America's First Assault Rifle: Burton 1917 LMR

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons calm imean I am here today again at the Cody Firearms Museum part of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West and we are taking a look today at an extremely cool gun this is a model of 1917 Burton light machine rifle and interestingly it fits all the characteristics of an assault rifle despite being made in 1917 now the impetus for this was the need to shoot down hydrogen filled balloons apparently poking little bullet holes in them didn't do a whole lot what was really necessary to effectively take down a Zeppelin or an observation balloon was incendiary ammo and in order to have an effective incendiary cartridge you had to have a big projectile so you could fit some incendiary in it for this reason ultimately what got used for this purpose were Vickers and Maxim guns reach eymard for 11 millimeter cartridges that was primarily what the Allies used anyway before that became standard however a guy named frank burton who was working for the Winchester company came up with his own solution which is this now interestingly he was the son of a colonel James Burton who was actually superintendent of armories for the Confederate States of America interesting bit of arms design lineage there are arms industry lineage Frank Burton had been working for Winchester for some time and he was actually the designer behind the series of Winchester self-loading rifles the 1905 1907 and 1910 which are all semi-auto simple blowback guns in the 35 351 and 401 Winchester self-loading proprietary cartridges what he did when faced with this requirement from the military was he took the 351 Winchester cartridge and redesigned it a bit and renamed it the 345 which apparently was the bore diameter that gave them a nice big projectile and instead of being a round nosed projectile like in the self-loading sporting guns he made it a pointed projectile and incendiary and he then devised a blowback select fire machine gun to use it and that's this gun now a couple distinctive things about this gun well okay there's one really distinctive thing this gun and that is it's got two magazines here one coming out each side these are 20-round magazines there's some misconception about that out there somewhere along the line it got misinterpreted as 40 round magazines is in fact two twenties that give you a total of forty rounds of capacity so we'll look at exactly how these magazines fit and lock in a minute when we get a close-up on the gun but for the moment let me point out that only one of them feeds at a time and it's not super fast to change from one to the other in order to understand why this setup would be done like this we have to think about the fact that this was originally developed as an aircraft armament and if you're up in a cramped little wooden biplane doing weird maneuvers it's hard to you don't want to have a lot of accessories kind of bouncing around in your observers seat so by having a second magazine already locked into the gun you had no risk of losing your magazine or having to find it when you need it to reload what you would do is basically pull one magazine partway out push the new loaded magazine the rest of the way in and then you could continue shooting now Burton recognized he made this a dual purpose gun so it wasn't just an observers gun although it does have a nice machined ring here to fit on a flexible amount of scarf type mount in an observed and aircraft observers seat however they also made sure that this would also be done that you could use on the ground if you were forced down in enemy territory for example and that is the reason why we see a bayonet lug on the end of the barrel which is not something you would typically need for an aircraft gun so I think we should probably just bring the camera back in and take a closer look at some of these elements because nobody really seems to know how this thing work because there's only one of these in existence and I don't think anyone's taking a real close look at it in a little while all right this funky magazine thing is what everyone wants to know about what's the deal with that so the rationale here as I said is you want to have a reload already situated on the gun this is like world war 1 ready mag and the way they do that is magazines by the way are really stiff the way they do that is by having two locking catches on each of the magazines so you have a storage position and you have a firing position for each magazine that's a little bit unusual that the locking catches on the front but on the back of the magazine there is one catch that is an over travel stop so that prevents you from jamming one magazine in too far it's a double stack magazine catches on the front of the magazine wells now let me pull this one out this one's the really safe one all right I'll demonstrate with this one so the magazine goes in well here one click there it is that's the storage position and if we take a close look inside the other magazine well you can see pretty much nothing when I bring the bolt back you can see that the bolts not going to be picking up a cartridge from that magazine until I push it the rest of the way in let's get the plate there for you so there's the second click now you can see that the magazine is protruding way down into the magazine well there and now now the bolt is in a position to actually strip rounds out of that magazine so once this this mag is in this position you can go ahead and fire 20 rounds once this mag is empty what you have to do is hit the latch and bring it up at least a little bit so that it clears the magazine well and then you can take your other magazine which you would already have in the gun excuse me a moment here and then you can snap the other magazine the rest of the way in lock the bolt back open and continue firing now the gun is ready to go so if we look at this from the back when it's in an actual usable position you can see that one mag is farther in than the other this is my stored mag either empty or loaded but in reserve this is my currently active magazine so mechanically this is an open-bolt firearm we have our bolt handle here you can take a look at the bottom of the bolt this is our sear engagement surface right there and the bolts just gonna cycle back and forth it's a pretty heavy bolt with a pretty heavy spring and that fits for Burton's other developments with the Winchester self loaders which were all low back guns based on the premise of having a fairly heavy bolt and operating spring in fact interestingly even having the charging handle here on the bottom of the gun is somewhat reminiscent of the Winchester self loaders where the charging handle was a button located out in the front of the stock anyway these two big lugs here on the underside of the receiver lock the grip frame and fire control group in place it sits there it just goes in the back and slides forward now looking closer at the fire control mechanism we have a kind of well very much an unusual and unique system here the trigger here is our semi-auto trigger now being an open bolt when you fire the gun just with this trigger the bolt will drop home chamber a cartridge fire it blowback and lock in the open position again if however you hold the bottom trigger at the same time and then pull the top trigger the gun will fire fully automatic until you release the bottom trigger now the way this works like I said is a bit unusual this is our actual sear right here that angled surface locks into the bolt and holds it back and in the typical ready to fire position this doesn't sit in its normal position to this out of the gun normally the bolts going to be pressing down on this sear the whole time and you can see the little shelf right here that this sear sits on so normally when you pull the trigger this goes forward and the sear drops sorry it's under my thumb but the sear drops down and you can see this square piece that's the semi-auto disconnect er it comes up through that Center slot allowing the sear to drop all the way at this point the bolt is cycling forward and as soon as it clears soon as the bolt - all the way forward now there's nothing holding this seared and it pops up like that when the bolt comes back the bolt rides over the sear pushes it down and now that rectangular block is no longer in alignment with this slot so the sear goes down hits that block the disconnect er and holds the bolt back it can't drop far enough to allow the bolt to cycle forward again when you release the trigger now instead of sitting on the disconnect er now it's sitting on the shelf okay now when I hold both triggers down that rear trigger is holding a lever back here which actually grabs that sear the first time it pushes down and holds it down so the gun will fire full auto because this Sears locked in the downward position and it doesn't engage with the bolt and it will continue firing until it's either out of ammunition at which point interestingly it will not lock open it will drop on an empty chamber and go click until I release this bottom trigger you can hear that click now the sear is able to come back up and we're back in our normal semi auto firing mode one other thing I should point out once you've got the trigger assembly on attach to the rails on the receiver you then have this spring-loaded catch right here you can see it's got that big wedge that locks into this cutout on the back of on the rear lug so in order to take the pistol grip off what you have to do is to pull this down like that far enough that you can then tap this assembly backwards out of engagement that's kind of tricky actually now the literature describes this gun as having a quick-change barrel which is sort of correct it does have a change of bull barrel what you have is actually this screw right here on the front of the receiver yet unthreads and when it does it comes out of this slot in the barrel once this screw is free of this slot then you can unthread the barrel so you can't really just push a button and pop the barrel out it takes a bit of a procedure but it is an easily changeable barrel because of this locking nut this locking screw you don't actually have to have the barrel cranked the the threads tightened way down this prevents it from unthreading so we have a rear sight on here there is no notch or aperture on the bottom but when you flip it up you have a range adjustable rear aperture sight now this would be intended probably well this would be intended for long-range use when you are shooting closer you would use this v-notch which is fixed in place now to go along with this this is the infantry barrel and we know that because it's got a bayonet lug on it if you read the literature it will say that this fits a model of 1917 Enfield bayonet the the British p14 Enfield aka the m1917 in US service which winchester was making so Winchester made this Winchester was making those it would make sense that would fit that bayonet however I tried one and it doesn't fit this bayonet lug is not dropped low enough to fit that bayonet so exactly what it does fit I don't know possibly its own proprietary thing maybe just some other model I haven't thought of but we know this is the ground barrel because it got that bandit lug you'd never have that in the air the ground model also has this standard front notch or front post sight now if we look here right at the front of the receiver we can see that there's this machined flat surface this is a mounting ring for something like a scarf mounting position for something like a scarf ring which was the standard type of flexible and flexible aircraft gun mount during World War one that said that you could pivot this thing around and an observer could fire it in any number of different directions if you pull the front trigger I'm gonna hold it down here bolt closes fires and then it locks back open if you pull the rear trigger well pull both triggers simultaneously now holding the rear trigger down that bolt will continue to cycle until I release the rear trigger then it will lock back open so so disassembly for the fire control group is done with a spring-loaded tab right back here which you'll see in a moment and then this whole thing slides back about an inch and comes off then you would unscrew the recoil spring from the buttstock this allows the buttstock to come off and then the bolt and the recoil spring come out the back of the receiver this is a very stiff screw and he doesn't want to get any tighter than that that's how we found it here in the display so we're gonna leave that alone we can take a pretty good look at the bolt the underside anyway when we take the rest of the gun apart so I've got the barrel off and we're looking down at the bolt face and when I pull the charging handle back it actually pulls the firing pin backward into the bolt so there is some sort of inertial mechanism inside the bolt that prevents the firing pin from going all the way forward until the bolt is in battery and the trigger is depressed I'm not sure exactly what that system is unfortunately I can't that the rear end of this disassembly just doesn't want to run smoothly so I can't take the bolt out of the action we have to try and figure this out from looking at it from the outside alright the safety on this is this lever right here this is the fire position if we rotate this forward what it does is actually lock the bolt in place so at this point I can pull the trigger nothing happens I can't cycle the bolt if I put it on fire now I can drop the bolt and then if I put it back on safe it has locked the bolt in the forward position so that prevents anything untoward from happening now the other interesting element here and unfortunately since I can't take the bolt out I don't have this entirely figured out but we can deduce something so when the gun cycles this does not have a fixed firing pin it actually has a floating firing pin which is connected to this charging handle and when it closes you hear a second kind of cur clack and that is the firing pin actually projecting forward there is some sort of little trip inside the bolt that does that that releases and allows the firing pin to go forward right there so in fact it's most noticeable if we fire in full auto so there it is there it is there it is but if I just pull the bolt back a little bit it doesn't make that noise so I suspect what's happening is we have something like an out of battery safety that at the end of travel trips and releases the firing pin to go forward and then it resets when the bolt comes all the way back so if you don't pull the bolt all the way back that thing doesn't reset in theory maybe that would also act as a safety mechanism to prevent say bolt bounce from opening the bolt just far enough to pick up cartridge without locking open then closing you know that was a typical safety issue on open bolt submachine guns it would be much harder for that to happen on this gun because the bolts much heavier and the spring is heavier I'm really kind of going out on a limb here but whatever the the release mechanism inside the bolt is might involve that as well so ultimately by the time this thing had gone through testing and was developed and ready and suitable for actual potential military issue the problem had already been solved in other ways namely Vickers guns in 11 millimeter Gras and this wasn't necessary you could you know the Vickers guns were belt-fed they were very high capacity they were very reliable guns and they could be mounted in a synchronized manner on aircraft and be much more effective than a limited capacity thing like this in an observers seat so production of this never began I don't know how many prototypes were actually made this is definitely the only one still in existence and it has no marking of any kind on it not even a serial number one which to me kind of suggests it's probably the only one that they did it's extremely cool it's interesting that it meets these criteria for an assault rifle it's a select-fire intermediate cartridge shoulder-fired weapon now it was not actually seen in significant service or what didn't see any service oh it's all was a bit of testing but it kind of shows that this technology was out there as of now 99 years ago no I hope you guys enjoyed this video I would like to very much thank the Cody firearms museum for letting me take a close look at this and pull it apart if you are ever in Wyoming you should absolutely take the time to visit the museum they have a fantastic collection and very well displayed and of course if you like this sort of content if you like seeing one-of-a-kind prototype assault rifles please consider checking out my patreon account its funds from the wonderful folks there that allow me to do traveling to come to places like Cody and show you guns like this thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 1,223,824

Rating: 4.9486852 out of 5

Keywords: burton, winchester, cody, museum, 345 wsl, .345, assault rifle, balloon, zepellin, world war one, world war 1, ww1, wwi, great war, auircraft, observer, scarff, select fire, magazine, 351 wsl, self-loader, frank burton, America, USA, US, American, experimental, experiment, prototype, history, development, trial, trials

Id: -OGyJPFzNfU

Length: 18min 57sec (1137 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 04 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/BleedingUranium]

I'm fully expecting the Burton to be a Support MG in one of the next DLCs.

[u/BeguiledBF]

I cant really see this being used for any infantry and the balance would be bunk in planes.