How a M134 Minigun works, Full Breakdown!

hey guys filled with a roller range USA here with Chris Paulsen and he is gonna be taking us through this thing an m134 minigun this guy is a machine gunner minigun master and so he's gonna take this part and kind of just how does a minigun work I've never really known I've known about mini guns for a long time but I don't actually know how they work so Chris what are we working with here all right well basically what we're looking at here is an original General Electric m134 minigun I'll walk you through a few things does it take it apart so we'll go for my any questions just ask me as we go so we did another video on this we're actually shooting it and running it and kind of talking about a little bit but this thing shoots around six thousand there's two options actually there's two thousand four thousand rounds a minute which is absolutely insane and one of the things that makes this gun really cool is it can runs completely off of the electric power so this tripod is specially built to house batteries underneath and then it runs up obviously to the minigun it powers the motor which turns the whole action and gets that big chunk of metal spinning so first I'll hook to the linker take that a linker off basically looking over here it's going to be one cross bang you know the linker comes out I'm gonna put this back together so I'll misplace my pin and we'll talk about those a link to this later but that's probably from here with me that's probably one of the most complicated pieces of machinery all miss an entire god correct so I'll hook the motor motor is pretty simple it is three bolts to take apart so the motor is what's actually driving the barrels in the D linker and you'll see here in a second where it's spinning the rotor itself or the gears connect if you don't mind just hold that up thank you so just for curiosity's sake how much would a motor like this cost uh anywhere between I'd say five to eight thousand dollars five to eight thousand dollars for this particular more so you can't just go to the just you know the hardware store and grab another like this no they're they're pretty specialty motors important thing about these things is not just the motor but the gears themselves exactly so this gear head that attaches very very important part for this because the gears on that motor is gonna what so these gears here is what's linking bring it over here is linking the barrel cluster and your D linker am I correct well this is just running your rotor Hughes okay so your rotor as we're gonna get to here in a second well in a few minutes actually is there's another gear assembly on the meters here so you can see this gear driving here and then this gear drives the delivery link right here so it's kinda like I would think of it kind of like a transmission type thing it all kind of works together like a drivetrain yep that's cool so this to the side [Music] okay let's actually take the bolts out next switch this around so it's a little bit easier for us to work on it so the serialized part of this gun as you were describing to me is actually this portion here is the actual gun correct what's here less here's an interesting fact for you actually so this part for me is serialized okay so for other manufacturers outside of the military the housing is what's the serialized part in the military the housing is not see realized it's the rotor inside the gun that serial hmm so depending you know who you're talking to we're asking there's two different versions of what's serialized so you have your safing selector and cover here so open this up and this is gonna allow the bolts to pop out so as you're gonna see the bolt is gonna pop out we're just gonna reach in and grab it should slide so here's just one of your bolts you want on a track a big deal so obviously for each of your barrels you're gonna have a bowl because you're gonna have each barrels functioning individually with its own ball obviously firing yes each of your barrels yep so actually well this assemble let me show you here real quick here its cover closed so as you see the track here you have the top cam port of your pull the little spinning part it's gonna rotate inside here and that's what's gonna pull the bolt backwards and back forwards so you're taking the rounds in and out of the Chamber's there's a bolt track right here so that's just a channel that's gonna mechanically move those bolts back is what your select and you will see that here in a second - now as you can hear as I spin it you're gonna hear the bolt snap so right there a firing pin just hit which means the round just went off I'll do it again [Music] so every time you spin that every time you hear it pop the firing pin is releasing and sending around up now which barrel is it actually firing it works so we see the ball action moving here is so it's firing out of this position here correct we talked about this earlier when you're shooting the gun it's a little bit different with my yolks my yoke right here the newer ones rotate the gun in a different position but my gun as it sits on my stand in the position it fires at two o'clock so if I click it right here this barrel is launching around at two o'clock you're looking at some of the other guns as how they're rotated mostly fired about ten o'clock so slightly different nothing wrong with it again it's just how it's positioned with the yoke on the stand okay so if we want to take this thing apart pretty simple we're gonna pop this back it's a lot easier just to pull it like that we're gonna take one track out at the time you don't have to necessarily the bolts out are the nuts these tracks can slide out I like to do it just a little bit easier for me let's put this here okay so this is gonna allow me to take one bolt out and this is your bolt right here it's a little bit messy let me wipe it off for you real quick [Music] excuse the nice and grease yeah it needs a lot of grease to give the run yes these guys love grease okay so this is your bowl as your bolt goes in there basically you're just looking at see the firing pin there you go so it's so the rotation of the ball is actually what's making the strike on the primer so instead of a having hammer that comes up and hits it it's the rotation of the barrel that's gonna activate the striker correct so as this goes inside this cam that we talked about right here so your cam is going in your bolt track so it's as it rotates it's coming back this is where it's ejecting around it's pulling around out and spitting it out here ejection port here that means says it comes back the other way it's gonna push around inside the chamber on this side and as it gets fully into battery it's gonna rotate and it's gonna snap and the firing pins in a strike and it's gonna set that round downrange interesting so pretty simple concept there's really nothing to the top portion of this grab these bolts out little slippery now there is six cracks that hold all six bolts up you only really have to take three out which is pretty convenient so if you take every other track yeah I think there are two bolts out it's amazing the speed that this rotates about the cyclic glory meaning how fast inspires and we're talking about 4,000 rounds a minute so what does that mean that means that this inside this casing is spinning at 4,000 revolutions a minute is that correct correct so you can think of it kind of the the engine that you have in your car how quickly that's spinning your revolutions per minute the same concept when it comes to do this firearm and how quickly it's turning over so that kind of explains why you need so much grease in there to keep things lubricated to keep things moving because it's pretty pretty intense and pretty violent how this thing operates it's a gun you really want to run dry how long did it take you to learn the process of disassembling functioning you know getting this thing to run well working with machine guns a lot it wasn't morally difficult because that's kind of your history previously correct Craig I went to school and 2004 for mechanical engineering before I joined the military so having a little bit of base of knowledge with guns and whatnot kind of know know what's going on mechanically it wasn't super hard but at the same time it's a relatively complex gun little things can go wrong the slightest bend and even a roll pin can stop the gun so once you get to know it it's like anything else I manages it's pretty simple now at first because your specialty was more and belt when you were in the military you're training in your specialty and your role was more and other firearms correct correct again I was a paratrooper in the military so saw got our first deployment things like that guns weren't necessarily keeping a running wasn't my priority by using them using buzz yeah so wasn't an armor but you know we're just gonna take the cover off of here next work let's take the GCU off as you see the GCU is the gun control unit this is your electronic system for this guy now I did make this from scratch so this is not a factory GCU it's very very similar it runs off to 120 volt relays it just got the dual trigger system on it versus a factory the newer ones only have the one trigger from the factory with the dual chair is that something that you had to make specifically the older DC use of what it came with the to trigger systems but to find an old G see you next to fossil making one was much much easy so this is basically it so that's the brains behind the operation the brains pans down this is all your electronic control system all of it right here it's really not much to it but at the same time it's and that's where you can see the two thousand four thousand rate of fire real simple it's got his company name right down there so this isn't regulated or serialize that all this is just everything ox can be bought if you can find it or source it that's not the issue the only hard part is the housing so at this position with this up that puts the gun on live so all the powers go into it it's ready to fire then you can choose whatever button you want to send some freedom downrange things ridiculous we're almost here very few ports left so we're taking our time disassembling and we're talking about it and just kind of learning about this gun but if you're focused and really trying to disassemble this gun and get it back into you know to clean it or having to fix it whatever how long would it take you if I was really trying to crank out work to get this thing up let's say there was a stoppage during a rental day or something like that it'd only take me a few minutes okay and if I ever had to do that too I mean you got a thing I'm going to taking the GCU off or anything like that it's it's pretty simple into the bare-bones right it's it's usually a blonde gold head or a badger linker so it's it's almost snap on parts of what you think so going back to just cost of operating this for all of the from what you explained to me it seems like everything is relatively affordable I mean keep that in comparison you know that's a certain statement but for many guns you know your your barrels your bolts different things like that where's the real large investment on this you're gonna be in the deal incre well no mine you're here I'm gonna have to hold that it might be a little bit easier to make it look bad here your big investment would be the dagger yordle inker is 99% of this gun that is your entire feeding mechanism so if anything is gonna break most the time it's gonna be your de link or so your investment is usually gonna be here bolts you're not gonna break it as often but you can you know again 250 to $300 a bolt I think the last bolt said I got was 18 1880 buck ship so I'm not gonna blow through those very often usually a good old General Electric bolt on the last about 250,000 rounds so as long as you run a good ammo quality stuff with good links you should have an issue all that's one thing to think about in owning and operating - guns - I mean this is really designed and purpose-built for for military operations and you have a team that is going to be able to service this and think about the infrastructure behind her in the military to be able to make you know maintain take care of these firearms it's a it's a lot to you know to keep these things running you have a military they're sent to special carriers they're not letting you know just growlers play with these things and do this by any means so if you don't mind I brought the wrong wrench so I hate using Crescent wrenches but we're gonna have to use one for this hold these barrels steady for me okay well I'll turn this gun back around here in a second I just have to loosen these before I cannot get too far with them this is what I get for now we're gonna write tools improvise you have to improvise there's only three volts I just gotta loosen than the rest oops here we got to rotate this just a little bit the rest I can take off okay that one's loose that one's loose rotate it back so you can see so this is gonna be your rotor support that we're gonna take off next and after this you'll see the rest of this gun is literally gonna fall out what do they what do you believe the overall weight do you have an overall weight of what this gun something like everything like this I think the newer ons are running around 65 to 68 pounds I think mine is running close to 80 85 a lot of the new ones - you're talking Dillon started making stuff on a titanium you have three psi teeny and rotors worse legacy series General Electric parts like mine so they lighten the weight as much as they could because if you think on a helicopter every pound counts when you're flying so the less weight you've got the better it's gonna be all right so here's the fun part this might get a little messy not messy I'm trying to think this might be a little sticky I think uh to get this out if you want to pull on the barrels we're gonna have to grab a hammer yeah we're going after girl man don't take a quick break yeah all right so I grabbed a hammer we knocked the barrel cluster out and now we're gonna be taking a look at the ejector right correct round positioner you left - excuse us we're not taking this out on camera oh this sits in here it completes the track basically is the round spin they're ejecting out this side it lets it roll through here creates a path and as it gets fed it also creates a path so so it's both feeding and ejecting at the same time on either side of that yep you can see the brass marks where the brass is rolling through it so it's just rolling in two different directions on it that's all it's doing it simple enough yep all right so where's my screwdriver this [ __ ] just pops no quick of course right when in doubt use a bigger hammer all right there we go it's a little stiff so there how much that alone wave it feel like that's that alright so as you can see here's the registered part you know we have a few things like the Yoakum optics mount this safe and cover everything is still on this the house but this is your registered port right here so take a look at it there's really nothing much to it it's just and you can kind of see see if Tennessee that channel that we were talking about what actually repositions the bolt within that housing and that's gonna reset the striker in each of your bolts it's gonna feed and extract and all that fun for us actually you know what we can do here's the one that this another grease on so as you can see the bolt it's literally just running through the channel going up and down sorry excuse my hand [Music] well you see it works yeah so I clean up and down in just like that and yes those bolt heads are supposed to come apart so that's not a big deal we didn't just break yeah no that's that's pretty common that's not a big deal at all so at this point this gun is pretty much completely disassembled we'll just call this 100% disassembly if you want to take your barrels off you're more than welcome to take your barrels off it's not a big deal it's one pin there one screw right here this holds your barrel clamp on when you take the barrel clamp off all you have to do is rotate these 180 degrees and they're not even pressed and they literally just slide inside the sleeve and they pop right out very very very simple to take the barrels off these guns nothing - is there a kind of like a notch or a pin like I like you would see on the ar-15 barrel they have kind of a setting port or being on the top of it to make sure it's seated properly against the upper receiver with this there's spots on the barrels right here that actually make sure that they're positioned right so you have a flat spot that when this the clamp goes on all the barrels will be positioned properly because the flat spot is gonna go around inside the housing right here so that to make sure they're all I guess timed properly or what would you not even necessarily time there's nothing a really time on these it's just to make sure they're all locked in they're not going to spin there's a half lug on the barrels back here that half lug again if you twist 180 degrees it'll pop the barrel out and just slide it out so you're basically you're moving the lug into a free path and it slides so up here I'm assuming this is just a giant bearing to let those barrels rotate freely correct that bearing just sits inside the housing right here the rear bearing - that is inside correct there is right here so Matt just nicely rehearsed but yeah yep so and again when you're looking at it so now you have your motor driving right here and your d-link er would be underneath it correcting it you know underneath this portion here kind of and then this gear runs on all right so really everything is based off of this gear and then this gear is gonna drive this which is gonna run your D linker correct okay so and you have again when we're talking about functions stoppages things like that what to look for is the roll pins in here can get torqued and bent so if something like that is bent you know the gear might still feel solid but if it's moved even you know one full degree it might miss a line the timing system to this and I will give you a problem from the rounds taking from your D linker and your feeder into here and I mean they're not gonna marry up but this isn't time dressed yes so a handoff on to this is completely filled at that time oh and with about the proper timing in the handoff I mean this comes just not gonna feed vicinity now there is a little bit different version the newer stuff runs a clutch pack on the back so the clutch replaces the bearing in this rear gear that basically allows a timeless system are you gonna do is pop it to linker on it you don't have the time it don't do anything it's an electronic driven clutch I still on runs on the back of that and it automatically times everything for you that's nice so when you let off the triggers on those things it is it's very convenient it'll stop Emel it'll spin the barrels out clean the barrels and stop live ammo from feeding into it so you're not throwing live a mile off the side or anything like that I mean it's the gun is always gonna be clear and we'll go from there so let's wrap up and talk about this d-link or real quick you're explaining to me that as far as the engineering for this particular gun this is probably the most complicated and involved portion is this d-link er that's really where the engineering and the smarts had to go in to get this kind of feed and operate so quickly correct doing kurz or I'd say hands down 99% of your gun if there's an issue with your gun I'd start with it a linker every single time no matter what the linkers you got to figure this thing is rotating so darn fast it's not even funny and you're you're stripping the links the rounds out of the langsam inured you're throwing everything out of this at an extremely high rate of fire so there's not real there's no real room for error when it comes to this so one of the reasons that these can be somewhat finicky especially if you're saying that roll pin gets bent or torqued or something in the rear but it's not perfectly married up in timed then get really really finicky correct so we're talking two simple stoppage can destroy this whole system I mean not necessarily destroy but stop it from working until you have to rebuild it in Vietnam interesting fact at about 35,000 rounds they throw their linkers out there wasn't even worth than you know so at 35,000 rounds they're putting a brand-new two linker on it just to keep the gun round and give you a perspective thirty five hundred rounds thousand thirty five thousand Rogers okay thank you 35 bucks or does that take you around ten seconds yeah you about thirty flax powder okay thirty five thousand even still you could run through thirty five thousand rounds very very quickly so all in all I think that covers most of how you assemble or disassemble we're not going to go through the process of assembly if you want to see that just put the video in Reverse and we'll put it back together but guys this is a m134 minigun this one's GE specific right it's a retainer electric just but that's pretty much the function of or the disassembly and how a mini gonna actually work so again thank you Chris for coming out sharing with us bringing your actual minigun and kind of teaching us how this thing's work be sure to check out all his social media stuff his company will put links to his Facebook and everything below so you can check out what he does thanks for watching guys again this is filled with royal Range USA you

Channel: Royal Range USA

Views: 73,065

Rating: 4.8695164 out of 5

Keywords: Royal Range USA, NRA, Guns, Pistols, AR, Shotgun, Rifle, Tactical Training, Safety Training, Archery, Reviews, Test Fire, Interviews, Smith & Wesson, Ruger, Remington, m134 Minigun, Minigun, general electric, dillon aero, full take down, complete disassembly, full review, nashville, tennessee, dtv tactical innovations, philip giannone, kris paulson

Id: 7CkqaaVTufw

Length: 24min 38sec (1478 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 18 2017