in the Great War quantity often beat quality to a point so in the end was this French machine rifle a dismal failure or an overwhelming success [Music] hi I'm Matthias and this oh this guy first of all needs to be put where I can hold on guys this bipod as you're soon to learn is a little new given that there wasn't really gun quite like this at the time here we go uh I think we have it this is the fusilli meat that I use si s RG model 1915 this is the much-maligned show Shaw automatic rifle so let's give it over to the light box so you can get a better look at this thing and all of its Majesty's weighing it just about twenty pounds and with an overall length of 45 inches depending on whether or not you have a flash protector this is actually a very modestly sized automatic weapon it does chamber the traditional eight millimeter labelled cartridge and theoretically carries 20 in its magazine although we found that downloading is almost essential to shore operation in our experience this means 18 rounds now this gun has a somewhat complicated history and service life which has led to a great bit of misunderstanding I hope that in this episode and the next we'll be able to clean some of that up but to talk about the cs RG 1915 we first have to know what that even means show shall Sutter reveille ROI and gladiator as we will see this initialism stands for three men and a factory right out front we have Jacques Louie on rhe show Shah born in 1863 to a parisian councillor of state louie show shah was highly educated fluent in french of course but also german english and italian he graduated the Sorbonne and then the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique I'm unsure of his early military career but by 1890 he already had an official thanks on file for some torpedo development as a young officer he did seem to enjoy small arms especially that had one several rifle competitions it seems that by the turn of the century he became involved in to emerging schools of thought the first was that France needed not only a new rifle but a future-proof rifle as well you see they had adopted the labelled 1886 and made minor updates in 1893 and while it was the most advanced rifle in the world on its release that was mostly due to being the first smokeless cartridge firearm in service its single loading tube magazine was slow cumbersome in relatively weak especially when compared to the then very new German Gewehr 1898 a Mauser action with excellent strength a modern rimless cartridge which fed from a quick stripper clip into a flush staggered box magazine it was pretty dang sweet now the French had plenty of designs on hand that could compete with the Germans but what would be the point of putting this huge effort simply to match their opponent no no France would need to jump forward to develop a gun that would make them the most advanced in the world again they needed an auto loading rifle and they needed to do it in secret luckily they had a bunch of state Arsenal's that they could put to work quietly and so they did records are sometimes spotty as most weren't made public until after World War two but by 1903 we see our Louise show Shaw now an army captain set up as supervisor to the auto loading rifle project at the Ateneo de construction a toe or a px for short this was actually the development site for the famed French 75 millimeter field gun which also oddly features in our story today show Shaw's principal assistant at a px would be Charles Sutter another excellent engineer for whom we have almost no biographical data his title by 1904 was officer to administration controller the arms and he had been transferred over from the state Arsenal shot Terrell he was a master armor and skilled machinist and draftsman Joe Shaw had met Sutter in 1900 when they were both involved in the Versailles Trial committee it's likely that show Shaw had requested him specifically when starting his autoloading rifle work now I know you'd all love for me to get into explaining all French experimental rifles but here in the future we know that none would be adopted before the Great War there will be at least one notable example during the war but we have some repairs to make before that episode I know it seems obvious that if show Shawn Sutter were working on Auto loaders they would of course consider a machine gun or machine rifle variation but at that time not really because machine rifles weren't much of a thing the closest that you would have would be the Madsen a very early light machine gun that developed from a sort of machine rifle so sure I was thinking pretty far ahead when he started working on his next design with Sutter he had a belief later proved to be true that most soldiers are rather poor marksmen in a fight it would be best to give the more dynamic weapon to the best most level-headed shooters and maybe provide them with an assistant to keep the gun loaded so they could just focus on Friday firing this was a very good idea and he was happy to take the lessons he learned from the autoloading rifles and apply them to a machine rifle program this experimental show shot Sutter c7 which was never adopted used a long recoil operation and the pair of inventors would happily bring that idea over to their concurrent project for an automatic just a review long recoil was pioneered by our man John Browning his patent covering it and some other goodies appeared in 1900 and was applied to both the Remington model a trifle and the FN auto-5 shotgun now curious point I happen to have a remington license copy of that particular shotgun here known as the remington model 11 now this one is from world war ii and was used as an aerial gunnery trainer as evidenced by this factory cuts compensated whoo that's neat but we don't really care about all that we want to talk about just the long recoil action and I think this will serve my purpose today to quickly show you how that works all right gang this is a shotgun these are two snap caps well one two I'm gonna use these to show you how long we call works very simply so let me go ahead load up my very fake ammunition and I need to do this because this system will not function unless it has a cartridge in place so the normal way to operate a gun like this is to just grab our lever and pull it to the rear and then release it forward that picked up our first round right well when you fire the gun what's gonna happen is the barrel and bolt are going to recoil together and if you know some slop it's because I've taken the friction rings out so I can do this manually and not have to struggle to stay in frame so the barrel and bolt are going to recoil together so bolt barrel and they're gonna keep coming back until the bolt gets snagged at the rear and then the barrel is gonna come forward it's gonna come forward very quickly until it goes into walk now in this particular case I'm gonna hold this to the rear myself so I can show you what's supposed to happen which is that extraction is supposed to happen in a moment but because I am traveling so slow it didn't really get it opening so that would have extracted while this was still to the rear and then as soon as the barrel was home you heard that click what will happen is the bolt will carry forward and so that means that you have all this real estate behind what you're doing so let me try that again pump to the rear everything's back letter forward and this time the bolt held open because we're out of ammunition so shot works exactly the same way and it introduces some problems because you have to create all of that energy all the way back sustain it cushion it and then shove it all the way back forward with Springs there's a lot of travel versus a short recoil on lock system not that but as we'll see it has some limitations more on that later though let me set this down show shot in Sutter take this basic principle and work it in secret 1908 they had produced some six prototypes each and evolution of the next but we don't have any examples of them remaining and not a lot of drawings in 1911 however they would hit on a potential winner of a pretty much new design this would be known as the AP X c7 fucile mitzvah ruse and it was a long recoil eight millimeter labelled machine rifle a very simple construction it was test-fired in November of eleven and failed miserably due to broken locking logs not to be deterred show Shawn Sutter kept at it through 1912 and continued to suffer repeated parts breakages and out of lock firing so this would have halted their project entirely entirely but funny enough it was the only gun in the trials that was reliably feeding eight millimeter labelled we've mentioned this cartridge repeatedly but to recap it was the first smokeless cartridge and was made in such a rush that it really just is neck-down 1101 your draw unfortunately that made for a very unusual shoulder angle and a cartridge that is very difficult to feed from a detachable box magazine the new gun was really freaking light for its time as well weighing only about 11 pounds so the French government didn't get too discouraged and told them to keep added that's what really saved this thing from being scrapped despite all the problems in June of 1912 Louis show shot was promoted to lieutenant colonel and transferred to the manufacturer de armas de santa tian or moss where he would serve as assistant general manager apparently he again brought along the Sutter and the new position gave both men greater overall Authority and access to much more equipment and expertise and so both took the opportunity to refine their machine rifle by January of 1913 they had a much better specimen in hand and submitted it for trials feeding was briefly an issue but that was quickly fixed on sight within the day two prototypes were made and both fired 2,500 rounds a pop neither broke any parts in both ran well there were a few stoppages but they were quickly cleared by just cycling that bolt it was compared to the Hotchkiss portative and was found superior in many regards although it did need some more refinement for military service notably the magazines were too vulnerable to damage leading to jams the thought was since this was going to be for fortress troops only obviously just make them thicker and bulkier that little extra weight in the magazine wasn't gonna matter a lot overall the French authorities were intrigued they put in an order for a hundred for troop trials and further testing and honestly it was deserved the CS 1913 as we'll call it was a very simple firearm using new steel stamping technology and basic metal tubing plus screws and rivets to keep the assembly very easy show Shawn Sutter supervised the final changes and the start of production for their machine rifles over at Moss but in the spring of 1914 they were called back to apx because the army was reprioritizing that auto loading rifle program with Europe and upheaval the belief was a new infantry rifle would be far more important than a silly machine rifle which at best might make it on an airplane and that was a very limited and forward-thinking notion of its own at that time the now orphaned show shafts Sutter fucile Mithra use of 1913 would actually see a 180 total units produced thanks to some early wartime additional production they would be taken straight from trials into service and fielded on French aircraft exclusively ultimately they were replaced by other designs like the Lewis light machine gun and the full-sized but still fairly light Vickers many of these guns must have been lost or otherwise scrapped after the war because I only know of one left in existence in a Czech Museum very rare I'm pretty sure the army knew that they had been close to a revolutionary gun because in transferring show shot back to a px they'd given him the Legion Donner so it's pretty high accolades for his work on a gun that wasn't actually adopted anyway it's back to semi-automatic infantry rifles for the gang at least for just a few months until war were declared oh yeah and it's a nasty [ __ ] fun fact machine guns were important now France was not too terribly far behind materially in the automatic department they had adopted the rather heavy and complicated salt at the end 1907 again a gun we've called a clockwork nightmare but they had significant numbers of them what they lacked was good doctrine or training the French had largely ignored the lessons of the research Japanese war and still relied on a sort of righteous rolling mass infantry attack with heavy emphasis on alone and while that had a good basis in the Napoleonic era combined with some good old cavalry flanking it's not really good against a German with a maxim and it was terrifyingly effective seeing MgO eighths pitted against these infantry charges you could not break it no matter how determined ya german use of that machine gun was extremely surprising and costly for the French and honestly it should have been a complete massacre but they did have one thing that the Germans did not the model 1897 75 millimeter cannon this little artillery piece had great reach excellent infantry shrapnel rounds and a hydropneumatic recoil management system what made it unique was being able to fire repeatedly without renaming the gun that means an order of magnitude more shots in a minute the 75 millimeter was both a blessing and a curse to the French because it was so effective at policing no-man's land that the disparity between automatic small arms was kind of offset at the Battle of the Marne in 1914 the 75 s directed by airplane reconnaissance certainly halted the German attack but the guns were not perfect because they lacked the sheer size and power necessary to be used for attack to dismantle defensive trench works it was a much better defensive tool than offensive one and while that worked at first with Germany on the attack once the front settled down in 1915 and the trench lines were dug well those Germans went to defense in depth if the French had chosen the same the 75 would still be perfect but they chose a strategy of constant attack attacks that could not be properly supported by artillery and could not easily bring up the extremely heavy machine guns that were available at the time again this made the German Maxim's all the more effective on this particular front now as much as we may mock the French Army's lemming-like doctrine truth be told they were sort of stuck already in 1915 they were calling for production of massive 155-millimeter howitzer but the timetable was a long one was significant arrivals taking until 1917 and 1918 and as I said they had no real light machine guns or machine rifle so it's either mass infantry attack and or no attack at all and yeah Papa Joffre wasn't going to allow that he was a strong proponent of constant assault always probing for an opening what he did agree with was doubling the allocation of machine guns and ordering new production Jaffray wanted mobile firepower for his attacks that tactical consensus was one of walking fire we've talked about this in our project lightning specials but basically you've taken a machine rifle or light machine gun put it to your hip or into a special cup on your belt and trot across no-man's land shooting with every other step the notion was to suppress or even kill the enemy as you approach the trench and then once on the scene you can prevent any immediate reinforcement by using your gun like a more traditional light machine gun prone we always think of diving into the trenches but that would be done by grenades and bayonets and the machine rifle and all likelihood is used at the top to prevent people from the other side coming over and dropping in on your guys in addition to being highly mobile the gun would need to be rapidly reloadable and thanks to an overloaded Arsenal system they need to be simple and inexpensive to produce and oh boy they were going to need hundreds of thousands of these for mass attacks in a way it would be fine for them to be almost disposable since attrition was expected to be so high at this point starting to get why they made this gun yet well the army went looking for an easy light machine rifle and yep turns out they had one in stock although it would need some changes even that wasn't obvious at first because in april of 1915 jeffery read request 50,000 CS machine rifles of 1913 this would become an order in july of course they also wanted some changes the guns needed to have a sling and more mobile fixed bipod and should be set up specifically to be fielded by a two-man team a gunner and a loader let me show Sean trowel Sutter were brought back in and told to ready their gun for mass manufacture oh and they were not allowed to interrupt any current machine gun production no other lines could be affected yeah it's no problem right guys so they had to find a private manufacturer with some surplus capacity which they actually strangely managed société they seek ladies could a man a gladiator which had been founded in 1891 in Paris it had expanded from bicycles to motorcycles to automobiles rapidly but the company was bought up by British investors and 80% of those cars were moved over to England for production by 1912 what was left of the automotive field failed it was sold off so they were only doing two-wheeled vehicles and they had some extra tooling in space on hand but that's a 77 thousand square foot factory with a 650 horsepower steam power plant and as of 1914 700 employees gladiator with Shoshana Sutter's best friend so the cycle company also had a manager on hand who would prove to be critically helpful putting the R in CSR G Paul rebei Roy was yet another unsung hero once more I cannot seem to find even basic biographical data but in 1915 this mechanical engineer from that it called the arts and the tears was already 41 years of age with very important experience in adapting prototypes for easy factory manufacture this is an assembly line man by 1914 Lucho Shah was already known to be in poor health suffering illness likely brought on by a lifetime of factory fumes LED bullets and gunpowder still in late 1915 he relocated to gladiator taking up the title inspector de la fabrication Don's of the industry de armes automatics it's a lot of words and supervised both Sutter and rib a Roy in the adaptation of his mechanism all three men had the prototype ready by October 9th of 1915 and gladiator was certain that they could get production up to three hundred guns a day in just four months with two more months they would be able to see 400 a day for sure the official government contract would be signed October 20th requesting 55,000 si s RG 1915 machine rifles along with a separate request for eighty-eight more of the SI s 1913 rifles which we actually already mentioned that total of 188 now before I show you the gun which is this guy right here I need to explain two things this gun has some mid-war updates and this gun wasn't made by gladiator I'll address both of those later in this episode but for now let's get a closer look and instead of doing the usual zoom in let's take some nice little shots so that you guys can see what the heck's going on all right gang first and foremost as we go to this gun I really want to point out these screws are everywhere so we have actual screws and then we have these sort of nuts fit over top of threaded rods we have let's see right here you can see we just have a foreign piece of heat steel for a turn guard it's screwed in at the front just out of frame very rough wood grips this whole grip itself is just sheet steel with wood laid over it and then we've got just a dowel turn like a turn dowel hand grip that's just bolted straight through the center this is very very simple construction yeah let's clean up that view a little bit so again flat steel panels simple pieces of wood just a simple dowel style and then it's threaded up through the bottom and then again just another nut on the end there very very very simple construction in terms of the materials used and then just lots of assembly this whole thing is just basically two pieces of metal with a bunch of components sandwiched in and sealed up that makes it very easy to manufacture now these two are actually adjustment screws so you don't just torque them down this one and this one both have dimpled settings where you can loosen and set them back down to adjust the feed system so that you have a slightly different pickup this was part of working with that eight millimeter Laval cartridge and all the way in the system so this may have been responsible for a lot of jams if you especially have like US troops or some of it was not that familiar with how to adjust these they may have just sort of loosened and retighten them and lost the positioning although I'm going to bet that training really did knock that out after the war though in the collector's market these guys caused a lot of confusion so make sure you understand that these are for adjustment not just for torquing down now before we start getting into this gun I want you to go ahead and see we have our nice housing with our aluminum radiator down inside that is then wrapped around the barrel we also have this guy back for what you would consider to be sort of the receiver tube these are both just sheet steel tubes so again very easy components to manufacture just taking them right off of raw production and attaching to the system really speeds up production again using my patented plastic and pokey I want to point something out on this particular gun you'll see that my sight notch is here on this adjustable rear sight tangent leaf just like you guys would be used to but this gun has been modified and we're still working on when this modification happened but it looks like it was to offset some problems with the initial factory accuracy more on that later in the episode but if you look the original sight notch is right about there this is just a plate that's been added over back so as much as we enjoyed shooting these guns the thing you're gonna realize is that we actually had the benefit of this being pushed even a little bit further out and there we didn't have to hug our heads as close as the original soldiers would have to this is a very tight site to the sort of center line of the gun when you have to get your head up this close it makes it very uncomfortable to use and we'll see a lot of complaints about that later in the episode and while we're talking about ergonomics look at this guy now when you're just holding the gun he just Raggles there's there's no controlling it and the more you move the more it moves it gets tied up on your wrist it gets swung around it sort of donks and bangs and slaps and when you try to set it down if you're behind the center line it just collapses so oh trying to get the show shot bipod to behave is probably one of the more difficult operations of the gun now the magazine this is a whole other animal so we have this big exposed section here with the spring that you can see the reason for all this is twofold one the assistant gunner has to be able to see where we're at in the feed so he knows when to ready and load another magazine and then to the curvature of the 8 millimeter cartridge or rather the odd shape of the millimeter cartridge trying to go around this particular curvature means that it binds very easily and so when you're setting up the cartridges it helps a lot to be able to get in here and line them up when this gun first came out and magazine when production was lower and we see people carrying more packets of ammo and fewer magazines well that helps out because you have to be able to quickly load magazines in the field from packets of ammunition this became less helpful once you had enough magazines to ground and you were just ingesting tons of mud because of this opening so as much as people knock this window don't forget if it seems completely insane guys there may have been a contemporary reason and again having loaded these by hands I'm gonna tell you it's much easier with the window I would this window is my favorite thing about running this gun just because without it I would have never gotten these mag stacked in nearly the same amount of time now they did add some features at a time there's a hole here where you can put the bullet tip of an 8 millimeter cartridge through in order to hold the follower all the way in the down position I am probably not able to really replicate that without pinching myself but essentially this guy would come all the way around there's a hole in the working backwards on monitor there's a hole in here that lines up the hole in there so what's up snap in my area in terms of actually releasing and attaching the magazine cover this in project lightning but it's really easy it'll fall free when you push forward not so much down but forward and the letter and it comes out real positively it's beautiful that way and then you get her in you just have to pay attention to this little cleat right here set her up it's by the way that the simplicity of construction is that that component is really lumisi where my point focuses is just the floor plate being extended a little bit and yet that little extension helps all much more because you can just get her in there get her forward till she stops and swing her on up and she clicks right into place that's actually a very good magazine system other than the fact of the cartridge and trying to deal with these large openings in the middle of a muddy battlefield I should probably talk about how the gun actually works now this is an open bolt system so right now we could not fire the gun this has already been discharged so we have to draw her to the real oops I'm up under the gun I can't do that there we go I have to leave myself room to do what I'm doing so open bolt is where she fires from that helps to keep the action cool while we're running in the field so that means again you're trying to shed heat as much as possible on this and it's a little simpler of an operation to set up this way and just go ahead and let it vent air through the barrel at both ends whenever you're not firing and with the low rate of fire on this gun you're not firing almost as much as you're firing even in full auto so that's sort of an advantage now the trigger itself is extremely heavy and I don't want to just dry fire this so I'm just gonna let it right forward and she's gonna drop all this watch that bolt head as it rotates and the body comes up closes behind there's our full lock now this is a long recoil action but I cannot actually demonstrate that here because it's all shrouded I can't push down on it with enough force but we already saw that from the auto five okay so I guess we should probably talk about how the heck to control this thing alright guys this is the user interface device we have three positions if we set this guy all the way and again I'm working backwards in the monitor all the way forward for s for safe all right or the French word for safe everybody yells at me for my French but I'll try it anyway because M here in the middle is tanaya's so that's our automatic setting that means banga banga banga banga banga and then at the back C is actually Cooper coop so shot-by-shot that would be semi-auto I think it says deliberate as you can get in that regard now this particular selector is stiff you can overpower it or you can lift on it and move you can tell it's sort of been wearing a groove over the years that may or may not have been factory but there's a dimple at each stage it's very positive it sets in nicely it's a big obvious switch and you're very unlikely to get into a mid position and have it wander on you you pretty much setup where you're going to set up I have noticed over a couple of show shots though that internally the way this assemblies put together it does tend to wear and so if you are a show shop owner or would like to be paid close attention this because very often you end up a situation like this gun so if I charge it not that you can see that and I pull the trigger in automatic this gun is going nowhere and I have seen this on at least four show shows now because of the way these parts link together so this can be repaired it takes someone where they find ends so marks getting pretty good at these but that is one potential weakness and it may be why we hear so many jams in these guns is because one of the first things that you'll see is that instead of actually dropping it you'll start to see the action rise up a little bit no this one's not quite doing it so badly but we had that problem in project lightning with a totally different gun as well so one potential weakness in this platform to begin disassembly we are going to need to put this bolt in the forward position to let off some that spring tension so all the way down nice and gentle now we're gonna open up this tube and to do so we have to depress this little lever so if I hold that down this is free too right and I can rotate it like this casually for a moment but eventually that spring tensions gonna catch up to me so I'm actually putting if you watch I'm actually putting a fair amount of pressure into my hand to make sure that this isn't gonna go flying so just wind it down it's a very big coarse thread that still takes places and there's the tension all right we reposition so that you guys can see better without me flopping my gun around and we have two Springs in here that's because this is a long recoil system there's our outer there's our inner and we'll see these a little bit better than animation I'm not gonna go crazy trying to show you this giant mechanism on the table next up we're gonna press in on this button now normally this would have sort of a split ring spring on it but that has apparently been lost in the past hundred years or so so I'm gonna be able to push this in it'll stay if you're still has the spring you're gonna need to push and hold so push and then go to the other side here's the other side right here and I'm going to push that head over that little cross piece that Wiggles in there so I'm pushing it that way and I rotate er so that she is in line with the pin that way she can be driven through so if I were to push on this and then you can't get through the other side it's a bit sticky after century or so I've got my pin out and we're ready to rock and roll now essentially we have a tube attached to a rectangle and we've detached the rear we have to detach the front which was done by this 90 degree angled key right here you literally just have to grab this guy and drive him down now these can be very loose or very tight good lord yeah and if they're very very tight we luckily have the persuader now I'm not saying go crazy but a couple little taps gentle gentle get it started and then we are down this gun is uniquely tight and it's probably been more recently serviced and most of these turn very easily with that done you can just lift this whole action up but as you're going to see we're snagged let me show you that in better detail right there if you see this guy it's not so much a problem taking the gun apart because you just have to go to the rear and she'll slide right out but when you go to put it together you gotta get this just right let me just lift and that falls free this leaves us with just the inner frame which as Ian warned us in project lightning this is very sharp do not cut yourself on this this was not machined in a way that was favorable to the soldier this was a machine in a way that was favorable to just plain assembly so I'm going to take this whole thing and set it aside all right just to orient you this is our rear sight we are now upside down this was our charging handle this is our little Raceway that was flopping around and what we want to do is lift this whole thing out now in order to do that I have to slide down and show you that there's a opening at the rear of the gun so we can start to pull this barrel assembly out as we do we're gonna get a couple bits and bobs so first of all this ring may or may not have fallen out when we first took all the springs image to right along this far but be aware don't lose it so as we come back we can now lift this guy straight out he was just being held on by a singular log right there that has now freed the rest of this stuff to come out the rear and if I pull it out all at once we're gonna start to see some cool stuff so let me just you know what second guys there there's our aluminum radiator and if we look we now just have this steel tube with some stuff added onto it very simple construction I'm gonna put this aside all right what you're looking at now is the barrel with a sort of shrouded barrel assembly like you would see on say like at c96 pistol our locking lugs are actually in here this is all the locking this is the business of the gun our locking lugs are in here our bolts in here at bolt head with its locking lugs are in here everything's here we have a barrel that's sleeve down inside this aluminum radiator that I'm not going to press off but yes the barrels down in there and you can tell now by the way just how short this is so let me get that in the frame you're really looking at from here to here for your barrel these are not long barrel guns so I'm going to back this up and show you right in there is our bolt we can draw it to the rear so unlock as we pull in that rear tail and we're free and that's really it there's our lock there's our Raceway on the other side I'm really just showing this so that you can get an idea of it in real life for our animation I am NOT going to go into the actual principles of the gun here but you can see if I'm settled in the right spot I can't compress if I come over suddenly I'm slipping down now we talked about this in project lightning but to get this gun back together you have to do two unique things that I should probably mention the first we sword already did which is that this Raceway has to be juggled into place at the same time as dropping the barrel in it's a bit of a three handed thing but it's not that difficult the other issue is here with the bolt and a lot of people kind of have issues getting this guy in but if you have the assembly it nice and out and clean and a little bit more exposed than we did in lightning when we're in a hurry to just get to the bolt well you can take this guy you can set him until this stud right here see that little stud you can set him until the stud drops down give me one second to find the spot alright so my studs dropped I can hold the stud as a control to keep the bolt from collapsing and then I can get the bolt into place so I can line her up then once the stud that clears the receiver the stud holds the bolt in extension like it's supposed to be we drive in rotate on to our lugs and once we've rotated on to our lugs I'm sorry guys once for you so let's say by the way it doesn't matter the orientation so the bolt can go three and 60° I'm just twirling in there what matters is that as we come in we go ahead and we align it correctly with the extractor to the outside to the port that's your big clues the extractor lines up and then you push that in and she's in walk nice and easy so this is basically our show Shaw sandwich we have our lower assembly our upper assembly and then all this Billy bibs between if we look at it as a filled disassembled machine gun we've got maybe two problem spots which is these two guys this one's not so bad but this is pretty small pin on later versions we'll see that this is captive so that works out really well and then it's really just big big barrel and locking lugs barrel extension we've got big big Springs and big big spud we've got big old giant bolt that's all one big piece with the bolt head retained so it doesn't come completely off and then we have this nice little pre program to guide rod and that's it so realistically this is one of the better points of the show shot not a lot to lose in the field still very easy to get an in-service all right now if you're still not satisfied with all this don't worry because we have an animation provided by One V BBS my tea for you to enjoy here we can already see the long recoil action with the bolt and Barrel going to the rear together as you can see there is a breech latch which holds the bolt until the barrel is all the way forward at which point the bolt is either held for semi-auto fire or immediately released in automatic the system is fired by two concentric Springs at the rear one pressing on an extension of the bolt body and the other on the breech sleeve which is in turn attached to the barrel sleeve walking is achieved by a set of logs on the bolt head these turn into mortises in the breech sleeve the camming action comes from a set of lugs marked in red which are attached to the tail of the bolt head these riding grooves in the bolt body which rotate the bolt head into lock as the body and head come together at the end of the forward stroke the same stroke also drives the firing pin into the cartridge discharging the weapon once empty the system does not actually lock open instead that feeding ram catches the follower and stays in place just shy of being fully locked open so you would have to recharge the system before loading another magazine you may wonder why the bolt body does not collapse into the bolt head prematurely you see that little yellow pin it's keeping them apart set into a notch in the bolt heads tail that is until it's allowed space in the breech sleeve to rise once the bolt head is seated clearing the way for the bolt body to spring forward note the grace lighting cam track this is known as the cartridge guide rod which works on a roller represented in pink this raises in lower as a tipping cartridge guide ramp which helps direct the tip of the next round but then dives out of the way of the feed piece which is a ram an extension under the bolt that shoves the first round forward and upwards into the path of the actual bolt now this part could be shorter but it also acts on the barrel lock which keeps the system from bouncing the trigger and select fire mechanism is a bit odd to understand pull the trigger to drive the transfer bar represented in blue rearward which tips the green hand sear which is pressed up against an extension of reach sleeve at the top only when in battery so this is sort of a safety mechanism as well the hand sear tips the sear lever that trapezoid looking block which in turn tips the actual sear or breach catch releasing the bolt well on recoil the hand is freed in the rear spring drives the whole system upwards allowing the breech to be caught again by the sear and releasing it once the breech sleeve extension is all the way home so long as you hold the trigger and semi-auto the selector represented by the brown block is turned to prevent the transfer bar from rising and so the hand is allowed to slip over it which makes the shooter release the trigger to fire again and safe the brown block simply prevents the lever from tipping at all alright I think that it has this covered from most of the internals of this gun however I can let it play for just a bit longer so you get another look all right let's get over to May for demonstration this system [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] now I'm just a quick note on these magazines every source I see has said that this gun takes 20 rounds we did a whole thing with anvil where he tries to squeeze 20 rounds on this and it was abysmal 19 does fit but it feeds like crud and when I look at old photos well mostly I see them with 18 rounds in there I think I found one with 19 rounds and you actually see a few with even fewer rounds because they likely had shot a few so I'm gonna call it that the most common loading was probably actually 18 rounds thanks to the show Shaw contract gladiator became a beehive of activity it swelled to 1,800 workers and over time saw to 11 hour work shifts back to back six days a week locals say they could hear the guns being test-fired day and night now this didn't come easy we're already well into the war so materials and tooling weren't short supply equipment was obtained quietly from Switzerland and more loudly from the United States like other industries facing labor shortages gladiator happily employed women with them representing nearly 50% of the labor on the floor rib a Roy had made certain that the new rifle could be assembled by just about anyone regardless of their experience in the firearms industry you just had to trust in the assembly line most of the components were produced in-house the barrels however came from the Arsenal at Sheppard are all at first these were discarded labelled barrels ones that had been damaged near the muzzle which could be trimmed back for the show Shaw thanks to that shorter overall barrel length the Jo provided the barrel housings and a handful of smaller non-critical parts came from subcontractors we're talking like sling swivels magazines were produced by both gladiator and a number of other contractors and rose to nearly 10,000 a day by 1918 while gladiator had promised rapid tool up to production they just could not beat the panic market and so by May of 1916 leave 500 for guns were delivered out of what was supposed to be 17400 promised hmm the first guns off the line were not especially good reports from the front poured in complaining of poor extraction broken bolts broken bolt head stops cartridge guide rods detaching and easily damaged magazines it's the second time we've heard that while not ideal most of these issues were solved with things like proper parts hardening and minor dimensional changes these were wrapped up by the summer of 1916 only the magazine right here would prove to be a recurring issue gladiator was still behind in production but Joffrey was very enthused by what the guns he did have were able to do and so ordered another 55,000 more in July putting the total request up to 110,000 by September they were catching up now roughly 26,000 guns of 51,000 promised and still not great but we're getting there like we've jumped way ahead and November total orders were increased again 230,000 then pushed further to 155 thousand although that 25,000 unit order was not given to gladiator and instead another line was sped up folks I have spent my French word budget for today so you can read this on your own at home or just go with F AM H more commonly known as soft shamone they had been an iron and steel product supplier for the french armed forces and railroads they also produced the soccer mom model dragon 75 millimeter gun and the south Sherman tank in addition to naval guns Sherman also owned a subsidiary company Society Saddam which appears to have some history producing small arms these guns would not start rolling off the line until October of 1917 and represent a minority of cs RG production as I mentioned earlier the first show shop pattern was slightly different from ours today in left a flash hider and had a disassembly collar between the radiator housing in the breech housing I'm unsure when the collar was dropped but by January 1917 this flash hider had been added this was not to prevent being spotted by the enemy or from the side rather it's meant to keep the fire from being blinded by the overwhelming muzzle flash of this gun when using it in low light it's likely that many of these guns were retrofitted with this feature later on in the war during 1917 gladdie air production rose to 600 guns per day which is just phenomenal that's amazing for an automatic at that time and right about here I have to admit to a mystery at some point either during the war or after the rear sights were changed I've seen a number of these guys I have not been able to find out when by whom but the Y is something that I can guess fairly easily and reliably the show shot was not shooting straight well it was straight it just was not zeroed well testing at the time revealed that at 200 meters the average semi-automatic group was fairly large 22 inches high and 21 inches wide still largely within the silhouette of a man vertically and only just outside horizontally but if we assume proper and Philon fire no biggie the biggie was that the guns were averaging hitting twelve inches below and 4.7 inches to the right of point of aim that's not good and meant plenty of soldiers were using Kentucky windage aiming at the top left shoulder of the enemy from their perspective now this was mainly an issue with the gladiator guns the saddam's like this guy were actually doing much better a suggested solution was proposed by an army gunsmith in March of 1917 but according to the authors I trust that was rejected mostly because each gun would have to be recited and adjusted manually as the individual deviation was too high for it to be an overall solution the problem is I think at some point it was done I've noticed a handful these guns with adjusted v-notch plates riveted to the rear of the sight note that they were pushed to the left which would mean adjusting the point of aim to match that right-hand offset which is where the guns were shooting our example that we fired for the show had this particular setup and seemed to aim much more dead-on than the book would say despite other difficulties with firing it other complaints against the show shot as well see the magazine these guys are easy as heck to deform and easy to fill with mud either we quickly put a gun out of action so in May of 1917 the competition was organized to find a better banana a number of ideas were trialed but proved to be a mix of expensive unreliable still very weak or impossible to reload and that is sort of key it's a huge pain to load these things that's thanks to the unusual shape of the millimeter little cartridge so you kind of have to have this big cutaway here just so you can steer the cartridges around the curve most people think it's just to see the ammunition and while that is true the carrier did need to see the magazine capacity and remaining capacity clearly he could probably do that without all this exposure the big part of the sheer size of this opening is how you have to manipulate those cartridges just to get them to feed quickly nearly real magazine improvement would be the addition of a hole right about here one that allowed you to use a bullet tip to hold the follower in place so you could dump load the magazine and then fiddle with it for 20 minutes and theory better steel was also put into magazine production but it's hard to see the effect the gun itself also proved prone to mud and some attempts were made to seal up the action sliding dust cover or am i right back here was actually adopted just days before the Armistice and so never saw mass production now France would not be the only consumer of the show shot rifles though Russia took in 3800 CS RG in eight millimeter labelled as aid they considered a conversion 276 - but this was never realized Romania received at least 3,500 Serbia at least 1,400 Greece also took an unknown number all in eight-millimeter but Germany and Bulgaria would feel captured guns although not often on the front line as they were not super impressed post-war Poland would receive some as aid in their fight against the Bolsheviks and he even converted some in the 1920s to eight millimeter Mauser Finland also received an unknown number before World War two now I know what you're thinking what about Belgium well oh yeah I guess maybe you know States to both of those countries had some special requests and we know the numbers for each so we can separate their production from our totals for the French for the most part which by the way those production numbers were very impressive Gladiator produced two hundred twenty seven thousand one hundred ninety c srg 1915 s saddam managed only twenty thousand 195 all of that in thirty three months of production now just to show you how crazy these numbers are by armistice thirty two thousand two hundred thirty one Lewis guns and fifty three thousand ba ours had been delivered with maybe half of those ba ours in Europe Germany had focused heavily on the mg o eight fifteen and they managed roughly one hundred and thirty thousand from the data that I have right now that's a lot more shows oz than anything else but we were talking about a gun designed specifically to be manufactured so I wonder what the cost savings were well it's not that the end heavy machine gun cost the government roughly three thousand two hundred seventy four Franck a Hotchkiss 1914 some 5902 from in the high mark the show shot at its worst cost eight hundred eighty franck roughly ten labelled rifles now here's something crazy to consider out of 247,000 and some change produced french inventories reported fifty thousand nine hundred eighty eight in service at the end of the war about 25,000 were sold or given away to allies but that's still only what seventy six thousand accounted for out of two hundred forty seven or so made that number indicates a few things a good number had not yet entered service possibly a good many were lost in combat with Gunners experiencing really high casualty rates third the CSR G 1915 s really weren't built to last honestly when we see later simpler guns like the World War two famous submachine guns well maybe the show shot was ahead of its time or maybe it was crap we're not going to find out the full story today anyway because this episode is long and I have a lot more to cover next time with another show shock so for now let's just get some handling opinions from a who's actually sat down and fired this thing all right once more we've made room for Maine and we went ahead and put the show shawl on the table and it's probably a little out of focus but don't worry about it because you're supposed to be listening to us so we have actually already previously talked about the show Shaw and other light machine guns in detail thanks to a special project that we did known as Project Lightning so this may be a bit of a recap for some of you because me and I have both expressed our opinions on this gun but let's go ahead and get some of the covered here to have a complete episode when we talk about the show shop I think looking at it people think this is an ergonomic nightmare but where are you at on that may well how do you feel about this gun so the shot is an interesting machine gun it's not what I have thought of of machine guns in the past because I've shot the Lewis gun before done the OE 1508 I mean shoot we've gotten to the Maxim's and then we get into things like the Hotchkiss portative that we did recently and then the Hotchkiss 1914 all big bulky guns never get the show shot not really bulky or big it's kind of rifle like it's very narrow it's very portable it's very light compared to everything else we've shot so far for this primer series now granted Project Lightning we did you experience the maximum or the Madsen but that's gonna be that's gonna be for later on down the road when we get to that episode now interestingly enough that narrowness that lightness that's gonna be great for hipfire you know it just it's a great straight shot I feel like I was very confident with that I feel like I can move with this gun but then the problem comes to want to go to lay prone with it it in with that bipod it's so tall that I'm just I don't know what am I supposed to be shooting at is the target on the ground or in the sky cuz I feel like I could just never get that front I could never get the front down on this gun it was really difficult no mace the size of an average soldier for the time by the way when we talk about that vibe all because this has come up a few times and I you know verrat forgotten weapons and I have had conversations about this because he swears it does better when you're in weird out of position but on flat ground it's a real pain and so even the mud even in the muck that we played with the gun in constantly the height of the bipod on the show Shaw is just the biggest enemy because it feels like you can't get that second arm back to stabilize the corner of the stock like you'd have to have a stock that had a much further drop on it in order to pick up where your hand can really grab and settle the gun it's it's so incredibly tall and I am a big person and I'm still arguing my back so far back to try to get behind that gun to get it down to a level shot so any sort of like you know if you want to shoot below the muzzles natural resting position I don't know you'd have to put it over your shoulder practically I mean is it's bizarre how its configured that way and then on top of that if you if you're thinking about not only having you're having to fight the height of that bipod but then you're trying to get up over the gun on top of that to look down the sights yes that's incredibly difficult I have a hard time how is it winding up the sights by the way you know I really thought after everything was said and done I was going to slowly learn to they're like zoom this one in I really couldn't ever put my finger on it but like no matter what either I was drilling her into the dirt or just hitting too high I always feel like my shots were all over the place on this one unfortunately I never could just get used to those sites so it's really unfortunate I constantly had to press my head tighter and tighter against the receiver wall because you can't move further back you know you got bruised by this gun I actually did yeah it gave me a nice little bruise after a day or two a project lightning but I did notice the firt the more overtop you can get on that gun that better off you're are you really are so just hook your body as far to the left as you possibly can with that one to throw yourself over the top yeah it is the most awkward shooting position of any gun I think I've ever experienced and that's kind of interesting because you said that it felt good from the hip and I would agree from my feeling I've said the show shows are the best hip shooting guns of the war including above and beyond the VAR because the BRS fire rate is so high but I'm sorry what well I was gonna add to that the only issue with the fire from the hip only one problem I found with that was where this front handle is located unfortunately because of where that is you literally are holding all the mass in the gun in just one singular place practically it's behind the center point yes it's really awkward and it's honestly it puts so much weight on your left forearm that you're just you're you're barely keeping that up easily on hipfire it's kind of revolver situation you're holding a low into the rear of the action and so once the nose down and you fire and it noses up and so don't get me wrong it has a natural sort of settling rhythm and you can get control of it really it's the sort of thing that's uncomfortable and awkward and it could be better but you get the rhythm of it pretty fast like I can do pretty good groups hit firing a chair shot it's actually kind of impressive how easy it is to hit by this gun because of that low rate of fire but I agree that grip too close we might see an improvement of that next episode one other thing I really actually I did want to mention one of the really good positive thing about the show shot in terms of features and that was that mag release honestly I thought it was really positive very easy to use and you could get really fast that I mean Ian showed us you know he showed us on that one but you could get so quick with that it was really nice yeah I would definitely agree on the magazine so okay ergonomics it's narrower than you would think it's lighter than you would think it works from the hip it's a pain in the butt on the ground we've kind of wandered into firing a bit by talking about the sights but what do you think about actually pulling the trigger on this guy it's kind of sad that it's a machine gun and that automatic fire on this particular machine gun is practically useless because your first shot you know Lord help you it's in the center if you manage to do that the next shots gonna be up it's gonna be the head or above that goodness knows where it's gonna go it's gonna be practically vertical so at least there's that I could probably draw a line with it on the target but the problem is is that it's just no way to hit that second third shot in full auto fire like on target very easily I really can say that was quite difficult it's better in semi when we hear this problem we usually think that it's because of the power of the cartridge and the light weight or odd economics of the gun and don't get me wrong it's a powerful cartridge and the gun has very odd ergonomics but most of that feeling of missing I would say in May it's up to you to agree with me or not on this one it's not the cartridge it's not the recoil itself it's the mass of the long recoil action it's just throwing so much metal back and forth it's like those water wigglers from KB toys back in the day where they just sort of have this weird Wiggly you're trying to hold on to it this gun squirms oh yeah it squirms to the point that it squirmed you out of position even if you I don't know about you of thighs but it was constantly bucking my elbow like back and around to the point that I had to resettle a few times just to even keep to where I was originally in place no I'd say almost every shot you had to almost reset position and for me as large as I am I'd get maybe three shots and then I'd have to kind of settle myself back into position it's an odd gun to use it really just wants to destabilize you I agree so okay it smack you in the face it's hard recoiling do you feel like it was terribly accurate now we shot this for our episode in a much shorter distance because we learned something from our project lightning so we fired this gun both at 50 and a hundred yards which distance would you like to use it at is 10 yards an option because I feel like I feel like 10 yards is the way to go with this one because it's seriously it doesn't do well at 100 doesn't do well at 50 it does better walking fire at long distance which is saying something that's incredibly bad but yeah I guess closer is always better with this one is what I learned it you just have no clue for telling how far up or down your shots are gonna go on this one it's dip it's really difficult guys yes siting on these guns from the factory was vaguely in the ballpark so there are a lot of recommendations on how to fix that and we'll talk more but our guns had the benefit of being a hundred years later they've been adjusted for fire they they generally hit where you point them but it still takes a little practice to figure out what you're looking at that site and after every shot the whole thing's misaligning you got to reacquire so for me the gun inherently I think has an acceptable amount of precision up to perhaps 200 yards my ability to execute that with accuracy is very limited I'd say you'd feel the same way that's just so hard to get the person the gun is more precise than I can be accurate with it because the gun is the shape that it is and then I would also add unfortunately that that the fact that takes so long for your next shot to go off that's alarming to me for some reason like I just I had the hardest time even adjusting for that because the problem is is that it be so long until the next shot went off that realistically I felt like that's that's bad for it because that just gives me more time to fidget or more time for me to be misaligned I don't know about you but that was that was not good generally a lower rate of fire would be better for this sort of thing like a very nice sluggish rate of fire even with a wiggly gun should give you a better chance of getting back on and I don't know if a higher rate of fire without improving other factors on this kind of would get you anywhere but I'm gonna say we both haven't done this episode you at the mg o 8:15 we've both shot that gun it has a higher rate of fire but is also Wiggly er than this gun because as a central pivoting point it likes to shake the crap out of you I found that gun easier to control and automatic than this one and it's because I got a rhythm to it and you eventually you're like okay I'm shaking to death but I'm just gonna shake to death and point it down here whereas you have 18 to 20 rounds of this thing if you're able to cram 20 in there it's not enough time to get back control of it and the rhythm so loping that it doesn't average out it's just it's kind of like that thing where they say if you go over a bunch of potholes in the road fast versus slow that you end up skimming the potholes you settle into the depth of every single rut in the road when it comes to this gun in my opinion so we've covered pretty much the ergonomics to covered the sheeting the question is now at this point ladies and gentlemen does he want to cover the the final bit of this Oh what do we take it in the battle well may shut your mouth because we have a whole other episode on the show Shaw coming and unfortunately you know you guys I'm not giving too much way to say that they chamber this into cartridges and we happen at both today so I don't really want to talk about it because they resemble each other so much and we have so much more history on the gun to cover because right now in this episode we've only really found about production we haven't talked about service history or anything else so I think we're gonna have to save it for once we're going to leave you guys hanging for just a moment to make your own assessments and maybe take some guesses and the next week we'll talk about well not next week but two weeks away or if you're in the future you'll be able to just go click on the link you lucky jerks but we'll talk about it next time I think there's a lot more to cover in this gun we've we've only gotten maybe half the story so far clapping okay so with that covered well thank you all for tuning in check after the credits for any updates and have a good one night guys [Music] all right game that is our 99th episode and I think you know what 100 is going to be and I'm sorry it's not the 1911 I get a lot of pressure to just sort of do episodes let me explain something to you the two things we never have enough of around here are time and money and we've slowly ended up building up enough money and then I traded in a lot of it for time by bringing in a full time so now I'm starting to build up a wall of time by pulling ahead which is excellent for challenging something like a a detailed deep dive on something like the bank to women but I still need the funds to travel around maybe get some rare pieces or ammo either shipped in or bought or made or whatever it may be so that's a big bite to take it's not one that's gonna come right after Project lightning with no additional fundraising I'm very sorry it's just the nature of bouncing this all so that the show doesn't actually iceberg itself in the process of going full steam ahead now if you'd like to support the show you can go over to patreon that makes it very easy and stable for us to pick what we're doing it allows us to have a rolling budget and understanding of where our savings are and things like that if you want to sort of just throw some cash here and there you're more than welcome at the shop where you can find things like our project Lightning posters I know this is very bright but you get the idea and t-shirts things like that we have special fundraisers from time to time one of those should be right around the corner if not currently and then there's other general support ideas like sending me emails and articles and things like that that pertain to these particular fields when you stumble across them those are actually always welcome as long as they are in-depth so if you stumble on something that's very unique by all means there's forwarded on I love those things so with that in mind I would like to dial turn attention over to not our channel because something very interesting has happened that is mr. McCullum over at forgotten weapons has launched his own book and it's being pre funded and it's doing extremely well at this point I don't think anybody's worried about it not being made to actually the golden edges of everything but when you contribute to something like that project I want you to understand what you're doing you're not just getting a book you're sending a very clear message not only to ian's own efforts but also to maybe other publishers that there is a market for this if it is advertised and acknowledged correctly people want john history books in good detail readily available for reasonable ish prices I say reasonable ish because these books tend to be more expensive than your common book but way less expensive than say a textbook out of college and so if you can tell them that this market exists we may be able to better fund some of these authors out there and researchers out there who I rely on in order to do this show and therefore you rely on in order to see this show they are the unsung heroes and there's not a clear path to paying them right now this sort of thing really helps with that so if you have it go fund something like that and send a message alright have a good one you
