![]() It was during June of 1883 that the Director General of the Artillery requesting larger scaled testing of the Guedes system at the Vendas Novas firing range. ![]() It was also in the beginning of 1883 that Guedes indicated his intention to register patents on his designs for the breech and safety system of his designs which was granted to him on the 29th of July 1884 The testing done by Guedes centered around the firing and breech mechanisms of the rifle and not so much on a specific cartridge design because from correspondence to the War Ministry, Guedes requested from them “two Grass barrels and at least 1,000 complete Gras cartridges” as well as requests for reimbursements, leading to speculation that at least parts of these tests were financed by Guedes in his personal capacity and not by the Royal Arms Factory. In hindsight it seems strange that, while other European Military Powers were already adopting more modern bolt action rifles with multi-shot capacity, attention was still given to reseach of a single shot rifle. Feedback seemed favourable and created enough interest on the side of the War Ministry that the go-ahead was given enabling Guedes to continue testing his designs for the next two years and in December 1882 the Secretary of the War Ministry arranged for Guedes to be transferred to the Tancos Practical Academy of Engineering and in January 1883 gave instructions for a committee to evaluate the ongoing tests. Records dating from July and August 1880 mentioned rifle tests using an under-lever falling block, single shot rifle designed by Luiz Fausto de Castro Guedes Dias who was at that stage a 2nd Lieutenant in the 10th "Caçadores" Regiment. This was a period in which firearm development and reseach moved along at a blistering pace in Europe and in June 1878 a commission was formed by the Portuguese War Minister Fontes Pereiro de Melo to select a suitable weapon for equipping the Portuguese Army to be selected from a variety of weapons aquired from various European powers. Much of the work and research was done by the Mauser brothers, refining and improving on the bolt action development by German designer Nicholas von Dreyse that lead to the adoption in 1871 of the Mauser M71 rifle. ![]() During the mid to late 1860’s, various military powers in Europe were in process of changing their outdated percussion cap rifles to the newly developed self-contained metallic breech loading cartridge.
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