As Neffi got to first, the Whatzis this week was a Japanese rifle, the Type 18 Murata. This was the second version of Murata rifle of the three Japan would eventually adopt - the Types 13, 18, and 22.
This is one of three Winchesters in Castle service. One being our Winchester-built M1 Garand, the second being the M97 trench gun, the last being the Murata. Well, okay, Winchester neither designed nor manufactured (at least not directly) the Murata. But it was built at the Tokyo Arsenal on Winchester-supplied machinery.
The Murata Type 13 was adopted in 1880, the 13th year of the Meiji Restoration (hence the Type 13 moniker). The rifle was designed by Major Tsuneyoshi Murata and it was Japan's first locally designed and produced standard infantry rifle of the post-muzzleloading era. As was true for a lot of rifle designs in the period of transition from black-powder muzzle loaders to small-bore smokeless powder cartridge weapons it borrowed heavily from the major European rifles then in regular service, something the United States did during this era as well.
The principle inspirations for the Type 13 were the M1871 Dutch Beaumont, the M1874 French Gras with a touch of the M1871 Mauser, all of which are held in the Castle racks, and will likely find their way onto these pages in the future. Just like the Beaumont, Gras and Mauser bolts,the only locking feature on the Murata is the bolt handle and guide rib. This creates an inherently weak lockup, and also transfers the firing stresses unevenly through the receiver body - which in the case of the Murata was partially handled by making the receiver relatively robust whether by design or accident.
Like the Gras (and many other French military rifles down the years), the Type 13 had no safety. And, like many of the first turn-bolt cartridge rifles adopted for general infantry use it did not have an ejector. Spent cases were removed from the action by either tipping the rifle or using your fingers to flip the spent cartridge out of the receiver.
Just to make sure you understand the difference - an extractor (which is the bar-shaped item in the picture of the bolt) hooks to the rim of the cartridge and pulls the expended cartridge from the breech when the bolt is opened. An ejector is usually a projection of some sort built into the side of the receiver opposite the bolt handle. As the bolt comes back with the cartridge, the base of the cartridge hits the ejector on that side causing it to flip out of the receiver to the other side (almost always to the right), where the extractor holds the base of the cartridge, providing the fulcrum for the leverage needed to flip the casing out with sufficient force to clear the receiver.
Like the Dutch Beaumont-Vitali, the Type 13's bolt handle is hollow and contains a v-shaped flat spring which drives the firing pin. There are differences in the details of construction but the operating principle is the same, and differs from most other bolts in that it does not use a coiled spring in the bolt body to drive the firing pin forward. These springs have to be properly made or they fail in service pretty routinely - that, and the complexity it adds to the bolt caused this system to only flare briefly in active service then die away.
The Type 18, which is what is in the holdings of the Arsenal of Argghhh!, was a product-improvement of the Type 13. To see the Type 13, the website that MCart found has a nice write up with pictures.
The major changes between the two rifles start with a major safety improvement by providing gas escape holes in the receiver top as well as a gas escape channel in the bolt - all to vent hot gases away from the shooters face in the event of primer failure. In the early days (and even now and then today) primers in the base of the cartridge could fail for numerous reasons - allowing gas to escape to the rear. If provisions were not made for it to vent elsewhere, it tended to blow straight back through the bolt into the shooters face, as well as cause catastrophic receiver failure, including splintering the stock - all of which are *very* annoying to the soldier pulling the trigger and the guys to his left and right, while providing much ribald merriment and delight to his erstwhile target. If you've ever wondered why rifle receivers had those little holes in holes in them... well, now you know.
Another change, which in the end proved a mixed blessing, was changing how the bolt was retained in the receiver. In the Type 13, the bolt was retained by a screw and washer in the rib to the front of the bolt handle, ala the Mauser M1871. This is another inherently weak solution, as the stresses, especially when a soldier has the adrenaline from combat augmenting his strength, of jerking the bolt open hard tended to cause the screws to back out, resutling in them either falling out or breaking, with the result that the soldier pulls back the bolt and... suddenly it's in his hand, not his rifle. And the screw is either missing or broken. Very annoying, especially under fire, having to drop to your knees desperately seeking a fallen screw.
So the Type 18 tried to solve that problem by securing the bolt with a screw that came in from the side of the receiver, which solution was actually the opening salvo of the this week's Whatzis. Of course, the problem with that was... the screw could still back out, and the hole weakened the stock significantly in that area - hence the crack in the stock you guys noticed in the original post. If you take a look at the Type 18 one the website MCart pointed you to - you'll see that stock is cracked, too. I've seen about 10 Type 18 rifles - all of them have the stock crack at that location.
The last major change from the Type 13 was adding a stud on the side of the muzzle to aid in attaching the bayonet and to reduce the stresses that side-mounting the bayone put on the forward end of the stock, especially in combat usage. Of course, the whole method of side-mounting the bayonet affects accuracy at long range even more than the method of hanging the bayonet in what are to us more conventional positions. At least when you put the bayonet below the muzzle, you have a more easily predicted and accounted-for effect on the barrel - it's going to droop a smidge, and you can adjust for that in the sights. Hanging the bayonet out on the side, and involving the stock in the mounting, generates both a droop *and* a twist that is much harder to account for. Mind you, it really only matters at long ranges, but it matters enough that side-mounting fell out of favor.
The Type 22 Murata found by-then Colonel Murata returning to Europe to refresh his engineering Muse. The switch from single-loaders to magazine-fed rifles being in full swing, Japan wanted to keep up. The Type 22 used a tubular magazine running under the barrel like the Portuguese M1884 Kropatschek rifle (another holding of the Arsenal) and... the bayonet mounts more conventionally.
The Murata was a serviceable series of rifles, made obsolete about as fast as they were adopted - true of just about every rifle introduced in that era of near-dizzying innovation in firearms. The Japanese, like just about everybody else - went with some variation of Mauser's front dual-locking lugs in their next series of rifles, the Arisakas.
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