Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, I'm here today at the National Firearms Centre. This is part of the British Royal Armouries in Leeds, and today we are taking a look at an
Extra-Light model of Maxim machine gun. This is actually an air-cooled Maxim which is, well, they didn't make very many models of air-cooled guns. One of the distinctive features about
the Maxim was its distinctive water jacket. However around 1895 the Colt Company
in the United States introduced the air-cooled Colt-Browning machine gun, and that thing
started to look fairly appealing to a lot of militaries because it was a pretty lightweight
gun compared to the Maxim. So most of the Maxim guns out there
were over 100 pounds with their mounts, and the Colt was substantially
less, like half that weight. So in order to try and and compete Hiram Maxim put together an air-cooled extra
lightweight version of his gun, and this is one of them. ... There is still a jacket out here because
in order for the the Maxim system to work, you have to support the muzzle of the
barrel as well as the rear end of the barrel, so that the barrel can reciprocate back and forth.
That's why he couldn't just leave the brass off entirely. However, he maybe didn't quite do the best version
of this for an air-cooled jacket that he could have. We'll touch on that in a moment. At any rate the idea here was, aside from
just being lighter and this comes in at between 27 and 28 pounds for the gun, which
is like half the weight of a typical Maxim. And then not much more with the tripod,
it's like 44.5 pounds with the tripod. So there's actually a rather famous picture
of Hiram Maxim, a published picture of him, holding one of these with its tripod out
at arm's length, just to prove that he could. Now, 44.5 pounds out there, he probably didn't hold it
very long, but it made for a really good publicity photo. The Maxim company was hoping... Like their
intended market for this thing was really cavalry, because without the water jacket ... it didn't
have the same sustained fire capability as a typical standard Maxim. It was
still belt-fed, it still had the rate of fire, it had the potential firepower, but it would overheat
fairly quickly because, well, it wasn't very well cooled. So the idea was give it to cavalry who are
going to use it for sort of hit-and-run things, where they're not going to be
needing really sustained fire. The coolest thing that they did with this was actually
a two-person tricycle, or a tricycle that held two of these guns at the back and had like
folding tripod stabiliser legs. It's extremely cool. But anyway, ... there's really one main change that they made
between the standard Maxim and this, aside from air-cooling. Let me go ahead and show you that on the inside. One of the coolest things about early Maxims like this is the awesome
brasswork and the markings on them, which are really neat. So this one is no exception. Maxim's Patent. At
this point they had amalgamated with Nordenfelt and so this is the Maxim
Nordenfelt Company, in London. Maxim guns were numbered sequentially from the very first
production through, they didn't start new numbers for new contracts. So this is actually the 5,414th Maxim gun
manufactured. These were made in 1895. I'm sorry, it's Maxim Nordenfelt
Guns and Ammunition Company. And then the specifics of the cartridge are
marked a little farther down on the jacket, This is in .303 British for the British military, which is probably part of why this one ended up
in the Pattern Room collection, and now the NFC. Because it was so lightweight, they made sure to
mark that on the jacket so that you didn't forget it. It's apparently a little closer
to 28 pounds, but it's marked 27. Now I mentioned that the jacket had to be on the barrel
in order to make the gun work, to support the muzzle. However, it is odd that
it's not ventilated on the top. There are only four ventilation holes and
they're only on the bottom of the water jacket, well, the air jacket now. And this was really the
main problem with the ... Extra-Light Maxim is that the barrel was relatively heavy, but once
the barrel heated up all that heat stayed inside this brass jacket, and it really had
no good way to dissipate or be cooled. You wouldn't think that it would take that
much of a leap to drill more holes in the jacket, but that's one of the things about
early developmental guns. This is 1895, there weren't any recoil operated air-cooled machine
guns out there at all. This was the first of them, so we have to give some leeway to people who
are having to come up with entirely new concepts. Even when those concepts look
to us really obvious in retrospect. We're the ones who get to look at everything that
already exists, and then decide how obvious it is. So of course this thing is mounted on a little pedestal here
and I'm leaving it on that mount. That's why that's down there. Because this is such a narrow gun
it doesn't have spade grips on it, it has a single, rather somewhat modern,
like, pistol grip with a regular trigger. We have a safety lever here that in the upward position
physically locks the trigger, so that's your safety. This pattern was one of the first to
actually use the roller bearing back here. The earlier black powder Maxims had a solid
flat stop that the the crank handle would run into. On this one you have a much smoother operation
with the curved surface here and the roller bearing. And of course Maxim patented all of this sort of
stuff as he went along in the development process. If you're familiar with the Maxim and Vickers guns,
you will notice that while this has a roller bearing, it doesn't have the anti-bounce lock on it that
you would see for example on Vickers guns. That will come later. That's the next subsequent
development that hasn't happened when this one's being built. Again, in light of this being a slicked up, lightened
and shrunk down Maxim gun, instead of having a big vertical tangent sight on the top cover, they instead
have a sight mounted here on the very back plate. This one is unfortunately stuck in place, but there's a little locking
screw down here and then you can slide this up and down. Have a little range scale there on the back to set the range
out to 2,000 metres, or 2,000 yards it would have been here. The rear sight is a little V notch
there, offset to the left side of the gun so that you can still clear the latch to
open the top cover here, because this lifts up like that, so you
do need some space there. And then the front sight is just a big, basically
conical, peg stuck into the very front of the top cover. Now what you may have noticed is missing is
the ... fusee spring and cover here on the side. That is the major difference between this and a standard
pattern of Maxim gun (aside from the size and the water). They moved the fusee spring to
the inside. So I can open this up, just like a typical Maxim
the whole top cover lifts off. And there you can see our main
spring on the inside of the gun. Now one might ask, why didn't they
do this as standard for all the Maxims? It seems like a real advantage
to have that spring on the inside instead of hanging out on the outside
of the gun where it can be damaged or, you know, just get in the way
and make the whole gun wider. Well, there are a couple of reasons. One of them is you can't easily remove the lock in this gun
without first having to remove the spring, which is a bit annoying. You also don't have any way to adjust the
tension on that spring. And that was one of the big considerations with the Maxim gun in
an era when ammunition was in particular not ... necessarily all that consistent, certainly not as
consistent as we have come to be used to today. You needed a way to be able to adjust the
tension to get the guns to run at the proper, well, proper harmonic, to get them to run
correctly. And with this you don't have that option. So these guns were, you know, the
factory sets it up and that's what you get. And if your ammo is too heavy or
too light you're kind of just out of luck. And that does make sense to me why this would not be continued,
this particular feature, in the standard pattern guns. Aside from that difference, this is
going to run like a standard Maxim gun. So we have, of course, the whole cycle of the toggle lock there, ... back. There is no top pin on this, by the way,
which is also a little bit of a development departure. So on this one, as soon as you open the top cover, the pistol grip can pivot down
on a single pin at the bottom. On normal Maxims there is a second
pin up here to hold this in place. And that's one of the things that just
had to be gotten rid of to lighten the gun up. So to have a second pin here
would require a metal block up here. They shaved weight on this everywhere
that they could get away with it, they had to. As with a typical Maxim we can just slide
the feed block right out of the receiver there, and it's one of the really cool early cast
brass, really quite beautiful feed block styles. You ... actually have rollers
here to ease the feeding of the belt. This lever drops the cartridge stop in there, which
allows you to pull out a belt that still has cartridges in it. And then, of course, we have the barrel here, the
brass trunnion there, and when the gun recoils like so you can see this action arm comes back. That action arm locks into this lug
so that as the action arm moves, the feed block here cycles in and
out to pull cartridges into the gun. In total they only made 135 of these guns.
It was a complete commercial failure. Virtually all the ones that they did make were sold
in little orders of one and two all over the world. And that's kind of typical of especially the
very early Maxims. A lot of countries were interested but sceptical, and thought well
we'll give this a try, but they're pretty expensive and I don't know that we want to, you know, buy 1,000
of them to equip the entire military right off the bat. We'll just start by ordering one or two. And that was
pretty much the story for all of these Extra-Light guns. They didn't last very long. They were actually tested by
the US military, who rather liked them but found the sustained fire capacity insufficient for US use. So they
did keep Maxim in the US trials, at least for a little while, which would turn out well for Maxim
because in 1904 the US Army would adopt a heavy full-sized standard water-
cooled Maxim for the United States. Never saw that much use, we never had all that many of them,
but this was part of the process in getting that gun adopted, so. This is, of course, at the
National Firearms Centre in Leeds, and I'd like to give a big thanks to them
for giving me access to show it to you. 135 of them made, I don't know how
many survive but it's not very many, and it's a really cool, unusual
pattern of Maxim gun. So if you're interested in visiting the NFC, they have
perhaps the best gun collection in Western Europe. It is accessible not to the general public, but
it is accessible by appointment to researchers. So if ... you have a good reason to
come in here and poke through their guns, call them up, in fact there's a link to their
website in the description below, and they will be very friendly people and do their
best to accommodate your visit. Thanks for watching.
