Pinfire guns come in all shapes and sizes. There are 2mm pinfire toy cap guns that were sold as novelties. 5mm pinfire pistols could be kept in a pocket or a purse for last minute encounters and were smaller that the palm of a hand. Millions of 7mm pinfire revolvers and 9mm pinfire revolvers were made for decades across Europe in the 1800s. Larger 12mm pinfire revolvers were used by about every major military in the world at some point. And 15mm pinfire pistols made for a great last line of defense for farmers against wild animals.

Keep an eye on this page as I begin to gather these pinfire guns from around the world and list them for sale.

Also be sure to check out the pinfire cartridges for sale. It’s hard to have one without the other and displays looks so much better with both.

If you have any questions or would like to sell or consign items please contact me at: AaronKSU@gmail.com

12mm Pinfire Guns for Sale

9mm Pinfire Guns for Sale

7mm Pinfire Guns for Sale

2mm Pinfire Guns for Sale

This article will take a look at some of the smallest pinfire guns and cartridges. The 2mm pinfire cartridge showed up around 1880. This is when Société Française des Munitions began producing the variations shown in the following factory drawing.

These cartridges were made for tiny pinfire revolvers that looked like miniature versions of the normal pinfire revolvers. The following image is an example of one sold by Wayne Driskill Miniature Firearms.

There have been many articles written about Jean Samuel Pauly and his contribution to the history of firearms development. One excellent source recently looks in detail at the patents by Pauly, Roux, Picherau and Lefaucheux. You can read about it here:

Priestel dives deep into the modifications by Pauly and the successors to Pauly’s company, but there are a few other improvements to the Pauly system by other prominent gunmakers of the day that are not addressed in this publication. A couple of these were mentioned in a French gun magazine’s article in the 1970s, but other than the brief mention there, there is nothing I could find published that goes into detail on the following improvements to the Pauly gun and cartridges.

So I gathered the patents, transcribed them and will detail the improvements here!

Jacques-Joseph Plomdeur | 1825-03-31

Jacques-Joseph Plomdeur was a well known gunmaker who had a business at 25 rue des Fossés-Montmartre and later at 5 bis, rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière. He was best known for his improvements to primers and percussion caps which he held a few patents on. In the 1830s he took out many advertisements for his improvements to guns and primers such as the following:

On 31 Mar 1825, Plomdeur took out a French patent for 5 years for an improvement on Pauly guns.

There are two main areas that he addresses. First is how the hammer is connected to the plate, passing all the way through, which allowed for considerable fouling throughout the inside.

Over the past few posts we have taken a look at the three American companies that manufactured pinfire cartridges for use in the American Civil War. Between Allen & Wheelock, Christian Sharps and C.D. Leet they manufactured a total of 1,572,000 pinfire cartridges. 

However there is no known documentation on which manufacturers we imported additional cartridges from. We know that the Union Army purchased at least 200,000 cartridges with the large order of Lefaucheux revolvers from France. We know some of the smaller purchases also came with cartridges. We also know that the Confederate States Army had pinfire cartridges stored in their arsenals and used pinfire revolvers.

So I figured the only way to answer this question was to acquire the actual cartridges they used. And that is exactly what this article is going to focus on.

On August 13, 1864 an arsenal inspection of the Selma Arsenal showed that the Confederate States Army had 52,800 pinfire cartridges in stock. Various inspection reports also list cartridges in Union arsenals as well as pinfire revolvers in use by various Union and Confederate units.

Full box of 16g that I plan on loading and shooting

A nice 16g boxwood hand roll turnover tool for pinfire cartridges

A leather holder for 10 16g pinfire shotshells

This story of Casimir Lefaucheux’s first pistol begins in 1812 when Jean Samuel Pauly patented an early breech-loading pistol and rifle. Casimir Lefaucheux worked as an apprentice for Pauly and began to learn the trade of gun making. There are conflicting opinions on exactly what this first gun was at this time as some modern researchers believe that much of the historical documentation is incorrect, or at least conflates Pauly’s inventions and the inventions of Pauly’s successor, Henri Roux.

What is known for sure is that around this time, Pauly created and patented a system of igniting a charge by the use of rapidly compressed air with a fire piston. It is described in a report by a French military commission on 16 July 1812. This design was also patented in England in 1814 and 1816, where Pauly moved after selling his Parisian shop.

What is contested is if this was also the design of his French patent from 22 September 1812. The patent application does not go into details on how the mechanism works and the accompanying drawings show images of a rifle and pistol that use a percussion piston to hit an early percussion compound. Early reviews of the system and the official recorded record of the patent all speak of this percussion mechanism.

Some researchers think it is unlikely that Pauly created the compressed air version for the military review in 1812 and then pivoted to the percussion version in his civilian model later in 1812 and then back to the compressed air version that he patented in London.

This cartridge is a great example of two things:

1. Pinfire cartridges had so many variations and even the sizes were not standardized at the very beginning. Jules Chaleyer marketed these as 8mm. He also marketed a 10mm and 12mm cartridge. This cartridge fits in the same guns as the later cartridges that standardized on the 7mm size.
2. You can’t always believe everything you read that is published. I once wrote a whole article on these attributing them to Jullien & Gauthey based on previous publications that also identified them as such. I later found actual sources that contradicted the other publications. Original sources are always going to be better than anything you read online or in a book, especially if it’s not sourced.

These 7mm pinfire cartridge were manufactured by V. Francotte, May et Cie. of Liège, Belgium for the Belgian proof house to proof 7mm pinfire guns.

On 12 September 1859, a Norwegian military commission recommend contracting with Eugène Lefaucheux to acquire some of his model 1854 pinfire revolvers to begin updating their service handguns. In October 1859 they ordered 800 revolvers and 120,000 pinfire cartridges for the Norwegian Navy with a delivery date of summer 1860.

There are various sources that claim differing serial number ranges of this first order, but The Lefaucheux Family Archives has matched up original purchase orders and invoices to determine that they are around the LF14597 – LF15936 range. Some of this is detailed in the excellent book on the subject, La Production des Modeles d’Eugène Lefaucheux by Guillaume Van Mastrigt.

Norwegian Model 59

This first order of revolvers followed the below design as shown in this example from the Norwegian Armed Forces Museum where they have it labeled as an example of the Norwegian Navy Model 1859. It is thought that there are no special markings that specifically indicate which guns Lefaucheux made specifically went to fulfill this first order.

This is a German proofed 9mm pinfire revolver by an unknown maker. The German pinfire guns are much less common that the Belgian or French ones.

It is mechanically sound and works in double or single action. It has its extractor rod and loading gate intact. The only mechanical issue is that the spring for holding the loading gate closed is partially broken to where you need to use a small knife or similar to press it as fingers will not fit under there. You could also just remove that little spring or replace it as the little screw under the loading gate is accessible.

In 1983, the collective knowledge of pinfire firearms was greatly increased when Chris C. Curtis and Gene P. Smith wrote The Pinfire System, a new book detailing pinfire guns and ammunition from around the world.

The book featured images of guns, patents, advertising, cartridges and more. It was the first book that focused on this often neglected topic that played such an important role in the history of firearms. This book has been out of print for many years and often shows up on the collectors market for a couple hundred dollars. This book has more of a focus on the cartridges than his next book, with many pages dedicated to showing pinfire cartridges and even identifying headstamps.

Chris Curtis recently sent me the last of his pinfire cartridge box collection. Some of the boxes went to my collection and the rest are offered for sale here. I will notate the ones that appeared in his books.

A lot of people get Galand and Perrin cartridges confused, so we will take a look at these French thick rim cartridges over a few upcoming articles. The 9mm French thick rim cartridges are the most straight forward so we will start with them. Above all, the important take-away from this article is that, even though it is repeated in various articles and references, there is no such thing as a “Galand-Perrin” revolver. And these cartridges were never meant to be interchangeable nor were they ever designed to be used in the same guns.

What is a Perrin Cartridge?

A Perrin cartridge is an early centerfire cartridge invented by Louis Perrin in 1859. It was designed as an internally-primed cartridge which had a percussion cap resting in a metal anvil or frame inside the cartridge.

The pinfire system was one of the most important developments in the history of firearms. It mainstreamed the concept of fully-self-contained cartridges and breech-loading firearms.

Pinfire guns were made and used everywhere and were adopted at some point by nearly every major military in the world. Read through the following articles to learn about the relationship between the United States and pinfire.

These Little Atom 2mm pinfire cap gun pistol cufflinks were imported from Japan by G & S Mfg. Co., of Nashville, Tennessee beginning in 1950. They sold them wholesale to small shops across the country.

An original cased set is very rare. This set comes with a set of two cufflinks, the cartridge extractor and an original tube of 2mm pinfire cartridges. They are also the version with the fully bored-through barrel that can fire blanks or ball rounds.

The following video shows the functionality of these pistols:

For more information please read the full article on these: 2mm Pinfire Guns and Cartridges