Guycot: A Rocket Ball Chain Rifle From 1879

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0:00 Introduction and Background of Rocket Ball Firing Chain Rifles
1:25 Detailed Examination of Ammunition and Loading Process
3:48 Analysis of Markings, Serial Numbers, and Design Changes
6:16 Discussion on Reciprocating Barrel and Misconceptions about Caliber
7:44 Internal Workings and Disassembly of the Rifles
8:46 Comparison with the Spencer Rifle and Features of the Stock
10:30 Production Numbers, Limited Interest, and Conclusion

The “Guycot” is a rocket ball chain rifle system named for its two creators, Paulin Gay (the designer) and Henri Guénot (the financier). They patented the idea in 1879, and manufactured it in both rifle and pistol form – I have a previous video on one of the pistols and today we are looking at two of the rifles. The chain inside holds a series of compartment links, each sized to fit a 6.5mm rocket ball projectile (a hollow-based bullet filled with a powder charge and set with a primer in its base). This is a baseless style of cartridge, so there is no residual case needed to extract or eject after firing. These rifles have a capacity of 80 such rounds, while the pistol models held either 25 or 40 rounds.

Only a few hundred Guycot guns were made, and they were a commercial failure. This is probably due to several factors. The guns must have been quite expensive to produce, and the ammunition was proprietary, expensive to make, and likely quite fragile. The ammunition was also extremely underpowered, with only enough space for a tiny amount of powder in each bullet. This would have been fine for indoor parlor shooting, but woefully insufficient for almost anything else.

Thanks to Ader of Paris for the chance to film these very cool pieces of firearms history!

Previous video on a Guycot pistol:

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[ Guycot Rifles ] Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I’m Ian McCollum, and I am here today in Paris at Ader taking a look at a pair of super rare, super cool, Rocket Ball-firing chain rifles. That sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it?

… They are known by two different names actually. In England these were marketed under the name Guycot … (depending on how you pronounce it) g-u-y-c-o-t. Which is actually sort of a combination of the names of the two guys responsible for their invention.

In France, they are known as Gay-Guénot after the two guys. The inventor was one Paulin Gay, and the financier behind the project was Henri Guénot, g-u-e-n-o-t. And they patented this system in 1879, and made it in both pistol and rifle form.

Now I did a video on one of these pistols several years ago, so I’m going to leave out … all the intricate details. If you are interested in some more of the backstory definitely check out that video, I’ll link it in the end screen of this one.

But in addition to the pistols which held a paltry 40 rounds, they made rifles which hold, I kid you not, 80 rounds of ammunition. So let me bring the camera in and show you how exactly

You fit 80 rounds of ammunition in this thing, that doesn’t appear to hold any ammunition. So the way you load this thing is through this sliding port that is the rear sight. And when we open that up, you can see three little chambers here.

Now the way this works is there is actually a chain of these little chambers that runs all the way up here, around, and all the way down into the stock and back. And these are chambers for basically Rocket Ball-style cartridges.

That is, self-contained cartridges where the powder and the primer are both within the bullet. So you can see how tiny these things have to be to fit. They don’t fit all the way flush in here, … the point of the bullet sticks out a bit.

But there’s not much space for the tip of the bullet to stick out. And that has to contain all of its powder charge as well as its primer. And that was really the downfall or the shortcoming of this design, is that the ammunition was substantially underpowered.

So what you do is, essentially it is a double-action firing mechanism. I’ll pull … the side plate off of this in just a moment. But when you pull the trigger it is going to cock a striker back, it is going to cycle this chain forward one position,

Drop the striker to fire and then reset. And when you pull the trigger again it’s going to do the same thing, and it will do this over and over and over, until you’ve fired every single one of the cartridges in this chain.

Now the loading process is exactly the same as the firing process, except you have this lever on the side which is a safety. Which actually catches the striker and doesn’t allow it to strike the primer of each cartridge.

You can see there’s a little hole in the bottom of each one, that’s where the firing pin comes through. Hold this lever up and the firing pin can’t come through. And so your loading process is literally to load the ones that you can see,

And then pull the trigger to cycle the chain forward, load the next one, and you just do this 80 times until the whole gun is loaded. Presumably remembering which direction is safe and which is fire

Here on the safety lever, because it’s not marked on any of the ones that I’ve ever seen. I want to point out a couple of the markings on these, because there are actually very few markings. We basically have a couple of proof marks and some serial numbers.

We have a serial number 120, serial number 197. And then gun number 120 … is fitted to stock number 289. And that’s it for markings. What’s interesting here is there is a bit of a design change between these two guns,

Number 120 and (which is this one by the way) and number 197. The trigger guards here appear to be the exact same piece, but they haven’t been mounted in the same position. If I line these up, you can see very obviously

The early gun has the trigger mounted … under part of the metal receiver. The late gun has the trigger mounted under the beginning of the stock. They both appear to work the same way, it seems that they simply came up with

An improvement in the mechanism of the double-action firing ratchet, I suppose. And moved the trigger guard and the trigger slightly to make an improvement to the gun. You’ll notice there is no cutout on the bottom of the receiver here,

Where there is one here for the trigger to cut through. Instead here we’ve got that in the bottom strap of the gun. Now the other thing that I want to point out is (and I’ve seen this referenced in several places)

There is reference to a 6.5mm cartridge for these guns and an 11mm cartridge for these guns. And you can pretty clearly see the difference in size there between the cartridge and the bore. These guns are both like this, what’s actually going on is the gun has a reciprocating barrel.

And you can see this very clearly in the pistol video, and you’ll see it in a moment when we disassemble the gun. But when you fire, the barrel actually slides back into the action to seal around the chamber.

Well on the long rifles they didn’t make the … actual barrel the full length of this, that looks like the barrel. So the actual barrel in here is only coming to somewhere in this range.

I don’t know exactly where … (and I can’t get a good camera angle on it unfortunately) but looking down the barrel with a light you can see that it … doesn’t go the full length. It is a 6.5mm barrel that’s about this long, and reciprocating back and forth.

And I suspect the issue was on a rifle-length version of the gun having the barrel reciprocating over this entirety created a lot of friction, and a lot of drag on the trigger, and probably caused problems with the mechanism. So I suspect that’s why they actually shortened the barrel inside.

There may also be a legitimate concern that there’s so little pressure in the cartridge that a full-length barrel might actually trap cartridges. There might not be enough power in that Rocket Ball projectile to actually run … the friction of a full rifled barrel.

And thus they cut the barrel down to about this long, but give you sort of a faux barrel at the end to mount a front sight for a longer sight radius. So the unintended consequence of that design feature is that people who just look at the muzzle of the gun see it as of .44 or .45 calibre, an 11mm sort of muzzle, and assume that that’s the actual calibre of the projectile coming out, which it is not.

These actually use the exact same ammunition as the pistol-calibre guns. Now for disassembly I took the 5 screws out of this side plate. And this will simply lift right off. There is the safety that I was talking about.

So the way this works is this hook simply locks around your striker here, and prevents it from going all the way forward. It is a really nerve-racking style of safety. So when you fire normally you are going to pull the striker all the way back.

And we’ll just help it here to make this easy. It’s going to come all the way back to here, then the chain rotates. And you can see the inner barrel sleeve is going to come back and nest over the chamber here.

And then we have our firing pin right there, which is released, goes forward, fires the cartridge. And when it … moves all the way forward it’s going to … push the barrel sleeve back forward, which unlocks it from the chamber and allows the process to happen all over again.

Now in the pistol version of this, the chain comes back to here at the back of the pistol and you have 25 or 40 shots. On the rifle, this chain goes all the way back here into the stock to about this point.

And you actually legitimately have 80 cartridges, … 80 of these little chambers to load. Which first off, is going to take quite some time, and then you’ve got 80 to fire. So that whole saying about the Spencer, that it was

That rifle that you load on Sunday and shoot all week long? Well, that applies even more so, like an order of magnitude more so, to this guy. So this is like the world’s worst camera angle ever.

But if I take the butt plate off the rifle, they have actually carved out the interior of the stock and you can see the last couple of chambers there at the back. That’s where there’s a second sprocket at the end of the chain.

And then this is actually a tensioning screw that allows you to slide (you can just barely sort of see it there) that allows you to slide the whole sprocket assembly forward and back in case the chain is too tight or too loose.

So it’s got a little locking pin. You would push down the locking pin, adjust the screw to the proper place and then let that locking pin pop back up into position. There’s a different angle showing you the butt plate removed. Note the crack here, that’s not a crack actually.

… The stock was made in two pieces, the left side and the right side, so that they could hollow out everything necessary for that chain to run on the inside. So the stock is hollowed out as two pieces, and then presumably glued together.

And … protected by the butt plate on the back there. The total number produced is really quite unclear. You can see from the serial numbers on these, thanks to the fact that we have a mismatched stock, we have a serial number as high as 239.

But the other numbers are in the 100s, we see variation within those. Production was very slim on these, this was something that would work probably quite nicely for indoor parlour shooting. But for much more than that, it was just such an underpowered cartridge

That there wasn’t a whole lot of interest or demand. Not enough to sustain a major manufacturing effort. In addition to that of course ammunition was difficult to come by, probably didn’t transport all that well, probably was a bit fragile, being an early self-contained style of cartridge.

And the guns would have been really expensive. You can see how much had to go into the manufacture of something like this compared to your typical single-shot parlour rifle that frankly you could basically load just as fast.

Because if you want to get 80 rounds fired out of this thing, you have to spend a substantial amount of time manually loading 80 of these little Rocket Balls through that cover on top.

So as cool as it is, and it truly is fantastically cool, it just wasn’t all that practical. And thus failed to be a real commercial success. Leaving us with just a handful of extremely rare examples like these.

So a big thanks to Ader for giving me the … opportunity to bring these both to you guys. I hope you enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.