The Idea
Anyone who has been shooting since youth, and many who haven’t, are familiar with the air gun kings, Daisy. They have a wide variety of offerings on hand, and they’ve been building BB guns and pellet guns for a long time. But there’s this: Did you know that Daisy, that famous air-gun company, once made an honest-to-gosh firearm?
The problem was, their timing wasn’t the best, and the oddball rifle they came up with was different enough that perhaps they didn’t think it was really a firearm. But the United States government did, and that’s when the trouble started.
So let’s take a look at the history of Daisy’s V/L rifle.
The Gun
Daisy, as most of us remember, is an air rifle company. The Daisy Red Ryder BB gun was famous for motherly cautions of putting one’s eye out, and the first formal shooting competition I was ever involved in, at about age 12, was with Daisy lever-action BB guns with target sights – at this distance in time, I couldn’t tell you the model number. Daisy’s famous for air guns because their air guns work, they have one for every niche, and they’ve been in the business for a long, long time.
A guy named Clarence Hamilton founded the company in 1882, as the Plymouth Iron Windmill Company – yes, windmills, and why not? Both products involve moving air. In 1888, the company started including a BB gun with each windmill purchased as a sales gimmick, but the BB guns they made to give away proved more popular than their windmills. So they retooled, renamed themselves the Daisy Manufacturing Company, and in 1895, launched themselves as a manufacturer of air guns and nothing else.
In 1968, though, after some time in development, Daisy came up with something new. Well, actually, they purchased something new, from the gun’s original designer. The new piece was named the Daisy/Heddon V/L rifle. This was something new: A .22 rifle that used a unique caseless ammo.
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The operation was simple. There was an action lever under the forearm. To load the rifle, one opened the action bar, which compressed an air cylinder, opened the bolt, and set the gun’s safety on. Why the air cylinder, if this is an actual firearm? I’ll get to that.
With the action open, the shooter could place one round of the caseless ammo in the chamber and close the cocking lever, which closed the bolt. Now the shooter was ready to commence operations.
Remember the air cylinder? The caseless ammo had no primer. Instead, the air from the compressed piston was blasted into the chamber, where a small gizmo called an “obdurator” compressed the air into a hot, hot stream. 2,000 degrees hot, in fact, which hit the back of the caseless ammo, firing the round out of the barrel – but ejecting nothing, because there was nothing to eject. It was kind of a slick system, and it was the first mass-produced American caseless-ammo sporting rifle.
In 1968 and 1969, about 25,000 of these rifles were built, in three grades:- The Basic Model, with a wood-grained plastic stock
- The Presentation Model, with a hardwood stock
- The Collector’s Model, with what looks to be a walnut stock in which was mounted a brass plaque with the owner’s name engraved.
It wouldn’t have worked, though, without the ammunition.
The Ammo
Daisy’s caseless ammo and the initial work on the rifle were done by a Belgian chemist named Jules Van Langenhover. In 1961, the president of Daisy Heddon, one Cass Hough, bought the design and the company started working on scaling it up to production.
The caseless ammo was unique and yet familiar. In the production version, a standard .22 caliber 40-grain lead bullet was attached to the front of a small yellow cake of smokeless powder, which was formed by moistening powder, forming it into the small, cylindrical form, and drying it. There was no primer; as noted above, a jet of hot air ignited the propellant.
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While no repeating guns were made, probably because the V/L ammo was more fragile than brass-case ammo, the single-shot rifles still worked pretty well. The caseless ammo drove that 40-grain bullet at velocities that were on a par with most traditional .22 long rifle cartridges, and they were clean – no brass to police up after shooting.
The New Law
Then came the 1968 Gun Control Act.
In 1969, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms visited Daisy, and informed them of something Daisy, primarily an air-gun manufacturer, of something they may not have thought through: That they were manufacturing a firearm, and they were not licensed, under the new law, to do so. The unique nature of the gun and its caseless ammo may have led Daisy’s management to overlook that requirement, but ATF sure didn’t.
Here’s the thing: The 1968 Act defines “firearm” as:
The term ‘firearm’ means (A) any weapon (including a starter gun) which will or is designed to or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive; (B) the frame or receiver of any such weapon; (C) any firearm muffler or firearm silencer; or (D) any destructive device. Such term does not include an antique firearm.
OK, that would seem to be a problem. Innovative and unusual as the Daisy/Heddon V/L is, it still expels a projectile by means of an explosive. There just really isn’t any arguing that.
So, Daisy was informed that they had to either apply for and receive a federal license as a manufacturer of firearms, or to cease manufacturing the Daisy Heddon V/L. They chose the latter.
Thus ended the run of America’s first successful firearm employing caseless ammunition. It was odd, but it worked.
Here’s my question: What could Daisy have done with this technology had they only obtained that federal manufacturer’s license, and continued on with more guns, new models? The fragility of the ammo may well have made a repeater difficult, but not impossible. Just off the top of my head, a gun that used a cylinder, in the manner of a revolver, would solve that problem. And who knows but that more powerful versions may have worked out? I don’t quite see anything on the level of, say, the .338 Winchester Magnum, which is a favorite of mine, but something along the power levels of the .22 WMR or the .22 Hornet certainly ought to be doable. Or, barring that, why didn’t Daisy just sell the design to someone willing to continue developing the concept?
Daisy is still around today. They still make a variety of air guns. They could have had something with the caseless ammo and the gun that fired it – but, when you stop to consider it, for a company that’s almost a century and a half old, they’re doing pretty well.
