Before the Lewis Gun was the McClean Automatic Rifle

I guess thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian McCollum and I'm here today at the Murphy auction company taking a look at the very last gun manufactured by dr. Samuel McLean the man whose ideas would ultimately become the Lewis gun now this is unusual in that this gun actually dates from after World War one this is from about 1919 if we go back to the beginning of the story dr. McLean Samuel McLean was born in Iowa City Iowa in 1857 paid his own way through University and got himself educated as a medical doctor was quite successful in that role he was popular he was well-liked but he also had kind of an inventive mind and he started coming up with a bunch of ideas in fact by the time he passed away in 1930 he would have some 36 US patents to his name many of them revolving around firearms design and he was interested in a lot of different aspects of firearms design the most notable areas that he got into were recoil reducing things basically muzzle breaks complex and interesting muzzle breaks automatic cannons and machine guns now he really put this into practice in 1896 when he formed them a clean arms company and this got serious pretty quickly in 1897 he turned over his whole medical practice to his assistant to run so that he could focus full-time on firearms development and he had a good thing going his ideas were they looked like they had a lot of promise the McLean Arms Company interested a number of high-profile sorts of investors he had General Joseph wheeler of the CSA later of the US military was an investor Marcellus Hartley who's one of the principals at Remington was an investor in the McLean Arms Company like he had legitimate ideas here and he was attracting interest from legitimate people who knew all about the small arms industry now the problem was McLean was never quite able to get the gun working well enough to be militarily successful and he would go through a number of trials of both his semi-automatic canons mostly a 37 millimeter a 1 pounder but also did some work on a three pounder which would probably been a 57-millimeter gotten bunch of trials never really paid off he had a water-cooled machine gun in fact he actually started with a bolt action clip feat rifle that didn't go anywhere he ultimately developed this into a machine gun or redeveloped a machine gun because that was the thing that interested militaries at the time there's a big very very cool unusual-looking steampunky sort of water-cooled machine gun which is notable I will point out for the fact that unlike virtually all other water-cooled guns this one was actually designed to recirculate steam and water where most guns like the Maxim's and related water-cooled guns will have a convincing can and so as the gun fires water heats up turns into steam and it's then pulled off by hose and dropped into a condensing can into some existing liquid water to reconvince it and eventually the water jacket runs empty the condensing can that's full and then you pour the can back into the water jacket McLean's gun actually did this whole recirculating system by itself and that was probably part of the reason that it wasn't successful it had a pressurized system so you'll notice it looks kind of like it's got a scuba tank on it it has valves it has condensing coils it has all sorts of extra stuff it probably shouldn't actually have the oppression of try be incorporating all that stuff now I'm getting a little sidetracked here ultimately the McClean machine guns would fail in a series of military tests and in 1910 the McLean Arms Company by then actually in its second iteration failed and went bankrupt if you want a little more backstory on this and how it actually evolved into the Lewis gun I would recommend checking out the CN Arsenal video on the Lewis gun he covers this development and how this turned into the Lewis ultimately the investors when the company went broke brought in Isaac Newton Lewis to give them some comment on the viability of the patents and the models that they had left Louis figured air cooling is the way of the future he got some ideas about air cooling the investors then brought him in and the Lewis gun was the result but that isn't quite where this thing comes from this was McLean's last attempt a military firearm so in 1910 after his company went bankrupt McLean ended up moving he moved up to Detroit and went to work in the automobile industry and he was reasonably successful in there never stopped inventing however and by the time World War one ended he he had one last idea for an air-cooled machine gun shoulder fired kind of more like a sort of analogous to the BA R this was select fire so you have a semi-auto trigger and a full auto trigger in it and he presented this to the Navy for testing in 1990 so let's take a look at what this thing actually does and then we'll talk about what happened to it in 1919 looking at this up close we have a shoulder stock I think it's clearly designed to be fireable from the shoulder although in Navy testing it was actually fired from a tripod mount two triggers the front one is the full auto trigger and the rear one is the semi-auto trigger this hook here is the magazine release you can see it retracts a little plunger there at the bottom and this brings up an interesting element which is what is the magazine to this thing well I have a couple original pictures these were printed in the book the Belgian rattlesnake about the Lewis gun by William easterly they show the original magazine although it is not present on this gun unfortunately it is missing somewhere but somewhere out there is a MacLean 1919 automatic musket magazine what we do know for sure is that there is a mechanical ratcheting system here to rotate the drum it is a drum style magazine and it's sort of a doughnut-shaped magazine probably the closest thing I can come up with would be a knackles drum from a Gatling gun now whether it mounts off on the side or over the whole main body of the gun is not entirely clear easterlies books as it mounts on the side this is very much centered on the gun the front grip here is the exact same height as the magazine catch which makes me wonder if the magazine is supposed to slide over the whole gun like I said it's really not entirely clear what I can tell you is that it feeds here through the top and it ejects down here out the bottom of the receiver looking at this up close unfortunately the receiver the rear of the receiver here has been cut away that is because this was in fact a machine gun but it was not registered as such and at some point someone cut this away so that it was considered legally destroyed and not illegal to possess unfortunate legally necessary now this side of the gun would originally have had a couple wooden cover plates like you have over here they are missing and there would have been hole in them down here to take to let out empty casings so you probably notice we have this handle over here this is non reciprocating it's currently locked down in the stowage position you can pop it up and out to actually use that's why there is this cutaway in the back of the stock because the handle comes back and out like that when we open this up first off that's your ejection port right there we have an interesting style of locking system here you've probably seen interrupted thread style of locking lugs where you try to get the most surface area possible of locking surface McLean definitely went for that this all the way back there you go at least a dozen locking lugs in there and you can see just barely up into the receiver here you can see the mating surfaces where those all lock into place so you've got lugs on this side and you've got lugs on the opposite side of the bolt and it is a rotating bolt very much a louis-style rotating bolt which of course is ultimately in fact a McLean style of rotating bolt so what we have here is an operating rod down here that has the firing pin on it you can see the firing pin right up in there and it's running through a cam track in the bolt so when the operating rod goes all the way forward like that it has now forced the bolt to rotate into the locked position and the op rod which holds the firing pin is slightly rearward that's about an inch farther back than it would be when fired so when I drop the firing pin what will happen is there is a sear that's holding this opera back it will drop op rod goes forward the firing pin goes forward and that fires the gun this is precisely the same system that was used in the Lewis gun just Isaac Lewis massively simplified it compared to this with just two big locking lugs at the front instead of this system McLean's earlier designs also had multiple lugs his water-cooled machine gun I believe had five sets of dual lugs on each sides like 20 lugs total the idea is not bad but you don't really need that you're just as well having a couple that are a lot smaller or a lot larger now if we look at the bolt face a little more closely we'll see a couple of interesting things this acts as the ejector and it also picks up a cartridge from the magazine to feed so you'll notice when this comes all the way back that ejector gets pushed down under that rear lip of the receiver when it does that it is pushing the cartridge this is a little hard to see but if you look at the bolt face there you can see that that ejector gets pushed down boom right there and it's going to push the cartridge straight out this ejection port right here there are two extractors one on each side so the cartridge is held firmly this way and push laterally out the bottom of the gun by the way the bolt handle also has this nice stowage position so it's there's a little tiny spring in the front you can push the bolt handle forward rotate it down so its toes up nicely against the body of the gun possibly keeping it from interfering with the magazine that's not entirely clear to me as I said but then you lift up to actually make use of it now looking at this thing you'll notice it has obviously we have a barrel up top and the barrel is knurled to give it in theory maybe a little more cooling capacity and we have this big thing at the bottom which seems a little out of place like why is that so large it's obviously too large to be a gas piston right well no actually this is kind of modeled on the McLean semi-auto cannons which have this very large gas piston in them I can actually take the front cap here and unthread it take that off and then lo and behold that is the gas piston face when I pull the bolt back you can see that whole thing reciprocating right up here at the top is the gas port into the barrel this thing is just a really ginormous gas piston unfortunately I can't take the piston assembly apart but there is a recoil spring wrapped around it inside here just like all of the earlier McLean guns the one bit of disassembly that I can do for you is to take the lower off we have a bolt here that just connects the upper and lower assemblies Aaron's stowage take that bolt out and then we can take off the lower that makes it very easy to see the sear here and that sear hold on to the back of the operon which is this hook right here so so that's your operating rod and that is going to rotate the bolt to lock and unlock you can see the cam track here at the end so that's unlocked that's locked so I believe this one was the full auto that pulls down both levers the rear trigger here is semi-auto although to be fair I'm not entirely sure where the disconnect er is it might just be not working anymore in this gun you can see the little lug on the front of the charging handle that's what actually pulls back on this lug of the operating rod on this side it's right there that little hook and you can see the large diameter mainspring just barely down inside there obviously McLean never did become wealthy off of his patents despite the success of the Lewis gun he did actually file a lawsuit after World War one in an attempt to get some some financial compensation from the company that had used what were originally his ideas and patents that went all the way up to the Supreme Court before it was ultimately ruled against him remarkably I mean Samuel Samuel McLean was apparently a very friendly outgoing nice guy and despite all of these setbacks he never did actually blame Isaac Lewis for the turn of events and as far as I can tell remained friends with Lewis for the rest of his life this gun was presented to the US Navy for trials in early 1919 they did a bunch of shooting it wasn't a complete failure it was moderately successful but the final report in May of 1919 did not express any interest in adopting it and not surprisingly by the end of World War 1 first off there was a lot less need for machine guns and there are a lot of other interesting designs out there to be followed up on that had more promise to them than the McLean gun so I believe this is probably the only one of these ever made McLean never made all that many of any of his guns probably talking less than a dozen guns made by doesn't rifle caliber guns made by McLean altogether so the fact that this one has survived is really cool it's unfortunate that it had to be legally destroyed have the receiver cut because it was a machine gun and it was not registered as such but we are it is really cool to still see the last example there are a couple other surviving McLean guns out there in various museum collections there's at least one water-cooled one private collection but if you want some of the guns that were directly associated with the origin of the Lewis gun arguably one of arguably the best light machine gun of the first world war this is a literally unique one-of-a-kind example so hopefully at some point someone will find the magazine as I said if you if you have the magazine for this that big doughnut looking thing if you've got a weird doughnut look in magazine you don't know what it goes to this one's floating around out there somewhere so if you think you have it contact the morphe auction company and they will be happy to put you in contact with whoever ends up purchasing this gun it would be great to reunite that magazine with the gun that did originally went to anyway hopefully you guys enjoyed the video thank you very much for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 238,800

Rating: 4.9649324 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, lewis, lewis gun, mcclean, automatic rifle, mcclean arms company, 37mm, cannon, semiauto, machine gun, full auto, automatic, accles drum, drum magazine, prototype, us navy, us army, trials, testing, rotating bolt, isaac newton lewis, failure, unsuccessful air cooled, water cooled, tripod, military, early machine gun, ww1 world war, great war

Id: BmhzOS76QjY

Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 18 2019