Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum and I'm here today at the Morphy
Auction Company taking a look at some of the guns
they're going to be selling in their upcoming April of 2019
Premier auction. And today we have a Dreyse carbine.
Now it doesn't look quite like a normal Dreyse carbine.
The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that
the bolt handle is sticking horizontally over, just like
a modern bolt action, instead of kind of sticking up
at about a 75 degree angle like one would expect
from a Dreyse. Well, there's good reason for that.
This is actually the very last Dreyse system, and it had gone through some
substantial updates and improvements by the time that these rifles came out.
So the original Dreyse was invented by Nicolaus von Dreyse in 1836.
It was adopted by the Prussian military in 1841, ... as their standard service rifle for like 30 years.
When the Franco-Prussian war breaks out in 1870/1871, it's still their standard rifle.
They used it to good effect against the Austrians in the 1860s,
they won the Franco-Prussian war, but they won it in spite of their Dreyse needle-fire rifles.
The French Chassepot dramatically outclassed the Dreyse.
And by that time everyone was starting to realise that while the Dreyse had been this fantastic
early breech-loading system that offered, you know, this huge increase in firepower over a muzzleloader,
by the early 1870s it's becoming obsolete. Now the ... Prussians have gone through a bunch
of different iterations of the Dreyse, they're slowly improving it, tweaking it.
The standard pattern was the 1841, but then they have a bunch more. They have an 1854,
they have an 1860, an 1862, an 1865. And those are just the standard common variations.
There're a bunch of little developmental iterative ones in between all of those.
In 1867 Nicolaus von Dreyse actually passed away, and the company was taken over by his son, Franz von Dreyse.
And Franz would be the guy (Franz was also a talented engineer and designer in his own right), and
he developed this very last system, and he did it to compete with the Mauser 1871,
which is the rifle that would be adopted as Germany's first cartridge loading infantry rifle (centerfire metallic cartridge).
And by the way, of course at this point with the Mauser 1871, there is now
a nation state of Germany, which didn't exist before the Franco-Prussian war.
So Dreyse's kind of in this sticky spot, OK, the standard rifle's being replaced
by this new thing from Mauser, whoever that is, some upstart.
And he wants to stay relevant, and so he needs to invent an improvement
to the Dreyse system if he wants to have this thing stay in service.
This is what he invented. So let's take a look at it.
If you are a Dreyse aficionado you will notice upon looking at this that it's not marked
"N", its marked "Fv Dreyse" for Franz von Dreyse, instead of Nicolaus,
and that ought to be a clue that this is a particularly late development, given that
Nicolaus was the guy running the company until 1867. And then of course,
it's also marked Sömmerda, which is the city where these were manufactured.
There is very little else on these guns in the way of markings.
We have a kind of a scriptey word "Patent" there on the top.
We have a Württemberg [?] proof mark here, the W with the crown over it.
This particular rifle was sold into the state of Baden, which was ... served by the Württemberg proof house.
And then we have a serial number here. This particular pattern of Dreyse will be found with
serial numbers in the 13,000 and 14,000 range, so that's what we would expect there.
The rear sight is just an open notch, and you have a second one that lifts up for longer range.
Not sure, unfortunately, exactly what those two ranges are.
Front sight is a nice big triangular post there.
And then we have this rather unusual style of cleaning rod,
and that's because this isn't really intended to be a cleaning rod.
If you use a steel rod like this on the bore, you'll end up damaging it over time.
Instead this is really intended to be a clearing rod, so that if you put a cartridge in
and it fails to fire for whatever reason, you need a way to get it back out.
Because this fires paper cartridges there is no extractor,
and so you would have to use this rod to knock a dud cartridge out from the front.
Apparently troops were actually instructed to, if they were cleaning rifles in the field,
if at all possible make a cleaning rod out of available wood instead of using this.
This is for clearing and for emergency cleaning purposes only.
There is of course a bayonet lug on the front as well, pretty standard fare at this time point.
Sling swivels are a bit distinctive here, but this is the pattern that you would expect, that's correct.
And a similar pattern for the rear sling swivel.
Now the interesting bit, of course, is the bolt system.
With this you simply lift the bolt up, pull it back, put in a cartridge, push it forward,
lock it down and you're ready to fire. See the striker sticking out the back here,
that drops when you fire. And it's a cock on open system, so when I open the bolt there,
it's going to automatically re-cock the striker. And that is the major improvement of this
pattern of Dreyse, this was patented in 1874, and these were put into production in 1875.
If you look on the top of the receiver, you can still see this traditional Dreyse sort of offset
bolt channel there. And that is because ... the bolt comes out the same way as the early Dreyses.
You open it all the way to here, and then pull the trigger hard,
and then you can pull the bolt over the rest of the way and slide it out of the gun.
In the original early Dreyse rifles you had to manually cock the striker spring, or the needle spring,
as part of the cocking and opening and closing process. And what Franz did on this one is
automate that. So I can unlock this and then I can take out the bolt head
and you can see on the bolt head here we have this cam surface,
and we also have this track [lug] that runs in this recess in the receiver.
What that does is it forces the bolt head to remain in this position, because that's locked in the side of the receiver.
When you open the bolt handle, and then your 90-degree rotation of the bolt handle
causes this curved or angled track to act on the actual striker assembly which forces the striker back.
You can see this step right there. That is held back by the sear right there,
so when you pull the trigger the sear drops, which releases this so that it snaps forward and fires.
And then, of course, when you open this, as I just described, it pushes this back and re-cocks it.
As before, you can unscrew the needle here from the back, just like the original Dreyse.
Needle fatigue and breakage was one of the weaknesses of this system,
and Dreyse accommodated for that by making the needle very easy
(you can see that's a really long needle), Dreyse accommodated for that
fragility by making the needle very easy to replace. You don't even have to
disassemble the gun to do it. So that just threads into the back end of the bolt.
The one other thing to point out here is that we do still have a de-cocking mechanism.
So if you push in on this pad and rotate up,
you can basically take all the spring tension off of the striker.
And that is your safety system there. To re-cock it you just push in and rotate down,
and now you're ready to fire the rifle again.
One consequence of making that change to the needle system was that the cartridge also had to be
modified a bit. So the original Dreyse cartridges had a, you know,
you've got a paper cartridge and the primer was actually at the base of the bullet,
and the needle had to extend actually quite a ways into the cartridge in order to reach the primer.
Because this system only extends about a centimetre,
they had to redesign the cartridge a bit to move the primer back so that the needle could actually reach it.
These remained like a...
Well, the Dreyse system used a bullet with a paper sabot.
So the bullet's actually a little bit smaller than the bore diameter.
Groove diameter on these is like 15.8mm, land diameter is like 15.3mm.
You'd be using about a 15mm bullet wrapped in a paper sabot.
In addition, this system does not have the interlocking cones that the original Dreyse did to redirect
any gas leakage forward. This is pretty much just, well, there's a little bit of a recess
so that the bolt face fits into the breech face, but you still have a system where gas is going to leak a bit out of this.
The way that they got around that was by developing a sealant in the cartridge itself.
I believe it was a felt pad at the base of the cartridge, along with a couple other elements that were intended
to fully gas seal the base of the cartridge. That appears to have worked fairly well,
but that's still not really a selling point for a needle-fire paper cartridge system by the mid-1870s.
With the benefit of hindsight it's pretty obvious that a needle-fire system was not a
competitive military rifle by 1874 when this was designed.
And there was no way that this was going to be adopted by a major military.
However, it wasn't a complete failure for Dreyse.
They did manage to get one official client, and that was the Baden Customs Office, or Department.
These are typically called Border Guard rifles which overlaps with the customs sort of agency.
You will sometimes find these with a "BZ" stamped on the top of the receiver. This one doesn't have it.
But they did sell 1,000 to 2,000 rifles to Baden for that.
And then they also manufactured this system as a sporting rifle in a couple different scales.
Because this is a paper cartridge system, there're not cartridge designations the way we think of them today.
But there was a small, a medium and a large frame sort of sporting rifle version of the 1874 Dreyse.
And those would sell until about 1900, when they were really quite thoroughly obsolete, so.
It's pretty cool, these are a very scarce version, I mean, pretty much all the Dreyses are relatively uncommon,
but this is a particularly scarce version. And it's pretty neat being the very last one,
which actually finally got rid of some of the more unusual quirks of the Dreyse system.
Now if it's something you would like to add to your own collection, it is of course coming up for sale
here at Morphy's. If you take a look at the description text below, you'll find a link to ForgottenWeapons.com,
and from there you can click over to Morphy's catalogue page on this guy.
You can take a look at their pictures and their description, the price estimate.
If you're interested in it, you can place a bid right there on-line, or you can just
browse through everything else that they have in the catalogue.
Thanks for watching.