[ Passler Model 1887 ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at RIA
taking a look at another of the Austrian 1880s
manually operated repeating pistols.
This, I think, really cool, very niche batch of
mechanically interesting guns.
So these came out just before the first self-loading pistols,
and the idea was kind of akin to the American Volcanics.
But, frankly, much better designed to be practical pistols.
So, we looked at a couple days ago a design by Schulhof, Josef Schulhof,
who was really the progenitor of a lot of these designs.
What we have today is an 1887 pattern Passler pistol.
And Passler was working at almost exactly the same time as Schulhof,
and basically just copied his idea.
Passler had his own patents, and you'll see his gun is a little bit
different on the inside than Schulhof's,
but works in fundamentally the same way as the 1887 Schulhof design.
Which is to say it has a rotating bolt,
and then of course the same ring trigger firing system.
So, you will find these guns ... marked by Passler, and also by Passler & Seidl.
And it's not really clear what the relationship was,
this was Franz Passler and Ferdinand Seidl.
Most likely Passler was the engineer,
and Seidl was the funding, was the money behind the project.
They did split ways, there's ... one known example that
was originally marked Passler & Seidl,
and the Seidl part has been like erased off, it's been ground off,
by presumably Passler after their partnership broke up.
At any rate, let's take a closer look at this one, and I'll pull it apart and show you how it works.
Alright, looking at this guy from the outside, let's start with the markings on the top.
We have Patent Passler, Wein (or Vienna).
And we have a serial number, which is 196.
And the barrel is marked Guss-Stahl, or [cast] steel.
Now this was designed to load using a Mannlicher-style clip,
or what we would often call an en bloc clip.
And the clip mounts up in there.
So in order to make this work, what you do is take this lever,
which is your spring-loaded follower.
There's a flat spring, right here, that's going to put pressure on it.
Open that up, you insert the clip, unfortunately I don't have a clip for it.
There is a little spring clip ... catch right there to hold it in place.
And then you push the follower back down.
So, as long as there were cartridges, and when the clip was full with like 5 rounds
this follower would sit here.
And as you use the cartridges it would advance up.
Until when you chambered the last cartridge
there's then nothing holding the clip in except this release button.
Now this was intended to be fired, basically like a double action revolver, from the open bolt.
So you use the ring trigger, pull it back, it's going to chamber a cartridge.
And then as you close the bolt your finger will automatically hit
the actual trigger right there and fire the gun.
And because the ring is spring-loaded, extraction is fairly simple
as long as you can get the bolt started just a little bit, right there.
You can see it's rotating, so that's ... basically your primary extraction.
It unlocks, and then the spring pops the whole thing open,
which is going to kick the empty case right back out.
Now you can carry this cocked and locked, mostly.
There is serration on the front of the ring trigger for just that purpose.
So you can close it like this, chamber a cartridge,
and then there is a sliding safety on the back here.
And when engaged, that safety locks the bolt from opening or closing,
and in theory it's supposed to also lock into a little notch.
This little top tab on the safety locks into this pin at the back.
That is the striker, and it should hold the striker back.
The problem is on this particular example (which I should point out is like 140 years old),
the safety doesn't quite line up with that tab in the striker,
and so it doesn't quite work. But it's supposed to.
And then, as a right-hander, you have quick and easy access to punch the safety over.
So your practical handling is really fairly similar to a revolver.
Rapid fire, double action using the ring trigger,
or safe carrying sort of in single action, chambered, and cocked and locked.
Now let's go ahead and pull this screw out,
pull off the side plate, and take a look at the internals.
So if we take the screw out, we can take the side plate off.
And then we can get into the inner workings of this guy.
We're going to go ahead and take the ring trigger out as well.
And now you can see exactly how this works.
So like I said, this is fundamentally pretty similar to the Schulhof design.
Instead of there being a fork or a stirrup down here to control the bolt,
instead there's just a single peg right there on the bolt body,
which is controlled by the ring trigger there to cycle back and forth.
You can see the firing pin spring right in there.
... If we open it all the way up, we can then snap the striker over the trigger mechanism.
You can see the trigger right there.
In fact let's just do that, let's just take the entire bolt out.
So there's your striker sear, striker spring.
I'm not going to take the back of this off because there's really no need
it's a pretty basic mechanism down in there.
You can see the sear very clearly right there.
Looking at the clip release, also pretty simple.
... Push it back and it unlocks the latch in the clip,
which then allows you to take the clip out.
So, if the clip is empty, you just pull this and pull the clip out.
If the clip is still loaded, what you would have to do is open up the follower lever,
and then pull the clip release, and pull out a partially loaded clip.
I wish I had a clip for this, unfortunately there just isn't one with the gun.
So there's a lot less machining and there are a lot fewer parts
in this than there are in the Schulhof design.
It's a better, kind of a simpler, design in that regard.
This is chambered for the .32 Short Revolver cartridge.
It was of course a black powder cartridge,
and that's fairly common for these manually operated pistols.
They were typically relatively low pressure cartridges.
In total about 100 of these were made, so not a particularly successful endeavour.
Spoiler: none of the manually operated pistols were particularly successful endeavours.
But this is yet another of these really interesting ones.
And I think it's pretty cool the way it's set up to use those Mannlicher-style clips.
A little funky, but very cool looking, so.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed this video.
I have another one coming up in a couple of days on another design of this nature
from a couple of years later, so stick around and check that one out.
Thanks for watching.