Doughboy Bringback MP-18,I on the Range

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on forgottenweapons.com i'm ian mccollum and courtesy of morphes we are out here today with a very cool very exciting gun this is a german mp18 comma one and this is actually a us doughboy souvenir bring back gun this was german issue to the storm troop and at the very end of world war one and it was probably the very first submachine gun to see actual active military service i'm going to ignore the italian stuff for the moment now after the war the vast majority of these were converted over in a couple different ways they were the ones that were kept by the german government were marked 1920 to indicate weimar government ownership and they were converted to a straight 20-round system schmeicer magazine however those were not in use during the war during the war what they had was the drum magazines from artillery lugers and that's why this thing has a very sharply angled magazine well is because the luger magazine here is intended to go into a luger grip let me put that there that's what you've got these are really complex overly expensive and generally not nearly as reliable as the magazines that replace them so i've got i think about 20 rounds in it this is actually a reproduction drum this gun has a legit original drum and original loader with it as well as a reproduction drum and reproduction loader and i'm using the reproduction drum here today so you'll notice there is a spacer on here uh that's to make sure that it fits just at the right right length inside the magazine well this should be an interesting gun to shoot so let's find out open bolt only uh full auto only there is no semi-auto position on it that is a really gentle shooting gun it just pop up pop pop pop pop it's really nice [Music] and i am now out of ammo so let's take a look at how we actually reload this magazine because it's about the most complicated magazine reload you will ever see all right so got my ammunition we've got our drum by the way there is the little sheet metal sleeve that spaces it properly put that back on now we have a loading tool here this is actually an original loading tool there are reproductions out there and this has its own magazine catch and a lever for giving you spring tension uh to depress the follower because this is the equivalent of a 32 round straight luger magazine it just comes down the tower and then curls around here the luger magazine requires a loading tool to put eight rounds in it much less 32. so the first thing we're going to do is open this lever and i'm going to hand crank the spring there are actually two springs in here there's one inside the drum and then there's a second spring that's just for the feed tower the feed tower spring we're going to leave alone you just that's the equivalent of a normal lucra spring more or less this one i'm going to pre-wind and then use this button there we go to lock the spring in its fully compressed position now with that tension reduced now i can actually load the thing so we're going to go ahead and lock this onto the magazine of this is a little finicky and you just want to be careful because these are all old and very complex parts so i'm not going to load this to capacity you may have seen the tag here the previous owner of this gun suggests 25 rounds maximum and i'm going to do probably 20 to 25 somewhere in there so because we have removed most of the tension well the first round goes in easy then we'll pull the lever down and then i can put a round in i let the lever up and push the round the rest of the way into the feed lips so down round goes in push it in and we're just going to repeat this process in theory 32 times but for our purposes today more like 20. now a team actually using one of these guns in combat had a chest with a whole bunch of pre-loaded magazines because this is not something that you want to try and do in the dark in the enemy trench and they actually had ammo bearers for the guy with the submachine gun kind of like light machine guns were considered uh you know crew served weapons in some ways the mp18 was also a crew-served weapon because of the complexity of these magazines what i'm going to do now is open up the lever i'm going to pop this back and unlock it if you forget to do this you have no spring tension on your magazine and the gun just won't fire so pop that and then this lever is going to unwind to however many rounds i've loaded in this case i thought i had 22 but it looks like i've got about 20 in there this lever will continue will rotate uh the rest of the way back to 12 as you shoot the gun so if it's all the way loaded it stays up here and it just rotates around as you empty it it's a finicky process but at least from that first magazine full i would say it is totally worth the time all right all right it's time consuming and complicated to load this thing but like i said it's worth it the one safety on this gun is the safety notch on the receiver there is no fire selector there is no manual safety catch it's full auto or nothing it really is just remarkably smooth to shoot it's too bad that this overhanging drum is so counter you know so off balance on the gun i have done a little bit of shooting with one of the schmeiser magazine conversions and i want to say this is actually a little more pleasant because it has a little bit of a slower rate of fire that comes from the tension in the magazine the issue is because there's so much tension in here when the bolt goes to strip around off of the top of the magazine it takes a lot of force to push that round forward and that actually slows down the rate of fire and i think i am yep wow that is awesome i am out went through i mean it wasn't fully loaded but went through the whole mag without a single malfunction it's almost like the germans know how to build submachine guns or something i can totally understand why some doughboy chose to bring this back i'm a little surprised a lot more of them didn't because these things are fantastic all right i've got one more drum worth of ammunition you can see my target now my various uh unsuspecting bowling pins which i may or may not be able to hit because i have no idea how well zero this particular gun is but you know i'm just going to empty the drum so i'll say it right now big thanks to morphes for giving me access to shoot this for you guys these are extremely rare guns to find uh in their original world war one configuration they're over 100 years old now which is kind of crazy anyway hopefully you guys enjoy the video thanks for watching i hit a couple of them

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 254,589

Rating: 4.9862337 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, mp18, smg, submachine gun, 9mm, liger, drum, snail drum, ww1, world war, Great War, sturmtruppen, Germany, German, american, souvenir, rate of fire, schmeisser, villar peros a, thompson

Id: T8r6OxScnHg

Length: 8min 11sec (491 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 21 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Thunda792]

Ian, you lucky bastard...

[u/theBritishGuy03]

I never knew the gun would b that large

[u/RaDeus]

I've never considered how much the magazine could impact the rate of fire of a gun.