Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be selling during their upcoming September of 2017 Premier Auction. And today we're going to take a look at a French light machine gun. This is a Model of 24/29 Châtellerault machine gun. And to properly understand this we need
to go back to the end of World War One. Now during World War One most of France's small arms, their rifles, their machine guns, their pistols, their submachine guns, (well, they didn't have a submachine gun), most of this stuff was pretty much thrown together during the war. Where other countries came in with some pretty decent guns, the French came in with the Lebel, which was already obsolete. They adapted their cavalry carbine, the Berthier, to
take its place, sort of, as a replacement infantry rifle. They never did have a submachine gun. They used
a smattering of, like, 8 different types of handguns. They didn't even have a light machine gun when
the war started, although to be fair most people didn't. What they came up with during the war was
the 1915 Chauchat, which was not an ideal gun. Very much like the Sten, it was
clearly a design born of necessity. There were a ton of them manufactured and they did
their job well, but they were clearly not an ideal gun. So at the end of World War One, in fact by 1921, France
had actually started a serious rearmament program. They wanted to come up with basically a
completely new slate of small arms for the Army, to replace all of this weird junk that they'd
been using during the First World War. And the light machine gun was really
on the top of the priority list there. The light machine gun had proved itself to be an
extremely useful type of weapon during the war. They had a really bad light machine gun, relatively speaking,
all things being equal. And they wanted a new one. So the development of a new bolt action
rifle, of a new semi-auto rifle, new pistols, new submachine gun, all that stuff would
kind of languish until the mid to late 1930s, but the light machine gun got done. So ... testing began almost immediately. In 1923 the
French government held a series of competitive tests of pretty much all of the light machine guns
that were out there and available at the time. So they tested the Hotchkiss light machine gun,
the Vickers-Berthier light machine gun, the BAR, a couple French Saint-Étienne manufactured copies of
the BAR, the Madsen, the Lewis, pretty much everything. And they came to the conclusion that
the BAR was the best of the bunch, so they started to look into
what it would take to get the BAR. And what they wanted was the technical package
because they wanted to manufacture it in France. If another war broke out they did not want to be
dependent on anyone else to supply them with a critical type of weapon like a light
machine gun. Well, that didn't work out. I don't know exactly what Colt wanted for
royalties to licence production of the BAR, but it was too much for the French to accept, and so they
turned down that idea. And they needed something new. Well, the idea came up from
one of the testing officers of, "Why don't we take the Châtellerault
arsenal, and we'll just design a new gun." And let's be honest here, part of the rationale
for this was they'd just finished a trial of looking at pretty much everything
that was available on the market, they're going to take the best elements
of every gun that they can come up with, and create a new light machine gun
using all of those ideal elements. This is kind of like what the Japanese did with the Arisaka,
the ... Type 30 Arisaka, they sent out a commission, they looked at everything that was on the
market, they took the best ideas they could, and combined them into their own gun which they
made themselves without paying royalties to anybody. That's exactly what the French wanted to do with this. And they did a pretty darn good job of it. So this looks like a more modern gun than it actually is. If you look at this, a lot of people are going to say,
"Oh, it looks like a Bren", or "It looks like a Nambu." These are guns from the 1930s, when the Châtellerault here, this
design, the first prototype was finished in 1923, mid to late1923. And it didn't really change, it stayed in
French reserve armouries until the 1980s, it was used, or kept, by the Gendarmerie until 2004. This is a very long-lived gun, and it lived on in basically
the exact same configuration that it was first made in. So if we are to judge this gun by the state of machine gun
development in 1924, it's really quite a substantial accomplishment. Now, it's not quite perfect, it does have
a number of elements to it where you go, "Oh, you know that's pretty good, but it could have been a little
bit better. You could improve this, you can improve that." It is generally a not very well known gun because
the French didn't really sell these to anybody, which is kind of typical of the French military industry. It is state
run, the vast majority of it, and they don't do a lot of exporting. So these were used by French
colonies in Africa, but that's about it. As a result there's not a lot of experience
that people have seeing these in other places, or other militaries getting a
chance to experiment with them. Now there's one other thing we need to talk about before
we can start taking this apart, and that's the cartridge. This is chambered for the 7.5x54mm French cartridge. It's very similar to 7.62 NATO, slightly
lighter bullet, slightly lower velocity. This actually began as the 7.5x58mm French cartridge which
was developed in the early 1920s, it was adopted in 1924. The development and the testing was kind of going on in
tandem with the development of this light machine gun. And this was the most important single element
of the ... new French armaments program, because up until this point they had been
basically hobbled by the 8mm Lebel cartridge. That thing had a really big rim, a really heavy taper, and it
was extremely impractical for use in detachable magazines, belts, all manner of repeating firearms.
The 8 Lebel cartridge was not ideal. It was adopted in a rush and they weren't
able to get rid of it before World War One. They weren't able to get rid of it during the war.
When the war ended that thing was done, they're finally going to take this opportunity
to get rid of that 8mm Lebel cartridge. So, they developed the 7.5 French. It's rimless, it's pretty
much straight walled, it looks very much like 7.62 NATO. It's an excellent cartridge - except for one thing. The original 7.5 French, as I said, was 7.5x58mm. Now the
French had also, in addition to what they were developing, they had taken a lot of military equipment
as basically war retribution from Germany. And this included like a lot of Maxim guns,
German Maxim guns in 8mm Mauser. These were being used by French military units
in the colonies, anyone who wasn't frontline. There are a lot of these Maxims floating
around, they make great reserve troop armament. So, what they started having problems with was
people blowing up new 7.5 machine guns and rifles. And after a little investigation what they discovered
was the cartridge looks very similar to 8mm Mauser in its original incarnation. And it will in fact
chamber in a 7.5x58mm, a 1924 pattern chamber. So the problem they had was units that were using
8mm Mauser for some guns and 7.5 for others, the ammunition got swapped. And if you take an 8mm round,
load it into this magazine, chamber it (this is the 1924 version), it'll go in, and then when you pull the trigger you're
trying to squeeze an 8mm bullet down a 7.5mm barrel, and it causes massive problems and seriously damages the gun.
Hopefully not the shooter, but possibly the shooter at the same time. We still see the same thing today, by the way.
If you shoot 5.56 and .300 Blackout in your ARs, be very careful of which ammunition is
going into which gun. Because a .300 Blackout in a .223 chamber, will chamber, and it will
detonate, and it will do nasty things to your rifle. Same thing is exactly what was going on here. The
solution was to shorten the 7.5 cartridge by 4mm. When they dropped it down from 58mm to 54, it was
now short enough that an 8mm Mauser cartridge would not successfully chamber
in the gun. Problem is solved. So in 1929 the Châtellerault machine
guns that had already been made were all sent back and were
re-barelled for the new cartridge. All further development of 7.5 calibre
French arms was done in this 1929 pattern. And that's what leads us to the formal designation
for this which is "Fusil-Mitrailleur 24/29" It's adopted in '24 and then retrofitted
in '29 for the new version of the cartridge. Now, understanding all of that, let's take a closer
look at the internals of this and the little features. What they did right, what was really good in
1924, and what still could have been improved. While we're looking at this, I want you to
remember the whole time that this is a gun that was actually in combat before
the ZB-26 was even fully developed. So, ... in some ways its reputation suffers from the
fact that it's better than it should have been at the time, because it's not as good as it
could have been by the 1930s. Anyway, as far as form factor goes we're
looking at a fixed barrel light machine gun. There is no quick change barrel option on this,
that's an armourer's job and not done in the field. We have a top mounted magazine, holds 25
rounds, and a nice quick magazine release system. We have two triggers down here. The front trigger
is for semi-auto and the rear trigger is for full-auto. And we have a safety lever right here for fire and safe. The charging handle is of the non-reciprocating type. The gun of course fires from an
open bolt. So you charge the bolt open, and then push the charging handle forward and
it will stay there until you need to use it again. In accordance with the top mounted
magazine, the rear sight is offset to the left. It is a flip open sight, so when you're
not actually using it you can stow it away like this to prevent it from being
damaged or catching on anything. And we do have a tangent rear
sight that goes out to 2,000 metres. And the front sight here is of
course also offset to the left. Having learned a thing or two in World War
One, they put a nice effective dust cover on it. First off, this is currently pinned in place. It's held
in the open position so that it doesn't flop around. In order to set the dust cover up you actually
have to pull this pin that sits in that hole. So you lift this open this way to
release it, and then you can flip this over. That covers up the magazine well.
And then we pivot it down, and there is actually a locking lever right there to
hold that dust cover in place over the ejection port. Once you've got that done, this is your magazine
release button, we can actually fold that down fold the sight, lock the magazine release in
place so that it doesn't catch on anything either. And you've taken a gun that has a lot of stuff hanging off
of it, and you've actually made it relatively smooth sided. Now should you need to actually engage the
gun, you don't have to mess around with this. What you do is hit that switch, this comes up, drop that over and it locks in place,
and when you lock in a magazine the magazine release button automatically
pops up ready to use when you need it. One other feature that I particularly like about the Châtellerault
is this chunky big grip on the bottom, handguard. ... If you think about the guns of this period, both before and
after, they typically are going to have carry handles on the top, but not any way to hold them that might allow for
shooting from the shoulder or from the hip if necessary. And the Châtellerault fixes that. This is not only a great place you can hold onto the gun
without burning yourself on any hot part of the action, it's also mounted right at the balance point.
So it's about as comfortable as it can get carrying a basically 20 pound rifle.
This is 8.9 kilos or 19.6 pounds. I much prefer this to a carry handle
on top, like the ZB-26 for example. Now the bipod on the Châtellerault
has some good features and some bad. On the good side it's a lot more stable
than the Chauchat bipod had been. It has a limited travel forward and back, so it won't
collapse on you if you push into it or pull back on it. However it does spin ... 360 degrees,
(until you hit your camera tripod stand), and it tends to just really fly around
like this when you're moving with it. However, it does also have
some limited ability to gimbal a bit, and allow you to pan and tilt the gun
without having to move the bipod feet. So, it would have been nice if it were a
little bit, honestly, a little bit less mobile. Maybe control the swing here
through some mechanical means. But you know, they got some stuff right. It's definitely better than the Chauchat bipod, and that's a good start. When not in use the bipod folds up like so. And then sits up here alongside the barrel.
In fact there are little cutouts in the feet to allow it to hook over the barrel and gas tube, like that. Disassembly is pretty easy. We'll of course start by taking
the magazine out, and then we're going to remove this screw. This is basically a pin, but it's threaded into the receiver. So. Unscrew it, there we go, and then I can just pull it out. That one pin locks in both the grip frame and
the buttstock. So with it out, both of these pieces can come off. Now that simplicity is really nice, but in one of these instances of they did
pretty good but it could have been a little better, this isn't captive, so this is an
easy piece to potentially lose. On the bright side, it's only one piece
that's necessary to hold all of this together. Once the buttstock is off, we can take
the bolt and gas piston assembly out. Those come out as a single unit, again nice and handy. Now we have our bolt, gas piston, operating rod assembly.
We also have our ejector rod which comes out and is a loose piece. This is another part where you know I guess it's
easy to replace if it breaks. It looks pretty resilient, but it's another loose piece and ... this is not a good
part of the design, so they could have done this better. I'll show you how this goes back in
when we're done taking the gun apart. The recoil spring is captive inside the gas piston. That works fine as long as the gas piston doesn't
get too hot and in this design it never really did. The place that this typically caused problems is when ... the
recoil spring was wound around the outside of the gas piston. Now mechanically this locks by having
a vertically traveling, or tilting, bolt. Our locking surface is right here on the bolt.
When it pushes back, it lifts up on this connecting pin, and it locks against this piece right
here. That's your locking shoulder. Which can be removed from the gun and
replaced. So if you have a headspace problem you don't have to worry about replacing the bolt or the
receiver, you just put in a new properly sized locking shoulder and you're good to go. You'll notice
that is a size 3 locking shoulder. I can take this down a little bit farther by poking
out the connecting pin here, which will allow me to pull the bolt off. You can see that
we have a fixed firing pin right here, That's a really good thing. This whole system
is really quite good, a bit reminiscent of the BAR. Honestly, a little bit reminiscent of the 1911 in
some ways with these two swinging toggle links. However, not quite ideal. The Czech ZB-26 would do this type of locking a little
bit better by having fewer moving parts in the system. Instead of a swinging toggle link, it had
basically a ramp built into the bolt carrier. So of course the gun fires from an open bolt, and
this fixed firing pin means that it cannot possibly fire until the bolt's in battery. Because if the
bolt's not in battery, it has moved forward, and if it's moved forward the
firing pin doesn't protrude through, so, right there. In fact the bolt is in battery at this point, and it has to travel
a little bit farther before the firing pin comes through. This is a nice resilient, safe, strong and overall a very
good action. Maybe not perfect, but really quite good. However, it's not quite perfect because,
remember, we still have this loose ejector rod. This thing actually locks into the
receiver in this little slot right there. So it goes in and then it runs through the length of the bolt
and protrudes out the front when the bolt is all the way back. It's a simple design, it's a resilient design.
The problem is, you know, it's like 90% good. Because all that's fine, except you're left with a part
that kind of falls out when you disassemble the gun. (My hands are a little greasy
here from working with this.) This can easily fall out and get lost. This ejector rod can also potentially cause
malfunctions. It is supposed to sit like this, with this side locked into the receiver, so that when the bolt
cycles backwards this protrudes out and ejects the case. However, and this was the case the first time I
disassembled this gun, it can be put in backwards like this. And if you do that it just jams up the cycling of
the gun when you try to run the bolt, so not ideal. The trigger mechanism here, as I pointed out
earlier, has two triggers. The full-auto trigger simply drops this sear at the back,
allowing the gun to fire as long as it's held. The front trigger has this disconnector mechanism
built into it, so it's going to do the same thing and drop the sear. But when you pull it all the way through it snaps over, and the sear comes back up. So here's a cool, clever bit of engineering. This is the bottom of the op rod, and the recoil
spring is held down in here inside the op rod. When this goes all the way forward,
the back of the spring is right there. And when I hook the trigger group in, this
hook goes over that pin which locks it in place, and then this hook on the front of the trigger assembly actually holds against the ... back,
I suppose it would be, of the recoil spring, forcing it to compress when the gas piston moves. So that's
what allows me to just drop this in without any spring tension. But as soon as this piece goes in, you can see it's hooked on there, Once it goes in, now when I try to pull the bolt handle back I have spring tension on it. Really quite slick and clever. And lastly to finish reassembling the gun
(I've got the ejector rod in there by the way, it would be very easy to forget and
leave that out and have no ejection), the last thing I do is I'm going to take the hook at the
top of the buttstock and hook that up in the receiver, and I've got the pistol grip hooked in there.
Those are going to come together right here, and then I just put this one connecting pin back in and thread it down. And the gun's ready to go. Well, production of these started in 1925
and it ran till after World War Two was over. In total almost 190,000 of these were manufactured,
so not a trivial amount by any stretch. As I mentioned earlier, they stayed in
French service for quite a long time. In front line service they were
eventually replaced by the belt fed AAT-52. But continued to be used for many
years after that as secondary guns. They haven't seen much use here in the United
States, there aren't a whole lot of them around here. The magazines however actually are quite readily accessible
in the US, a lot of those got imported for some reason. And by all accounts this should
be a fantastic little gun to shoot. If you're interested in having it yourself
and doing some of that shooting yourself, take a look at the description text below. You'll find a link
there to Rock Island's catalogue page on this particular example. And that will show you their pictures, their
description, their price estimates, all that sort of stuff. And if you'd like to have it you can
place a bid on-line, ... or over the phone. Or you can come here and
participate in the auction yourself, I believe the second weekend of
September, September 8th through 10th. Thanks for watching.
