Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
l'm Ian, I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction House taking a look at some of the guns
coming up for sale in their February of 2015 Regional auction.
One of the ones that I figured we ought to take a look at is this Dolne or Apache Knuckleduster revolver.
We've looked at a bunch of this era of pocket defensive pistols, but we haven't seen this one before.
So they had a good example in the auction, and I figured I should pull it out.
What makes these a little bit different is they're actually three weapons all in one.
So if I go to put this back together here, it is actually a set of brass knuckles.
It is also a dagger
right there to be used with the knuckles, and
a folding trigger revolver. There's actually a lot of neat intricate stuff going on in this gun,
so why don't I bring the camera back here and let's take a closer look.
Alright, so a frenchman by the name of Louis Dolne patented this device in 1869.
They were manufactured by a number of different companies in Europe through until about the turn of the century, about 1900.
At that point of course they'd been superseded by more ... typical modern pistols.
So let's start with this as a knuckle duster. You can see, obviously, it has space for four fingers.
It also interestingly has this little hole in the one last finger, and a little pin right there on the frame.
So that that gives you a solid position to lock the knuckles into the frame, so that they don't bend if you go and hit someone.
The top of the frame here is curved, that's not an accident, that's intentional
so that it fits nicely into the palm of the hand like so.
For what it's worth, I find that these knuckle holes are just a hair too small for my fingers.
I can get the thing onto my main row of knuckles, but then it's kind of tricky to get it back off,
so I'm not going to do that on camera.
Now the next weapon involved in this is this little flamberge style dagger.
It has a locking latch
right here, so I push this button down that allows it to go back in.
You can see right there a little locking latch pops up, and the whole thing is held on by a screw.
It is kind of wobbly, but if you tighten it down it'll probably work at least once.
Now ... a lot of people look at this and assume that it's supposed to be like a bayonet pistol,
I'm pretty sure that the knife is actually intended to be used with the knuckles. It certainly seems a lot more practical this way.
When the knife is not in use it has a little latch here, or cover, that holds the point of the blade.
The blade, by the way, is not sharp. The point is pointy, but the edge is not sharpened.
So there's the knife blade.
And then the last element to this is the revolver. So we have a latch here, spring-loaded.
See how that works.
A little spring-loaded latch there, and the knuckles lock into the frame like this.
(Put that back under its catch.) The trigger folds down and we have
a functional revolver.
I was a little bit surprised at handling this just how good of a grip you actually get from these brass knuckles.
It works better than I was expecting, and frankly better than most other pocket pistols of this sort of this era.
The revolver itself it has no barrel, it's just a cylinder, holds six cartridges.
This particular one is a 5mm pinfire, that was probably the most common. They were also made in 7mm pinfire.
Unfortunately on this one the cylinder hand is broken, so it doesn't properly rotate the cylinder.
But you can see we've got our hammer there. There's no way to manually cock this, it's double action only,
and being pinfire this simply drops down onto the pin primer extending out from a cartridge.
There is no rebounding safety or half-cock, so if you're going to carry this you would want to carry it on an empty chamber,
you carry 5 loaded rounds and one empty. In order to load it or unload it what we do is rotate
this little pin around, you can see there's a lot of little fiddly stuff going on on this guy.
Anyway, we rotate that around, and then we can open up our cylinder access pin here.
(Take that out.)
Once this pin comes out (and you can see it has a little retention spring on it there), then the cylinder just drops out.
So there's our cylinder. No rifling, just six long chambers.
There's a hole in the front of the frame that you fire through.
And you can see the hand right here. The spring that's supposed to push it out to engage
with this ratchet on the back of the cylinder, that little spring is broken, so that's why it doesn't work.
And then at the base of the cylinder here we have the lock. So that prevents the cylinder from rotating while you are actually firing.
Now, the axis pin would act as your cartridge ejector. It's got the spring, so it's a little tight.
Push that in, eject each cartridge one after the other,
and then you would manually reload them all,
put the cylinder back in,
run the access pin in, rotate it down,
rotate this up to lock it in place, and then you're ready to go.
You can see the spring, this right here is the mainspring for the trigger mechanism.
That's what's being acted upon when I pull the trigger.
And that's about it mechanically for these guys.
I mentioned at the beginning that they're often called "Apache" pistols.
I can't quite vouch for the veracity of that exact story, but the idea is these were used by gangs of
French, specifically Parisian, roughs and no-goodniks, gangsters basically, who got the name Apache
allegedly for being renowned as being as cruel and violent as the American Apaches.
Whether that's absolutely true I couldn't say for sure, but it makes for an interesting story.
And apparently this sort of pistol was either a trademark of theirs or simply something that became associated with them.
So I don't think they were typically called Apache pistols at the time, but it's a name that they've gotten since.
So here are the markings on the front of the frame. You can see there's a serial number.
We have the word Dolne, that's the inventor. And then Brevete is a patent notation.
So it's a Dolne patent gun. We don't know exactly who manufactured this one,
there is a little teeny mark on the frame right there, and that's about it.
The majority of these were brass, there were some made with iron frames.
The style of the blade varies between different examples as do the style of the knuckles.
Of course being made by multiple companies you had a lot of different designs.
The only real commonality is mechanically how they function.
Well, thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
I hope you learned something about another one of these interesting 1800s defensive weapons.
And if you'd like to buy this and add it to your own collection you certainly can.
This being an auction house, it is up for sale. So this is lot 1,117, you can see right below
there's a link in the description to Rock Island's catalogue page.
You can take a look at their high res pictures and place a bid on it.
It is in a lot with another interesting old revolver, so definitely something to take a look at.