Maxim Silverman Model 1896 Automatic Pistol

okay thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I mean I'm here today the Institute of military technology taking a look at some of the excellent cool guns that they have in their firearms collection and today we have an extremely rare and interesting early semi-auto pistol this is a model of 1896 Maxim silverman pistol and there's some interesting history behind it so just to start off it is a simple blowback kind of converted into a sort of a delayed blowback automatic pistol box magazine-fed and this particular one is chambered for the 7.62 art cartridge that's same cartridge that was used in the c-93 Borchardt it is dimensionally the same as seven 6-3 Mauser but a lighter powder charge to it and what's interesting about this is it's probably not actually a design that was thought up by Hiram Maxim instead it's a design that was thought out by his assistant Lois Silverman now Silverman was the first person that Maxim hired when he arrived in England and set up a business in fact when he hired Silverman he was still working to untangle his attachments to the gas and electric power industries and Silverman would stay with him for many years pretty much through his whole career in machine guns now unfortunately and Silverman seems to have been a very clever guy is very capable assistant and employee would go on to be a factory supervisor for Maxim unfortunately Maxim kind of didn't treat him as well as maybe he could have was a bit condescending towards Silverman and when this particular gun was patented it patented was under the names of both Hiram Maxim and Lewis Silverman but Maxim doesn't mention this pistol at all in his autobiography and Maxim was really a quite capable self promoter and if he had any involvement with this any significant involvement with this pistol we'd really expect to see it in his writings now he does mention a follow up version of this pistol which was much more based on his own ideas looking at this follow up you can definitely see the influence of the Maxim machine gun in it and it doesn't hurt that it has a nice big em on the grip but this first version really seems to have been Silverman's idea now I said it was a blowback pistol and it was probably that's the one failing of this gun it is in many ways a gun well ahead of its time it's very ergonomic its elegant and simple inside it's not that difficult to machine it's a really cool pistol the problem was they chose to colorful the cartridge for it the 7-6 3 borchardt really kind of needs a locked breech in order to function properly and we can see that we'll get into this in some detail but there's a spring here that was added to the side that doesn't appear in the patent drawings or documents of this pistol and it's pretty clear that as originally designed the pistol simply opened way too fast and they needed some way to slow down the action and that's why this spring was added to the outside now in total they're only three of these guns as far as we know that we're ever made they're certainly owned like three existing today and it's kind of interesting that all three of them each one is in a different caliber so this one's 763 Borchardt there's a second one that is in a unknown 8.45 millimeter cartridge which appears to be 763 Borchardt necked up to about eight and a half millimeter almost certainly an experiment by maximus silverman and then there's a third one which is a much larger frame which is actually in 455 Webley impressively large automatic pistol so while the gun had a lot of potential to it it never ended up going into production I think partly because Maxim wasn't really all that invested in it it wasn't his idea it seems to been something that he allowed Silverman to tinker with and and work on with the tacit support of the maxim company but at the same time maxim was really focused on military contracts and large-scale production and as you can see or as it becomes clear from the development of this gun it really wasn't suited to a full power military pistol cartridge they didn't really consider the potential for a civilian market for a lower powered cartridge maybe it could have been successful but they didn't follow up on that and there was enough work going on with the machine in the maximum company that it appears there really just wasn't time and resources available to follow up on the pistols so they ended up making probably not more than just the three that we still have today maybe just those three and then the project kind of withered from there so it's a very much a Forgotten weapon why don't we go ahead and take a closer look we'll pull it apart and I'll show you the elegant insides of this design so we normally start with markings and controls and that's going to be pretty simple here because there are no markings and there's basically only a couple of simple controls these were of course all prototype pistols so they're not even serialized kind of cool these came out of England but they are pre 1898 guns so they don't even have import marks required control wise obviously we have the trigger we have a magazine in the grip and there is a magazine release right here on the heel so I pull that back that allows me to pull out the magazine very sharp angle to it before people ask because I know they will this was not influenced by the Luger because it does predate the Luger and it probably did not have any influence on some of the more modern guns that we see that look stylistically similar like high standards or Ruger automatic pistols simply because this gun was obscure enough that it's very unlikely that any of those designers were familiar with it but at any rate there's our magazine holds eight cartridges 7 6 3 7 6 3 borchardt this is a single-action pistol so we have a cocking piece back here here click that cocked and then pull the trigger drop the striker here there is no hammer there is no manual safety on the pistol if had gone into commercial production they probably would have added one but for this at this stage of development there was not and then this is kind of a delaying spring tech this is exactly a delaying spring so we have a bolt inside the pistol here when it fires what it has to do is actually lift this spring up out of the receiver you can see it lifting right there and I have to get it topped all the way up in order to cycle the gun it's really quite a strong spring there's no full e cycled comes back down pull the trigger drop the striker and fire disassembly is really slick and easy on this there are three screws that I need to take out first I'm going to pull out these two and take this spring off the outside and then I have one screw here that connects this top dust cover to the striker assembly there's the delaying spring you see this is kind of a crude part it's nicely polished on the outside but some of the shaping on the inside leaves a bit to be desired this was something like I said that was added on to the gun they discovered it was opening too fast and needed a way to slow down the action so they milled a hole in the frame drilled and tapped those two holes and added that spring that the bolt has to overcome you can see the edge of the bolt right there as it starts to come back it's going to be interrupted by that spring and has to pull that spring up and out then removing the screw that holds the dust cover on I can pull the bolt slightly back lift this up the dust cover has this little nose piece that locks into the bolt there so I can pop it out as I have now with the dust cover off the main disassembly is to unscrew the rear breech plug which I can do with the striker the hole back here for the striker is rectangular the hole back here for the striker is rectangular so I can use this basically as a screwdriver to unscrew the breech plug once that's unscrewed then it just pulls out the back of the frame now we have two pieces here we have the bolt and we have the firing pin slash striker it's all one continuous long piece and then there is a cross pin here holding on this rear cap if you take the cross pin out which I'm not going to do then you can pull off the rear breech plug and the spring but you can see everything through that spring right there now the way this actually functions first off let me point out this has a floating ejector so you can see the ejector pin right there that is this absolutely tiny little piece by the way this fell out like a thousand times while I was doing the prep work for this video that is the ejector with a tiny tiny thing and it's it's in this channel and it's shorter than the channel is so it can be when you have a cartridge in there it pushes the ejector down and then this groove on the bolt rides on a lug in the frame you can see how that lug guides the bolt when the bolt comes back to this point that lug is going to hit the back of the ejector push it forward and cause it to pop the case out the top of the pistol so it would do that about there then once the case is ejected the ejector is now fully inside the bolt and can ride over the top of that lug now the firing mechanism here is also pretty slick and really efficient and well thought-out so you have this front flange of the firing pin is the same diameter as the inside of the bolt and you can see right down there there's something interrupting so the firing pin can't go all the way forward that is the shear here pivots on this pin and if we look at it right there you can see it moving up and down see it better from this angle there you go so now it's out of the way firing pin can go forward now it's in the way it'll hold the firing pin back I put the firing pin in that's where it gets held until this is pushed at which point the firing pin can go all the way forward and it protrudes out front and fires the cartridge so so that's the sear and it is activated by the trigger pushing that bar that bar goes up pushes the front of the sear up which pushes the rear of the sear down which moves it out of the way and allows the firing pin to drop so in this case we have only one spring and it acts as both the striker spring flash firing pin spring and also the main recoil spring so I can demonstrate that here you can see this is far enough back that our striker has been cocked and it's now sitting back the firing pin is sitting back in the bolt when I pull the trigger it drops forward and fires then inertia will cause the firing pin to start moving backwards before the bolt so it'll recaulk like that then well then it would cycle if you had the dust cover which connects this to bolt which I don't have on right now so that won't work but so overall this is really a very elegantly designed pistol it's not that difficult to manufacture a lot of things like the bolt really can start as just a simple piece of bar stock that doesn't require any really complex machining operations to complete the frame itself is a little more complex but not nearly as bad as some things I've seen for example the top of the frame here really just is a hollow tube there are no particular features in there that are difficult to make the barrels then I believe threaded in it it's kind of unfortunate that Maxim didn't decide to take the opportunity to develop this more as a small civilian pistol where it might have actually been one of the better early blowback pistols thank you for watching guys I hope you enjoyed the video I am thrilled to have been able to finally get my hands on one of these Maxim silverman pistols this one of course provided here by the Institute of military technology they are a collection and Research Center established to preserve this sort of history and help educate people about it very much the same sort of mission that I have myself so the collection is not generally open to the public but it is available for research and study by appointment so if you're interested by all means get in contact with them there are some fantastic items in the collection here like this one and of course if you enjoy seeing this sort of thing on on the internet where everyone can get easy access to it please do consider checking out my patreon page its support from the folks there at a buck a month that really makes it possible for me to travel to places like this and bring you guys fantastic early pistols like this one thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 603,283

Rating: 4.945322 out of 5

Keywords: maxim, silverman, pistol, handgun, semiauto, 1896, prototype, experimental, rare, unique, valuable, blowback, 7.63mm, webley, design, history, development, simple, ingenious, clever, recoil, louis silverman, hiram maxim, forgotten, forgottenweapons, inrang, inrangetv, mccollum, kasarda

Id: F1ElpucXu6A

Length: 14min 19sec (859 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 24 2017