Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island
Auction Company taking a look at a couple of the guns
that they are going to be selling in their upcoming auction,
specifically Boberg pistols. These things are an
absolute dream for a total gun nerd. They have so much
weird mechanical stuff going on in them,
compared to pretty much anything else currently on the
modern market, that they're just awesome.
The problem came when ... he tried to translate awesome into lots of commercial sales.
And that's where Boberg ran into some issues. So this project was started, invented,
by a guy named Arne Boberg, lived in Minnesota, is an engineer, and had been tinkering with guns for a while.
When he got his kick to actually produce his own gun and create a company was in 2009,
when he was laid off from an engineering job. So got the the spark to do something on his own,
got some capital, set up a company, and in 2011 released the company's first pistol,
which was the Boberg XR9-S.
That was followed by the XR9-L, which is the slightly longer barreled version of the 9mm gun,
which unfortunately I don't have an example of for you today.
And then in 2014 they released their third ... product, which was the XR45-S.
As you might suspect, a .45 calibre version of the same thing.
Now, ... the whole reason for these pistols is to maximise barrel length while minimising overall length.
The bullpup thing, except in a pistol instead of in a rifle. So that requires
totally new style of magazine, a totally different style of feeding, and then, since you're on a roll at this point,
let's just go with one of the weirder operating mechanisms we can come up with, say,
rotating barrel. So let's take a closer look here and see what all the cool mechanics are inside these things.
Here they are up close, the .45 and the 9mm.
And let's start off by actually getting a little bit of size perspective here.
This is a Glock 43, and it's one of the most comparable alternative carry pistols to the Boberg 9S.
So these two guns actually have almost exactly the same barrel length, but, as you can see,
the Boberg is about an inch shorter overall. So that's the benefit that you're getting there.
One might ask, what's the point? Why is that relevant? And the answer is, well,
at least Arne Boberg's answer I suspect would be: the longer barrel allows you to have more velocity,
which in turn also leads to better expansion in hollow point type bullets,
and is more effective. And that's why it is worth having more barrel length.
And of course having the smallest gun you can makes it the most easily concealable.
So, that's the justification.
And we can see the same sort of comparison here between the .45 calibre Boberg and the Glock 30S.
Again they have virtually the exact same barrel length, but the Glock is definitely a bit longer.
Now normally in a semi-automatic pistol you're gonna have a cartridge sitting about here in the magazine,
and the slides going to go back, open up the chamber, and when it comes forward
it's going to push a round up and into the barrel.
Just like ... that.
So, the magazine is behind the chamber.
On the Boberg however, the magazine is actually set up backwards,
and the cartridge is pulled out of the magazine rearward, lifted up, and then pushed into the chamber.
Which means you can have the chamber basically parallel to the magazine.
So when this feeds,
it's going to pull the cartridge out the back, lift it up, and then drop it into the chamber.
And thus you get your long barrel in your short pistol. Let's pull this apart and see how that actually works.
Disassembly is thankfully simple. Pull the slide all the way back, rotate the lever forward.
Right back,
lever forward. Now the slide just comes nicely off the top of the frame.
We have a recoil spring.
The locking system, because this is a locked breech pistol, is a rotating barrel.
So ... that's how it's actually going to cycle.
We have this lug on the bottom of the barrel, and it is locked into the frame
(you can see the half-round cutout there, that mates up with
this right here when the gun's disassembly catch is in the assembled position),
so this lug remains fixed to the frame. As the slide starts to go backward that is going to
force the barrel to rotate. So
right there it's going to start to rotate,
(you can see it more easily at the back than at the front),
just a little bit of rotation, just enough to disengage locking lugs.
And then the whole thing slides forward, then it's going to
go through the whole feed cycle. And when it locks up again
the barrel stops moving here, the lug continues, and locks it in place.
We can further disassemble this by opening it all the way up to the front,
lifting this lug out.
So there is grease on here, and that is done very deliberately to aid in proper cycling of the pistol.
But you can see the cam track right here that that rotating lug travels in.
There are three lugs in total on the barrel.
This one is just for rotation, these two are your actual locking lugs, and
they are going to lock into the slide right back here, right there and
there.
Now the feed system is pretty cool here.
You can obviously see these two prongs that rotate up and down,
those are spring-loaded at the back, and
when the slide goes forward these snap around the rim of a cartridge, like so.
And then ... when the slide opens,
that's going to pull the cartridge backwards out of the magazine, it then pivots up slightly, just to right there,
and that is going to bring the cartridge up
basically into the bottom of the breech face.
Once it's here, it then needs to get pushed all the way up into the extractor, like so.
That is done by an extra lifting mechanism right here in the back of the frame. So
(I'll cock the hammer because the slide at this point would be backwards, so it holds the hammer cocked),
and then the rest of the slide is actually going to push on this little lug right here,
which is going to pivot that lifter up, and that is what kicks the next cartridge up
into the extractor and seats it.
So that when the slide goes forward it will seat nicely on the barrel, and then you're ready to fire again.
In order to do this, of course, the magazine is funky and weird.
There is no follower, there's just the magazine spring, ... it's unconventional, but it works just fine.
You have nice stout feed lips because all they have to do is hold the cartridge at this height,
and it gets pulled straight out of the back.
So, in theory, this is actually an easier type of magazine, a more reliable type of magazine, to manufacture, which is cool.
In this way this harkens back to only one other historical pistol really, and that is the Mars pistol,
(which by the way I have some video on if you're curious about how to do this, but make it
Victorian, well Edwardian really, steampunk and massively magnum in calibre).
Capacity of these by the way is seven plus one for the 9mm version,
and five plus one for the .45 calibre version.
The recoil spring that Boberg uses is remarkably small.
What's kind of interesting about this design is that Boberg has a
number of other elements set up to basically bleed energy out of the system,
rather than just relying on a recoil spring to try to slow down the slide.
In particular, this lifter mechanism sucks a lot of energy out of the recoil stroke.
Despite maybe what you see online, ... these aren't recoilless pistols,
they don't shoot like .22s, they in fact shoot like compact 9mm.
But this is something that does make them less painful than a lot of similar guns.
So you've got that, you've also got the locking system, which does in fact draw some energy when it cycles.
As for the particulars of shooting, this is double action only.
So there is no manual safety on it, it really isn't necessary.
It does not lock open when the magazine is empty, because of course the mechanisms that do that
are generally run by a thing on the magazine follower, and there is no magazine follower here.
The sights are a rather typical standard three dot sort of arrangement.
Magazine release is entirely normal, just a button right there (I've got two snap caps loaded in there).
Once again to show you the loading process.
When the slide is forward, the little grippy arms have grabbed a cartridge by the rim, and it will pull it out
(sorry, it's hard to do it slowly), it'll pull it out there and you can see in fact at this point
I have kind of jammed the thing up, because the tip of the bullet is a little too low and it's hitting the base of the barrel.
What that means is I didn't pull it far enough back for that lifter to fully engage.
You can see right here that the cartridge hasn't come up into the breech face.
So if I pull it back a little bit more, right there, you can see that cartridge
has been pushed up into the breech. Now it is directly in line with the barrel
and it will feed.
One might wonder why hasn't this sort of thing been done more often. There are a few answers, in that
this is more complicated, it has more parts than a traditional style of pistol. There's also
an interesting, and probably unexpected,
problem that arises with this, and that has to do with ammunition crimping. So
when you're making the ammunition,
of course, you have to decide how tightly to crimp the bullet into the case. And
this varies by manufacturer and by purpose.
When you feed a cartridge forward, like so, it doesn't really matter all that much.
You're mainly worried about making sure that the bullet doesn't bounce loose under recoil while it's sitting in the magazine.
However, when you're pulling the cartridge out backwards like this,
you're ... attempting to pull the case off of the bullet.
Because the bullet has a lot more mass than the case, and that mass tends to want to stay at rest
when the slide goes to yank it backwards.
And this does have the effect on ammo that isn't well crimped of
leaving the bullet sitting in the magazine while pulling the cartridge case off the back.
It then attempts to feed the empty case like a cartridge, which usually means that it jams,
and the powder kind of goes poof and flies out everywhere.
This in fact is not actually a dangerous situation, it's not like that powder is going to ignite,
but it is a rather inconvenient malfunction to clear.
And Boberg ... had to be right upfront about this from the very beginning,
maintaining a list of ammunition that did and didn't work in the pistols.
So that is an unfortunate complication as a result of this very unique rearward feeding system.
Unfortunately for Boberg the project didn't go entirely according to plan.
I don't know any details of the company's finances, but in 2016 the whole project was sold to Bond Arms,
a good established firearms company down in Texas. Bond Arms reworked it just slightly,
rebranded it, and they are now selling it as the Bond Arms BullPup pistol.
Whether Boberg was forced to get out because ... it wasn't a financially soluble company at that point,
or whether he just decided it wasn't all that much fun anymore
working in the firearms manufacturing industry, I don't know.
But the upshot is that the original Boberg pistols have already become collectors pieces,
because if you get one now from Bond Arms, it's going to have different grips, and a different finish,
and a different name on it. So if you're the true collector type, of course you need to have the originals.
Now, there're probably more than a few people who saw this series of events coming the first time
they laid eyes on a Boberg pistol, but that's OK. They're extremely well made guns,
and really cool, just not necessarily everyone's cup of tea for daily carry.
So if you're interested in either of these two, they are coming up for sale here at Rock Island.
Check out Rock Island's catalogue pages, they'll have their pictures, their description,
their estimates for the prices and all that sort of thing.
As well as of course everything else that's in the upcoming sale.
Thanks for watching.