Please support us at: https://www.patreon.com/capandball 26" inch octagonal bore, full length magazine tube, American walnut stock, borach rifled match grade bore, and hard kickin' 45/70 Govt. calibre. Love the Pedersoli 1886 Winchester repro!

Please support us at https://www.patreon.com/capandball For buying Capandball Civil War cartridge boxes and cartridge formers: http://stores.ebay.com/Capandball?_trksid=p2047675.l2563 or the Capandball webpage: https://capandball.com/termekkategoria/capandball-products-2/ History, shooting and hu...

Today's firearm is not a normal gun; it is a conversion of a Spencer into a shotgun. My question is, what path did this weapon travel? What did it begin as, and how did it come to be in its current form?

Let's see if we can puzzle this out looking at the evidence in the gun itself...

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. ...

The Evans rifle/carbine was developed in 1873 by a Maine dentist named Warren Evans. Its main innovation was a large helical magazine that held a whopping 34 cartridges of Evan's proprietary .44 caliber cartridge. By 1877 Evans had made a number of revisions and improvements to the gun, including...

The Winchester 1895 was the last of Winchester's lever-action rifles, and has an interesting place in a couple different parts of world history. On the one hand, the 1895 in .405 Winchester caliber is known as Theodore Roosevelt's "Big Medicine" for safari hunting. On another, it was the object o...

Spain was historically a major center of patent infringement in firearms manufacture because its patent law left open a big loophole: patents were only enforceable if the patent holder actually manufactured their guns in Spain. The major European and American firearms manufacturers were not inter...

We've all seen lever action rifles galore in movies about the old west, and most of us have handled and shot a bunch of them as well. But do you know where they came from?

Today we will take a look at the first American lever-action rifle put into successful (more or less) production, the Volc...

Marlin's 1892 lever action rifle in .22 rimfire caliber proved to be a very popular firearm, and so the company released an improved version in 1897, offered only as a rimfire takedown model. The 1897 would also prove very popular, and the same basic design would continue later as the Model 39.
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The Whitney-Scharf was the final rifle manufactured by the Whitney company before it was bought out and closed down by Winchester in 1888. Only about 2,000 of these rifles were made before that time.

We have reached the final iteration of the Winchester lever action rifle development story today, the Model 1895. This was another John Browning design, although the locking system is basically the same as the 1894 but with the bolt extending over the top of the locking block and hiding it from s...

The Winchester 1894 has become one of the most manufactured and most popular sporting rifles in American history, and it owes this success to a combination of factors. Mechanically, the 1894 was a continued improvement on John Browning's already-excellent 1892 model. It was strong and simple to o...

The Model 1886 was the first Winchester repeating rifle to improve on the original toggle locking system of the 1860 Henry, and it is also the first of John Moses Browning’s lever action designs. Browning met with Winchester executives to sell them his design for the Winchester 1885 single shot r...

As the Model 1873 began to show its age, Winchester wanted a new rifle to take its place in the company catalog. Scaling down the Model 1886 to the pistol cartridges of the 1873 seemed like a fine option, and Winchester executives approached John Browning, offering him $10,000 if he could produce...

While the Model 1873 was a very popular rifle, its pistol caliber cartridge did leave a segment of the market unaddressed. Winchester wanted a rifle that could chamber the larger and more powerful cartridges popular with long range hunters, and the Model 1876 would be that rifle.

Early attempt...

With the Model of 1873, Winchester was able to address the major remaining weakness of the Henry and 1866 rifles - the cartridge. The 1873 was introduced in tandem with the .44Winchester Center Fire cartridge (known more commonly today as the .44-40). This cartridge kept the 200 grain bullet from...

While the Henry Repeating Rifle had been an serious leap forward in firearms capability, it was not without problems. The biggest single weakness of the Henry was its magazine. The tube magazine was open to dirt and debris, the follower could easily come to rest on the shooter's hand or anything ...

The Henry Repeating Rifle was a truly revolutionary development in firearms technology. It was not the first repeating rifle, but it was the best of a emerging class of new arms, reliable in function and very fast to shoot (much faster than the contemporary Spencers). The Henry used a simple togg...

During the Civil War, the Union purchased about 12,000 Spencer rifles and many tens of thousands of carbines, and the weapon became a standard arm for the Cavalry service. After the war, thousands of Spencers were in warehouses and arsenals in need of refit either from combat damage or just abuse...

Andrew Burgess is an underappreciated arms designer, and his Model 1878 (aka the Whitney-Burgess-Morse) had the potential to be a very serious competition to Winchester. It was chambered for the .45-70 Government cartridge, and unlike the Winchester 1876 Burgess’ design could handle to power of t...

Sorry for the breathing you hear in the video - this is the final video we filmed in that session. The fellow running the camera is a disabled vet with serious lung problems who owns this rifle (among others). If I had realized his breathing would be audible I would have used a different mic setu...

The Winchester Model 94 is one of the most iconic American sporting rifles ever made, and this particular one is chambered in the equally iconic .30-30 cartridge. It is a takedown version, made in 1907, and most interestingly of all, it comes with a legal and registered original Maxim Silencer. ...

When Winchester first began producing Model 1895 rifles, they made a model that only lasted a short time. Between serial numbers 5000 and 6000, the first pattern 95s were replaced by a second pattern of the design, which changed several elements. The most notable was the receiver profile, which w...

The French military during World War One used a number of American-made small arms, including both the Winchester Self-Loader and the Winchester Model 1894. A total of 15,100 Model 94s were purchased by France in 1913 and 1914, and they were used as a supplemental arm for drivers and airfield gua...