M134 Minigun: The Modern Gatling Gun

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hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian and I am here with a pretty cool gun that has been provided for this video by modern arms out of Tempe Arizona suburb of Phoenix this is a GE m134 minigun and i'm sure everyone's familiar with having seen these but i bet a lot of people don't really know how they work or where they came from so a little bit of background on this thing these were actually first developed as a 20 millimeter rotary aircraft armament and the reason that they are called mini guns today is because when ge developed this one they scaled it down from a 20 millimeter aircraft cartridge to this little tiny 308 round and at that point it becomes the mini version of the gun now actually development goes back a little bit before that that was 1950s but in fact experiments with electrically powered Gatling guns and that's what this really is go all the way back to the 1890s you can in fact find it's really cool you can find articles from magazines in the 1890s talking about Gatling guns with electrical power firing at these astonishing rates of fire like 3,000 rounds a minute literally as fast as they fire today they were able to do prior to 1900 the reason is an electrically driven motor will run this gun as fast as you want to run the motor now the obstacle back in the you know 1900 was you couldn't just have electricity anywhere and where these guns were considered or powered Gatling guns were considered at that time period was his naval defense because on a large naval vessel you had a turbine always running that was providing electrical power and so you could hook the gun up to that at that point you didn't have vehicles driving around that you could put power you know connect the power from and certainly you can't run this as an infantry weapon because you need electricity and in 1900 you don't have electricity to just kind of carry around like that so they never they were never really successful at that point people opted for other other mechanisms and at that point they were never belt-fed they were typically running Ackles drums or Broadwell drums or some other existing Gatling feed mechanism and at 3,000 rounds a minute any of those go dry really fast if you're gonna run this effectively you really need a belt feed that's what we have in this and that's what made these practical in the 1950s so power wise these things run on 24 volts DC and they run now your power consumption depends on your rate of fire because this is a totally electrically operated gun it's not recoil operated it's not gas operated it's operated by an electric motor so it'll run it whatever rate of fire you want it to and your power consumption for three to four thousand rounds a minute is gonna be about a kilowatt in half and that's quite a lot of power you're not getting that with double A's or cr123 batteries you need basically a pair of car batteries hook together and that's on one of several reasons why whenever you see these things in Hollywood being carried around and fired from the hip or whatever completely bogus the first reason it's bogus is because you're the guys not carrying you know 100 pounds of batteries with him the second reason it's bogus is he's not carrying the ammunition with him because at 3,000 rounds a minute you're firing 67 rounds per second you're go through a lot of ammo and that you need somewhere to store it and it weighs a lot and of course the recoil force you're talking literally hundreds of pound feet of recoil impulse from this thing this is equivalent to fire your 308 rifle 3,000 times in a minute or 67 times in the second adding all that recoil up and delivering it to the shooter so that's why they're always on fixed mounts now originally these were aircraft armaments specifically helicopter armaments in Vietnam and they were fantastic in that role that's where they really shine because in say an you know an attack Huey you can stick this thing on a nice fixed mount guys got a nice open field fire out the door ammo just goes in a couple of crates inside the helicopter you can plug into the helicopters turbine engine get all the power you need and the real advantage of this the reason that you want 3,000 rounds a minute is because when you're flying past someone you have a very limited window in order to engage a target and so what you had to do you know the better the gun was the more bled it could deliver to the target in that one second or two seconds that were available this is something that you'll also see in standard aircraft machine guns for example a ground mount browning 1919 run said five or six hundred rounds a minute the aircraft version they make a bunch of changes and crank that up to like 1,200 rounds a minute because again you have these very short engagement windows and when you are on target you need to put as much lead downrange during that brief moment as you can that's where this shines all right so the way that these actually work is there we have a couple main components here we have a barrel cluster we have the actual power source the the motor that runs the gun and then the most complex and really in some ways the most important element to the gun is this structure here which is the DES linker so this gun is fed via a standard belt of 308 ammunition normal links m60 links and what you have to do is have a way to take the rounds off the belt and then feed them into the rotary system of the Gatling gun so I've taken a cover plate off here so we can see the actual workings of the gun and what we have are six barrels and six bolts and you can see depress this you can see that the the barrels rotate through and we're kind of getting the boring section here but right here is where they're closing with a new cartridge they're firing right about here and then the bolt get scammed backwards by this track to extract the cartridge so we're getting a feed down in this area comes up chambers locks fires at 10:00 or 11:00 o'clock on the clock face and then extracts and ejects and you can actually hear the firing pin so the firing mechanism the actual barrel cluster is in some ways it's not that complex and it's actually extremely similar to a vintage 1870s Gatling gun what makes it different is the DES linker alright so this is a separate D linking mechanism and this is definitely the most complex part of the actual gun so what we have going on here is right here is the entryway where the belts coming in so when this is on the gun it's gonna be kind of in this orientation with this solenoid sticking up out of the top but what we're looking at here is our links are gonna come in here our belts going to come in here and what we have to do is actually push the cartridges forward off of the links or straight through the links so most machine guns pull the cartridge out the back this is going to push it straight through straight forward through the link and it's going to be hooked up to the motor by this gear and we can see it best okay so right up in there at the top of travel you can just see the pushers starting to come through as I rotate this what's gonna happen is rounds coming here at the top of this mechanism they start to get pushed out of the links and then we come to this side they get pushed forward into this silver spindle and what's interesting here is this spindle actually holds two cartridges one above the other when it's operating so when a cartridge is first stripped off the belt it goes into the very bottom of this cutout and it's then going to go all the way around this circle and end up on top of this it's kind of like a snail shape surface here so when the cartridge goes down it's on the underside when it comes up it's writing on top of this surface and right about here it gets transitioned off into the gun so the best way for me to demonstrate this is to actually just put some ammo in it so there is no firing pin mechanism in it or anything in this this is just the D linker and it would be a little bit better if I had these on links but I can manually cycle it with my thumb if they're just loose rounds and you'll get the idea of how this works so I put a couple rounds in there and then I have the exposed gear so we can start to pull them down a couple more in there fill it back up now if we look down here we're gonna start to see these come through so there's our first projectile coming through and as I said it's going to come up inside here so these cartridges are in the bottom of this boy I don't know all the terminology for this gun bottom of that spindle and then they're going to rotate around there we go no now you can see we have this cartridge on the top and we've got another one coming in right below it right there just in time this one comes up now it can actually come out it's sitting on top of this surface and in the top of the spindle and right in here the D linker hands this cartridge off to the actual barrel cluster to fire and that is how your minigun feeder or D linker works when those links when the rounds are pushed out of the links the links are gonna come out this little feed chute kind of directed away from the rest of the the works of the gun to keep it clean but that's where the links will come out and we'll see that in just a moment in some firing footage so the trigger mechanism here being that this is an electrically fired gun it's got an electric trigger mechanism make sense right a bunch of different stuff going on we have this plug which connects to our master power and then a safety switch that turns power on or off to the gun and of course when you knock this down you're going to turn the gun off light just confirms that you have power running to the gun these are your triggers you can fire the gun with either one of them you don't have to have both depressed and then interestingly you have another one here this button is actually set up to connect to your communications so if you're the door gunner in a helicopter or if you're you know Humvee or something that has this mounted on it pushing this activates your radio it's the equivalent of reaching to your microphone and what this allows you to do is keep both hands on the gun and still be able to communicate which is important when you're the one directing this kind of firepower all right so firing procedure lifts up the safety engage master power lights on although you can't see it in the sunlight and now we're ready to go one of the interesting side effects of an electrically powered gun like this is the barrels don't just stop the moment you release the trigger they're going to the motor stops and then the barrels spin down until they stop from friction you do want to make sure that you don't have say all of your ammo continue to feed through the gun while the barrels spinning right so you don't have you know fifty or hundred rounds dump out the side of the gun while the barrels are slowing down and that is done in one of two ways the original mechanism was actually a mechanical a solenoid on on the feeder and with those you would actually lose about 5 loaded rounds when you stop firing they would spit out the ejection port and the reason for that was that they were in the gun cluster at the time the more modern way which companies like Dylan have have developed is to actually put a clutch on the thing that disconnects the feeder earlier and with a Dylan clutch on it you don't lose any live ammo that was one of their selling points so you know I can fire up like a one-second burst and I'm getting about a one-second spin down a little more than a one-second spin down when you're actually shooting these something to keep in mind is that they don't really like quick repeat taps of the trigger so give it a moment to spin down before you fire it again otherwise you're kind of inviting feed jams when these guns do jam it's primarily this guy it's the the D linker that's going to give you problems and you don't want to have to pull this thing apart to clear a malfunction you just want to keep shooting it so in general firing these give it a burr you doesn't have to be a long burst but don't try and fire stop and then immediately fire again all right before we can shoot it we have to load it up now of course we have this feed chute that doesn't what this does is simply guide the belt and prevent where there's a cloth cover on here to prevent links from getting stuck in the belt this just keeps everything nice and clean so I'm gonna go ahead and disconnect that then this is our ammo can and this is I believe a thousand round ammo cam got some half-turn locks and we can take the lid off and you've got it divided into two segments here and there's a trick to getting the thousand round continuous belt all loaded in here just perfectly so it'll feed without any snags now we're gonna load I believe I think we're into a 200 round belt this time so we're not really gonna need to mess with this we can use just the cover so let me put this back on what I'm gonna do here is pop the top of this and what this this funnel is here so that you can feed from either this side or this side and the belt will slide into the center position where it goes up into the feed chute we've got a plastic nice low friction roller there so put our feed chute on there we go lift up the top cover as with US military machine guns we want the brass facing down or as they say brass to the graphs what's kind of cool about this is because these are contained in the feed chute I can actually push this belt and it'll push rounds all the way up that shoot up to the gun all right I can see the end of the feed chute or the end of the belt up in the chute there so I have just a little bit of belt left which has gotten bent I had it twisted down there and bent a link so it is important on a minigun that you do not have a trailing link like this because that will mess up the that will jam up the D linker so I'm gonna put a loose round in that trailing link and then we'll just slide there because I have so little belt down in the can I don't need to worry about making sure that it's folded right it just barely even hits the bottom of the cam so go ahead and close this lock it down now we're ready for the next step of loading rotate the barrel till the clutch will open up all the way okay now by pinning this in place it will allow me to rotate the barrels which I have to do to manually feed the belt in at first so I've got my belt down here we're gonna lift it up we want to make sure that everything goes in perfectly straight and parallel here you don't want the rounds nose-diving forward or back and so we've got it all the way up I'm gonna maintain some upward pressure rotate the barrel cluster counterclockwise which will rotate the d-link or clockwise and pull that first round up until I hear a click there's one click we want to clicks so maintain pressure make sure these are still nice and even there's our second click now the D linker is holding the belt under its own strength I can let go with the belt I'll go ahead and put this back in place and now I want to continue to click the barrel cluster through until I see a first the first link come out of the feed chute there now we're going to continue to click this through until the first link comes out the feed chute once that happens we'll know that the belt is all the way through the D linking process okay there we go very important now we remove the pin and reengage the clutch if I don't do this ammo will continue up into the barrel cluster and after a couple of clicks it will actually fire around as long as the clutch is engaged here now the barrel stays still and what we'll be doing here is just cycling the belt up and in until the gun is completely ready to fire and now you saw the second link came out now we're all the way through the D linking cycle and I can click the barrel around as much as I want because the clutch is engaged ammo is not feeding into the gun at this point however the gun is hot and as soon as you turn on power and press the triggers the clutch when you press the trigger the clutch disengages and allows the gun to actually fire alright here we go master power on that was a little high and that's a hundred rounds so there isn't an iron there isn't an optic on this gun and you actually you aim it by watching impact and the trickiest part about that is it fires so fast that you run out of ammo you have to be pretty fast to pick up okay where where am i hitting adjust with a regular machine gun 500 rounds a minute it's not that hard to go well okay you know duck duck and bring it on to target with this thing by that time you fired at 250 round belt already it's gone so you have to get some pretty quick reaction times on this which means that I need some more practice on it I normally don't shoot at goofy targets like old trucks but the minigun is kind of a different beast and kind of requires something like that so I'm gonna see if I can actually hit that we're gonna start low bring the GUP gun up on to target powers on well I was hitting it there shall we go take a look and see what happened so as a guy without a whole lot of experience shooting a minigun I was able to successfully perforate the snot out of this truck including both of the tires and I think there is going to be an attempt to set this thing on fire which will be made very easy by the fact that the gas tank is now also thoroughly perforated and drizzling out on the ground so I'm gonna stay a little farther back from it than this it is interesting to note that that rate of fire actually makes it kind of hard to shoot because you have so little time to to track your target and engage before you're just out of ammo so we can't take some actual a little bit of real-world lesson from a goofy exercise like this namely you'll notice that I have bullet holes pretty well distributed across the front of the truck including a bunch here on the front blew out that tire however if we look at the back side of the truck we've got a lot of bullet holes coming out the back but we don't really have any coming out the front here got to there in front of the tire and one clearly went low enough to actually puncture the tire but while I wouldn't say there is any safe way to hide behind this from a minigun you'll die a little bit later if you hide behind the engine block thanks for watching guys I hope you enjoyed the video I'd like to really thank modern arms out of Tempe Arizona for letting me get my grubby hands on this thing show you guys how it works and show you guys what it looks like actually shooting tune it again to forgotten weapons calm and have some fun you

Info

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 3,648,579

Rating: 4.8592839 out of 5

Keywords: minigun, gatling, m134, gatling gun, cannon, rotary, 308, destroy truck, helicopter, modern guns, electric, belt feed, belt fed, american, united states, fire, shoot, destroy, awe, general electric, 20mm, delink, disassembly, function

Id: rIlwHT4IdRc

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 22min 0sec (1320 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 22 2016

Reddit Comments

Glad he went into the de-linker mechanism, that's a key but sometimes unappreciated part of the system.

👍︎︎ 13 👤︎︎ u/Guysmiley777 📅︎︎ Dec 22 2016 🗫︎ replies

I could listen to Gun Jesus explain the assembly and history of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

👍︎︎ 21 👤︎︎ u/WienerJungle 📅︎︎ Dec 22 2016 🗫︎ replies

That was very interesting

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/arajparaj 📅︎︎ Dec 22 2016 🗫︎ replies

Is it true that this gun will turn you into a sexual tyrannosaurus?

👍︎︎ 6 👤︎︎ u/GuyWhatsItToYa 📅︎︎ Dec 22 2016 🗫︎ replies

One man can't carry one of these things, pshhh. He has obviously never heard of Vulcan Raven.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/AnAnyMoos 📅︎︎ Dec 22 2016 🗫︎ replies

All electronic, very cool.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/confused_patriot 📅︎︎ Dec 22 2016 🗫︎ replies

I would not like to find myself on the business end of this thing.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/bbp84 📅︎︎ Dec 22 2016 🗫︎ replies

RIP Headphones

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/ADgiant 📅︎︎ Dec 22 2016 🗫︎ replies

Ahoy's video on the minigun is something I'd recommend to anyone who likes this video.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/TheSwedeIrishman 📅︎︎ Dec 22 2016 🗫︎ replies