Chaffee-Reece M1882

About the Chaffee-Reece M1882

The Chaffee-Reece M1882 is an American bolt-action repeating rifle chambered in .45-70 Government, designed by Reuben S. Chaffee and General James N. Reece and built in small numbers by the Springfield Armory between 1883 and 1884. It fed from a tubular magazine housed in the buttstock, loaded through a rear trapdoor, which used a twin-rack double-ratchet mechanism to advance a cartridge each time the bolt was cycled and a magazine cutoff to permit single loading while holding the magazine in reserve. Submitted to the U.S. Army's 1882 magazine gun trials against rival Remington-Lee and Hotchkiss designs, the complex feed proved prone to jamming and difficult to clean, and the rifle was never adopted for general service.

Designed by Reuben Chaffee with patent input from Civil War veteran General James N. Reece, the rifle's signature feature was a buttstock tube magazine that held cartridges in a rigid rack moved by a double ratchet, an ingenious but fragile answer to the era's race to give the single-shot Trapdoor Springfield a repeating successor.

Chaffee-Reece M1882 specifications

Only 753 examples were manufactured by the Springfield Armory for trials and evaluation. The magazine held cartridges nose-to-base in a rigid rack rather than spring-fed, isolating primers from bullet tips to allow safe use of pointed-nose ammunition in a tube. Most surviving rifles passed into the surplus market after the design was rejected.