1921 VS 1928 Thompson Machinegun (FullAuto)

everybody thanks for joining us here today on the VSO gun channel we've traveled all the way down to Virginia this is my good friend Steve we have an excellent toy for us to play with here today this is a constant submachine gun steve is going to give us the lowdown on this thing he's got a huge amount of knowledge on this thing that's coming up right here right now on the BSA gun show all right so the plan here is I'm going to kind of defer to Steve because well Steve knows more about this gun than its forgotten more about this gun than I'll ever know so Steve you go ahead and take it away man just just go ahead and write bro what I'd like to show you today is the 1921 model Thompson when auto ordnance made the Thompson's back in the 1920s after they had made their plans the first thing they had to do was build a factory so the subcontractor with Colt so this is one of the first Colt Thompson's that was made they made 15,000 and then auto or Derna stook over production later in the 30s but this is one of the original model 1921 that was made and it shot about 900 rounds a minute the later when they started trying to get these guns sold we just come out of World War one so the country was broke and they didn't have a lot of money so the Thomson's weren't selling very fast at all and so in 1928 the Marine Corps was guarding the mail trains and they were issued these submachine guns they liked them Marines I'm a former Marine we like machine guns we like things that go fast and so they took and kept some of these Thompson and took them to Haiti and later to Nicaragua so when they were being used in Nicaragua there's the Marine Gunnery charge of a name of Bill Lee that he was a Marine gunner so his job was to know all the weapons and to help develop weapons for the Marine Corps and if they tested these in the jungles of Nicaragua he realized the rate of fire was too high so they wrote back to auto ordnance said we need to slow the rate of fire down for the Marine Corps to adopt this Thompson and the way they did that we have two different boats here the first boat is the original 1921 internals so this shot about 900 rounds a minute you can see this actuator how thin this is what they did is they added weight to it so they made the actuator heavier and then they change out the spring and the buffer pilots and so just by changing these parts here they were able to slow the rate of fire down to what the Marine Corps wanted which was 650 rounds a minute then on the side of the Thompsons what they did were this is model 1921 they over stamped it with US Navy and 1/8 so this now became the model of 1928 and that's how they controlled that rate of fire when the gun was first produced they had 20 round stick magazines 50 around drums in a hundred around drum I don't have a hundred round drum out here today but those were the standard for those guns going into World War two the drums are very difficult to load they're not a good combat weapon because of the sand and debris they would jam if you dropped it it got a dent in the side it would stop functioning so coming into World War two they started making the 30 round stick magazines and that allowed the Marines to be able to change the magazine's faster the drums a little bit more awkward to put in and they became standard so the drums went out of the inventory in fact the United States rather than keeping these into storage for the money it would cost they destroyed the drums which is one of the reasons why when you find the original drums today they're so expensive but that's sort of a quick history on the Thompson the different rates of fire how it became adopted and so this is one of the original Colts and one of the first 15,000 then this was upgraded to the 1928 model Steve thank you the knowledge will fade if we don't continue to push the envelope and disseminate it through through modern means we really greatly appreciate your expertise in your service to our country we get this thing hot yes and let it run let's check the two rates of fire let's see if we can hear the different rates of fire between the 900 and 650 rounds I think that's the plan I think we have a lot of fun today thank you sir yes sir all right we have the Thompson setup the 1921 configuration right now what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to shoot a couple and singles and then we're going to let this thing run so you guys can feel and see what the 1921 looks like before we swap over to the 1928 so the controls on this thing open bolt machine gun you have a stake you have a safe and fire mode they're backwards from the way you would think of them today the flange is the direction that of the mode so this is actually on safe right now we're going to go ahead and put this to fire and we're on single now so let's gun it it's going to pop ready to go so we're gonna go ahead just do some singles all right put the gun to auto 19:21 configuration god that's a lot of fun so the next thing I reel with that is so the way that the drums lock in there's a a lever here that has to be fettered when you put the actual drum in to lock in because there's a bar that it sits on the Thompson magazine this is a 30 rounder has a track here that it rides up and it just clicks into place with a with a detent right there you have to load the thing though you had to get the rails in the track which by modern standards I mean I'm a I'm a black rifle guy so it's like kind of like push slap kind of thing and I've done this before I promise alright so we're locked in again open bolt machine gun watch the rear this guns ready to go third year round a lot shorter than the drum so one thing that I wouldn't point out is even with the 30 rounds look at the muzzle climb that we got on I think I was I had to pull the barrel down to get those last couple on there and the magazine was pretty much expended by the time we got it there we're going to go ahead and do now is swap over to the 1928 configuration that we can tell the difference between the two the modulation should be a lot better we should be able to get more rather than target okay so this is the internal of the drum magazine I just want to show how it is loaded and how it operates I've loaded most of the drum but you can see the sides of the internals how that guides the round as it is fired so this is the drum this is the rotor I've already put in 45 rounds and you can see just to show how it floated how you would do this and understand that in combat situation debris is flying any little dirt and debris would cause this to jam which is why this was not ideal for combat it wasn't used in World War two but that's where they also then replaced it as rapidly they could with a thirty round stick magazine instead of the 20 around this is the drum key this snaps on and then with the older 1921 tops had their higher rate of fire you would wind this to 11 clicks with the 1928 conversion that weighted the bolt and slowed the rate of fire down you would only wanted to nine clicks for this to be able to function that's what I want to do right now because we're going to shoot it with the tighter bolt [Applause] no no hold it in the mouth okay when men were men yeah yeah Ron is like keeping one spot and one other one other disadvantage of the drum with the noise of maize you can hear this very little noise if you're patrolling with the 20 and then later the 30 round stick Mac which in fact replaced the drum so this is what the drum mag sounds like not what you want to hear when you're patrolling ha ha that's terrible [Music] alright guys we've swapped this gun out the Thompson is now set up in 1928 configuration you also see that we changed out the fore-end the reason they went with this forend is one they wanted our horizontal foreign as long as the ability to attach slings to the gun so that they could use it in the field this is a noclip sling no buckle sling and it's basically the precursor today's modern slings would say the combat sling is designed to lengthen and shorten with the individual's needs at the time so without further speaking 30 again 1928 configuration should be a little bit more controllable than what we saw in the 1921 we're ready to go oh yeah significant way more controllable yeah that's uh that's a joy right there you can now yes sir I will take a second one here see that I got people homely bad if only you knew the background of the people who are standing here feeding bags for me you just be all over it oh I did Willam do you feel bad man not favored weapon yeah I believe it alright guys thanks for joining us out here today taking a look at the Thompson and a couple different configurations here on the views of gun channel thanks for traveling all the way down here to Virginia to hang out with our friends here we had an excellent time we're in close this video out right we're do some pretty boys polite action take the stock off just a button there at the back do some Chicago's typewriting and we're ready to go [Music] and [Music] so the Blish walking I want to grab that actuator very quickly and then put it back as this moves back and forth you'll see that rotate up and that would lock it in the chamber at the moment that the gun went in and it hit and fired so that would freeze it into place and there's been a lot of speculation with the low velocity of the 45 if that was actually required and when they did the m1 upgrade they realized that Blish actuator was not required it took a lot of machining inside of the receiver and they were able to completely take that out in the m1 upgrade when they made the m1 a1 that you would see in Saving Private Ryan the charging handle is on the side they completely got rid of the block mechanism and so it was a great engineering marvel but in the field it really wasn't necessary trying to help out the Marines when you filter it this they actually put up and put an arrow so you would get the Blish lock correct as you put it in and out but they didn't realize Marines couldn't read so that was wasted effort because if you can put that on there you never get it right but some Marines could read so you don't have a lot of the Hollywood crazy plastic only hips count

Channel: The VSO Gun Channel

Views: 748,072

Rating: 4.8306265 out of 5

Keywords: Thompson, tommy gun, Submachine gun, sub gun, machine gun, full auto, fully automatic, world war II, WW2, information about, learn about, 1921, 1928, marine corps, world war 2, WWII, soldier, nfa, transferable

Id: pjhQ5hVkfVI

Length: 14min 20sec (860 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 17 2017