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Reilly 14983 and the Lancaster "Base Fire" action

Stephen Nash's incredibly interesting historical line on the early origin of pin-fires,
https://www.doublegunshop.com/forums/ubb...;gonew=1#UNREAD
led to a review of some 1860's Reilly's. The most interesting of all perhaps is 12boreman's 8 bore Reilly SxS shotgun, SN 14983, with both "New Oxford Street" and "Rue Scribe Paris" on the rib...the earliest extant Reilly with both the London and Paris addresses..making it serial-numbered surely circa February-March 1868. See P.16 in this line.

The key parts of the gun are the unique hammers and center-fire system:


In Diggory Hadoke's Vintagegunjournal on-line, there is this article about Lancaster:
https://www.vintageguns.co.uk/magazine/ace-of-base-fire

The article discusses the well-known Lancaster "base fire" center-break, breech-loading system from the late 1850's, and the failure of a superior design because of greed - he wanted to monopolize the sale of cartridges for his system.

Take a look at the "base-fire" Lancaster system. Does that not look something like the action on 12boreman's 8 bore Reilly made in 1868?



12boreman's gun is surely unique...a Lancaster "base-fire" design turned into a center-fire. What an interesting time in the history of gun-making.

And everyone supposes that with the Daw center-fire patent of 1861 (from the Frenchman Pottet), or even more significantly the
.. 1) 1865 breaking of the Daw center-fire ammunition patent by Eley, and
.. 2) the 1866 revolutionary cartridge/shell primers introduced by American Berdan and a few months later by Edward Mounier Boxer in UK,
. that center-fires just immediately took over the market. Not so. Pin fires continued to dominate up to about 1872.


Last edited by Argo44; 07/19/20 09:58 AM.
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