RAREST GUN In History - Shooting Cast Boolits!

[Texas by God]

Garry James wrote one up in Guns & Ammo a few years ago. Very,very neat. The chains to handle a hot barrel to change to a new one is smart & funny.

[Geezer in NH]

At 25K I would spend another 5-6K and convert to 45/70!! Keep everything to keep original but shoot it as a 45/70.

Gatling guns go for way more. The Josey Wales Gatling [Colt made] sold for over 250K with the buyer premium. Note: they are legal in states that do not allow NFA machine guns and they are pre 1898 so Antique!!!

Nice gun if the dope on pawn stars paid 20K it was worth at least double. Bet he has no FFL for a reason. Hollywood gets special treatment.

[Baryngyl]

The only thing I thought odd was the direction of turning the crank.



Michael Grace

[waksupi]

Garry James wrote one up in Guns & Ammo a few years ago. Very,very neat. The chains to handle a hot barrel to change to a new one is smart & funny.

I was shooting muzzleloaders with Gary James this past weekend. Also our winter military and sporting rifle matches.

I frankly think this gun was undervalued at 30 grand!

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Hand-made guns are often perfectly unique, and even among factory products this isn't as unique as, say, the US army trials .45 Luger, of which only one or two exist. IMI and Atlanta Cutlery both list them at around $29,000 dollars. With the close relationship of some kind between IMI and Atlanta, that could be up to

These photographs are my own, taken in the artillery branch of the Royal Armouries (ours, not Nepal's) in Fort Nelson above Portsmouth. It was purchased in 1982, and very likely left Nepal while it was still state of the art, or as near as it ever got.




The first thought is, what a marvellous technical achievement, for a nation which must have enjoyed being a small and isolated mountain kingdom just as much as anyone with sufficient good sense would. It's true it is based on the Gardner gun, just as they had an uncertain blend of technological aid and plagiarism from people like Martini, Francotte and Westley Richards. But Zululand and Lancaster County could have had that, and Japan, with all its perfectionism and appetite for work, put up a stern resistance to modernity.
t
if 1898 was the year of its invention, time had passed it by. Mannlicher had patented good semiautomatic rifle designs before the smokeless powder they needed, and John M. Browning patented the potato-digger olt machine-gun in 1890. In 1893 the Austro-Hungarian Baron Odkolek invented the gas cylinder and piston which became the Hotchkiss, and by that time nobody was thinking of much besides self-powered automatics, smokeless powder and small jacketed edbullets.

The Bira was heavy, but it was made for a region where combat in and around more or less conventional buildings was more likely than in Europe. I don't know about the Bira, but the Gardner performed some amazing sustained-fire feats in good condition with the .45 Gardner-Gatling cartridge. The British navy liked the Gardner but sand jammed the it quite easily, and even its cartridge, longer and straighter than the .577/.450 Martini-Henry rifle cartridge, had to be revised with a changed shoulder angle to improve feeding. As the Martini-Henry round had found unsuitable for the Gatling due to both shape and coiled brass construction, I doubt if the latter cartridge performed really well in the Bira. The British probably tested the five-barrel Gardner, and the more barrels the better as far as black powder fouling is concerned. You can't do much about shooting into a smoke-cloud, and it is a whole lot easier to duck a burst than an infantry volley.

[biffj]

I have been thinking about where I had seen this gun before.Finally figured it out.There was one featured on that show sponserd by the Julia auction company.So I guess that there are two of those in the US unless the one featured on"Pawn Stars"was the same one.
Good luck.Have fun.Be safe.
Leo

Pawn stars is another joke "reality" show like sons of guns. Not a lot of what they say is truth, its a tv show.
As for the Bira guns there were a number of them imported from Nepal by IMA in New Jersey. They aren't common but the rarest gun in the world? Not a chance. They are basically Gardner guns with some mods like the pan magazine. Simple hand cranked multi barrel guns and they originally shot cast bullets when they were made. Gardner guns are fascinating pieces and were pretty heavily used by the British navy. Look them up online as there is quite a bit of info out there. Ordnance Research in Pennsylvania has built a number of new made guns in 45/70 along with the Gatling guns they're building with the Colt name on them and the really wierd nordenfelts which use a lever to feed and fire. I got to shoot all of them at a shoot out west over the years and the Gardner is a reliable and fun gun.

Frank

[Ballistics in Scotland]

A major advantage of most competing guns of the time was that they were better than the Nordenfelt, often termed an organ gun of five to twelve barrels. Many of them were sold, chiefly through the dubious or worse than dubious marketing techniques of Sir Basil Zaharoff, for whom the nickname "The merchant of death" first saw the light of day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_Zaharoff

[Thumbcocker]

Any knowledgable gun buff knows that the rarest firearm is the left handed tangent sighted semi-self-loading target model Asperly Aimless.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Ah, self-unloading. I had one of those once.

[Earlwb]

That is one of the cool-list things I have seen lately. I like it. Thanks for sharing.