Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the James D. Julia Auction House taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be selling in their upcoming spring of 2018 firearms auction. And today we have a Browning Model of 1917. Now this is a little bit special because it is still an original M1917. The vast majority of these guns were either reworked ... after World War One and before World War Two, or
were physically updated to the new pattern of M1917A1. This one is still in its original World War One
configuration, and that's pretty cool. It is also sitting on an original M1917 tripod,
which is perhaps even more difficult to find. These are very rare today, again the vast majority
of them were replaced with M1917A1 tripods. So a little bit about the history of this gun. This is
John Browning's first recoil operated machine gun. Browning had originally developed a gas operated
machine gun in 1895. That was manufactured by Colt. It has a big swinging lever under the barrel up here,
and it got the affectionate name of "Potato Digger", because if you mounted it too low to the ground that swinging hammer
would dig a hole in the ground like it was going after potatoes. That gun was not particularly successful,
they did sell, they weren't a flop, but nobody, in a large scale military sense,
nobody was really all that interested in them. And so Browning took that lesson to heart and decided that really
the method to use for a good machine gun was recoil operation. That's what Maxim had used, and
Browning took to that pretty well. So he actually started his first experiments
with what would become this gun in 1901, but he didn't get really serious about it until 1910. He took some time in there to develop the Browning Auto-5, the world's first recoil operated
semi-auto shotgun. You know, little stuff. In 1910 he really started perfecting what
would become the Model of 1917 machine gun. ... In fact by 1915 he had the design well enough
established that he went and talked to Colt and started to work with them in
tandem to ... not just to finalise the gun, but also to develop the production tooling
and to get ready to actually produce these guns. Both Browning and Colt could clearly see that with World War One
raging there was going to be an interest in modern machine guns. ... If it wasn't the United States,
somebody would be wanting these guns. So, he and Colt together spent a
couple of years perfecting the design. And when ... the US government finally
realised, "Holy crap, we need machine guns," they actually adopted the Vickers gun in 1915,
and contracted with Colt to start making them. But then in 1917, realising that the Vickers was
huge and expensive and really kind of out of date, they held a major machine gun trial at Springfield
Armory. They had like 14 different guns show up. And the winner of that trial by a long shot was
John Browning's Model of 1917 machine gun. It was so good that the head of the testing
board wrote a letter, not just approving the gun but emphatically urging that they immediately buy
10,000 of them. And describing John Browning as, I don't remember the exact words, but something to the
effect of "the world's master machine gun mechanic." ... The test required a 20,000 round endurance trial,
and the Browning handled that so successfully that just for kicks they put
another 20,000 rounds through it. The whole time they only had one malfunction that couldn't
be traced to either bad ammo or bad belts. That's not too bad. So the gun ... was formally
adopted in 1917 by the US military. And one of the issues they then
immediately had was one of production. Because Colt was making Vickers guns
and making a bunch of other firearms, and didn't have the production capacity to make
as many of these guns as the US military wanted. So ... the government convinced Colt to
give up its exclusive licence to the gun (which it had gotten from John Browning), in
exchange for a million dollar lump sum payment. Which honestly Colt thought was way
too low, but as a result Colt allowed other companies to manufacture
1917s for the US government. Remington and New England
Westinghouse would both take up production. Westinghouse in particular was well
suited to the job because in 1917 ... Russia dropped out of the war as
a result of the communist revolution. And that left Westinghouse, who had been
making Mosin-Nagants for the Russians, with a lot of excess production capacity. So
they were able to start making 1917 Brownings. The Colt company actually manufactured the tooling and
the gauges for Remington and Westinghouse to use. That was part of their payment, and
they got royalties on the guns as well. One of the government requirements was that parts from all
three manufacturers had to be completely interchangeable, so that there would never be any issue of trying to sort
Colt parts from Westinghouse parts from Remington parts, and trying to deal with the logistics of repairing and replacing
guns when you couldn't actually count on any part ... fitting in any gun. So, the way to do that was to have one company make
all of the tooling and gauges, and that's what Colt did. As a result, Colt was actually the last of the
three companies to get the guns into production, and they made the fewest actually during the war. Westinghouse ... was the first to have guns actually produced,
and Westinghouse ended up making the most of them. By the end of 1918 it was, like, 56,600
of these guns had been manufactured. Now, they started shipping over to France in 1918, and they were actually demonstrated to a group of
French ordnance officers in late June of 1918 in France, ... both these and Browning Automatic Rifles actually,
and they met with a tremendously positive reception. Apparently ... they ran a few thousand rounds through
each of the guns and they all ran absolutely flawlessly, and apparently the French officers
were quite taken aback by this. They apparently had never seen automatic
firearms that actually ran without any stoppages. So cool, good on us, good on John Browning. First actual combat use of these guns was with
the ... US 79th division in September of 1918. So right at the end of the war they actually managed to get the
guns into combat. And apparently they did remarkably well. And you know, basically as long as the gun
continues working what more do you expect from it? And these guns just continued working, so. One interesting little point, when the
US started sending over Brownings, of course the US troops had been training
on other firearms, and so they needed training, introduction to how these things
actually worked and how to operate them. And one of the officers who went over to do that training
was none other than John Browning's son, Val Browning. So there are a number of pictures of Val Browning
in France instructing American troops on how to use both the Browning Automatic Rifle and the
Browning water-cooled heavy machine gun. As Val commented later, he was probably the
... person on earth most familiar with these guns, with the sole exception of his father, John Moses. Alright, a couple features to take a
quick look at here, starting at the front. This is of course a water-cooled machine gun, so
this water jacket is filled with a couple pints of water. And ... not everyone understands exactly
how water cooling works, what this does is it keeps the barrel's temperature limited to the
boiling point of water. Once this water jacket hits 212 degrees Fahrenheit, or 100 Celsius, the water will
start boiling. It turns into steam, it comes down this hose, and into this condensing tank where,
because it's not being heated any longer by the firing and the barrel, it recondenses into liquid water,
where it can eventually be poured back into the jacket. There is no circulating system on these guns, nor
in fact on virtually any water-cooled machine guns. Now, ... once water hits the boiling point,
any additional thermal energy that it gets doesn't actually increase the temperature,
it just converts the water into steam. So as long as there is water remaining in this jacket,
it doesn't get any hotter than 100 degrees Celsius. People think that, like, the water-cooling jacket means
that this thing stays cool to the touch, it does not. With the guns firing, you know, in a sustained
role, this thing is going to be about 212 degrees Fahrenheit to the touch,
and it will burn the crap out of you. However that's not a dangerous temperature as
far as the barrel and the metallurgy is concerned, so that's how water cooling actually works. We have a little plug here that goes in this vent.
There is a tube inside that prevents this from leaking. We have a fill plug on the back, which you can't see
from there. We have a drain plug right here on the bottom, and then a condensing hose that
you use with a condensing can. By the way, this is like a piece of lead sinker
weight or something, this should be a cork. Which normally would go in here when it's not in use. You
can use this gun without the condensing hose or can set up. It just means that ... what happens
is as the water starts to turn to steam, it comes out here as steam, and then goes
straight up and makes this big steam plume telling the enemy exactly where there's a machine-gun. The reason for using a condensing can,
in addition to conserving the water, was to prevent there from being, you know,
any sort of signal showing where the gun was. So typically using the can you'd actually put some
liquid water in the bottom, so that steam came out under the layer of the liquid water
and that immediately re-condensed it, so you didn't have any big plume of steam coming up. The Browning had a fairly complex rear
sight. This big knob is windage adjustment, and you can see how that
pivots the sight from side to side. And then you ... push this button, slide it up and
down, and that goes out to something like 2,800 yards. And then you have your choice
of 5 different rear apertures. So that one there at the bottom is actually a rear notch
style of aperture, and then you have four round apertures that you can use as you prefer. There was also a plain rear open
notch if you left the sight folded down. That's your battle sight zero if you don't want to have this thing
up in the way, or you don't need to be firing at extended range. The side of the tripod mount has
a bracket for holding an ammo can, I don't have the appropriate can to go in
there, unfortunately, but that's what this is for. And then ammunition fed in
this side of the gun, on the left. We can go ahead and open the top cover
here, and you can see inside the action. If you're into machine guns you will
definitely recognise this system. This peg travels in this track on the bolt,
so as the bolt goes back and forth this arm is shifted side to side, and this pawl
picks up a round from the belt, pulls it into the gun, and then (being held in place by the extractor), this then snaps
down over the round, to repeat the cycle each time it's fired. You can see notches on the barrel here. That is for adjusting
headspace of the gun which is something you have to do when a new barrel is put in, or if a barrel's
chamber becomes excessively worn. This is a recoil operated gun, so
when I pull the bolt handle back you can see that the barrel actually reciprocates
slightly, and that's what functions [operates] the gun. Unlike many machine guns today the
Browning actually fires from a closed bolt, so this is ... what it would look like when
it's ready to fire with a round chambered, and then the extractor here hooked
over the next round in the belt, right there. There's an opening on the right side of the receiver
so the empty belt continues out the right side. This used solid cloth belts,
typically 250 rounds in length. The tripod allowed precise elevation adjustment, you can see this is in mils and it gives
you nice solid clicks as you rotate it. And you can see that this elevates the gun as I turn it. And the trigger on the back is actually styled very
much like the Browning 1895, the Potato Digger. A single pistol grip. There was some
debate over whether to do this versus a twin pistol grip like on the Vickers. And a trigger that lifts up. There's also a sliding safety on the
back here. That is the fire position. And that's the safe position, which
simply blocks the trigger from moving. The Browning 1917 kind of seemed to appear
fully formed out of thin air in World War One, at least as far as the public was concerned. Basically because Colt and
Browning had the foresight to put it through a lot of its development before
the military actually expressed an interest. However, as anyone familiar with firearms
manufacture would expect, there were a lot of hiccups getting the gun actually into production, especially
co-ordinating between three different companies. The difference between a handful of handmade
prototypes, and an actual production line producing tens of thousands of guns
is a very substantial one. And there were a bunch of small changes that had to be
made in order to actually scale this up for mass production. In addition, once the guns actually got some field combat use
in Europe, there were a couple other problems that were discovered. The most significant one was a
weakness in the bottom plate of the gun. So when firing, because of the mechanics, there's
some energy that tends to be dumped down, the bottom plate of the gun kind of gets battered on. And it turned out that they hadn't really made that part
strong enough. So when the 1917A1 update was done, that was one of the ... major
things that was addressed. So that's something to look for on these guns.
If you see just a plain square receiver like this, right here, without any reinforcing,
that's an original 1917 receiver. One of the other problems
they had was leaky water jackets. That's something that any ... water-cooled
machine gun shooter will be used to. But in this case the problem actually came from
poor quality control, especially by Westinghouse, on the soldering of the water
jacket onto the trunnions, so. Some of the guns in Europe leaked
fairly badly, a lot of them leaked a little bit. It was something that was not
that difficult for armourers to fix, but they had to take off and
re-solder the water jackets. And that would also be addressed
in the 1917A1 improvement program. We will take a look at a 1917A1 at a later date,
along with the mechanics of how this disassembles and what all of the internal pieces are doing,
but I think that's about it for this time. That's about all we have time for. Well, if you collect World War Two firearms, especially
machine guns, and you want the absolute cream of the crop, this is quite a rare one to find in its
actual original World War One configuration. So if you take a look at the description text below, you'll
find a link to the James Julia catalogue page for this guy. That'll give you their pictures,
their description, their value estimate, everything else you would need to
place a bid on it in the upcoming auction. It is of course a fully transferable, curio and relic,
eligible, NFA registered machine gun. So as long as you're willing to go through
the NFA process to own it, it could be yours. Thanks for watching.
Gun jesus
This guy is awesome for ww1 knowledge, gets super in depth and sometimes gets the chance to use the weapons as well.
There’s no way one person could carry that, right?
Oh I never forget my M1917