Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Morphy Auction Company taking a look at a selection of the guns that they're going to be selling in their upcoming April of 2019 Premiere auction. Specifically what we're looking at today are the original Ingram submachine guns made in Powder Springs, Georgia. The first of what is colloquially called the MAC-10. And I should in fact just start out by pointing out that MAC-10 is kind of a misnomer. What this actually is, these actually are, are Ingram M10 and M11 submachine guns, ultimately produced by MAC, the Military [Armament] Corporation. So, to go to the beginning of our story, Gordon Ingram is an ex-World War Two serviceman who is interested in firearms design, and right after World War Two he starts designing machine guns. The first one ... he goes through a couple
models. He actually starts with his M5 submachine gun. He was hoping to get a military contract and so he figured ... the army currently had
the M3 submachine gun. He would leave the M4 as a, you know, maybe they'll adopt an
M4 at some point before my gun's ready, so we'll leave that out, and I'll call mine the M5.
Well his M5 was just a prototype, never went anywhere. He improved it with his M6. That gun
actually ... saw substantial serial production. And in fact, I have a whole video on the Ingram
M6. If you're interested, you can check that out. There were then a couple subsequent prototypes
developed in an attempt to improve on the M6. So that's the M7, M8 and M9 were all experimental guns. And all of those guns are kind of in the form of a
Thompson submachine gun. It was with the M10 in 1964/1965 that Ingram changed completely. And
he went to this sort of stamped sheet metal, very boxy, telescoping bolt type of design. Now
his original M10 was in 9mm Parabellum, and he was unable to find anyone interested in the thing,
and it was just kind of dying on the vine for a couple years. Until 1969, when he was introduced
to a guy named Mitch WerBell III. Mitch WerBell had been in the
OSS during World War Two and was, ... or fancied himself ... as
sort of a covert ops type of guy. And after the war, into the 1960s,
he decided he wanted to manufacture covert ops type stuff for the military,
and in particular he focused on suppressors. He started a company called Sionics to manufacture
suppressors, and he did in fact go on to make a lot of suppressors for the US military for a
variety of guns, suppressors for the M14, the M16. And when he met Ingram in 1969 he was
basically on his way to Vietnam to demonstrate some of his suppressors, .45 calibre suppressors.
And Ingram at the time ... had made an experimental version of his M10
in .45 ACP and a mutual friend, (actually Tom Nelson, who is a well known
and very well regarded firearms author today), introduced the two of them thinking, you know what, Ingram's .45 calibre submachine gun and a .45
calibre suppressor could make a really interesting pair. And turns out they did, so they made a quick
deal. Ingram loaned his gun to WerBell who took it to Vietnam and started demonstrating
it for special ops guys, and Army guys, and everyone over there really liked this
thing. This was a very compact package submachine gun, and ... a big part of this gun is
the combination of the gun with the suppressor. The suppressor gives you a place to actually hold
onto the gun, ... this thing has a very short muzzle, not having a suppressor out here gives you a substantial
likelihood of accidentally shooting your fingers off with it. And WerBell envisioned this as a
special forces, covert ops type of thing. It was naturally subsonic, chambered for
.45 ACP, you've got this nice big suppressor on it. It makes for a pretty quiet, high rate of fire.
You know, you can lay down a lot of firepower at very close range, very
quickly with the Ingram M10. So he took this to Vietnam to demo it
to people, turned out to be very popular. So he sends back word that you know, "Hey get Ingram and let's start arranging to get
the rights to manufacture this gun for him". And in fact by 1970 he had convinced Ingram to
join his company as chief of design, or chief engineer. And in December of 1970, just shortly thereafter,
they actually changed the name of the company. He created Military [Armaments] Corporation because ... you know, honestly, that's a better marketing name to work with than trying
to sell submachine guns under a name like Sionics. So MAC was born.
Now they started off with a .45 calibre gun. Ingram had made his M10 in 9mm, but
9mm is generally a supersonic cartridge, which means it's gonna make a lot of noise
whether it's got a suppressor on or not. MAC would make a 9mm version of the M10, but they didn't actually put it into production
until after they had had the chance to work with some reloading guys in the Georgia area
and come up with a good reliable subsonic 9mm loading that they could pair with the
submachine gun. Because really I think it's important to recognise that the whole purpose of
this gun was really a package of gun and suppressor. All of these guns are made with
threaded barrels directly for suppressors, and this was not really a common thing.
This had been sort of a specialty idea before, and Ingram and WerBell wanted to create a ready-to-go
package, that was kind of a new sort of idea. At any rate, they also wanted a smaller version of the gun, remember WerBell was sort of a covert ops
type of guy, and so they picked a smaller cartridge that was also natively subsonic, namely .380 Automatic. And
so they came up with a scaled-down version of the gun, the M11 submachine gun. Chambered for .380, but
basically the exact same package just shrunk down. So same design, same mechanical functionality,
same stock and the same type of suppressor. So let's go ahead and take a look
at what all three of these actually are. The original, the one and only, Ingram, (well the one of very, very many),
Ingram M10 submachine gun. This is a relatively small gun, as you can see. It
really kind of fits the form factor of an oversized pistol, but it's a wide gun and it's a
very dense gun. These things are heavy, substantially heavier than I think you would
expect if you've never actually picked one up. This comes in at like 8.75 pounds.
So this is basically the weight of a rifle, all compressed down into the size
of this blocky, bulky block of a gun. Our markings on here are Ingram M10 calibre
.45 Auto. Couple relevant things to point out. When Ingram and WerBell were forced out
of the company, all subsequent production (well, at least once they used up some of the already
marked receiver flats), the owners of the company got rid of Ingram and they added MAC instead
of Ingram and that's where MAC-10 comes from. They were pissed at Ingram, they were unhappy with him
and WerBell and they wanted to take his name off the gun. So Military Armaments Corp is of course down here
because that was the company name the whole time. Powder Springs, Georgia, was the location of
Mitch WerBell's, basically, I think a 30 or 40 acre farm where production began. It wasn't that long
after production began that they moved to a larger facility elsewhere in Georgia
(Marietta, Georgia, I believe). But they had actually a substantial number of receivers
that had already been marked Powder Springs, so they were using Powder Springs
marked receivers after they moved. There is the Military Armaments Corporation logo
here, which is a Cobray wrapped around the world. And a Cobray is a very '80s thing, it is a
combination of cobra and manta ray. We have a serial number up here on the front of the gun,
and there's a bit of information you can decode from this. These six digits are the actual serial number,
the first two digits here are some data. The first digit tells you calibre,
1 is .45, 2 is 9mm, and 3 is .380 and the second digit tells you the year
that it was produced in the 1970s. So a 1 is '71, this is a 1973 production gun. There is a manual safety on this thing.
So you have safe and fire right there. And then these were actually selective
fire guns. So on the left side in the front, you have a selector switch
offering you full-auto or semi-auto. They are however open bolt guns in
semi or full, so that's your firing position. Pull the trigger the whole thing drops, and it will
continue to cycle in full-auto until you release the trigger. The magazine, the original M10s were
designed around a slightly modified M3 Grease Gun magazine, the lower ridge here
has to be cut down by like a sixteenth of an inch. They wanted to make sure people had to
buy mags from them. At least, you know, organisational contracts had to get mags from
them, gives you a little nice extra profit margin there. So 30 rounds of .45 ACP. We have a pretty awful butt-stock
on here, it's virtually useless, although to be fair, it is better than nothing at all. In order
to deploy this you have to squeeze it together, and rotate it backwards, and
there are locking pins right here. So in the deployed position it locks in like that
(or mostly locks in, because it does wobble). And then you push the button on the
bottom of the receiver and you can extend the stock all the way out like that. ... You'll notice that the butt plate here is angled,
that does a great job of sliding off your shoulder. ... It's too short for most people, it's too low for
most people, it's really kind of a terrible stock, but it does fold up very, very compactly, and it gets out of your way if you're not
using it, and that's I guess something. There is a bracket here hanging around
the muzzle, that is for a nylon strap that gives you something to hold onto
here, so you can kind of pull it back and not run the risk of getting your
fingers out in front of the muzzle. And then one of the distinctive and very
important features of these guns is this coarse threading on the barrel.
That was on every one of them, and that was there specifically for the suppressors
that were intended to be packaged with the guns. This is our original Military
Armaments Corporation suppressor. So this is a .45 calibre suppressor and
we have the same sort of information down here, 1 indicates .45, it's 1972
production, and this is serial number 1,148. And this is a cleanable, serviceable, suppressor. So it's two-stage, you've got an
expansion chamber back here and then this end of the thing is a whole
series of baffles and, well, stacked baffles like so. I'm not gonna pull them all out,
there's a big ol' stack of them in there. Now that threading sits there,
and this just screws on. There's no fancy locking collar, there's
really no fancy anything, it just threads on there. Now you've got a suppressed MAC. There were some
rubber covers, you'll see people covering these with cloth or wraps of various sorts because
with extended shooting this will get very hot. However with limited bits of shooting,
certainly the first bit that you ever shoot with, you know, at a given range trip, you hold on to
this thing by the suppressor and that is your front grip. ... This really is a safety device for the
MAC beyond just your hearing because this prevents you from putting a hand in the way of the
muzzle.This thing fires at about 1,000 rounds a minute, and without a good way to hold onto
the front of the gun it can be nigh on uncontrollable, certainly
very challenging, especially for novice machine gun shooters. So the
suppressors are really a good thing. It is an integral part of the
Ingram submachine gun package. Now the next version we're
going to look at is also an M10, however, it is chambered for 9mm Para or
Par, I suppose. They abbreviated that a bit short. Note that our serial number here starts with a
digit 2 for 9mm, and then it's a 1973 production gun. This is identical to the .45 calibre M10
with the exception of the grip frame, which is just a part that's
welded onto the lower receiver And this grip frame, of course,
is set up to use 9mm magazines. Where they used Grease Gun mags on these,
and in fact Ingram's very first prototype 9mm M10 used a Sten gun magazine.
However, he was concerned about unreliability of the Sten gun magazine and so
they changed to the sort of trapezoidal style of, basically, Walther MPK/MPL magazines. So the 9mm version here uses a double stack, double feed magazine where the .45 Cal version has just a single feed M3 Grease Gun type mag. I apologise, I actually don't have one of
the magazines here to show you for this, but it looks just like a Walther
MPK or MPL magazine. I should point out all three of these
are up for auction here at Morphy's, none of them come with magazines.
The mags that are in the other two guns I have scrounged from other
lots to be able to show you here. So the M10 9mm is a little bit lighter in weight than the
.45, but not much. This is more like 7 and 2/3 pounds, the bolt's a little bit lighter, which accounts
for most of that (the bolt and the barrel). Still a very chunky, very heavy gun. This
is not all that covert and concealable. Before we go farther actually I
should point out this real quick. This is the exact same design of suppressor
made by MAC, and this is a 1972 suppressor. First digit 2 tells us it's in 9mm. And same design
just a different bore diameter to fit the 9mm guns. And that brings us to the baby MAC. This is the M11, the whole thing scaled down for
a truly concealable covert package in .380 Auto, but otherwise retaining all of the
same features of the original M10. So this is designed to be sold
as a package with a suppressor. It's got the exact same type of barrel threading
to attach that suppressor (there we go). This is also a two-stage suppressor with
cleanable baffles. It just doesn't have the different diameters to it because it's smaller for .380. Here we have the markings on that one,
calibre .380 and you'll notice right there digit 3 for .380 and this one is a 1974 production,
so actually a relatively late production .380 suppressor. This guy is truly tiny. It does use a 32 round
magazine of Military Armament Corporation's own design, because there weren't any
good .380 magazines that would do. This is a single feed magazine, so the 9mm guns
were the only ones to use double feed magazines. The stock design is exactly the same, just scaled down. (There we go.) Squeeze that, fold it up and this
gives you a true little bullet hose of a machine pistol. This thing, while the bigger MACs fire at about
1,000 rounds a minute, this is more like 1,500 or even 1,600 rounds a minute,
depending on the ammunition. It will empty a magazine in about a second or
less. It is an extremely high rate of fire gun. Again, it's much, much more usable with
that suppressor on the front to hold onto, but ultimately of kind of limited utility in any
situation. As one general is quoted as saying, "It's ideal for a gunfight in a phone
booth", and maybe not a whole lot else. This weighs in at about 3.5 pounds. It's interesting to note that it is marked calibre
9mm Auto, as opposed to calibre 9mm P A R, Para, because, especially in Europe,
this is 9mm short, 9x17mm. Still kind of an odd choice,
but that's what they went with. It is easy to guarantee that this
is not meant for 9mm Parabellum, because the magazine well is in fact not big enough to
fit 9mm Parabellum ammunition in it with a magazine. In every other way though, this is the
same as the original larger scale M10s. So we can take this apart really easily. With
these original Powder Springs Ingram guns there is a spring-loaded latch right here at the
front. If I pull that back, I can then push out this pin. Alright, there we go. With that pin out,
the upper lifts right off of the lower. There is our stripped lower. There's nothing
else that needs to come apart in here. The fire control group looks a bit complicated because
it does have this semi-auto selector built into it. (So that's on fire position.) So when I pull the
trigger, the sear drops, that lets the bolt go forward, and it's just gonna cycle until it either
runs out of ammo or you release the trigger. In semi-auto it goes down but
then you have a disconnector right here that is going to trip when the bolt
goes forward, and lift that sear back up, thus forcing you to pull the
trigger a second time to fire it again. Moving on to the upper assembly. We pull the bolt back
to here, and then we can pull the charging handle out. There is a little spring-loaded detent
down inside there that holds this in. One of those kind of nicer elements to
the original Ingram Powder Springs guns that you don't see in the
later copies and knock-offs. So that comes out, then the bolt assembly
with its captive recoil spring comes out. We have our stamped and bent and welded upper assembly
here. Got your little spring loaded retention lever. The barrel, you'll notice, only sticks out this far.
But because this uses a telescoping style of bolt (like an Uzi or one of the Czech
24, 25, 26, 23 submachine guns), the barrel is actually substantially longer than it looks. Just your firing pin is all the way back here, and ... the whole gun is kept short by
moving the mass of the bolt up in front. On the bolt we have a fixed firing pin,
it is an open bolt firing gun. You'll notice there is a recoil spring here, and then there's
... also this second rod. That second rod is the ejector. So when the bolt compresses back
that rod comes out through the bolt face and that's what kicks a cartridge out of the gun. An extractor down at the bottom to help
control cartridges as they're being cycled out. And then there is the tiniest of little plastic buffers
back here. One of the things to look for on these guns, this one, if this was rubber originally
it's turned to hard, hard rubber. Some of these are made out
of like a fibre sort of material, some of them are ... some sort of
soft synthetic material, and over time these will completely disintegrate. So it's not
uncommon, even if a gun is like brand-new and unfired, it's not uncommon to open it up and find
that the buffer has just disintegrated over time. So that's it. That's the entire field-stripped Ingram M11,
and the M10 is exactly the same thing just a little bit larger. Now a couple things happen to the
Military Armaments Corporation during the ... just the few years while they
were actually in existence. First off, they thought this gun was
gonna be tremendously successful, and they were hoping, they thought they
had a really good shot at a big military contract. Maybe one with the United
States, maybe with some other countries. They thought this gun really
had serious military potential. And so they wanted to tool up to make quite
a lot of guns, and that requires a lot of capital. So they went out looking for investment
capital, and they found it in a group of investors who joined up under a business called Quantum. Well, at some point this may have been aided
by the fact that someone started to get the idea that the US military was seriously considering
replacing the 1911 with the Ingram M10. Which is a ludicrous idea that never
happened, and never would have happened. But it might have been helpful in
lubricating some finance for the company. Well, when the US ... didn't
place a large order for these guns (they did buy them in small numbers,
a variety of different military operational branches bought them,
the SEALs actually bought some, in fact the SEALs bought them when the
SEAL team and the UDT, the Underwater Demolition Teams, were separate
groups and they each bought some of them. I think the Air Force ended up with
some, and they made a number of small sales to a number of various small
foreign countries, but nothing significant). And so that starts to kind of put a hurt
on the company financially. You know, they've got a lot of money invested in this,
they have to make some sales to get it back. And that created some friction within the company.
In fact, a lot of friction within the company. And by the end of 1972 both Ingram and WerBell
had actually been forced out of the company and it was being run entirely
by this investment group. Without a big military contract to fall
back on, they had ... kind of limited options. These were legal to sell to the civilian market in the
United States, because of course this is before 1986, and they're made in the US, so these
can be registered as transferable guns. They are in fact registered as transferable
guns, and they can be sold to anyone with a $200 NFA tax stamp, and in the mid-1970s
200 bucks is a substantial amount of money, especially for what is supposed to
be a very inexpensive submachine gun. And they didn't make all that many sales,
there aren't that many people who were excited to go out and spend that
kind of money on this kind of gun. Now they did get some, and it was
certainly aided by some clever marketing. In 1974 the movie "McQ", starring John Wayne, well,
starring John Wayne and co-starring an Ingram M10 came out. That was certainly
good publicity and helped with some sales, but not enough to keep this company going. In 1974 as well the State Department decided to
institute a new policy of prohibiting export of submachine guns with suppressors, or of submachine
guns that could be readily fitted with suppressors. And that hit Military Armaments Corporation
square on the jaw, that was a big problem for them. And by 1975 they were looking at, basically, bankruptcy. They started missing loan payments,
... the company went under. In April of 1976 there was a bankruptcy sale.
They sold off all the company's assets to try and pay off its debts, and that was
the end of Military Armaments Corporation. So it only existed from 1970, very end of 1970,
until spring of 1976. Just a few years. Now ... they had a lot of guns in stock, and they
had a lot of parts, and a lot of tooling that were all distributed and sold in this auction. And a variety of
different companies bought up both guns and tooling and parts and would continue to produce this style of
Ingram submachine gun for many years after the fact. Those companies would include
RPB, SWD, Cobray, Leatherwood, a number of other smaller companies
making smaller numbers of guns. But there's a large variety, and a kind of confusing
variety, of guns under all of those names that came after the Military Armaments Corporation
that was the true namesake of this gun. So we're not going to talk about those in this
video. This has gone long enough already, we'll cover some of those varieties in a later video. I thought it would be really cool to take a look at three here that are the true original MAC-10 submachine guns. These are generally seen to be the, well, they are
the best manufactured of all of the Ingram type guns. And ... there aren't a whole lot of them out there
and contrary to what a lot of people might expect, these have actually become somewhat collectible
guns. They're desirable and they are sought after. So having all three models with all three of their
matching types of suppressors is a pretty cool thing. If you're interested in any one of them, all three
of these are coming up for sale here at Morphy's. They are all registered, fully
transferable, NFA machine guns. So they're all subject to background check
and tax stamp, as is standard for NFA guns. If you look at the description text below you'll find a
link to ForgottenWeapons.com, and from there you can click over to the catalogue
pages for each of these three, check out Morphy's pictures, description, price
estimates, all that sort of stuff, place bids for them on-line if you're so inclined, or just flip through the
catalogue and window-shop. Hope you enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.
I’ve seen that before (seen most of Ian’s videos) but it was well worth another watch.
Edit- Apparently I’m wrong, my bad.