Wednesday - February 09, 2011

Inventive Weaponry

Using his own ingenuity, a welding torch, and some spare parts lying around the shop, a gunsmith has built a rather unique firearm. He figured things out as he went along, and came up with what may be the first lever operated single action revolving cylinder shotgun ever made. Pretty neat. In the above picture the teardrop shaped knob you see behind the cylinder is the handle for the swing out loading gate, just like on a single action revolver. The ejector rod assembly runs along the right side of the barrel over the forearm and is used just like the ones on a single action revolver. The shotgun has a great 1880s look to it, right down to the red color of the wood which was popular in those days.

This is one of those posts that takes me forever to write, because I can see several approaches to it. I love the “lever action revolver shotgun” part, because it makes me wonder if this gun project wasn’t designed from the get-go to take a swipe at pulp fiction authors, who are historically awful at describing guns. Seriously, they write such colorful nonsense, like “emerging from the misty night, he lifted his .44 millimeter magnum double barreled automatic and drew a cowardly bead on the detective’s head from behind.”, proving yet again that they have even less awareness about actual firearms than Hollywood producers. That’s a challenge, because I didn’t think it was possible to actually have negative quantities of knowledge. So it strikes me that this could have been a “gotcha” project.

The other direction would be to point out that there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to firearms. Everything has been done before, and it was usually done 100 years ago if not longer. Old ideas get reinvented, improved a bit with modern materials and technology, and hit the market as something brand new. The revolver shotgun is one of those ideas. And that’s where a 30 second post of “oh, look at this neat picture, here’s a link, now move on” turns into hours, because I go and do the research so you don’t have to.

The revolving barrel / revolving cylinder idea is probably almost as old as firearms themselves. I would not be at all surprised if some ancient Chinese proto-gun someday turned up that had 5 or 6 bamboo barrels strapped around a wooden axle that allowed the shooter to fire off half a dozen rock balls in quick succession by touching a burning brand to the flash holes. Gunpowder came along a long time after the wheel and the lever, and reloading has always sucked, so the axial repeater is probably Thought #2 when it comes to inventing a better gun.

Metallurgy and ignition methods being what they were, it took until the early 19th century to make a revolver that was even somewhat reliable (the pepper mill pistol) and it wasn’t until the mid 19th century when Samuel Colt figured out how to properly do things. From then until now it’s only been a matter of improved materials and precision, with a few side steps along the way for such tricky bits of innovation like metallic cartridges and smokeless powder.

Somewhere around 1855 Colt enlarged his clockwork pistol mechanism and hung a long barrel off the front of it, thus creating the revolving rifle. It looked really cool but wasn’t very powerful. He further stretched the idea and turned out revolving cylinder shotguns. And between the two long arms, he invented the problem of blow-by. You see, in order for a cylinder to be able to spin around, the front edge of it can’t be in actual contact with the back end of the barrel. You need a little gap so the parts don’t rub on each other. But when you fire a revolver of any kind, some of the burning powder gas is going to squirt sideways out of that gap. So is some of the bullet if the parts aren’t perfectly aligned (and they never are). In a pistol this doesn’t really matter. You hold a pistol in one hand a stick it out in front of you. Any blow-by goes off to the side. But when you grow a revolver into a rifle or a shotgun, your other hand is out in front holding on to the fore end. Which means the blow-by hits you right in the arm. White hot gas and little shavings of high speed lead. Not cool.

Technology has come a long way towards mitigating the blow-by problem. Modern steels and modern machining can make that gap very small; just 2 to 4 thousands of an inch. Modern smokeless powders burn very cleanly. They don’t leave a bunch of sticky crud behind them like the old black powder did. That allows those close gaps to work; no crud builds up on the front of the cylinder to jam things up. Well actually it does, but these days it takes hundreds of shots to build up enough gunk on the front of a cylinder to jam a revolver. Back in the old days a dozen or two shots would have been enough, which is why the old guns had such big gaps between the breech end of the barrel and the face of the cylinder. And more blow-by because of it. So the revolver rifle/shotgun idea didn’t work out too well back in 1860, and it got set aside.

But it wasn’t set aside by everyone. Around 1866 Sylvester Roper found a better way. Roper was a prolific inventor, and like many other inventors of that era he turned his mind in several directions. He built a steam powered car. He may have invented the motorcycle: his was steam powered, and it was one of these two wheeled wonders that eventually killed him. But along the way he also invented a revolving cylinder shotgun, that used metallic cartridges before metallic cartridges were actually invented. So he made his own, out of iron. Chalk up another first for old Sly.

The Roper Revolving Shotgun was highly unusual, and at first glance appears to have solved the blow-by problem by putting a hinged shield around the cylinder (which is Thought #5 in repeating firearms development, once the burns have healed from Thought #2. It works but is really clumsy). This is not the case. Roper built his gun in a recursive, cart before the horse, kind of way so that cocking the hammer retracted a long bolt that ejected the spent cartridge out the back. Pulling the trigger advanced the cylinder, and released the bolt. The spring powered bolt slid forward, pushed the cartridge out of the cylinder and into the breech of the barrel, and then fired it. If you think about it, there had to be some kind of bolt locking mechanism inside somewhere, otherwise this thing would have been a machine gun. Here’s the video:

It’s a pity the NRA curator doesn’t work the mechanism using one or two of the iron cartridges because that would really make it clear how this one functioned. And the curator’s remark about blow-by is ill founded, since firing a cartridge in a locked chamber will have just about zero blow-by. But it was a really neat invention, and you could honestly say that what Roper built was actually a bolt action revolver shotgun, a description which should send detective novel authors into fits of orgasmic glee. Thank God it only had one barrel.

And here’s where the fun begins all over again. With divergence! It must have been a triple bear to cock that hammer, seeing how much mechanical complexity it eventuated. The guy had a good idea, but took what to us was an ass-backwards approach, rather like building a giant skillet under your hen house so your hens would lay fried eggs. It works, but the cost in chickens is going to bankrupt you. Which is exactly what happened to Roper. Like just about every firearms inventor of his time, he went broke. But you can’t keep a good mind down, even if it keeps coming up with backwards ideas rather like our old friend General Buffington, so with his partner Spencer (yes, that Spenser, the guy who invented the Spencer repeating carbine that was used so effectively in the Civil War), he looked at his creation, looked at the new tubular magazine that Henry had hung under his ”Yellow Boy” lever action rifles (this rifle would soon evolve into the Winchester lever action “cowboy rifle”, the so-called “gun that won the West” and make Oliver Winchester millions. Henry also went broke.) and it’s cartridge lifting mechanism, put two and two together, and then invented the pump action shotgun. 11 years before Winchester. More than a century later, the pump shotgun remains essentially the same. It’s prettier, stronger, smoother, better made and better balanced, but today’s model isn’t really much different than what these guys developed way back when.

But in doing so they gave up the revolving cylinder idea. Had they hung onto that, and just added a lever to do all the hard work, they would have built a creation rather like the one shown above that our unnamed inventor put together 130 years later. It would still have the blow-by problem, but perhaps “hardly noticeable with normal shirt sleeve” as our modern inventor at the top claims.

Ah yes, the divergence. Let’s go back to the turn of the 20th century, and take Roper’s revolving cylinder gun idea and add that lever. Let’s shorten the bolt so that the used cartridge gets ejected out of the top of the gun instead of out the back, and let’s make sure the lever does all the mechanical work. While we’re at it, let’s utilize those new fangled carbon steel coil springs so we can get rid of that clunky old hammer and put all the firing pin and striker parts inside the gun. We’ll keep the locking bolt and the idea of pushing the cartridge out of the revolving cylinder and into a chamber in the back of the barrel. Finally, let’s make it a rifle, since the repeating shotgun thing is all figured out. My gun savvy readers are smiling now, because they know what’s coming.

Behold the Savage 99. Arthur Savage did exactly what I said in the above paragraph, and in 1889 brought the rifle to market. It was a hit. He improved the design a little in 1899 when he was trying to get a military contract, but the improvements were mainly in robustness. It’s the same design concept as the 1889 model. Lever action, fully shielded internal rotary magazine (ie revolver cylinder), sliding bolt with a sturdy locking mechanism.  No blow-by. For the next 80 years this Savage rifle was the darling of American hunters everywhere. It’s a fast pointing, fast shooting, perfectly balanced little gun that can handle the strongest modern cartridges, and unlike the tubular magazine lever guns made by Winchester and Marlin, the Savage is perfectly happy with pointy bullets. It’s a very robust design without a whole lot of fussy little parts, and that makes for a easy to maintain rifle that lasts forever. Many 99s built many decades ago are still out there hunting today.

Hey, while we’re at it, since the market is clamoring for super high velocity cartridges, let’s put a famous cartridge designer on the payroll, one Charles Newton, and have him develop the hottest cartridge out there to pump up sales! And he did, inventing the .250-3000 Savage, a short little wonder cartridge that could push an 87 grain quarter inch diameter bullet at the unheard of phenomenal velocity of 3000 feet per second. Which means Savage invented the Assault Rifle Cartridge. In 1915. 50 years before such rifles even existed, and 75 years before they got that label. Just for fun, a few years after that Savage took the .250 cartridge and necked it up to .308, and made a short length cartridge that matched the ballistics of the popular military .30-06: a 150 grain bullet at 2700fps. The .300 Savage is a fantastic deer hunting round, and did the “short action” thing 50 years before the rest of the market had “invented” the idea.

Like I said, there’s nothing new under the sun in the firearms world.

h/t to Rich K

Posted by Drew458     on 02/09/2011 at 12:26 PM   
Filed Under: • Guns and Gun Control • History •  
• Comments (3) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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