Maxim Pom-Pom 37mm Machine Gun

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian and I am here today at the James Giulia auction house taking a look at some of the guns and enormous naval cannons that are gonna be for sale in their upcoming October of 2016 firearms auction and of course what we have here is a tremendously large naval cannon this is a Vickers pom-pom gun or a maxim actually this one's a maximum pom bomb gun so named by actually South Africans for the the sound the rather distinctive sound that this makes firing in fully automatic with 37 millimeter one-pound explosive shells this was a serious piece of artillery when these were manufactured which would have been between 1889 and 1900 or there abouts this particular gun it's really cool is has some really good documented history to it this is gun number 2024 and he started at number 2001 so this was in the very first batch of 30 of these guns that were made by what was at the time the maxim Nordenfelt gun and ammunition company and they made 30 of these guns kind of as an experiment they were hoping to make big sales of this as a upscale version of the standard Maxim water-cooled machine gun and the idea was these would be primarily used by naval units they out these on ships and they would act as you are close in basically like anti torpedo boat boat armaments so when people tried to get in close to do nasty things to a large naval vessel you needed something small that you could use to fend off small boats think of these another option would be think of them like the Somali pirates of 1900 they're gonna come up in little speedboats and you need something to keep them away and you know 14-inch naval guns aren't gonna do the job on a speedboat that's 200 yards away instead you get something like this that can rapid-fire a projectile that is you could have them explosive you could also have armor-piercing ones this would go through an inch of cast iron plate at 100 yards which is pretty significant especially at the time that really lets you defeat any light armor on a small naval vessel these will also go on to be used on ground-based role primarily as anti-aircraft guns you'll see pictures of these used by both sides by the British and the Germans in World War one as anti-aircraft guns with timed exploding projectiles you could really I mean this is going to do a serious number to a world war one wood and canvas biplane and there are just incredibly cool massive guns mechanically they're almost identical well not quite identical mechanically they're extremely similar to a standard maxim gun same basic principles but there are a few changes made to accommodate the enormous size of these things and in total they only made about 450 of them they did a really good job financially for the maxim Nordenfelt company for a couple years 1895 1896 really sales of these helped the company survive but beyond that they kind of quickly became a bit obsolete so these were ultimately in service for a couple of decades the u.s. declared them obsolete in 1911 and 1912 but they were still on US ships during World War one this particular gun I'm again I mentioned there are some cool provenance on this one well this particular gun was originally manufactured in 1889 as this one of the first batch of 30 and it took a couple years for it to sell but by the mid-1990s it was sold along with five other guns to Russia these were sent off basically as sales samples and the Russians tinkered with it for a short time and decided it wasn't wasn't what they wanted I think they actually claimed it had some defects to it and they shipped them back rather than pay for them so the maximum company Maxim Nordenfelt at that point got the guns back and rebuilt them and then they actually sold them to someone else and in this case we don't know who this second buyer was but by 1897 they had come back a second time because parts of this are stamped Vickers Sons and Maxim which was the new name of what would become the Vickers company as of 1897 so that we know that after 1897 this gun came back and got reworked again and then in 1898 it was sold a third time that third sale was to the US Navy who put it on a Coast Guard Cutter the USS Manning that Coast Guard Cutter was promptly brought into naval service for the spanish-american war they sailed down to Cuba and the Manning with this gun and a second one they also had gun number 2026 on the Manning and those two participated in some of the very first bombardments of Cuba after that it stayed on the Manning for the time it was eventually declared obsolete removed from the ship and kind of tossed in a pile somewhere probably until someone found it it's been largely restored it looks fantastic it is missing some internal parts and we'll take a look at the inside in a minute but boy it's just a really cool piece of equipment here swing it around you can see the other side this would have originally fired belted ammunition so these guys all in a belt in fact the platform over here is for a crate of ammunition instead of a fusee spring like you would have on a regular maxim gun you know a coil spring on the side these actually used a wound up like a clock spring and that would be contained in here on this one the springs present but it's actually broken so it's not installed but really cool markings here on this guy and all the way down to the little teeny pistol grip on the back which is what you would actually use to fire it fill up the water jacket with water for cooling this fires between 250 and 300 rounds a minute of explosive one-pound projectiles like I said a lot of firepower in this guy and a lot of the components on here are big cast brass pieces it was a lot easier for example to cast a part like a feed block like this a very complex a lot of curves involved it's a lot easier to make a mold and cast this then try and machine it out of steel so they did that for a lot of the complex parts you'll see that you notice the square parts like the side plates are steel these guys parts of the feed or if the operating mechanism have to be steel because they need to be stronger brass isn't strong enough to withstand the impact that you have with this when it's firing but for things that are just geometric like the feed block the water jacket here the pistol grip the sight this thing is actually a hydraulic buffer has this nice instruction on the back Phil buffer glycerin and water equal parts one pint at extreme depression so you would tilt the gun all the way this way and then you can fill the buffer up from the back via this screw plug and that's what the internals slam into every time you fire that decelerates them and this is actually on an original navel cone melt so this mount would have been bolted onto a ship's deck and you've got this thing that is one man can operate this although you have a second assistant at least one assistant to help bring ammunition but one man can aim and fire this you've got a rear sight you got a front sight this is set up so that it's pinned in place for elevation but originally you would have had a wheel allow you to elevate and depress the gun and of course it just pivots 360 degrees on the mount and you can you can deliver a lot of bad news to anyone who's trying to get close to a naval vessel with one of these same thing if you're shooting down aircraft in World War one Oh let's bring the camera in and take a close look at some of the the markings on this thing and we'll take a look inside the top cover alright so here is our spring collar in fact we can actually pull this off you can see the stud it goes on and then inside here you would normally have a very large clock type coil spring wind-up spring and then Maxim Nordenfelt was the name of the company at the time that there's an interesting story just in that the maxim gun company was bought up by the Nordenfelt gun company who was actually one of his competitors making multi-barrel what you'd call a manual machine gun and the two work together for a short time before eventually it was all all became the Vickers company and that's more story than we need to get into today but 37 millimeter which is in British parlance a 1 pounder because a 37 millimeter shell was a nominal 1 pound shell maximum felt gun and ammunition Company Limited now if we look down on the yoke that holds this whole massive thing up we have a u.s. Navy stamp it's a one pound one pound er Maxim gun and this was in the naval registry as gun number 6 separate from its Maxim named serial number weighs 97 pounds let's be clear that's 97 pounds for just of the gun without water without ammunition without this actual trunnion and without that the stand weighs quite a lot more than 97 pounds otherwise and the date on there is 1898 which is when the US may be purchased this piece here's the back of our hydraulic buffer with of course the instructions for filling said buffer well we'll see when we take a look inside what exactly that's doing and then here is our rear sight we've got windage adjustment right here like so and then in order to adjust elevation what you do is loosen this thumb screw and slide the whole sight bracket up and down this can go out to a maximum of 80 which would be 800 meters or yards I must say I'm not sure if it 2 meters or yards but 800 is is a pretty extreme elevation for this gun it's a fairly low pressure cartridge and the maximum range wasn't all that huge now that's not particularly important because this is primarily meant for close-range usage and lastly up here on top of the top cover we have the original data plate so it's a 1 pounder automatic and then patents from 1889 1890 and 1895 this is kind of interesting because it implies we know this gun was made in 1889 maybe 290 but it came back to be refurbished and updated by the maxim company and clearly it they added some feature to it I believe it was an improvement to the operating handle that was a feature that was patented in 1895 alright now to open this thing up we are going to pull the top cover pin that comes out and then the top cover lifts up comes all the way over onto the muscle and now we can take a look inside all right now I mentioned some of the internals are missing those would be the lock itself and the the slide component to the feed block however what we do have here is the original lock head so you can see that this hasn't interrupted thread to it and the lock would drop in here and rotate and lock in place on this and that is how it would remain attached to the internals of the gun when it's actually being used now these has two internal rails here and here just like a Maxima Vickers gun and when fired this whole assembly including the barrel all of this is going to reciprocate backwards about two inches when these go back they're going to impinge on that hydraulic buffer at the very back of the receiver and so that's what's going to dampen the impact they will be slowed down by the coil spring here and there is a charging handle on this other side so what would normally happen is this handle would reciprocate backwards when fired it would impact this and it would end up sliding all the way forward and then all the way back so as you're firing this this case this charging handle is moving through this this arc of rotation fully with every shot you don't want to stick your hand or your face in the way of that and that again is just like what you would have on a Maxima Vickers gun this design is of the the outside bits here is is exactly what they had on the very early maxim guns of this same period now one other difference between this and the standard maximum gun is again kind of due to its size and also a special naval interesting requirement the trigger on this first off it does have a manual safety but then the trigger on a regular Maxim runs along the bottom plate of the gun however on this thing there is no bottom plate so we can see right down through there and the idea was the Navy didn't want to accumulate in the gun just anything that gets in there let it fall out the bottom no big deal there's plenty of sailors to scrub the deck clean afterwards so the trigger bar can't go on this bottom plate which isn't there instead the trigger bar is running along the right side of the receiver looking down in here you can actually see the trigger bar right there at the tip of my finger it's locked in place it's not moving but it runs from there up you can see it right here and it's going to continue all the way up towards the front of the gun to right there so right here is a projection on the trigger bar that's going to interface with the lock and when this gets pulled backwards it's going to trip the lock and fire the gun and that's what happens when you pull the trigger this whole bar all the way to the back of the receiver slides backwards thanks for watching guys I hope you enjoyed the video it's really cool to get to take a look at one of these as far as I know there's only there only two of these in the country there are a couple more around the world and there are some others that are in total relic condition sitting outside VFW posts and such but this one's actually been restored the brass is nice-looking it's got most of the internals in it and it's a really cool rare specimen of the most ginormous maxim that they ever made so if you're interested in having this yourself you might need a bigger living room you might want to talk to your wife but pretty damn cool check out the link in the description text below you'll find a link there to Julia's catalog page on the piece you can see all of their their pictures their information their provenance which includes some of the naval records describing the naval inventory of this gun and the ship that was mounted on and placed bid online if you want or come right down to the auction house participate live and get to take a look at it yourself thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 1,174,812

Rating: 4.9496555 out of 5

Keywords: maxim, nordenfelt, gardner, aa, at, antiaircraft, ww1, world war one, world war 1, wwi, vickers, vsm, mngacl, 37mm, ap, usn, navy, uss manning, coast guard, cuba, spanish-american war, russia, england, hiram maxim, boer, english

Id: EG1DoHPAaRA

Length: 15min 43sec (943 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 13 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

well... thought i am going to see it in action. ☻

[u/Robert927]

Why is the American flag there? Is it symbolizing where the weapon came from? Because the Maxim is a Russian gun. Is this some modification to the original maxim gun?