Saturday 29 August 2009

What's This?


H/T DML

11 comments:

Unknown said...

Recoil.

Diamond Mair said...

Nothin' I'd ever want to be be lookin' at the wrong end of ...................... :-)

Semper Fi'
DM

fboness said...

What you have there is a 16 barrel pepperbox pistol. Many different kinds with varying numbers of barrels were made my many manufacturers. The pepperbox went out of favor when metallic cartridges made single barrel revolvers more practical.

tom said...

BZZZZZZZZZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yes it's a pepperbox but it didn't go out of favor because of metallic cartridges, it went out of favor because people worked out single barrel revolvers that were feasible that only used one barrel. Single barrel revolver designs long pre-date common usage of metallic cartridges and were made possible by greater manufacturing precision and better materials. All those Remingtons, Colts, and variant's that were in common use up till the end of the 19th century and were sidearms in the War Between the States and the Indian Wars: Non-metallic cartridge revolvers, every single one of any significant usage.

Another thing to note of this, like quite a few of the pepperboxes of the era, smooth bores and judging by choice of metallurgy, rather weak too. Brazz and bronze do not make a good firearms barrel so I'd date this particular one as 17th century at the latest.

I've got a .36 caliber replica pepperbox (smoothbore, although steel) I built for amusement purposes. Can't hit much with it except at very close range but you could pistol whip the hell out of somebody with it. 5 shots in a 5lb firearm...

fboness said...

This one is circa 1860.

Billll said...

Looks like a percussion cap model, which would put it closer to the early 1820s. With the barrels in that configuration, the hammer would have 2 firing pins or contact points, and the barrel would rotate when the trigger was pulled. 16 shots as fast as you can pull the trigger, assuming that the caps didn't set one another off, in which case you got up to 16 shots in one pull.

Is it just me, or do those outer barrels look like they're angled slightly?

Unknown said...

that is some serious sh*t.

monkey said...

its a gun.

and you boys need to get girlfriends or summat because i like my fire arms but that shit sent me to sleep.

Alexis de Tocqueville said...

Anglo saxons for you Monkey my dear....

fboness said...

This particular pepperbox pistol was made by M. Cerwenka, 1860

LifeoftheMind said...

Say Hello to my leetle friend.