Lever action rifle
A lever action (engl .: lever-action rifle ) is a firearm by a lever under the gun piston is loaded. This was a common form of the multi-loading rifle, especially in America, while repeating rifles with a cylinder lock actuated by the bolt handle are common in Europe .
history
The first series-produced lever action rifle was the Paterson Ring-Lever percussion rifle, manufactured by Colt from 1837. The actuation of the loading lever attached in front of the trigger cocked the internal hammer and at the same time brought the drum into the next position.
Features of a lever action rifle can also be found in a rifle designed by Walter Hunt , which was manufactured from 1848 by the company Hunt & Jennings in Vermont . Hunt's percussion lock rifle, the "Volitional Repeater", used caseless cartridges, the " Rocket Balls ". Similar to the Minié bullet , the "Rocket Ball" was hollow, but the interior was filled with black powder and the primer cap was not integrated into the cartridge.
Horace Smith , later partner of Daniel Wesson ( Smith & Wesson ), developed the Smith-Jennings rifle around 1851, which, however, had a knee-joint locking mechanism instead of the simple loading lever to operate the bolt, as it was later used in the Henry and Winchester rifles has been. Like the later Volcanic pistols and rifles manufactured by Winchester around 1855, it fired caseless ammunition in which the priming and propellant charge was pressed directly into the projectile, which was hollow at the rear. Since caseless ammunition leads to gas losses due to the lack of siding and the small volume in the projectile only allows an insufficient powder charge , the Volcanic weapons were ballistically inferior to the muzzle-loaders.
Only the .44 Henry cartridge developed by Benjamin Tyler Henry with a sleeve to hold the powder and the Henry rifle , which was further developed for it , were accepted by the market and were able to establish themselves. Although the 16-shot Henry was not an ordinance weapon of the US Army , the military command of the northern states acquired over 1700 Henry rifles to equip special units. In addition, they were used by many Union soldiers on their own account in the American Civil War and referred to by the southern soldiers, often still armed with muzzle-loaders, as "the damned Yankee rifle that loads on Sunday and shoots all week".
Another lever rifle used in this war was built by Christopher Spencer in 1860 and has become known as the .50 and .56 caliber Spencer repeating rifle . It has a tubular magazine with 7 rounds in the butt and an external hammer that must be cocked by hand before each firing.
Oliver Winchester's real breakthrough came in the second half of the 19th century with designers such as Benjamin Tyler Henry (1860) Nelson King (he developed the side loading opening in 1866) and John Moses Browning (The Browning locking system allowed the use of smokeless cartridges, 1886), who developed the lever action rifle known as the Winchester rifle . A total of over 7 million Winchester "Lever-Actions" were produced in various calibers, from the .22 lfB to the .44-40 WCF to the .30-06 (standard US Army cartridge ). The company announced in 2006 that production of these rifles, particularly the Model 94, would be discontinued after more than 100 years. Only briefly, from 1883 to 1885 Colt also manufactured the Colt-Burgess lever action rifle. Today companies such as the Marlin Firearms Company (now Remington Arms ) and Sturm, Ruger & Company offer such traditional repeater of their own development. The model 1895, which was further developed by Marlin, is also suitable in its larger version for firing more powerful cartridges than the .45-70 Government, the .450 Marlin . In Italy, replicas of the most famous Winchester rifles are still made today. There are also shotguns with a lever-operated loading mechanism, for example the Winchester Model 1887 Lever Action Shotgun and Model 1901 in caliber 12 and in the larger caliber 10, but these are by far not as common as forend repeater shotguns .
Lever action rifles are still made and used for hunting today.
Charging cycle
The lever action rifle is loaded by moving the loading lever back and forth. When moving forward, the lock is unlocked and pulled back. The empty case is pulled out of the cartridge chamber , ejected, and at the same time a new cartridge is brought in front of the chamber. When the lever moves backwards, the new cartridge is pushed into the chamber by the advancing bolt. In the last phase, the breech is locked, which is done by a knee joint on the Winchester models 1860/66/73 and 76 and the Colt-Burgess rifle, and by two on the rear of the Winchester models developed by John Moses Browning in 1886 and 1892 Locking block attached to the right and left side of the locking wedge and in the models 1894 and 1895 by a locking wedge attached behind the locking block.
Magazine and ammunition
Typical of the lever action rifles offered first is the tubular magazine below the barrel . On the Henry rifle, the 15 round magazine has a slot on the underside along its entire length. For loading, the magazine feeder is pushed forward and the front part of the magazine tube is swiveled out. After inserting the cartridges, the front part is turned back and the spring-loaded magazine feeder is released.
In the successors to the Henry rifle, first with the Winchester Model 1866, the magazine is a closed tube. It is filled through a loading opening on the right of the rifle's breech block. This is closed with a loading flap; the flap is provided with a guide groove to center the cartridges. The cartridges are stored one behind the other in the magazine, each with the cartridge bottom on the projectile of the previous cartridge. Lever action rifles were originally loaded with rimfire ammunition, from 1873 with centerfire cartridges in American caliber .44-40 WCF , from 1874 .38-40 WCF and from 1882 .32-20 WCF , whereupon the manufacturers of revolvers such as Colt with the Single Action Army , Remington Arms and Smith & Wesson adopted these calibres, which made it possible to use the same ammunition for revolvers and rifles. A common ammunition for lever action rifles today is the .30-30 Winchester hunting cartridge . A disadvantage of the tube magazines is the shift in the center of gravity of the weapon when firing, which has an adverse effect on precision. In addition, tubular magazines are not suitable for ammunition with pointed projectiles, as there is a risk of self-ignition. Winchester and Savage therefore developed lever action rifles with box magazines in the nineteen-nineteen-nineties; in the Savage rifle model 1899, like the Mannlicher-Schönauer rifle, the cartridges were fed from a drum magazine mounted under the breech block .
From 1887 Winchester launched a lever action rifle for black powder shotgun cartridges with a tubular magazine for 5 cartridges in calibers 10 and 12, the Winchester Model 1887 Lever-Action Shotgun. The successor, the 1901 model, fired smokeless cartridges in caliber 10. The 1887 model produced around 64,000 and the 1901 model around 13,500.
In 1895 the Winchester Model 1895 rifle came on the market, which had a box magazine and fired pointed cartridges. The weapon was manufactured as a large game hunting rifle, infantry rifle and military carbine. The Russian Army bought over 290,000 of these weapons in military caliber 7.62 Russian in 1915-16 . The carbine with a 22-inch barrel in the American army caliber was used by the Texas Rangers (police) , who provided their weapons themselves, and other police units. The most famous owner of a Winchester Mod 95 was the big game hunter and later American President Theodore Roosevelt .
Advantages of the system
The main advantage of the lever action rifle is that it can be reloaded without letting go. This is especially important on horseback. Even when shooting standing, the weapon does not have to be removed from the shoulder, which significantly increases the rate of fire. Before the development of self-loading rifles , lever action rifles were, together with fore-end repeater, the rifles with the fastest rate of fire.
See also
literature
- George Madis: The Winchester Handbook. Art & Reference House, Brownsboro TX 1981, ISBN 0-910156-04-2 .
- George Madis: The Winchester Book. Taylor Publishing Company, Dallas TX 1971, ISBN 0-910156-03-4 .
- Martin Pegler: Winchester Lever-Action Rifles , Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015, ISBN 978-1-4728-0658-1 . (82 pages online PDF)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Standard Flayderman: Flayderman's Guide to Antique American Firearms and Their Values. Krause Publications, Iola WI 2001, ISBN 0-87349-313-3 , p. 180.
- ^ Roger Pauly: Firearms. The Life Story of a Technology. Greenwood Press, Westport CT et al. 2004, ISBN 0-313-32796-3 , [1] p. 97.