They are single-barreled and manual repeating rifles. The automatic lever it was designed by Winchester technicians in 1887 on a Browning design. Once a shot is fired, a lever is moved forward under the bridge: in this way a mechanism retracts the bolt, arms the hammer, ejects the cartridge case and, returning to its initial position, pushes a cartridge into the combustion chamber.
Automatic with pump: Winchester, on a Browning project, started production in 1893 a new type of shotgun. Immediately after firing, the rod pushed by the shooter ejects the cartridge case, arms the percussion mechanism returning to its housing and puts another cartridge in the chamber. "The speed of loading - writes William Dozza, one of the most qualified Italian technical journalists - and the impossibility of jamming due to the cartridge made this type of simple and robust weapon a great commercial success in frontier countries such as states United, less so in the more traditional ones like Europe ”.