
and also the Marlin Model 60.
So the ... Cooey Model 64, the Winchester Model 64,
would again be a very popular, inexpensive, and practical popular firearm.
And it would be in production at Cooey under Winchester ownership until 1979,
when the factory was shut down. This was a factory in Cobourg, Ontario.
It was politics and labour and various unpleasantness that led to the factory shutdown.
And at the time the parts, and the tooling, and the rights to the Model 64
were sold to a company called Lakeside Arms up in Canada.
So they would go on producing it.
And a lot of the Cooey workers, now laid off, went to work for Lakeside.
Lakeside was purchased in 1995 by Savage,
and the Model 64 continued to be produced under their ownership.
Alright, we need to take a look at a couple of these up close.
So Cooey, c-o-o-e-y, made in Canada.
And this one is a post-Winchester purchase gun, made by Winchester Western (Canada) Limited.
This is the Model 39, so this is the single-shot.
Chambers .22 Short, Long, or Long Rifle.
And this is simply a single-shot .22 bolt action.
You manually insert a cartridge, close the bolt, lock it down.
And this is the locking surface, that's all that's necessary for a .22.
However what made the Cooey a very safe gun, and an ideal youth gun,
is that having just chambered a cartridge, I still can't fire it.
I actually have to manually cock the striker the rest of the way.
And then (I won't drop this because it is rimfire),
then when you pull the trigger it'll drop and fire.
But when you cycle the action it only goes to half-cock,
so ... the striker is being held back behind the breech face.
There's no spring tension on it, there's no way for this to accidentally fire.
And that was its major selling point.
Today we look at that as kind of an obvious thing like,
"Oh, yeah, that's because it's a basic kid's .22."
Well, that wasn't the case in 1919.
We can take the bolt out just by holding the trigger down, pulling it out.
And you can see the two engagement surfaces there.
One for locking this in place so that it doesn't come back when you pull the cocking handle back,
and the other is the actual firing sear.
Got a plunger ejector and a simple spring-loaded extractor there.
You can see the extractor spring here on the side of the bolt where it comes out.
Now the Model 60 is a much more complicated design,
adding in a tube magazine here under the barrel.
This loads very much like a Marlin, you would unlock the tube here,
pull this out.
You can drop cartridges in here, bullet forward.
The tube has the follower and magazine spring in it.
You can see the obvious similarity between the patterns of the two bolts,
the bolt handles and the cocking pieces are the same.
But the Model 60 does fully cock itself when you cycle the bolt.
So, no need to manually cock this one.
It's interesting, you'll see why in just a moment, there is a unique sound to the Cooey.
This sort of two-part click.
And that's because of the system that's used for feeding out of the magazine tube.
And before I take it apart, I will point out this notch right here is your safety.
So you just rotate this round lug up into the safety,
and that prevents the ... striker from dropping.
Now when I cycle the bolt, the magazine tube actually moves with the action,
which is rather unusual.
And if we look down inside here, that is the follower sticking up out of the magazine.
Let me pull the stock off, and I'll show you how this thing actually works.
Disassembly is a matter of simply taking out this screw - it is captive.
And once we get this out, the stock simply comes off.
And what we have here is a kind of a cool camming mechanical ... linkage
that pushes a cartridge up out of the magazine.
So when I open this, you can see that is going to push up.
So what's going on here is because the magazine tube cycles backward with the action,
you don't have a cartridge floating kind of in the free space
where it's trying to go from the magazine up ... to the bolt face.
The magazine itself guides it.
We have the magazine follower here, I'm going to push that forward.
This little fin, right there, that's connected to this piece.
And that's going to cam up and down as the bolt moves, like so.
... As the bolt opens, as the magazine tube comes back,
and as a cartridge is pushed back,
that fin pushes the rim of the cartridge under both of these spring-loaded extractors.
Then those two extractors are going to hold the cartridge nice and firmly on the bolt face
so that it's lined up with the chamber there,
and feeds when you push the bolt all the way forward.
And there's this curved track cut into the stock that helps push this up as it moves backwards.
And that brings us to the Cooey Model 84, ... Hubert Cooey's break-action shotgun.
I mentioned a minute ago that these were in .410, they were.
They were also however in other calibres, just to clarify: 20, 12, 16, kind of you name it.
Now at first glance this is just another single-shot break-action gun,
but there are a couple of, well, two cool elements to it.
The first is that the lever is actually ambidextrous,
you can break that lever to the left or the right.
Typically break-action shotguns only go one way,
for no particularly good reason, so that's cool.
And then the disassembly for the forend is simply spring tension.
So all you have to do is pull that down and the forend comes off.
There's the spring that holds it in place.
And then once the forend is off, you just pop the lever and the barrel comes off.
So it's again a very simple gun, very inexpensive, easy to use, reliable.
It's everything that a practical, everyday use, sort of working firearm ought to be.
So ultimately Cooey is a brand that may not be well known anywhere outside of Canada,
but within Canada it is absolutely a household name.
There are Cooeys all over the length and breadth of Canada.
And they've been responsible for the demise of all manner of game,
from the .22 single shots up to the break-action shotguns.
So, I thought this would be a cool chance to take a look at a gun
that definitely is worthy of the name Forgotten Weapons, as long as you're outside Canada.
Despite not being the sort of thing that we normally cover.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video,
got a kick out of something a little bit different like this.
Thanks for watching.