coach shotguns.

[aglass1987]

I was wondering why in sass events your able to use both hammered and hammerless shotguns? was hammerless shotguns around in the late 1800s to? i thought hammerless coach guns came out latter? just wondering

[PlacitasSlim]

Hammerless shotguns were available during that time frame. I have heard an argument on the start of the OK corral gunfight that the start could not have been caused by Doc Holliday cocking the shotgun he had borrowed as it was a hammerless. One of the magazines such as Guns of The Old West ran an article about that particular shotgun being actioned off several years ago.

[Lazarus Longshot]

From Wikipedia....

American inventor Daniel Myron LeFever was the first to develop a "hammerless" shotgun in 1878. It used internal strikers that were cocked manually, but in 1883, he developed a version that cocked the strikers automatically as the action was closed.

[wiki=Hammerless]Hammerless firearm[/wiki]

[Secret Squirrell]

   "Hammerless" centerfire shotguns have been around since at least 1838, Dreyse. Other commercially produced "hammerless" were 1850 Needham, 1862 Daw, 1866 Green, 1871 Mercott, 1875 Anson & Deeley.

   In 1878 Dr W. F. Carver, an exhibition shooter, using a triple wedge-fast hammerless shotgun "shot upwards of 200 consecutive days, during which upwards of 40,000 shots were discharged from it"  "This gun was used continually by Dr Carver for two years, upwards of 130,000 shots being fired from it"

   "The first gun in which the weight of the barrels falling as they turn on the hingepin on opening thegun is utilized to cock the locks is the Needham gun". This was 1870. "The next mechanism was that of the Anson and Deeley gun, patented in 1875, ----- regarded as the first really successful hammerless gun."

  Source of the above is The Gun & Its Development by W. W. Greener. 9th edition first published in 1910.
   

[torpedoman]

my 1885 greener is hammerless