Stamm-Zeller 1902: A Swiss Straight-Pull Converted to Semiauto
Prototype & Trials Weapons
•
12m
Today's rifle was designed by a Swiss inventor named Hans Stamm while working for the Zeller et Cie company in Appenzell Switzerland. The company originally made embroidering machinery, but turned to military rifle parts subcontracting to bring in additional revenue in the early 1890s. Stamm had shown a good aptitude and interest for this work, and when the company decided to lean into the small arms business he was put in charge of its new weapons division.
There, Stamm spent several years developing a self-loading rifle for the Swiss military. It was not something specifically requested by the government, but rather an opportunistic risk by the company. Stamm's resulting gun, the Model 1902, was expensive to produce, but quite elegant in design. It is a long-stroke gas pistol system with a rotating bolt, which was made from the ground up but could easily be adapted as a conversion of existing straight-pull bolt action rifles like the Swiss G96.
Unfortunately, the Swiss military declined the rifle, and Zeller was unable to find any other interested clients among the European states. By 1906, tired of dumping money into what is clearly a losing proposition, Zeller shuts down its weapons division. Stamm leaves the company, but he is not done with small arms design - we will see several more of his designs in future videos!
Many thanks to the Swiss Shooting Museum in Bern for giving me access to this visually one of a kind rifle to film for you! The museum is free to the public, and definitely worth visiting if you are in Bern - although it is closed for renovation until autumn 2025:
https://www.schuetzenmuseum.ch/en/
Up Next in Prototype & Trials Weapons
-
Aimpoint's Only Gun: The PC-80 Symmet...
Today we are looking at the entire scope of Aimpoint's firearms development division...which is actually just this one firearm. Aimpoint was founded in 1975 as a partnership between Arne Ekstrand (a Swedish inventor with an idea for a brand new "red dot" type of optic) and Gunnar Sandberg (a weal...
-
HK G11 Disassembly & How It Works!
In this special episode Matt has the privilege of field stripping a Heckler & Koch G11. He strips the rifle down into its major assemblies and then explains how the 'space magic' works!
Matt explains how the recoil management system, that compensated for the recoil of firing a 3-round burst at ...
-
ZB47: A Truly Weird Czech SMG
The ZB47 was developed at Brno as a contender for Czech military submachine gun adoption in the late 1940s. The Czech Army had technically adopted a submachine gun prior to World War Two (the vz.38; video on that is coming a bit later) but production did not begin before the arrival of German tro...