槍械 修復二戰.38 口徑韋伯利 Mark IV 左輪

Hello there, welcome back to Beckia Ballistics. Today we're still in England, still in Guy's Shed, and we're taking care of a .38 calibre Webley Mark IV revolver. If you remember the Mosin Nagant video I published a few weeks ago, I said that it was handed in together with what looked like a Webley revolver. Well, here it is. I have no idea where they come from, it looks like they were both buried improperly of course, but on this gun the corrosion products feel different, the rust is less sticky if that makes sense. I think this might be due to the fact that this gun was originally park-rised, but I don't know for sure. This initially gave me a sense of hope, but I soon realised that in most places the damage was just as severe as you'd expect it. I actually think I could have gotten these to come apart even without chemical rust removal, but you know what? I can't be bothered. The grips are plastic so they won't be affected, I'm just sticking it in my favourite de-rusting bath. You can find detailed instructions on how to make it at home by clicking this link. 24 hours later, there's no trace of rust left, and I can take this whole thing apart without much effort. Hopefully. Now, if you've been following my channel for a while, you know I've already made a video fixing something similar. That was a WWI era .455 calibre Webley Mark VI. This one, on the other hand, is a WWII era .38 calibre Webley Mark IV. I know it's a bit counter-intuitive that the Mark VI was used in the First World War and the Mark IV in the Second, but let me explain. Right after WWI, the British military decided their service revolver, the Mark VI, was too bulky and its ammunition too heavy. The army was happy with the design, only size was the issue. So, all Webley had to do was making a downscaled version of the same gun. In fact, they had already done that many years before, at the Mark III stage of the design iteration, when they offered a downscaled revolver chambered in .38 Smith & Wesson. By tweaking the design a bit, the .38 calibre Mark IV revolver was born. The smaller and lighter weapon meant it could be easily carried as a backup weapon, or in situations where you wouldn't be able to carry it. Back to the gun. There's a lot more to say about this gun design, but I'll do that as we progress in the restoration attempt. That V-shaped thing is the mainspring, responsible for pushing the hammer forward. Then, I want to separate the gun into its three main parts. Frame, barrel and cylinder. Even though this is by no means my first time taking one of these apart, I always keep undoing the screws in the wrong order for some reason. Right, last time I did these, the spring broke. Not this time, thank goodness. Now, the vast majority of modern revolvers uses a swing-out cylinder design. This is instead a break-action revolver, where the barrel is hinged on the frame and is rotated downwards to load and unload the gun. This was somewhat common in earlier revolvers, as it allowed a much shorter reload time compared to fixed cylinder designs that had to be loaded one chamber at a time. On the downside, the design was structurally weaker, and this means it's usually limited to low-pressure ammunition. What I'm removing now is the barrel catch, the part you act on to release the barrel and break open the action. As we take the trigger group out, note that this is a double-action revolver, meaning you don't have to manually cock the hammer before each shot. The trigger does that automatically as you pull it, allowing for a much higher rate of fire. This, combined with the short reload time provided by the break-action, explains why the army was happy with a design that remained in service for more than half a century. To optimise manufacturing, the blast shield was not made in one piece with a frame, but instead a separate part dovetailed in the frame and kept in place with a screw. Now that we've taken it apart completely, what do we do? If I was in Italy, I'd do some micro-arc welding on the surface to fill in the deeper pits. Unfortunately, I only have basic tools here in England, so all I can do is a bit of sanding and draw-filing, making sure not to go over markings. Then, I'll have to refinish it. Now, this gun is marked War Finish, awarding that Webley & Scott placed in their military contract guns to differentiate them from their higher quality commercial production that was well polished and blued. The military contract guns, on the other hand, were left much rougher and then parkerised. I've seen some that also had some sort of paint on top of the parkerising, but I'm no expert, so if you know anything about this, please let us know in the comments. In any case, this metal was originally parkerised, meaning that its surface was coated in a complex mixture of iron and manganese phosphate. Since this is a backyard channel, I've always been looking for a homemade parkerising bath. I couldn't find any that was even half-decent online though, so I tried making my own. And that's been happening on and off for quite a while, but I was never really satisfied with my results. Luckily though, another YouTuber has succeeded where I failed. The Elemental Maker made the best homemade parkerising bath I could find on the internet, and you can find a link to his video both here and in the video description. So if you ever need to parkerise anything at home, that's the way to go. Unfortunately, he only published the video after I came back from England, so considering my limited equipment and time over there, I had no other choice than bluing the gun, even though that's not how it would have come originally. At least it looks better than it was. What you just saw clicking is the automatic shell ejector, another feature introduced to speed up reloading. As I reassembled the gun, I made sure that there were no missing or broken parts and everything, including timing and ball alignment, seemed alright. The ball looks good enough to shoot, and I think we can get ready for a test fire. About that, it's time to talk briefly about ammunition, because there's a very interesting story behind the cartridge that this gun used. Remember when I said that the British military wanted to move away from the large .455 cartridge they used in WW1? They wanted a smaller calibre, but didn't want to give up the heavy bullets. In those years, there was a widespread belief, especially in England, that heavy and slow bullets were more effective at stopping an opponent than lighter and faster ones. To satisfy this preference, Webley, that had already been marketing a downscaled version of their Mark III revolver chambered in the smaller .38 Smith & Wesson, offered the army an improved version of it, designated as the Mark IV, which is exactly what we're working on today, but combined with a super heavy load for it. And by heavy, I don't mean strong, just heavy in the literal sense. It initially used a 200-grain lead bullet, and later a 178-grain jacketed one. That loading is also known as the .38-200, 200 being the weight of the original lead bullet. It's basically just a .38 Smith & Wesson, same dimensions, pressures and muzzle energy, but it uses a much heavier bullet than normal. To put things into perspective, the typical bullet for a .38 Smith & Wesson weighs 145 grains. The much more powerful and common .38 Special is hardly ever loaded with bullets heavier than 158 grains. Loading the weaker .38 Smith & Wesson with such a heavy bullet meant a big drop in muzzle velocity to between 180 and 190 meters per second, an unusually low velocity for a firearm, making the .38-200 arguably the slowest cartridge designed to ever reach mass production. Anyway, the army did their testing, said they were happy with it, so the project went ahead. So much so that the British government basically stole Webley's design, getting the Royal Small Arms Factory of Enfield locked to mass-produce a practically identical revolver, designated as the Enfield No. 2. Needless to say, Webley & Scott wasn't happy. However, during wartime, the production at Enfield wasn't nearly enough to keep up with the demand, and the British government ended up buying substantial numbers of revolvers from private companies, including, of course, Webley's Mark 4 revolver. That's where the war-finished Webley's come from. Anyway, for the test fire, we're using original WWII-era cartridges, since Guy had a surplus of them. And this is why you never shoot another round after a weird-sounding shot. In this case, either the primer or the powder deteriorated, and there was not enough pressure to push the bullet out of the barrel. Other than that, the gun worked fine for the rest of the testing.