This time I went out with the Martini-Henry MK IV, an 1886-dated Enfield-produced rifle.
Open wide! The breech awaits a new .577-450 cartridge; .468 diameter, 530 grains cast lead atop 85gr. black powder.
"V.R." for "Victoria Regina", or Queen Victoria. This one was sold out of British service in November, 1908. A stock stamping shows it accepted by the Nepalese military in 1909.
Like it's rack-mate, the MK II, it shoots a bit high at 100 yards bit hits dead on for windage. Recoil is stout but manageable and the smoke cloud quickly draws crowds on the firing line.
As always, I need to remember to bring at least one round of ammunition home with me, darn it! That's one of two deer spotted next to Murphy's pen. Distance: 30 yards max.
I also got some .45 ACP shooting in with this vintage custom Agentine Model 1927.
Besides being re-parkerized, it now sports an ambidextrous safety, Trijicon night sights (tall ones to clear a suppressor), Hogue grips and a trigger job.
It breaks sporting clays at 25 yards, so I'm happy with it.
Also exercised today: The bedside gun:
13+1 rounds of .45 ought to be enough to fight my way to the rifle in the gun safe, I figure.
That's it. Every piece that goes inside the rifle action. Simple, rugged and it only fits back one way. It's pretty much "soldier-proof". Celebrate the disassembly with a beer.
The barrel goes into my shower (guest room, of course) and it gets a good hot water rinse and scrubbing with a .45 caliber bore brush. Then it gets patched with alternating oil and dry patches until the patches come out clean or you run out of patches. With this old war-horse, it's looking like the latter. Drink two beers while scrubbing.
Clean and lightly oil all of those innards. Have another beer while you're doing it. Then put them all back in just the reverse of how they came out.
If you've done it right, everything is together and functional again. If you didn't get it right, have another beer and try again. There is a little trick to it, but once you've got it, you've got it.
Now go reward yourself with a beer. You've earned it!
Since I needed a break from dealing with dogs who snack on rat poison, I spent the morning assembling my first batch of test rounds for the Martini-Henry rifles.
As you can see, I have three at present, a Martini-Henry MKIV from Nepal (top), a MKII back from Afghanistan (middle) and an Orange Free State carbine from South Africa (bottom). I dedided that I want to continue shooting these old warriors so for the past coupe of months I have been scrounging up supplies to make new ammunition for them since nobody anywhere still makes .577-450 cartridges any more.
I finally found what I needed from a couple of key sources, one man who makes the proper bullets as a custom run and another man who re-sizes brass 24-gauge shotgun shell cases to the proper shape for the Martini-Henry cartridges. Then I had to find a source for FFG black powder. Fortunately another man runs a small shop supplying Civil War re-enactors just 45 miles away. I drove over there last week and got some powder and black powder grease from him. Then I was all set.
This morning, I primed five test cases with Winchester Large Rifle Magnum primers then belled the case mouths using the new Lee dies that Murphy so thoughtfully un-boxed not too long ago. Next, I filled each case with 85 grains of black powder and packed it down good. 85 grains was the old British service load. I then filled the remaining space in the case with a filler to eliminate any air space, which is crucial in black powder loads. For a filler, I used cream of wheat. (Don't laugh--the seasoned black powder cartridge loaders swear by the stuff.) Then I put a wad in the case neck, a bit of lube, and another wad. This is known in black powder parlance as a "grease cookie" and it keeps the black powder residue from fouling the rifle. Finally I seated the 480 grain bullet and set it aside. I just made five for test purposes, figuring that way, if the first one blew my face off, I wouldn't be out for a bunch of extra rounds.
Here's the chosen test rifle, the MK II, with it's new ammo.
This one was factory-new in 1878. Eventually the Brits took it to Afghanistan and apparently lost custody of it to the locals, who kept is and undoubtedly put it to good use driving out foreigners and settling tribal disputes until the Americans came along with cash, at which point this one wound up in a local bazaar, probably traded in on a new used AK-47. Not long afterwards, it wound up in my collection.
A new .577-450 round shown next to a .22LR cartridge.
Then I set my target out, humming "Men of Harlech" as I took it down.
The target: Whitest. Zulu. Ever.
I went back, loaded the rifle, took aim, and fired. There was a large smoke cloud and I got a pretty significant shove back, but when the smoke cleared and I checked the target, I was pleased to see that the first shot was on-target--a head strike at 100 yards.(I was aiming center-mass, but I'll take it anyway.)
I fired off the remaining four rounds, and each of them punched a big .462 hole the target as well. The old rifle's battle sight is clear but it's trigger pull leaves a fair bit to be desired. No appreciable group, but they all hit it. In actual shooting, that target would be one dead Zulu/Redcoat/DHS gun-grabber/etc.. I should have rested the rifle to see how it really shoots but I was caught up in the moment and fired them all standing off-hand while yelling "At one hundred yards...volley fire...FIRE!" like in the movie. After firing, I savored the warm feel of the barrel steel in my hand, wondering how long it's been since this old war-horse has been so heated. This won't be it's last time, that's for sure. It shoots great, and there was no obvious deformation of the brass, so I can probably keep reloading these same cases for some time to come.
When I got home, I saw this deer "hiding" in my driveway.
Someone needs to explain to Bambi the difference between concealment and cover, and just because you can't see me doesn't mean I can't see you. Pity I didn't have one round of .577-450 left.
This deer's prospects of surviving the upcoming hunting season:
Another new rifle ("new" meaning: "new to me") finally showed up the other day. This one appeals to me both by virtue of it's being a Martini Henry and it's tie to my family ancestry. It's a Martini Henry MkII carbine, manufactured for the Orange Free State Boer horse soldiers in South Africa, ironically by Westley Richards & Co. of Birmingham, England just two years after the First Boer War between the Brits and the Transvaal Boers ("Boer" being Dutch for "farmer") and just six years before the second, more devastating fight between the British invaders and the forces of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State in which the fast-moving horse-mounted volunteer marksmen Boers would have kicked the British Army's ass royally had the Brits not cheated and brought in soldiers from damn near every other Commonwealth country and then gone around wiping out the farms of ever Boer man who was off fighting them, destroying their crops, burning their homes and putting their families into concentration camps.
Not that I'm biased or anything, but anyway...
This particular carbine came out of the box looking more than a little rough around the edges, but it seems functional and fortunately I like a little "character wear" on my guns.
Cute little sucker, innit? For comparison, here it is on the rack with two of it's more traditional brothers, a Mk4 (top) and a full-size Mk2 in the middle.
As you can see, it's considerably shorter and should be quite interesting to shoot, as the .577/.450 cartridge that it fires isn't exactly small, as you can see in this shot, where a round dwarfs the current 5.56mm NATO-standard round fired by today's US military.
This carbine was made for the horse soldiers, and it still bears plenty of markings from it's service in the Oranje-Vrystaat.
Note the little "1900" carving in the second pic. This one probably saw some action in the second war, and being a Boer descendant and fan, I hope that it and it's owner gave a good accounting of themselves.
Note the small carbine sight, and the "Henry Rifling" stamp.
That sight is factory--this isn't just a cut-down long rifle. Not many carbines were made for Afrikaan forces, but this is indeed one of them.
By the time that this rifle was made, the old Martini Henrys were almost obsolete. It wouldn't be long before the Brits were started to field the Lee-Metford repeaters and the Boers would soon be armed with plenty of then-new Mauser rifles from Germany. (Meanwhile, here in America, we were still issuing Trapdoor Springfields to our soldiers and would continue to do so for some time.)
Faded but still legible--The Westley Richards & Co. marking and date of manufacture: 1883.
The company made high-end firearms then, and it still does today. They began operations in 1812, the year that the British tried to re-conquer OUR country after we whomped them the first time in 1781.
Not that I'm anti-British or anything. They did, after all, give us Monty Python and Dr. Who, and that pretty much makes us even for our saving them from the Germans in those two world wars. That said, this relic of a long-ago war and a failed fight for freedom and independence will still have a place of honor in my humble collection.
Note to self: Next time I go over to noted Martini-Henry expert Richard's house, do NOT bring check book.
But this time I erred and brought it, and as a result I acquired this new (to me) Martini-Henry Mk II rifle.It's not "new" new by any means. This one first left the Enfield factory back in 1878, a little over a decade after our civil war (still known locally as "the war of Northern Aggression) ended and a year before the beginning of the Zulu War.I got it from Vern, another Martini-Henry enthusiast who happened to be over there with a pick-up truck bed full of Martini-Henry rifles that he'd picked up in Afghanistan. He recently brought this one back, and after we engaged in some shooting and cleaning (and after Richard made minor repairs to both this one and my own MK IV), I wound up buying it from him for what was probably more than he paid for it in Kabul but much less than I would have otherwise had to pay for one here stateside. No complaints from me!
The only real collector's complaint that I have about this one is the fact that it has no finish at all left on any of the metal. Afghanis like their guns to be shiny, and this one, like most other antique firearms to come out of that country, has been polished down to bare metal. But the wood still bears the original Enfield logo in a roundel on the stock, right above two Roman numerals, a II, which denotes a MK II, and a I below, which indicates original issue to a British solider in a front-line unit. Had it been issued to native troops, volunteers or other irregular forces, it would have a different number.What really makes this one interesting is the fact that it did come from Afghanistan, so it's more likely than not that this rifle continued to see much actual fighting use well after the British turned it over to the locals or otherwise lost custody of it. In Afghanistan, when the tribes are not fighting the British, the Russians or the Americans, they are fighting with Pakistan or each other. In such a culture, rifles of any sort are highly valued and functional ones are used with little regard for relative obsolescence. It's quite conceivable that this veteran fired shots at any or all of the above during it's 80 years of post-British service, at least until it's last owner decided to sell it at the arms bazaar in Kabul, probably for cash to buy something more along the lines of an AK-47.
Here's the new one (top) with my ex-Nepalese MK IV below it.Quite the pair, aren't they? Both are 49" long and weigh eight and a half pounds empty. They are single-shot rifles firing the .577/450 cartridge, and both still shoot quite well despite being well over a century old. I was putting my shots into an 8" circle at 100yards standing off-hand with the MK IV once I figured out how much to hold under due to the sights not even being gradated for ranges that short. (You have to use the battle-sight setting and guesstimate a bit.)
In this close-up, you can see the main differences between the two variants. The MK II has the short lever action, and the MK IV has a longer lever and a slightly longer receiver. The longer lever came about in part following the disaster as Islandwana during the Zulu War when the short lever was blamed for many rifles jamming due to insufficient leverage to help with spent cartridge extraction. The receiver change was made to improve the shooter's grip on the weapon. So what's it like to fire one of these? Well the recoil is not as bad as many more modern cartridge rifles firing smokeless propellant, but it's still enough to get your attention. And the black powder cartridges (Thanks, Richard!) definitely produce a good bit of smoke. Your enemy will definitely know where you are even if he can't actually see you behind the smoke cloud.
Shooting these is an involved process though, as virtually no one makes commercial or military ammunition for them any more. So unless you're willing to spend a hundred and forty dollars for a box of twenty (I'm sure not!) you'll learn how to form your own brass cases and load them with black powder and 470-grain bullets that you'll cast yourself. This is my next project and when I get it down, I'll post a step-by-step highlighting the process. In the meantime though, this new rifle will join the others firearms in the gun room, where I'm sure that it'll have lots of war stories to swap.
The Martini Henry ammunition finally arrived, and just to see how it chambered, I took one of the huge .577 cartridges, opened the rifle's chamber, and dropped it in.
Uh-oh. It wouldn't go in.
Now I've seen this rifle operated in the movies numerous times. You open the block, drop a cartridge into the chamber, close the block, then shoot a charging Zulu warrior, and repeat this until you run out of ammunition or Zulus. It's pretty simple, actually. Yet in my case, the cartridge would not slide all the way into the chamber.
Help me, Internet!
Jumping over to Gunboards.com, I described the problem on their Martini Henry forum (because if something exists, there is a forum for it on the interweb) and within a short time, helpful people began offering suggestions, the most prevalent one being that the rifle had the wrong block in it. Even better, Richard, one of the forum's moderators, by happy coincidence, lives just 30 miles or so from me. We talked and arranged for me to bring the rifle out to his place today, which I did. He popped the block out, looked at it, and determined that it was in fact a block from an earlier Mk III Martini Henry rifle which had been crudely ground long ago in an unsuccessful attempt to make it work in this Mk IV. In other words, I was apparently the victim of some improvisational gunsmithing, probably by some armorer in Nepal whose grandkids are no doubt dead of old age by now. Richard kindly swapped a functioning block from one of his Martini Henrys for my bad one, just asking me to buy him a replacement when I got back home, which I am doing online as I type this. Once the new one was installed, Richard test-fired the rifle (holding it out at arm's length, just in case) and damned if it didn't go off, making a huge smoke cloud and blowing large chunks of sod out of the ground. The action opened smoothly and the cartridge ejected smartly, and it showed every sign of a good, tight headspace. So now the rifle is functional and has been pronounced "safe to shoot", and Richard is going to help me form some cases and make some quality ammunition for the old war-horse once I acquire some 24 gauge brass shotgun shell cases to convert. So stay tuned, and in the future I promise a range report and video of this old rifle in action once again.
Life is good. And it's better with well-made old firearms.
Martini-Henry's .577-450 cartridge next to current NATO standard 5.56x45mm round:
Got a new rifle yesterday, I did. Well not exactly "new"...it's one hundred and twenty five years old. It's a Martini-Henry MK. IV, a single-shot breech-loading rifle that took a black powder cartridge in caliber .450-577. It's old but tight and it appears to still be fully functional. (They built them good back then.)
I've wanted one of these for a long time, ever since I first saw the movie Zulu. These rifles were the backbone of the British Commonwealth military for quite some time, although this particular one is a bit too young to have been used during the Zulu War in 1879. (The Mk. II was the issue version back then.)
This was a military arm, as evidenced by the Royal Cipher (the crown) and the initials "V.R.", which represented "Victoria Regina" (Latin for "Queen Victoria"). Below that is "ENFIELD", which is where this one was made. Below that is the dtate of manufacture, 1886, followed by a lock inspector's approval stamp, placed there by the expert who inspected all such military arms upon his approval of that particular rifle: This one is interesting in that the Mark IV was produced for two years, in 1888 and 1889, yet this one is clearly dated 1886. This indicates that it was converted from an earlier Mark I pattern, as many were. Further proof for that comes from the fact that the Mark Number ("IV") is off-center. The receiver was originally stamped as a Mk. I and the "V" was added later when the rifle was converted to Mk. IV specs.
For those not in the know, in the mid-1880s, the British developed a new cartridge, the .402, which was superior to the .450 round. Accordingly, they began building martini-Henry rifles in this caliber, designating them EM Mk. I models. But about the time that they got going with this project, along came the .303 Medford cartridge, which was vastly superior to even this cartridge, and the Brits switched to that round instead. Since it was a serious logistical pain to try to stock the new round, plus the old .450-577 round plus this .402 round, about 64,000 of these .402 rifles were converted back to the older, less-effective .450-577 cartridge and used to arm the troops of British colonies. This is one of those rifles.The "KK.A" stamp on the lower edge shows that this rifle was "Sold out of service" or surplussed out from the Kirkee, India Arsenal, apparently in November of 1908. Like most of it's kind, this one was sent to the then-British colony of Nepal (The stock bears a faint Nepalese acceptance stamp dated 1908 as well) where it was stored and forgotten for many, many decades. The buttstock is a mish-mash of Nepalese markings and older British and Indian markings that were stamped out, most likely when it got to Nepal.According to the seller, a great guy whom I'd do business again with in a heartbeat, this particular rifle has been in the country well before IMA imported the bulk of the Nepalese guns,so it was almost certainly brought in as part of the first batch of Nepalese arms that were imported in the 1970's by Interarms, that great company built and run by the legendary Sam Cummings. (Thanks, Sam!) Now it's here at the Lair and it'll assume a place of honor in my gun room, waiting on the arrival of some vintage .450-577 ammunition and/or the tools that I'll need to reload ammunition for this old veteran. The breechblock is open, the barrel and chamber look great, and this rifle's voice will be heard again before too long, count on it.
Meanwhile, if you want to see Martini-Henry rifles in action, you can watch some being used here, in "Zulu".
I guess if I had a couple dozen equally-armed friends standing next to me, this rifle could come in handy during the next flash mob or London-style riot. Since it's likely to be just me and one or two others though, I think I'll echo the sentiment of poet Hilaire Belloc:
"Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not."
Granted, I don't have a Maxim gun (darn it...), but I do have an M60. It'll do in a pinch, I suppose.They should have had a few M60's at Isandhlwana. Maybe then they wouldn't have gotten shellacked so badly. (On second thought, courtesy of Lord Chelmsford's incredibly poor tactics, they'd have probably still been massacred even if every soldier there had been armed with a Minimi.)
It's not "new" new by any means. This one first left the Enfield factory back in 1878, a little over a decade after our civil war (still known locally as "the war of Northern Aggression) ended and a year before the beginning of the Zulu War.
I got it from Vern, another Martini-Henry enthusiast who happened to be over there with a pick-up truck bed full of Martini-Henry rifles that he'd picked up in Afghanistan. He recently brought this one back, and after we engaged in some shooting and cleaning (and after Richard made minor repairs to both this one and my own MK IV), I wound up buying it from him for what was probably more than he paid for it in Kabul but much less than I would have otherwise had to pay for one here stateside. No complaints from me!
What really makes this one interesting is the fact that it did come from Afghanistan, so it's more likely than not that this rifle continued to see much actual fighting use well after the British turned it over to the locals or otherwise lost custody of it. In Afghanistan, when the tribes are not fighting the British, the Russians or the Americans, they are fighting with Pakistan or each other. In such a culture, rifles of any sort are highly valued and functional ones are used with little regard for relative obsolescence. It's quite conceivable that this veteran fired shots at any or all of the above during it's 80 years of post-British service, at least until it's last owner decided to sell it at the arms bazaar in Kabul, probably for cash to buy something more along the lines of an AK-47.
Quite the pair, aren't they? Both are 49" long and weigh eight and a half pounds empty. They are single-shot rifles firing the .577/450 cartridge, and both still shoot quite well despite being well over a century old. I was putting my shots into an 8" circle at 100yards standing off-hand with the MK IV once I figured out how much to hold under due to the sights not even being gradated for ranges that short. (You have to use the battle-sight setting and guesstimate a bit.)
Richard kindly swapped a functioning block from one of his Martini Henrys for my bad one, just asking me to buy him a replacement when I got back home, which I am doing online as I type this. Once the new one was installed, Richard test-fired the rifle (holding it out at arm's length, just in case) and damned if it didn't go off, making a huge smoke cloud and blowing large chunks of sod out of the ground. 
This one is interesting in that the Mark IV was produced for two years, in 1888 and 1889, yet this one is clearly dated 1886. This indicates that it was converted from an earlier Mark I pattern, as many were. Further proof for that comes from the fact that the Mark Number ("IV") is off-center. The receiver was originally stamped as a Mk. I and the "V" was added later when the rifle was converted to Mk. IV specs.
The "KK.A" stamp on the lower edge shows that this rifle was "Sold out of service" or surplussed out from the Kirkee, India Arsenal, apparently in November of 1908. Like most of it's kind, this one was sent to the then-British colony of Nepal (The stock bears a faint Nepalese acceptance stamp dated 1908 as well) where it was stored and forgotten for many, many decades. The buttstock is a mish-mash of Nepalese markings and older British and Indian markings that were stamped out, most likely when it got to Nepal.
According to the seller, a great guy whom I'd do business again with in a heartbeat, this particular rifle has been in the country well before IMA imported the bulk of the Nepalese guns,so it was almost certainly brought in as part of the first batch of Nepalese arms that were imported in the 1970's by Interarms, that great company built and run by the legendary Sam Cummings. (Thanks, Sam!) Now it's here at the Lair and it'll assume a place of honor in my gun room, waiting on the arrival of some vintage .450-577 ammunition and/or the tools that I'll need to reload ammunition for this old veteran. 
The breechblock is open, the barrel and chamber look great, and this rifle's voice will be heard again before too long, count on it.
They should have had a few M60's at Isandhlwana. Maybe then they wouldn't have gotten shellacked so badly. (On second thought, courtesy of Lord Chelmsford's incredibly poor tactics, they'd have probably still been massacred even if every soldier there had been armed with a Minimi.)
