Orvill Robinson's Innovative Rifles
Forgotten Weapons
•
11m
Orvill Robinson was a gunsmith and gun designer in upstate New York who developed two rather interesting rifle designs in the 1870s. They are both pistol-caliber actions, with tubular magazines. The first (the 1870 model) used a tilting wedge very similar in concept to the 1886 Mannlicher straight-pull action. This Robinson design had a pair of checkered tabs on the back of the bolt, and the shooter would use them to manually cycle the bolt back and forth.
The later 1872 pattern rifle abandoned the earlier action for a toggle type of lock, operated manually with a small knob on the side of the bolt. The shooter would use it to pull the bolt open and push it closed. Much like a lever action, but without the lever.
Both guns seems to have had significant promise, which may explain why the Winchester company was interested in buying out Robinson in 1874. They purchased his inventory and patents, and Robinson signed a non-compete contract to boot. Winchester shut down the production; they were not interested in having a viable competitor to their lever-action rifles. Whether Ferdinand Mannlicher ever saw one of the 1870 pattern rifles is unknown, but it could have been the basis for his early 1886 action...
Up Next in Forgotten Weapons
-
Webley 1905
William Whiting was an engineer who spent his entire adult career with the Webley company, and was responsible for all of their in-house self-loading pistol designs. This work initially focused on a behemoth of a pistol, the Model 1904 intended for military contracts. The gun proved insufficientl...
-
Whitney-Kennedy Lever Action Rifles
Eli Whitney Jr., son of the inventor of the famous "cotton gin", ran the Whitneyville Armory for many years, producing a wide variety of firearms until nearly the end of the 1800s. Among other gun produced was the Whitney-Kennedy lever action rifle, based on an action designed by Andrew Burgess. ...
-
Enfield L85A1: Perhaps the Worst Mode...
The L85A1 (part of the SA80 small arms family) was adopted by the British military in 1985 as a new generation of small arms to replace the L1A1 FAL (one quick note, where "A1" indicates a revision in American designations, it is simply the first iteration in British ones - there was no "L85"). A...
