Why do we know so little about this gun? With firearms and weaponry expert, Jonathan Ferguson
When Jonathan first joined the museum 13 years ago, we came across a weapon of unknown design, maker and origin sat on one of the many racks of the Royal Armouries' stores. Having always wanted to know more about it, he believes to finally have some answers.
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Edit - correction, this is NOT a "Monte Carlo" stock, it just has a cheekpiece. The Monte Carlo comb sits proud of the butt itself, so has a step down near the buttplate. My friend Danny at the Cody Firearms Museum has pointed out something I missed, which is that the bolt arrangement is eerily similar to the George W. Morse patent 15995 of 1856. A possible inspiration, in which case the story COULD go Morse-This Thing-Jovanovich.
If it is indeed a variation of the Morse design, the developer of this gun was a proper patent nerd. To dig up an obscure half-a-century-old patent before Internet or even well-maintained patent databases would be a fit. Even the use of Curtis-pattern gas operation by Browning in his M1895 only goes to the late 1860s design, and it was dug up by a team of patent hounds on a payroll of a large corporation involved in a greatly damaging lawsuit.
🙋🏻♂️
they also had a laser blaster variant from 15995
@@kalui96 sadly, it didn’t look enough Star Wars blaster like so it was canceled
@@PaleoWithFries hold my tea. this with a few bolt on things would be amazingly star wars. a barrel length, single diameter tube (the old mid/late 1800s style], long eye relief "scope" (just needs to be tube with plastic or glass slide from microscope on each end] mounted on those sight bases and a low profile blocky magazine in the magazine well and some heat radiating ribbed pipe part that is cut with lightening holes on the recoil spring as a handguard. also some greebles on the top of toggle lock with a valve from scuba tank or other pressurized gas/liquid system on the hole in back of slide.
It's weird, overly complex, chambered for a very short lived cartridge... Makes my German heart spark with joy.
Fritz, we can design this to work with three screws,……ya ya but if we design it with seven it will be better.
@@noonehere1793 "3 Philips, 3 Torx ... what will we use for the remaining one? Robertson?"
Did we already have full auto? *Hands over electric tool* Spax tight that shit.
@@peterstadlmaier3107 Five point star (just like Apple phones)… Three point tamper proof would be another option.
Lads, this is the most German discussion I have read in years. I love it.
Feels like an episode of Forgotten Weapons. That's a compliment.
Ferguson and Gun Jesus are top tier. Both men that had their passion and pursuit for knowledge spill over into a career they can share with the rest of us.
Forgotten weapons sucks. Dude gets all his info from Wikipedia he is a fake expert just like this guy
Jonathon has more cool guns these days, Ian must be gettin' scared.
Only unlike on forgotten weapons this one was actually forgotten
@@edgarburlyman738 I hope they don’t worry too much about one another, because they’re both building the hobby and interest. The real enemy here is obscurity and they’re both fighting that, to everyone’s benefit
The barrel seems to be the key to identifying the provenance of this mystery rifle. It looks like an unfinished production part mated to an engineering shop prototype receiver and action. My wild guess is that it was a prototype made in the H&H factory using that particular barrel and cartridge because they were available as surplus parts. It may have been an "off the books" project by some H&H employee who knew of the Pedersen-based designs of self-loading rifles and wondered if he could make a self-loading rifle using the firm's facilities and no-one would notice if a spare barrel for their unpopular 0.375 Nitro Express rifle went missing. If you can track down any existing 0.375" Nitro Express rifles in collections or period literature and cross-compare the barrel shape and sight block layout that might give you another line of enquiry.
Might I suggest looking for a proofing mark as it would at least give you a national origin!
@World Traveler Jonathan did mention the rifle is totally unmarked, which would mean that if the barrel was taken from an existing stock, it would have been done *before* proofing, which may be the case since it also lacks the finish machining for the sights, so it may have been a rejected barrel the designer either took from the scrap pile or was given as it was junk to them anyway
My thoughts too and likely why it ended up in the museum after not impressing the bosses haha.
@@worldtraveler930 - Proofing only occurs when you have a completed firearm that you are ready to sell. This is definitely a prototype which means proofing is still in the distant future.
Exactly what I was thinking.
I love these oddball dead end designs. Thanks for sharing this one. With regards to not disassembling the guns to frequently, had the armory considered getting a good 3D scanner so that when one is taken apart accurate scans can be taken along with photos? It would be great from a research accessibility standpoint but also to allow recreation of various parts or entire guns.
Honestly one of the larger game studios they work with should donate one. Makes sense as a workflow even without the whole preservation angle.
Frankly they should just disassemble them. They're being overly paranoid about breaking things that are made of solid steel.
@@aniquinstark4347 I'm guessing you've not had much first hand experience with the various failure states of metal, then? Fatigue, stresses, peening, corrosion - all of these things come into play, even in a carefully curated environment such as a museum. Doubly so with these prototype designs that (as was noted) haven't even been properly hardened in development. This doesn't even account for things like alloy qualities - inclusions and minor variances in the alloy itself can cause huge weakness issues that take a while to show up, but are catastrophic.
@@aniquinstark4347 "I know more about how steel breaks than the museum that specializes in dealing with precisely this sort of thing all the time."
@@aniquinstark4347 you haven't taken a single class on material properties in your entire life, and it shows.
It's worth noting that the performance of the cartridge was deliberately made significantly lower than what was theoretically possible because it was a British cartridge for big game in Africa loaded using cordite powder which was exceptionally sensitive to heat. Generally a maximum pressure of 47k psi was allowed with cordite to give enough safety factor, but with newer flake or ball powders which don't see such drastic increases in burn speed (and thus pressure) the maximum would be up around 62k. So it wasn't exactly a slouch, despite being over a hundred years old it was right up at the limits of what would be allowed even today when using a brass case (which is 65k after safety factor).
Thank you - this is the kind of detail that I'm out of my depth on when it comes to hunting rifles.
I have also heard that chamber pressures on big game rifles were intentionally on the low side to facilitate extraction, which certainly seems wise if you have emptied that big double rifle into a dangerous critter which is, by now, feeling sort of upset but not yet feeling real dead.
In parts of the British Empire that restricted what caliber weapons could be used to hunt certain game, .375" was the minimum specified for shooting elephants. Also, I was seeing 'Express' style folding leaf sights still being fitted to brand new rifles into the mid-1970's from companies like Steyr (Mannlicher) and FN Browning
'50s was a bit finger-in-the-air but the colleague that I asked was thinking in terms of when it was popular, I think.
About 25 years ago I was in a gun shop in Shrewsbury when I was shown a double rifle owned by a local landed gentleman. A sidelock action gun made by Sauer in Austria. You may presume it would be chambered in a European calibre but this was in H&H •375. Allegedly the owner's father had used it in East Africa to shoot a right and left at two charging rhinoceroses back in the 1930s. However, knowing about the hyperbole that some people are capable of I did take a deep breath and a large pinch of salt.
@@philhawley1219 did I say rhino? Nah mate it was a pair of whinos 🍷
I've heard that a common concern among big game hunters was the risk of being charged by an animal they'd wounded. Hence why some big game rifles have two barrels, and also the original development of 'howdah pistols'. This might have been intended as a way to allow hunters to take quick follow-up shots at charging animals.
That is a reasonable assumption, at least with European boars it is a significant risk.
You know, based on the cartridge, this might have been a first attempt at a semiautomatic big game stopping rifle. The .375" diameter projectile been a popular choice for african big game hunting, and maybe the inventor was looking to break into that market. It's definitely a curious piece!
My thoughts were in the geographic opposite direction. Northern big game hunting. particularly bears or moose. Consider the large trigger guard opening for a gloved hand and the heavy spring arrangement to close into battery against frost debris in the fall or winter.
My mind also immediately went to Africa. If anybody can research Dutch patents, that might well be helpful, but given the “Wild West” attitude of firearm’s development back then it might have been a commissioned project from some gentry that wanted to show up somebody on safari
@@pavementsailor Also noticed the size of the guard, Semi-Auto, big game round 🤔 possibly for Daier Lemmings
A general comment here. Have you thought of using x-ray florescence as a NDT method of cataloging firearm metallurgy? I was using this method last summer at work and found it very revealing. Especially as it regards to "purity" of composition of metals. For instance using the Star-Trek like pistol and shooting a piece of "pewter" showed expected lead, antimony, and zinc. But it also revealed uranium, mercury, silver and gold content. With enough data one would be able to determine what furnace made what, if a particular manufacturer had a material specification, etc. Perhaps the rifle here may have steel(s) from an Italian, Czech or German plant. Just a thought.
Sounds like a great theory just one issue I would think metal tends to travel and move around and be bought ,stolen and everything in between so while yes u may be able to find exactly where it came from I don’t think u would be able to trace every bit as there would be no way to test purity n stuff on the recovering end they would just have to take their word . I hope what I’m saying makes sense
A quite fearsome recoil with all those large lumps of metal hammering around - also a great finger dicer if you let go of the wrong bit at the wrong time.
It uses the mass of the barrel and all to alleviate recoil. It would be a long, slow push rather than a sharp punch.
@@BlackSoap361 To me, that's somewhat worse, if things are slowed down enough that the giant flappy bit falls into your eye's ability to detect motion. You might not consciously notice the big hunk of metal flying at your forehead every shot, but your twitchy lizard brain might. That'll greatly amplify the general unpleasantness of the firearm, even if by the numbers it seems fine.
@@TheRealColBosch In operation the toggle would cycle so quickly and you are so far back from it that it would be a non-factor for the most part. But yeah, it is a "suboptimal" design.
Jonathan Ferguson and Ian McCollum are the best source of firearm related facts and interesting concepts
Tfbtv guy has been getting some very interesting videos done on his travels lately. Check it out. Stuff these guys could never get their hands on, because they're prototypes in the manufacturer's reference vaults.
Very cool! This may be Jonathan's best video yet - he's so very clearly really into the mystery of this thing. Entertaining and educational, an excellent use of my time. Thank you all!
The very roomy trigger-guard could be for use with heavy gloves similar to the FAMAS
Brilliant. The ingenuity of gun designers and builders is second to none. It starts with an idea 100% of the time based on something else. Guns shaped society, both good and bad. It needs to be understood not feared.
I only discovered this channel about a month ago. I've got to say that the content is excellent and this video is a great reminder of just how many unusual designs there must have been to get us to the tried and true mechanisms we know and rely on today. Simply brilliant.
You and Ian should have done a collab on this one. The knowledge you both have would surely be amazing to hear.
Jonathan, I am a Brit living in Wyoming. We used to have a firearms law but nobody used it. Been here 20 years and it has been great to pursue my hobby. I reload my 7.62x51. I am a convert to 1911 and 45ACP for my pistols. I am an amateur gunsmith in that I had mechanical engineering training in my teens. Love this program and Forgotten Weapons. Are these broadcast in the UK? The country is very anti-gun mainly driven by ignorance. I have visited the Leeds museum many times in the past.
Jon... Ian would LOVE this thing...
It always amazes me just how nicely machined and complete many prototype guns are and how nicely finished the metal and wood is in an almost production like way even way back then
That looks like an iteration of the C98 Mauser, one of Germany's first forays into self-loading rifles back in 1898. The elongated trigger guard and square magazine are nearly identical. The C98 was also a flap-lock design. Wonder if a Brit decided to do a little patent infringement...
"You see, when a spring loaded mouse trap and a self loading rifle get really, _really_ drunk one night in a motel..."
I was going to say it reminds me of the luger rifle or the Mauser self loader both of which had toggle or flap lock mechanisms, funny that at the turn of the century a lot of people thought that those types of actions were going to be the future
Hands down that was the best intro to a video I have ever seen. You win the internet
I have seen a virtually identical one in Australia. It was own by a professional SriLanken Tiger and leopard hunter. Unfortunately when semi auto rifles were banned his surviving wife handed in in and it was destroyed.
And an important, irreplaceable piece of firearms history was lost forever because of petty, power crazed "rulers".......
He must have bought it personally with his own money. Obviously, Sri Lanka didn't have much of a firearms industry back then.
Absolutely wild design, thank you so much for sharing it.
Thanks for sharing Jonathan 👍
love the humor you bring Jonathan
Fantastic work as ever Jonathan 👏
FASCINATING piece!
LOVED this video, JF! Obviously you can’t always have mysteries but this one was fascinating 🥰
Interesting artifact, Jonathan!! I wonder if Holland & Holland *THEMSELVES* may have had a hand in this? Thanks for the video!
It's possible. Kind of like how Remington had their .30 Rem AR cartridge a while back ago.
Okay...as a "hobby loveing gun nerd" this is really cool. Thank you for sharing this with us.
Man you have the best job ever. I would probably be fired because I'd be looking at all the weapons and forget to actually work.
Thanks Jonathan. I know virtually nothing about the working of firearms , more into the historical context. But find this video fascinating
Thanks Jonathan and team - really interesting. Thanks for showing the patent drawings but I'm not 100% convinced that they exactly fit this action, as you noted in the video. But patents are a great resource. In retrospect, we are really lucky that the point and purpose of item XIX.852 is covered by a US Patent that is now accessible online. It gives some clue as to what its mad inventors and their sponsors were up to at the time.
10:45 this is a really interesting argument on what type of firing system this technically is. A striker is a single piece with the firing pin, where a linear hammer is separate from the firing pin. However, as far as I am aware, no other toggle lock firearm had the cocking/firing mechanism inside the toggle arm like this one. You could say conventionally it is more similar to a linear hammer, or you could argue it has it's own category. Regardless, it's just semantics about what to call the parts of the gun that make it go pew pew pew.
The locking flap reminds me of the Browning gas operated pistol of 1897. Recoil actuated instead of gas, of course, by the large over the top flap with the internal toggle.
Hello Jon! Hope your doing good! Learned so much about old weapons from you!
I am well thank you - glad you're enjoying the videos :)
John and Ian doing great things!
It is interesting the Standard Arms also is known for battering issues if the buffer is ignored.
great looking action, would cut recoil well, we could make the frame in aluminum now to get most of the weight out of it. 😊
Sir, that is a very interesting rifle. When I first started, watching it reminded me of a few different obscure rifles. The Peterson rifle was one of the first to come to mind, and a J. M. B. from early 1900s. Thanks for sharing this with everyone. I know my comments added nothing of relevance to this, but to fuel U-tube tracking.
“what is this weapon? no seriously, i’m actually asking you…”
Awww 🤗 looks like a BAR and a mauser c96 had a big fat baby
First thing that came to my mind was a Selbstlader. But a whole lot of differences when you get to the details. What a cool find though, really interesting.
Wow! Extremely interesting!!
Furrer wouldn't be happy someone's stepping on his toggle lock toes.
I love this - thank you Jonathan for all your work. What a cool thing, big toggle action essentially, I can see why this never caught on. What a beautiful mystery though! Unknown - Unknown hah! Next time I'm in the UK I am definitely going to the Royal Armouries, can't believe I hadn't yet.
That toggle is an appropriate chance to describe it as "a big wacking piece of metal". A real hat lifter.
One thing i noticed: It has grub and hex screws. From this point, i would date it roughly around 1920ish If i follow this thought... Automotive Industry? They had the material, machines and these typical screws. Follow that path further... Allan Safety Screws were highly promoted in Canada. My wild guess: Some engineer of a automotive plant who had fought in WWI had some free time and constructed this one to hunt Bears and moose.
I wonder what type of threads are on the screws. Depending on the type, it might narrow down the possible origin of the firearm.
@@edwardmelvin9184 I'm surprised that there was no discussion of this during the video. Excellent point!
Didn't Jonathan mention a Serbian inventor, who moved to Canada?
375 belted was a dead cartridge a decade before 1920, and it was unpopular before that. So I highly doubt it was built that late. Screws are replaceable, and the design may have been tinkered with for 20 years, but 1920 is a little late for the initial build
Reminds me of those guns used to knock down ice ledges around glaciers and ski slopes.
That kind of front sight base is still common on high end hunting rifles. Often Mauser based rifles made by Rigby, h&h, and loads of custom makers.
Maybe someone was trying to build a self-loading safari rifle?
Maybe do some kind of chemical/radiological analysis on the steel and the wood buttstock. They might be able to determine when the steel was smelted, where the tree for the buttstock wood grew etc and narrow down where it was made.
thank you for video
This is most weird toggle lock mechanism on that gun that i ever seen.
Yea
It's reminds me of a stretched Mauser broom handle with the try to cancel the back sliding bolt in to a up flipping bolt group maybe the inspiration of this prototype.
Brilliant intro, Jonathan- you had my roaring with laughter within 20 seconds of the video starting 🤣
I was quite pleased with that ad-lib. If you listen closely you can hear some crew laughter :)
I wish that we would see more toggle lock firearms today. This is very cool.
Given that real weapons parts/designs were used, I can absolutely see this design being converted into a Star Wars universe rifle. Large chunky parts with hard angles and small curves and also the exposed return spring all add to the "star wars esthetic". Really interesting design nonetheless.
As an inventor myself I can say I’ve done a few iterations of a design before paying the money for a patent. It’s kinda expensive and time consuming to file for a patent. You want to make sure that your idea works before you go through the process. And of course your going to play with it and show your friends. So it’s going to be beat up a bit.
Great content, I'm surprised none of the major fiarearms companies haven't contacted you after this video to say that they have prototypes like this on file to help trace its lineage.
I wasn't ready for the introduction but it would have still been a great video as they always are
The oversized trigger guard was a thought of someone using gloves and needing more room than a standard trigger guard would provide just to guess though
an interesting bit of investigation into a semi-finished prototype. I imagine the amount of machine work would narrow down where something like that could have been made during the period. I wonder if the metal composition could give more insight into what region might have made the components.
that was nice 15 second episode
Hey Jonathan, ever since you did the Isonzo react video on the Gamespot channel where you reviewed the Beretta M1915, I've been wondering if it's the earliest form of bolt hold open system, or there was another existing example before it. Internet searches haven't been helpful to me, so I've been wanting to know what could be the earliest known form of bolt hold open system on a self loading firearm, because I feel it's a feature that a lot of us nowadays take for granted. Thanks Jonathan!
Great question, possibly prompted by my struggles to keep this one open :D The earliest self-loading firearm that comes to mind is the Mauser C96, but the M93 Mauser bolt-action had a hold-open follower. Since the Borchardt C93 doesn't have one I'd say this is most likely 'ground zero' for the hold-open device. But there could be something earlier. edit - there was - the 1884 Maxim rifle, although I don't believe it was ever built, only a patent.
Love this episode 😂
It looks like it would have had one hell of a kick to it. Thank you.
The large trigger guard could be provision for winter gloves.
Ask C&Rsenal those guys are VERRY good at turn of century guns , firing mechanism etc. They have a whole series on WWI firearms and the history behind them, it would be and excellent place to start in my opinion.
I wonder when Jonathan will cover Darne machine gun because I can't find any information about it. Hope to see it soon.
Interesting mechanics on this one. I wonder how it would perform when fired.
So, the consensus seems to be that it is a rifle for hunting something big (large calibre) and dangerous (fast reload) that moves in packs (many shots). Velociraptors?
Xenomorphs.
This thing reminds me so hard of a scaled up Luger pistol. It almost looks like someone saw a Luger and then thought, maybe we could make a rifle with a similar action.
So this is a semi auto 400 nitro rifle? Thats insane. I'm not sure what this would be used for, its completely overkill for hunting pretty much every kind of animal. Even an elephant will typically go down on the first shot from a 400 or 500 nitro. If I had to hazard a guess I'd say this was just a side project, something someone made for the fun of it. Gunsmiths in Africa are kind of famous for this sort of thing, tons of wacky one off guns made for the fun of it. I wouldn't be surprised if some bored gunsmith at H&H found a box of those rounds lying around and figured he'd make something cool to shoot them with.
It's not a .400 NE. It's a .375/.400 Holland and Holland NE. Basically a .400 nitro case necked to .375 bore and modified to belted rather than rimmed. Not as much steam as either .400 nitro, or the current .375 H&H magnum. More like a hot .38-55/.375 Winchester express. Not something I'd want to get hit by, of course, but not quite the "runaway train" class energy of the big NE rounds
My first thought was, where did you get an actual Combat Rifle from Fallout 4.
I think it looks really good, and the trigger guard would be great for gloves. It's too bad it's heavy
Gloves - a good point!
...so the Monte Carlo exotic rifle in destiny 2 doesn't actually have a monte Carlo stock? Missed opportunity there
I enjoyed reading the comments more then the video.
Hello, I love your work and find it enjoyable.. but my only thought is about the 'sling Ioop' it doesn't seem practical as a sling attachment point, please correct me if I'm wrong but there isn't a rear mount for a sling and no obvious hand guard, could it be pin slot for a hand guard instead?
A flapper lock in a toggle action? How intriguing!
It's like an elongated Thompson in appearance of the receiver to me.
It may have already been stated, but the trigger guard looks as if it’s catered for shooting with winter gloves. Thank you for an interesting look at this strange firearm.
Just as a note, in KZhead Studio, you can add things under "Tags" when editing how a video will be uploaded. That way, you can tag the videos as "#WhatIsThisWeapon?"
On the note that some people brought up about northern big game hunting, maybe that trigger guard is elongated for warm gloves in mind?
I was four years old when you started there sir.
While rather terrifying given that giant metal block flapping up and down while firing, one thing this "toggle" locked rifle seems to have as an advantage is a simplified geometry vs the jointed toggle of the Maxim or Luger. It seems it would be cheaper and easier to manufacture given the absence of the precisely matched toggle surfaces.
The covered toggle action elongates the lever and thus the mechanical advantage to open the gun breach by having a much longer lever. As a result, it might have been a way to solve the problem of the gun being overly hard to operate with a toggle action that does not have this lever. It appeared that you managed to somewhat easily operate the gun from the intended lever end, but it would be much harder to operate at half-length, where the toggle link is located.
It's a short-recoil action as well. Which were pretty popular designs before the M1 Garand was developed.
I like the idea this was just a one off idea by some random gunmaker that just ended up in Johnathan's hands a century after the fact. Like they never really intended it to be anything more than a fun project they worked on in their spare time.
looks cool
Reminds me of the Vogon Slapsticks from the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie. You know the creatures that slap you if you have an idea? The creator of this rifle must have built it to defeat the Vogon Slapsticks by thinking as little as possible.
Looks as if it would make an excellent military rifle. Reliable action, minimal open spots for dirt and debris, and a large trigger guard for operating with gloves in cold weather.
I love you, Jonathan.
Selous used the Velopexmonmamhunt in Norway with his H&H Mannlicher Schonauer action rifle.
You think 13 years is "many, many"? I had two careers that were longer than that and I _still_ retired early. I would come out of retirement and come to England to apprentice under you though Jonathan.
Call it a midlife crisis but it seems like a while - loving every moment though. Well, almost every moment :)
I think that the elongated trigger guard is actually a significant feature. The elongated trigger would allow the soldiers to shoot the rifle in cold climates while wearing gloves
This gun isn't for soldiers though. There's just no chance that any army wanted a rifle chambered in 400/375 H&H nitro belt.
The top locking block mechanism reminds me of the Winchester 1890.
The recoiling barrel is a bit reminiscent of the Browning designed Model 8 Remington of the same era. Serves as a delay so bullet is clear of the barrel before the bolt unlocks.
It looks like a steampunk BAR.