The rifles originally were issued with a loading gate cover, that kept dirt out of the action, and a magazine cut off, which allowed the rifle to be used as a single shot. There were 150,000 Model 1869 Vetterlis made by nine contractors. The Model 1869 had a 33-inch barrel and the magazine held 12 rounds. In January 1869, Switzerland became the first nation to adopt a magazine-fed repeating rifle. The elevator mechanism and much of the Winchester’s receiver design was incorporated into a bolt-action rifle. It used a lever-actuated elevator to lift the cartridges from the magazine tube. However, Vetterli liked what he saw in the Winchester 66’s feed system. Lever action designs were not very attractive to military buyers because of the complexity of the designs and cost of manufacture. The Model 1866 lever action rifle was already well known in global arms design circles. He borrowed a design from the United Stated and the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. The challenge here was how to get the cartridges from the tube to lift up to be loaded into the chamber. The first generation of rifle-feed systems used magazine tubes, usually located underneath the barrel. The Mauser-designed box magazine, that now seems so simple and should have occurred to designers after about ten minutes of thought, was still almost two decades away. Fixed metallic cartridges had only been perfected a few years previously and several nations were already working on single shot designs but the Swiss realized the limits of single shots and bypassed that stage in rifle design. In the late 1860s he worked on a repeating cartridge rifle for the Swiss government. Image courtesy of RIA auctions.įREDERICH VETTERLI was an engineer working for Schweizerische Industrie-Gesellschaft (SIG) in Newhausen, Switzerland. Gun collecting: The Swiss Vetterli rifle is worth looking at.

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