11mm Vickers "Balloon Buster" Machine Gun

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on forgottenweapons.com i'm ian mccollum and today we are taking a look at a balloon buster this is an 11 millimeter colt vickers gun and these were manufactured for aerial use in well at the very end of world war one now of course the british had been using the vicar's gun since well before the war the united states didn't adopt it didn't look at it very seriously they did start doing some trials on them just before world war one ultimately it would be adopted kind of as a rush wow we really need some machine guns because apparently there's a big war going on now they would adopt it as the model of 1915 in the standard 303 caliber ground configuration and colt got a license from the vickers company to manufacture them here in the u.s however it would take a number of years actually for colt to manage to actually get vickers gun production up and running they finally they had a number of contracts like the initial contract was for 125 colt vickers guns and it took them more than two years to actually get those delivered to the u.s it was 1917 before those uh shipped the first contract that they really actually were able to produce in quantity was a contract for the russian government but of course the russian revolution put an end to that and with the when the russian revolution happened colt was ended up with about 1200 vicars guns that had been made for the russians but they weren't going to get paid for now and they certainly weren't going to ship them and so they're left with them in the u.s and what do we do with those well about that time they actually got a contract from the french the french wanted some vickers guns in 11 millimeter the french had taken the 11 millimeter graw cartridge and they redesigned it to be an incendiary round because one of the things one of the main aerial targets for aircraft during world war one aside from other enemy aircraft were observation balloons we think of that kind of as quaint and like oh an observation balloon what's yeah well observation balloons were very important in world war one for artillery spotting artillery was a massive perhaps the most important weapon on the battlefield and being able to spot where the shells are hitting and adjust fire and spot where enemy troops are that was an incredibly important element of the war and so what they would do is they would send observers up in balloons with basically a telephone with a wire running back down to the ground to keep an eye on what was going on and it could be decisive in a battle to prevent the enemy from having observation or from shooting down their observation balloons these are hydrogen balloons they're highly flammable but little 303 caliber fmj bullets don't necessarily do a whole lot like you can poke a lot of small holes in one of those balloons without without impairing it too badly however if you take a an 11 millimeter cartridge and you fill it up with some phosphorous incendiary compound blow that into the balloon and and light the hydrogen that gets the balloon out of the air very quickly so the french developed that and then they need some machine guns for it the vickers is pretty well suited to be adapted to that use one of the things that the vickers had over the french machine guns over the hotchkiss is that it fires from a closed bolt which means that it can be much more easily synchronized to run in an aircraft firing through the propeller without shooting yourself down so all that is to say the french wanted some vickers guns an 11 millimeter and they were able to get them from colt colt had this 1200 guns left over from the russian contract they rebuilt at least 800 of them and shipped them out to france in the early summer of 1918. the other the remainder of the guns they sent to the the u.s flying corps in 303 caliber the uh sorry rebuilt also to 11 millimeter the u.s government in june of 1918 placed a further order for another 1711 millimeter guns plus another 4 300 303 guns and colt started working on those and started making deliveries during 1918. so we're talking basically the last six months of the war is when these guns were actually in theater in europe being deployed i don't know the exact numbers and distribution of which guns went where but one of the us aircraft that did absolutely use 11 millimeter vickers guns was the spad 13. this was one of the favorite aircraft of the american flyers there's a great picture of eddie rickenbacker if i can find it i'll put it in the video here on his plane and you can see he's got two vickers guns mounted on the aircraft one of them is a 303 gun one of them is an 11 millimeter gun so we'll talk about the pros and cons of the 11 millimeter in a minute but first let me show you what they did to make a vickers into an aircraft gun when aviators started mounting machine guns and aircraft in world war one there are two considerations that you really have to account for one is weight and the other is accessibility of controls there were a variety of ways that these guns were mounted early on in the war you would see flexible observer guns that's typically not the role that a vickers gun would have played a vicar's like this would have been a fixed amount on the cowl of the aircraft the idea being you can have a one-seater aircraft and instead of having to fly and aim a gun at the same time the pilot simply aims the aircraft and the guns fire right forward through the propeller over the nose of the airplane this 10 this is the most accurate effective way to run a single cedar aircraft so in order to do that first off let's talk about weight actually a vickers gun is not really any heavier than a lewis gun which is what preceded the vickers for aircraft use however the water jacket's kind of an issue the water jacket is there to cool the gun you need something to cool the gun because vicar's gun has a very thin barrel and it will overheat very quickly however at the altitude and the speed that these aircraft were flying wind flow over the barrel would do a perfectly acceptable job of cooling so they didn't need the water that also that that helps get rid of some of the weight and what they did is cut open the jacket to enhance airflow through it if we start by looking at the front of the jacket you'll see they've cut out basically as much material here as they can without sacrificing the rigidity of the jacket in general you might ask why not just remove the whole thing and the answer is the vicar's gun requires the barrel to reciprocate and there has to be a bearing surface here to support the front end of the barrel so they have to keep the jacket in place to support the barrel so in order to get air flow through the front out the back they have cut open the front this is where the steam tube was they got rid of that obviously they don't need it and then they've cut a series of louvers in the front here and they've angled them in such a way that they're going to pull air down into the barrel jacket now we'll point out this as well this sort of it's not really a flash hider this is just a protector so that the blast from the front of the gun doesn't damage the cowl of the aircraft directly under the muzzle moving to the back of the jacket you can see that they've again cut the louvers but they've angled them the opposite direction so back here they're pulling air up out of the jacket to help it circulate through from front to back they've also gone ahead and cut out the whole section here where the fill plug originally was and that'll help bring air out as well and even add a couple small holes down in the bottom basically as much material as they can take out they have taken out that is pretty much the extent of the weight reduction measures that were taken on the vickers the vickers was already lightened from the maxim design really as much as could be feasibly done and there wasn't a lot left to to get so just the barrel jacket now the next thing to consider is access to the controls there are a number of different configurations of aircraft vickers guns and a lot of the the differences are based on how you run the charging handle so depending on how the guns were mounted you might or might not have access to a charging handle like this now on this particular gun either the mount the extra charging handle levers have been removed or they weren't necessary in the first place this just has a standard charging handle on it when you see bigger ones it usually means like the gun was mounted inside the cowling of the aircraft instead of sitting right up on top of it and they had to have some sort of lever extension coming up that the pilot could actually get to we do have this cool modification to the fusee cover though normally there is a little adjustment tab out at the front of the fusee spring and this allows you to adjust the spring tension of the gun so if the gun's not running reliably you could adjust the tension up or down on the spring which is one of the cool parts of the vickers and maxim design however if you've got this thing mounted on the nose of your airplane you might be able to get to the charging handle in the back but i guarantee you you're not going to be able to adjust that fusey spring tension so what colt did is i actually made a different cover spring that allowed you to act to change the spring tension from the back at the front instead of the regular lever you have a gear wheel that is then connected to this second gear sprocket which connects to a long operating rod running back and that ends with a square profile so there's a little wrench that you could put on this that would allow you to turn it and adjust the spring tension one of the other obvious changes to the aircraft guns are brackets like this and these are meant to attach synchronization gear so the whole idea of synchronization is that you if you're shooting through the propellers arc of travel you don't want to shoot your own propeller off for obvious reasons there are two different ways that you can work around that well there are three really the simplest way is put big heavy metal armored deflector plates on the back of your propeller and don't care bullets to hit the propeller will just bounce off people did that for a while but it's not really an optimal solution so there are two other ways to do it and they involve hydraulic or mechanical links to the engine that will either prevent the gun from firing if the propeller is in front of the muzzle or fire the gun mechanically only when the propeller is not in front of the muzzle the first of those would be an interrupter and the second would be a synchronizer synchronizers were definitely the better the more efficient or elegant way to do this there are a number of ways that it could be done you could have a rod most of them were mechanical connections you could have a rod that would pull the trigger uh when the propeller was passing the right point in its travel you could have a rod that would push the trigger pushing was or a pulling was better than pushing because you could use a much smaller connecting bar however even better than pulling or pushing would be rotating and that's what this was set up for these guns uh use the the french design beer key it's b-i-r-k-i-g-t i'm not entirely sure how to pronounce that beer key system in which there was a connecting rod that came back here connected to the engine sorry it would come here and come through this clamp be held there and then it would rotate clockwise and counterclockwise as the engine turned so it would oscillate back and forth and when it did it pushed on this which has a rather heavy spring pushed on that lever this lever goes through these little cuts in the top cover and activates the trigger right there that little square stud sticking out up out of the lock is the actual sear that fires a vicar's gun so normally the trigger mechanism comes in through the top cover for this synchronizer connection instead it's right there you can see it working just like that this synchronizer system was developed by the same guy who designed the engine for the spad so it made sense you know he designed the engine he can figure out how to link it to a gun it goes into the spad the spad is what the americans are using at least largely and hence the american guns will largely have this style of synchronizer mechanism now there are a couple other mechanical changes that were made to the guns first off we have a strengthened top cover spring here to make sure that this doesn't come up unintentionally this is just a big old flat spring that you have to lift up against in order to open the gun and it's there we go it's really quite stiff but that's that's pretty simplistic if you look back here of course you don't have the regular spade grips because this wouldn't be fired by the regular thumb triggers you do have this which is a buffer tube now there's normally a flat spring on there that has broken off that's going to prevent this from unscrewing but what we have was a a guide rod and you can see it right there this is missing this particular gun is missing two little pieces there should be a big spring and a cover plate and basically what this is is a buffer so that when the action bars and the lock reciprocate backward upon firing they will hit that buffer that will decelerate them and and prevent the gun from taking a beating because remember this is in 11 millimeter gra this is a very large heavy recoiling cartridge more so than the the 303 that the vickers was designed for this also has the secondary effect of then accelerating the parts to go back forward which is going to help boost the rate of fire back to something more acceptable for aircraft use we also have a modification to the feed block and to the feed block locking mechanism on the ground guns there's a little lever that allows you to open this on the aircraft guns they put a bolt in with a cotter pin to hold it in place because there was no good reason to be opening this in flight a belt of 11 millimeter gra is a lot heavier than a belt of 303 and the feed block system was not quite up to fully reliably pulling 11 millimeter gra from the gun so what they did is add a booster spring here that just gives this feed block a little extra push to snap back over and help feed the belt in so this spring comes out and it's a pretty simple deal that's it didn't require any mechanical adjustment or change to the feed block just snaps in there so that is a a feature that you will find on the 11 millimeter balloon buster guns of course the feed block itself is machined differently on the inside to accommodate the 11 millimeter gra cartridge but it is otherwise interchangeable the demand the receiver dimensions are the same for the 11 millimeter guns as they were for 303 the markings on these guns are actually on the front of the water jacket this is vickers machine gun model of 1915 because that is what the ground gun was originally adopted as in u.s service colts patent firearms company hartford connecticut a serial number and these are typically relatively high serial numbers because the first 800 or so went to the french so when you find them in the u.s they're typically american service guns some of them will have an a prefix number as well i believe those are the french ones and then in this case 1917 inspection date although that's earlier than they actually got into combat service uh in uh in france this is turning into a pretty lengthy video but there's a little bit more that i want to show you namely the ammunition so the vickers was designed around cloth belts and that worked fine it was nice and cheap and easy and worked fine on the ground however in an aircraft role if you had your typical 250 round belt or if you're on an aircraft perhaps you would want even more as you know a winder spool with 500 rounds say you don't want to have you know halfway through that belt you don't want to have 250 rounds of cloth belt which would be many yards of belt flapping out along the the tail of the aircraft potentially going to get caught in something and cause problems so instead they developed disintegrating metal link belts these are predo links there are a couple different designs of them that were used but the idea is simply to have a flexible belt for one thing that you could wind up on a spool and that every time you fire it around it would simply discard an individual link off the side of the aircraft and prevent them from causing trouble this is very standard like these took over after world war one in place of cloth belts universally but they were originally developed for aircraft use so this is a belt of 303 we are very fortunate to have a four round belt of 11 millimeter vickers or 11 millimeter gra incendiary these are extremely rare today and you can see the the link design is basically the same but what you have is a link will hold front and back of one cartridge and center of the next so it's the cartridge itself that holds all the links together when you pull one of these out i can show you here when you pull one of these out the links are going to separate just like that i mentioned earlier on that uh rickenbacker had both a 303 and an 11 millimeter vickers gun on his aircraft and there are pros and cons to the 11 millimeter you might look at this and say it's big bore and incendiary what wouldn't i like why not just equip all the guns you know all the aircraft with all 11 millimeter guns well there were some downsides to it you can't carry nearly as much ammunition because the ammo is bulkier heavier and i don't know that the 11 millimeter incendiary ammo was really that much more effective than 303 on a fighter aircraft um this is world war one we're talking wood and cloth framed airplanes the incendiary isn't going to have a chance to do a lot what makes it really effective on balloons is the fact they're filled with flammable hydrogen so having having one gun primarily for enemy aircraft that being a 303 and one gun primarily for balloons that being the 11 millimeter would have i think made a lot of sense and of course you could use them both in in any circumstance so um you'll see these in american use in that way anyway um these guns a couple hundred of them came back to the united states as surplus after the war there were a number of things that were done with them they're kind of interesting in that they're basically unfireable so most of these out there are missing a few parts or have been deactivated and no one's ever really bothered to put them back together because there is no 11 millimeter vickers ammunition available the links are virtually unavailable it's very cool that we were able to get four cartridges like this is the most of these cartridges i've ever seen in one place before so there they exist primarily as simply historical curios like this one hopefully you guys enjoy the video thanks for watching you

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 422,182

Rating: 4.9732471 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, 11mm, 11mm vickers, 11mm gras, incendiary, balloon, observation balloon, balloon buster, machine gun, spad, spad xiii, Rickenbacker, ww1, colt, model 1915, vickers gun, aircraft gun, france, French, russian, contract, observation, synchronizer, interrupter, fokker, air cooled, aerial

Id: fIsdE-2g2jM

Length: 19min 11sec (1151 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 05 2020