Well Patrick Ferguson developed a weapon with a multi-start thread that meant one turn would drop the breech plug clear for loading. The Ferguson Rifle as it is most commonly known does seem to have been an effective shooting arm. However it suffered a few defects that may or may not have been the cause of its not being taken up into regular service. The firing mechanism is the contemporary flint lock and the combination of having to mount one of these and the screw plug led to a weakness in that part of the stock with breakage seeming to be a frequent problem. In addition they were complex to make Ferguson paid £4 for his weapons but at least one of the gun-makers contracted argued they should have received another £4 pounds per weapon as compared to muzzle loading rifles made by Birmingham manufacturers which cost £3.2.0 (that is 3 pounds and two shillings in contemporary usage) so maybe would have cost some 30% more per weapon. Of course this price may have been inflated by the small numbers involved but both rifling and the manufacture of the screw plug would have required skilled or semi-skilled artisans and a fair amount of labour.
The link is a video of Ricky Roberts speed firing a replica Ferguson Ordnance Rifle, he has studied both the weapon and the history of Patrick Ferguson quite extensively.
Edit okay we now get youtube straight here cool
Correct. Manufacturing efficiency was the single most important impediment to producing complex breechloading weapons. It wasn't overcome until 1819 when John H. Hall had to find a way to efficiently make his new breechloading rifle, and he ended up practically inventing modern mass production over the next 3 years. Once he found out how to do that, the rifle was finally produced in significant numbers- 25,000 of them were manufactured and issued to the US Army over the next 20 years. More importantly, the methods pioneered by him and others at Springfield and Harpers Ferry armories (notably Simeon North and Thomas Blanchard) spread to other industries, and became known as the armory system of manufacturing in the US, and the American System of Manufacturing outside the US, after the place where they originated. Once this was in place, breechloaders became cheap enough to be adopted as standard issue in most armies (along with other Industrial Revolution-associated advancements).
Article about how John H. Hall produced his rifle:
http://civilwarscholars.com/2011/06/mr-hall-showed-us-how-to-make-things/
I highly recommend reading this, as it shows just how revolutionary his methods of making things primarily with machine tools (
one of them Thomas Blanchards pattern lathe) and using gauges throughout the process to ensure interchangeable parts were. It is apparent when reading the reports from inspectors sent to his works that they have clearly never seen anything like this before. The only similar facility was the Portsmouth Block Mills, but this never caught on in England for some reason, and it didn't use gauges, so they never produced interchangeable parts. For comparison to previous methods, here's a
video of how rifles were produced before Hall. Note how even though the workers have specialized in one task, they still work by hand wherever possible, inspect parts subjectively (such as checking the straightness of a barrel by eye), and make sure parts fit to the rest of a specific musket. By contrast, Hall's system (which became the American System of manufacturing) used machine tools wherever possible, inspected parts by using gauges throughout the production process, and made sure parts fit to identical gauges (which was what achieved interchangeablitiy after over 100 years of failed efforts). There were at least 3 versions of each of Hall's gauges; one for the workman, one for the foreman, and one for the master armorer to measure the wear on the other 2. There were also more gauges for the final inspection. By the 1850's the British introduced the system after the Robbins & Lawrence Armory (a contractor for Springfield Armory using similar methods of production)
demonstrated 6 interchangeable rifles at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, a then unheard-of feat outside the US. A Commission to study US systems of manufacture followed (
video links)(also influenced by the experience of the Crimean War), and resulted in RSAF Enfield ordering tools from Robbins and Lawrence, among other US manufacturers, to update the RSAF Enfield to the same level of sophistication as the US armories.