Hi guys, thanks for tuning in another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Canadian War Museum
up in Ottawa, and we are taking a look at a prototype Ross, ...
well actually this is a prototype Ross fully-automatic rifle.
Dating from some time period between about 1912 and 1915, maybe 1916.
So Sir Charles Ross, who was the kind of like
bad-tempered Batman sort of figure, very wealthy landowner,
family of nobility, comes over to Canada, designs the Ross rifle, provides it to the Canadian military.
Well, he was also a tinkerer and an inventor and an engineer.
And had been interested in firearms development pretty much all of his adult life.
So in addition to developing just the Ross bolt action rifle, he ... developed an automatic pistol around 1905,
and he had actually tinkered with self-loading ... rifles way back into the 1890s. So he had a design in 1893, 1894.
And eventually, once he was developing the Ross Mark III, in addition to creating it originally as a sporting rifle,
and then developing it into a military pattern rifle, he also tinkered with turning it into a self-loading rifle.
Well, it's a straight pull design, meaning you don't have to lift the bolt handle up and back.
It's just straight back, straight forward. This lends itself very easily
to semi-automatic conversion by adding a big gas piston to the side of the gun, as this has.
Gas comes in here, pushes the piston back, the piston simply pushes the bolt handle,
cycles it backward and then you have a spring that pulls it forward. So a pretty simple type of system to convert.
Now this particular one we don't have a lot of very specific data on.
But we know that Ross had some correspondence in 1912 and 1913 discussing this design.
This particular rifle was made no earlier than 1915, ... maybe 1916,
I'll show you that all of that in just a moment.
And we're pretty sure that this was done by the Ross factory.
It wasn't patented, but the museum records behind this gun indicate that it almost certainly came from the
Canadian Department of Defence. And they would have gotten it probably from Ross. At any rate.
It's got one particularly cool feature to it, so let me go ahead and show you that.
So the basis of this rifle is a straight up Ross M-10.
This was almost certainly a standard rifle, off the rack military production, that was used for this semi-auto conversion.
Interestingly there is a big square hole cut in the side of the stock.
Obviously, this is a trials testing sort of gun, maybe they had some different magazine
or feeding mechanism that they experimented with at some point that went in that side.
If it's not that, I'm not sure exactly what the purpose was.
So the buttstock was originally just a standard Ross M-10 buttstock. However
it's been contoured up a little bit in here, and more substantially the wrist has been lowered a lot.
And that is because
... the sporter Ross M-10s generally had a deep enough cut here that you could put your thumb across the top of the action,
like so, when shooting, and then be able to cycle the bolt without hitting the top of your thumb with the bolt right here.
Well with the military guns, they wanted the stock to be stronger, and so there's more material in the wrist.
And it's a little bit touchy with the military design stock whether you can hold your thumb low enough to clear the bolt.
... That's not so much of an issue on the manually operated version.
On this one, where this bolt's gonna come flying back five times in a row when you pull the trigger,
you really want to make sure that your thumb is down below the line of that.
So the stock has been cut out down here to accommodate it.
Now mechanically the gun's actually fairly simple in concept. There's a ... gas port on the barrel here, comes out to a gas piston.
As we move back, you can see the piston and operating rod have a pair of recoil springs in here.
That operating rod comes back through here. We'll touch on this guy in just a moment.
The operating rod then comes all the way back to here. We have a ... housing that's screwed onto the receiver bridge.
And then the op rod connects to the bolt handle, so that when it cycles back
it opens the bolt. There's your op rod. And then you have the recoil springs
inside this tube that are going to compress. And when they expand after firing they pull the bolt back into battery.
Now the fire control mechanism on this rifle has been modified such that it is fully automatic.
As best I can tell, you pull the ... trigger once and it dumps all 5 rounds in the magazine.
Obviously that's not what you would want in a production military firearm, but this is clearly still an experimental,
a little past toolroom maybe, but this is still a developmental gun.
And presumably they figured, "Once we get the full-auto system working, then we can limit it to semi-auto,
then we can change the feed system out to something that holds more than 5 rounds, etc."
Now the large barrel shroud on this is there for a very specific reason.
So you can see here that the ... muzzle is actually recessed several inches.
It's like it's about an inch or two down inside the barrel shroud.
So when you fire, muzzle blast is going to push air out the end of this tube.
The Lewis gun, which was in military use and mass production by the time this rifle was built,
the Lewis gun uses that same system, and the Lewis gun has open vents back here where it can suck air in.
The idea of course is to have a continuous flow of cool air over the barrel to help cool it.
Well, this doesn't have those open vents, instead
this actually has a driven fan. So this little guy spins.
Unfortunately, the mechanism behind this doesn't work any more. And
we know from some documentation that as of 1970 this particular example wasn't working.
But the concept was there was a one-way ratchet inside this mechanism, and when the bolt handle came back
it would spin this fan up, which pulls air in, and then sucks it down the barrel shroud,
being pulled by muzzle blast. So actually a driven air system, which is really cool for a firearm like this.
Being that it was full-auto only, and you had a 5 round burst, probably a very high rate of fire I suspect,
you would have a firing sequence that would sound something like "Braaagh BZZZZzzzz".
Like you're a computer fan. So that I think is probably the coolest and most unique element of this design.
I've never seen something like this on another firearm conversion like this.
Anyway, it's always cool to take a look at bolt actions converted to semi-auto.
Always weird looking, and the some of the ideas they go into them, like that forced air cooling system, is really pretty cool.
So hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. A big thanks to the Canadian War Museum up in Ottawa
for giving me access to put this on camera and bring it to you guys.
If you're ever in the area, make sure to stop by. They have a variety of exhibits that
change periodically, as well as a bunch of small arms and a really cool vehicle collection on display.
Thanks for watching.