In loving memory of Sabrina Blackrose

Blunderbusses were common weapons until the mid 19th, when carbines were introduced, with some people not enthusiastic with the poor replacement, and even if it also lost space in favor of breech loaders, the blunderbuss could still be found in use by civilians as a defensive firearm. The "Sabrina" breech-loading blunderbuss was an attempt by the British inventor and gunsmith, Lewis Blackrose, to modernize the design and turn it into a more versatile weapon, starting the project around 1860, when brass cased shotshells were invented, naming it after his wife. The project wouldn't see the light of day until almost 100 years later, after Lewis passing.

In 1894, Bergmann pistols started to appear, using a blowback system fed by box magazines, allowing for semi-auto fire and shortened reloading time. Seeing this, Lewis scraped "Sabrina"s original mechanism idea and developed a new one inspired by Bergmann's, maintaining both the barrel and wood stock. With Lewis only fabricating the basic components for testing purposes, shotgun shells also transitioned from brass cased to paper by that time, but they didn't had optimal power to be used with the blowback system yet. Not letting that stop him, he envisioned a hybrid reloading system that he would call "lever-breech", where a hinged cover to the bolt would also serve as a charging handle, and while full opened, would allow direct placing of a round inside the chamber or the reloading of the attached magazine through a removable clip, much like Mauser's C96 pistol.

In 1936, the Garand M1 was adopted by the US military, a gas operated system proved very reliable as a semi-automatic alternative to the blowback systems, inspiring Lewis' youngest son, whom was already on his mid-fifties, to modify the project, adding a new system that proved very reliable and wasn't prone to malfunction as the blowback was. Lewis' son also noticed, while reworking the bolt, that the firearm had ambidextrous capabilities, and since he was left handed, he added a small lever on the back of the gun that would rotate the bolt 140 degrees on either side, selecting the extraction direction.

In 1945, Vesely's v-40 came into prodution, using the trademark magazine with 2 rows of cartridges in front of each other. As gas-operated machine guns proved to be very reliable with the introduction of the Bren LMG in 1938, the Vesely v-40 was an excuse to alter "Sabrina" one last time, allowing fully automatic fire and the much needed increase in ammo capacity that came along. It would be the grandson's work to see the final design come to life, but he opted by placing two separate magazine in front of each other, making a mechanism where the ammunition was preferably drawn from the front one, and only when empty the back one was used, allowing two stacks of 10 shotshells to be reloaded independently, easily and faster, unlike even modern drum or "banana" magazines.

MODEL DONE BY REQUEST AND BASED ON 's IDEA (hope you like it!)