Photographs: Durs Egg Breech-Loading Carbine

Matt was recently lucky enough to examine a 1785 Pattern Durs Egg Breech-loading cavalry carbine. Based upon Giuseppe Crespi’s breech-loading system, the Egg carbines were tested by British cavalry regiments in the late 1780s. You can check out our full-length article on the weapon here and our video here.

Below are a some photographs I took of the carbine showing some of the details of its design:

DSC_0844
A right-side view of the length of the carbine
DSC_0857
The carbine with its breech fully open from the right-hand, lock side
DSC_0853
Detail photo of the carbine’s lock and breech handle
DSC_0848
An overhead view of the Egg Carbine’s open breech showing the chamber into which powder and ball were placed
DSC_0849
A closer overhead view of the carbine’s breech
DSC_0850
A close up of the carbine’s spear point bayonet showing the extension of the brass trigger guard into which the bayonet point sits
DSC_0856
With the carbine’s breech partially open its possible to see the small touch hole into the breech block, just above the frizzen and pan, which allows the flash from the fan to ignite the powder charge
DSC_0851
The carbine and its bayonet

Our thanks to the collection that holds this example of the Durs Egg Carbine, whom wish to remain anonymous, which was kind enough to allow us access to their impressive array of small arms.

If you enjoyed the video and this article please consider supporting our work here.


All photographs taken by Matthew Moss. Please do not reproduce these images without permission or credit. © The Armourer’s Bench 2018.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s