Q&A 30: ACRs, Besas, and Czechoslovakia

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another QA on forgotten weapons I'm Ian McCallum and as always our questions here have been provided by you the awesome patreon patrons who support this channel and make it possible so let's just dig right in here I will start with question from watchit who says hey Ian do you know why the Brits adopted the visa machine gun in their tanks it was in the non-standard calibre people in leader Mauser and I believe they already had the Browning in production in 303 at the time which made a fine coaxial and hull tank machine gun so why'd the besa I think well first off once the the British tank corps got their hands on browning machine guns in tanks with the arrival of American lend-lease tanks they really liked them and they would eventually replace the visa with Browning's I think the reason they didn't early on is because the Browning that was in production early in the mid to late 1930s was an aircraft gun and while it is it has the same fundamental mechanical operating principles as the Browning infantry and paint guns there are some important differences the rate of fire the cooling capability so aircraft guns have to be a much higher rate of fire to be effective and they don't really have to worry about cooling all that much they kind of do there were actually some issues with cook-offs II in early aircraft Browning's during testing but as a general rule the things sitting in the wing of an aircraft going several hundred miles now are at high altitude it gets lots of cold air blowing over it you don't really have to worry that much about cooling in a tank you don't have that and so you do need to have some sort of capability for cooling the gun so of course going into this the British had the Vickers gun well the problem that the Vickers is it's water-cooled and it's got a water jacket on the front end of the gun that's the bit that's sticking outside the tank so the Vickers was not an ideal tank machine gun although it was used that way especially in some of the early like little white British tank ads but you know one round goes through the water jacket or piece of shrapnel goes through the water jacket and then your gun has very little staying power because Vickers gun has a very thin barrel underneath the water jacket so the British had a good relationship with Brno at this point they've just gone through all the work or finalizing all the work of adopting and producing the Bren gun or no has this belt-fed 8 millimeter gun really ideally suited for tank use it's a relatively short receiver it's got a pistol grip on it you don't need a buttstock it's air-cooled and it works it's already been proven out and it was an easy thing for the British to adopt they didn't really have to worry about logistical issues because parts interchangeability between airplanes and tanks really isn't a thing two very distinct services and you've got a bazillion other parts on both of those vehicles you that you're not ever expecting to interchange so if your tank corps has different ammunition than your Air Force doesn't just really matter I think the reason they went with a millimeter was simply that's what Brno designed the gun in it worked in that wasn't a huge order of guns and you're talking a couple thousand guns rather than try and go through all the development cost and time of redesigning it to 303 it's only going in tanks just adopted as it is and it made really actually kind of made sense now like I said at the beginning once they got their hands on basically infantry browning it's not the aircraft Browning's but american-made infantry Browning's in Shermans those were really nice and and they preferred those for a number of reasons Nick also by the way they actually adopted the besa in 15 millimeter as well although that didn't last all that long Nick says are you aware of any good reproduction French model 1915 field gear and BDUs I'm having trouble finding quality sellers that offer custom sizing I'm very tall so standard sizes don't fit I think you're probably out of luck I hate to say it I'm not aware of any one commercially offering French World War one reproduction uniforms in the United States I have seen them for sale in France there's a company called dorsal do you are sou ex that I don't know if they are the people who are commissioning them but they do sell them they have a surplus shop in Paris and I've been in there and they've got you know a decent selection of standard sized reproduction uniforms they might be able to make something custom or put you in contact with whoever it is that's actually producing those that's the the best that I can give you on that one it's not a popular thing like they don't have a lot of World War one reenacting in the US in the first place and a lot less of it is French Joseph says there was a discussion online recently about the brn 180 uppers from Brownells and how well they represent the lost potential of the ACR the Remington a double Evo's adaptive combat rifle aka the Magpul Masada do you think the ACR could have been a success in any capacity if they had designed it as an upper replacement kit for the m16 rather than a completely new rifle most of the ACR s important features were in the upper anyway a compelling what-if or just another way for the ACR to fail I don't think it would have been more successful in that way I guess it couldn't have been a whole lot less successful than it was but I think the the idea of marketing the Masada slash ACR to the law enforcement market was kind of doomed from the start a lot of people have put forth guns like that and even when they come from major manufacturers like say the FM scar a few contracts have come through for the scar presumably enough to justify its manufacture by FM but not huge wide scale adoption and I think when it comes to the US military there just isn't a compelling reason to to spend the money to replace a lot of uppers with a new upper that doesn't offer all that much you know this this question comes up a lot in various different forums things like having interchangeable barrels and being able to swap between six eight or six five and five five six these things really aren't that big of an issue for the military like unless they're actually planning to convert huge amounts of you know huge numbers of infantry rifles to say 688 it does them no good to have a barrel that can be swapped to 680 if they're never going to do that and if they are going to do that do they really want all of the infrastructure that goes into detachable you know quick changeable barrels in a military context you're not gonna have two different cartridges that you kind of pick and choose from they're gonna have the one cartridge for your infantry rifle and you're just gonna use it so I honestly I think mag pol was lucky to have gotten out of that rifle I have no insight into what that may have cost the company at the time hopefully didn't hurt them too badly obviously they survived it but I don't think that's a rifle with a lot of sustainable future I think Brownells is very wise to have designed their brn 180 uppers in such a way that they are easily adaptable to air fifteens and aim them exclusively at the civilian market I presume exclusively at the civilian market for more enthusiasts hobbyists maybe competition shooters and not tried to put in the infrastructure they didn't try and build a lot of stuff into the 180 upper as far as I can tell keep it efficient keep it simple to manufacture and make it appeal to the consumer market on a couple of points and not you know not not base your your whole project I'm trying to get you know orders for a hundred thousand of the things from some agency brokenhearted liberal says why are released on empty magazines not more popular seems like something you'd want for everyday carry I disagree I think the idea of having a pistol that automatically ejects the magazine when empty is one of those things that sounds good in some contexts on paper but introduces a lot more problems than it would actually solve releasing the magazine so if you're actually if your concern is being able to very quickly change magazines and a pistol I don't think you find any delay from releasing the magazine you would be releasing the magazine with the hand that's holding the gun at the exact same time that you are reaching for a new magazine with your other hand and if the magazine automatically ejected when it was empty you would still have to reach for that new magazine and I don't think you would see any quanta native increase in speed what you do get is a extra mechanical feature that is certainly liable to malfunction or not work and I think it's liable to malfunction and on top of that a lot of people are going to be a lot more concerned about that malfunction then maybe they would necessarily need to be like I don't think it would necessarily malfunction all that often but people will be super paranoid about rejecting that gun on the basis that one in a gazillion times it might malfunction and that's unacceptable to them you know when when that thing if it gets dirty will it you check the magazine when it's supposed to will it perhaps not let you eject the magazine like will that mechanism make it very difficult to eject the mag will it eject the magazine unintentionally when they're still ammunition in it there are situations where you don't want to be just randomly shooting magazines off onto the ground this is part of the reason that a lot of European military pistols early on had heel releases it was important to conserve those magazines because unlike today's competitive shooter with a belt full of a dozen of them in a military sense not everyone's running around with a ton of pistol mags and if you just lose them if you discard them yeah that's a potentially a problem so the cost of developing it the mechanical complexity involved in it the potential for malfunction and the lack of to my mind a real benefit I think all come together to explain why there are virtually no firearms that automatically eject magazines there was the grant Hammond 1917 that did it there was a very recent gamer a ar-15 model that did it was kind of cool but even those guys were extremely explicit when they when they were showing that thing at shot show like this is for competition gaming that's all we're intending it for so I think they had to do that to avoid some of those you know this will get you killed on the street sorts of responses nick says in the course of your research what lesser-known countries have pressed you most in terms of advancements in firearms design and/or manufacturing large nations or empires notwithstanding US UK Germany Russia what smaller countries stand out the most the two that occur to me are first off Czechoslovakia and now the Czech Republic they have this amazing tradition of exceptional firearms design and it continues today you see that with cz you see that back in the 20s and 30s with a whole slew of very interesting experimental early semi-auto rifles the the Czech is eh 29 was one of the one of the best contenders early on it didn't really get adopted by anybody in huge numbers it got a few small contracts but it was kind of that Universal comparison and tests everyone would take their new domestic done and if it couldn't at least be better than his aged 29 then you'd better go back to work and improve it some more and cz of course remains today if especially if you go outside the US the cz 75 in its modern iterations is one of the most popular pistols on the planet and has absolutely rabid fans and for good reason so Czechoslovakia / Czech Republic is one of them the other one that comes to mind is Finland but not quite in the same way a lot of the guns that are domestically finished designed or maybe not great like i Malati's pistol it's okay but it had some some fairly substantial weaknesses to it and it was heavy but what impresses me about Finland historically is their ability to take someone else's gun and substantially improve it so by far the best Mosin Nagant ever come up with are the finnish iterations of them the Finns took Russian Imperial Mo's ins and turned them into really nice m39 they did a great job on that and then they went and did the same thing to the Kalashnikov taking a standard milled receiver a K and turning it into what we recognize today as the val mat which would be in their terms the RK 62 and then more recently the arcade 90 to 95 which is I would say the best generation of the Kalashnikov so their ability to take that like maybe not develop the thing from the ground up but to take someone else's work and make it truly the best it can't be in sort of that Luger style where you know Luger didn't invent the Luger from the ground up he was brought in to take the Borchardt that wasn't all that great and turned it into something that has become legendarily you know well known and excellent Christopher says in block clips what are the pros and cons mechanically logistically etc were they equally adopted equally effective in all rifles that use them why didn't more countries or manufacturers adopt them finally what is your personal opinion of the end block clip I really like in block clips and I think it's a bit of a misunderstanding to think that they weren't widely used they were very widely used the austro-hungarian Empire universally adopted them with the Steyr m95 series of rifles the Italians used them universally in the Carcano series of rifles the United States used them in the m1 the Germans used them in the ver 88 they would replace that with the the Mauser click later on but you know there are a lot of guns out there the French of course use them in the Bertier series and the RSC series you know maybe not a full 50% but a huge portion of the world's militaries at the time that you know the repeating bolt-action rifle was becoming was the standard military firearm a ton of them used I would say I'll say in block clips or more appropriately moniker clips because the history of these things is that Ferdinand Mon liquor designed this packet loading clip and at the time it was a tremendous advantage over everything else that had existed at the time because prior to that you had mostly two magazines or you had magazines he generally had to like load one at a time and what Mon liquor came up with was here's five rounds all at once so we can go from this problem of the tube-fed guns which is it's not really it in overall time once you have to reload the magazine you don't actually gain any speed from a tube magazine because you have to load it one round at the time so if you say I want to fire 25 rounds and you're gonna start with empty guns a guy with a single-shot rifle and a guy with a tube gun like a crop a Czech or Swiss vet early or a Lebel there have basically the same time required to do it because the two mag just means that you get to put 8 loading motions through in a block and then fire 8 times it doesn't mean it goes any faster the packet clip went a lot faster now with one motion kachunk now you've got five more rounds in the gun and you can go back to shooting it came first then the Mauser clip came afterwards and the Mauser clip is has has benefits and detriments to it obviously in time the Mauser clip would become as we know the stripper clip would be chosen as the the superior design worldwide so what are the advantages of the mon licker clips they're cheap they're disposable they in some ways prevent damage to the gun or they simplify design of the gun because the feed lips for iman liquor clip are molded into the clip itself rather than being built into the gun now this can be an advantage or a disadvantage it means that if you damage a clip it's not gonna feed right and you're gonna have problems but it also means that you don't have that feature getting the rifle you can always throw away the clip and get a new clip far more easily than you can fix a rifle that has damage feed surfaces on the other hand it's relatively difficult to damage that part of a rifle if you look at a Mauser 98 damaging the the top of the magazine where the feed lips are really doesn't happen Mon liquor type clips are in many cases quicker smoother and easier to reload especially compared to stripper clips or charger clips for rimmed cartridges you compare reloading a Steyr m95 or an m1 garand to an Enfield stripper clip or a Mosin Nagant stripper clip and you're gonna be hating life those those moniker packet clips or far better for that so on the other hand they're also more expensive than stripper clips because they are a little more complex they require more complex dyes to stamp and you have to get those feed lips right or else the clip will cause malfunctions in the gun no matter how badly you make a stripper clip if you can get the rounds into the gun then they'll work personally I prefer moniker Clips if I was going to take a gun out to do say a two gun match with and I have the option of either one I'd rather have unblocked Clips rune milling says you have often stated that with the current technology improvement handguns right now you have often stated with the current technology improvements to handguns right now are limited to fine tuning details and existing designs but what about cartridges and propellants with guns like the FN five-seven and the Brno seven point five millimeter could the future lie in smaller faster cartridges perhaps propelled by more powerful powders than we have today is this feasible it might be feasible but I don't think it'll happen because I think we have done a lot of experimentation with smaller high velocity cartridges as well as larger lower velocity cartridges and what we've come to standardized excuse me what we've come to standardize on today in primarily the nine millimetre parabellum is an equilibrium in between the two something that gives a good balance of capacity velocity terminal effectiveness recoil it balances really well everything in firearms design and really probably everything in mechanical engineering design is compromises and trade-offs and they're if when you start getting into small lower weight higher velocity handgun projectiles you're going to start having concerns about terminal effectiveness you can't pump the velocity up super high without having consequences for recoil you know they are no seven and a half millimeter thing is it's interesting but and they've made attempts to counteract the recoil but there is no free lunch your have a more powerful cartridge you're going to have more powerful recoil a handgun so honestly I think I think the balance we have right now is quite effective and I suspect it'll stay that way John says he in pretty basic question here but I've read and seen some pretty dubious definitions lately how does group size supposed to be measured I've always assumed or read it for so long that it's now an assumption of mine that group size is the smallest circle that all the shots will fit into I've seen people shoot ten shots pick three closest and measure them edge to edge I've seen people throw out flyers all kinds of goofy stuff well there is no like you know world wide society that if finnaly tells you how you have to measure group size there are a lot of different ways you can do it there is potentially validity to throwing out flyers know if if it's your rifle and you're shooting a group and you want to know how it is and you sneeze when you fire one of the rounds and it goes way off the side of the target you can probably legitimately say oh well you know that's not representative of the rifle and I'll I'll leave that one out that said the goal the intent of measuring and group size is to find out how accurate a rifle is and how you measure it can include or or leave out important bits of data so if your group if you're measuring accuracy will say that instead of group size if you're measuring accuracy based on the smallest circle that all the rounds will fit inside of here's an interesting thing you could have a group like this where all your rounds are basically at the circumference of this circle and you can have a group where all the lines are in a purple around turn a perfect horizontal line and they would both come out of that measurement exactly the same so there's an interesting piece of data that you're not getting if you say well was a three inch circle okay where were the rounds in that three inch circle where they were they all vertical were they horizontal these can tell you important things about what you have to do to make the group smaller to make it more accurate traditionally probably the most informational way to measure group size is I can't remember the exact terminology for this but it is too the rifles accuracy in terms of the average distance that a round will impact from the point of aim so and the reason that this isn't used very often is because it's kind of time-consuming to actually calculate but if you fire five rounds take your aiming point and then measure the distance from the aiming point to the center of each each impact hole and then average those measurements and what that will tell that will give you a way to predict if I fire this next shot how close will it land to my point of aim if you just have you know a circle that encompasses the group you don't really have any information about that like is this you know am I am I getting the circular pattern am I getting vertical am I getting horizontal is it offset in some particular way a lot of lot of information can get left out so depending on what you're trying to find how you measure group size makes a difference the standard by the way is what's the what's the smallest circle that will encompass all the rounds and depending on typically what you would do is measure center of the rounds or because it can be hard to exactly pinpoint the center of a hole in paper if you measure outside the outside and then subtract the diameter of your cartridge so so 30 caliber round you've got a 2.5 inch group outside the outside that's then a 2.2 inch group center dissenter it's easy to measure it conveys most of what we're looking for in terms of how good am i shooting not the best for testing you know if you're in the military and you're out trying to figure out which sniper rifle is more accurate you're gonna want more detailed information about exact group pattern next up phase says you often say that extra weight in a heavier gun helps control recoil I'm adapting my theories on that by the way are there any gun designs which include pure ballast weight to accomplish this and is it ever the right option for a practical design sort of yeah actually like long-range precision rifle shooting specifically NRA high-power where you're shooting out to 600 yards 600 meters there is a weight limit to the guns and people will typically add ballast to the buttstock of a gun to basically to help counterbalance it they're typically using relatively heavy barrels and that puts a lot of weight out on the front of the gun if you can counterbalance it with weight in the back of the gun that helps keep it it helps keep more of the weight on more easily supported you know directly over your body structure so you know you're supporting the rifle here the more you've got in the back to help pull up the muzzle and keep it easily held on target I'm butchering this explanation but the short version is yes competition rifles not will often include ballast in the buttstock as for extra weight alone controlling recoil it sort of does but it also is not necessarily the most important factor how the bits inside the gun move and impact and convey force onto the shooter makes a very substantial difference and is probably the most important factor rather than just pure weight you'll see this like stoner light assault machine gun is really light it was something like 9 pounds 10 pounds I think eat somewhere right in that range like seriously light now you're gonna add a bunch of weight when you throw on 200 rounds of ammo but that thing recoiled far less than guns in the same caliber that way in below there's there's more to it than just weight but that's a discussion for a whole separate series of videos all right next up SB Pete says what weapons can you think of that have the ability to fire from the open bolt in full auto and the closed bolt in semi can you list them I can only think of the FG 42 and the LWRC submission to the Marine Corps are competitions etc what's involved in making it possible can you explain the mechanics so there are only a couple that come to mind I'm sure I'm gonna miss a few here but as you said the FG 42 is probably the most common example the course AK em1 developed by a Polish designer in the UK after world war ii had the same capability although it was heavily based on the fg42 Jim Sullivan just in the last few years developed his improvements to the m4 carbine which included that functionality those are the only ones that really come to my mind but like I said I know there are others out there I just can't think of them nothing really in huge production quantity and I think the reason for that is you typically either one open bolt or you want closed wanting both is usually something that's gonna come up in a design that's not going to be successful for other reasons the FG 42 is a perfect example it's supposed to be both an infantry rifle and a light machine gun so as an infantry rifle you want closed bolt for better single-shot accuracy and for a machine gun you want open bolt so that it doesn't overheat and cook off most of the time when you try to combine both of those functions in single firearm it doesn't work out well m14 for example as for the mechanics of how to do it on the FG 42 it's actually pretty simple because the FG 42 has the way that the sear works is it sort of an open bolt gun in general and they just add a second sear notch farther down the operating rod so that instead of being open bolt with the bolt always you know all the way open instead it's kind of like closed bolt where the the bolt has closed and chambered around but the striker the firing pin is being held on the a prod which is farther back sort of in an open ish position the system is all locked but it waits until when you pull the trigger then the opéra jumps forward like an open bolt system and that fires the cartridge and then cycles it so I honestly don't recall exactly how Sullivan did his and I have not ever put my hands on one of the LWRC IAR trials rifles so I don't know exactly what they did but it is that little extra bit and then you've always got this weird weirdness of okay what if the guns the bolts locked open ready to fire and I change the selector to semi does it automatically close or does it not if I'm if I have the bolt closed in semi and I move the selector to full auto if I pull the trigger will it fire do I have to rack the bolt open first lock in the open position I think in many cases that's more complicated to deal with than the mechanics of making it functional Patrick says with the commercial failure of the Sig 5 5 6 do you think there's any hope of a legit not knockoff signify 50 series rifle in the US is it just engineering and craftsmanship that right makes those rifles what they are is there something special about the design I think it's engineering it's the craftsmanship and the cost that was put into it it's a military rifle the government paid not a trivial amount of money to have a whole lot of them developed and produced and the result is as is typical especially with something out of Switzerland very good when that comes over to the US on the commercial market well like with the sig five five six a lot of things are redesigned to make them less expensive and to make them a little bit more modern that 550 doesn't use air 15 mags so okay we're gonna redesign the lower to use ar-15 mags we're gonna do more to make it optics compatible there are some sig 550 s in the United States there are little bits here and there they get imported without pot stocks as pistols so that's an option if you're willing to pay an exorbitant price for one because there are very many part of the problem also is that the process of making a gun semi-auto in the eyes of ATF is potentially tricky for countries for manufacturers in Europe who have much different standards like in Europe you can use the same receiver I think pretty much everywhere you can the same receiver can be used for a semi-auto and a full auto gun just if it's semi-auto it has semi-auto fire control parts and it only works in semi although that's not a view that ATF accepts here in the United States here if the receiver is this is a full auto receiver regardless of whether the gun can or cannot fire in full auto it's considered a machine gun so you can't just take a full-auto military rifle convert it to semi by European standards and import it into the US I should circle back just a little bit like I don't know that there's anything super compelling about the sig 550 design independent of its history and quality coming out of manufacturer in Switzerland you know there's a lot of black rifles out there that were pretty much like the bullet comes out that end and the ar-15 Magda's in this end and you know how much nuance how important is the nuance to you because the functional output is not really any different Scott says will you be releasing a digital ebook version of Oz PO 2 from us no we are not planning to and it's largely based on piracy like as as an author it the the idea that I can put it out there as an e-book and it will inevitably be copied kind of sucks you know I put years of work into developing it into writing it and we put a lot of money into the photography a lot of time into the editing and and it's just a very difficult choice to say do I want to do I want to give this away for free to everybody so we do have some really interesting notions about electronic electronic companion works to reference books so I don't want to go into detail until we've got this idea fleshed out a little more but I'm excited about the possibilities and I think that that offers frankly a much more practical usable thing than an ebook version of a reference book I think a reference book is much more practical to use when you can just physically open it up and have it side-by-side with a firearm and you know look up what you want to look up so yeah I know it's it's a it's a difficult question it's a tough choice my thought on a matter kind of is I've produced a lot of content for free the book is much better as a book there's more to it than just the information the whole package I think is a value and so we're gonna stick with just selling it as a physical book Jasha says would the dreicer needle rifle have been any good during the u.s Civil War and why weren't there any of them in the war at all or was it some German secret even though 20 years old yeah that's exactly it it was still a German secret even though it was 20 years old would have been excellent in the war it would have had the same effect in the u.s. Civil War that it did when the Prussians used it against armies with muzzleloaders it was a state secret they weren't available even if they had been available I doubt that well the Union wouldn't have been willing to adopt some newfangled crazy thing that they'd never tried before and the Confederacy wouldn't have had the money for it so even if the Germans had been willing to share it I don't think it would have ever made a an appearance in the u.s. Civil War next up Christopher says during all the auction price reviews what had been the they paid how much guns that stick in your memory there are a couple one of the interesting ones to me was years ago at Julia they sold a transferable Vietnam bring back a que for a hundred and thirty two thousand dollars which is like two and a half times what it typically would have been expected to go for yeah it's it's funny I've been told that the consignor when he saw that number like literally fell out of his chair and often with things like this there are one-off explanations and in this case apparently it was two different containers or two different bidders who both had the money to spend and really wanted that gun because it was just good condition gun it was well provenance that you know it came directly from as I recall came directly from the veteran who had brought it back you know the story behind its capture was well known so two guys decided that's the one I want and they both had the money to put behind that and there's banging went way up more recently like someone apparently spent 1.6 million dollars on a very nice case Dragoon Colt Dragoon at Rock Island that boggles my mind I am baffled by who would do that there's like if you if you put even if you said to me I am a Colt revolver collector here's 1.6 million dollars what can we get with this I would have come up with a lot more interesting stuff and better stuff overall than a single cased Dragoon I'm sure there's an interesting story behind that one but that I don't have any personal insight into Seth says back in the early days of forgotten weapons you had a pretty distinctive black thumb that you said was from an accident with a British m2 rifle what exactly happened that messed up your thumb for like 30 videos so two parts first off we were filming a lot of guns in one trip and that's part of why that thumb injury showed up in so many videos for so long because I filmed a bunch of them right after it happened what actually happened is that the em2 has backup iron sights just offset from the barrel and it has a relatively stubby little charging handle and theory you want to grab it underhand and rack it back and the other thing about the the em2 is it has a very stiff charging handle it's ok once you get it moving but kind of like a g3 takes a big jerk to get the thing started and it wasn't working this way and so I flipped my hand over and grabbed it like this pulled it back and it slammed my thumb right into the front sight and bruised the underside of my thumbnail and that didn't go away until like my whole thumbnail grew out over a period of some time and it hurt I got very painful so that was my accident but the m2 Molly says in your opinion what would be the most advanced model of small arm producible with turn-of-the-century 1890 to 1950 manufacturing techniques I you know here's the interesting thing if you look at the guns that were being developed in that time period they are insanely complex compared to today's guns it's not a matter of having like we've developed a better manufacturing technology that allows us to make the guns that we have today in a few circumstances that's true polymer material science has improved dramatically stamping technology has improved substantially but in terms of actual like meat and potatoes milling and lathe work on machine parts there's as long as you've got the right alloys available and to some extent this is a limitation on turn-of-the-century manufacture you know having the right quantities of the right exotic materials in your steel and and having gone through the years and decades of developing those to understand you know what exact combinations do we want to get this you know the right level the right amount of toughness and a part not too brittle not too flexible aside from that there's virtually nothing that we make today that couldn't have been machined in 1890 or 1900 or 1910 you know take a look at the sign TN 1907 machine gun that thing is easy disaster inside it is from a machinist perspective if you're not the one who has to make it it is gorgeous it's magnificent and a lot of the other guns at the time were look at the maximum guns tremendous amount of intricate machining involved there and close tolerances and you know you look at World War one and they're building these guns that are parts interchangeable in huge quantities so I don't think it's the machining that is a limitation in what could have what was able to be produced back then it was a matter of it takes time to iterate a firearms design and learn what works and what doesn't and in a lot of cases it takes battlefield experience to understand what sort of gun you ought to be making because you can theorize all you want but those theories don't often stand up in the face of reality and World War one is a perfect example of that how many countries didn't think the machine gun was that big a deal how many countries didn't recognize the potential of a crude firearm like a submachine gun so as long as you don't have stamped parts and you don't have you know modern polymers that you have to formulate I think virtually anything that we make today could have been machined back then Ron says thanks to you and Carl for providing my favorite content on the Internet thank you Ron do you have any experience with the South Korean Daewoo Ketu and if so have you liked it I recently bought a pre banned version I feel like it is parts car light in Part A or 15 I rather like it Carl has less less interest in them I wasn't there but Carl's been around when there were a couple of them that came through the two gun match and he seemed like three charging handles break on them which really soured him on the design to my mind it's cool it really is this awesome a RAK hybrid it's got an ache a long stroke gas piston system and an ar-15 fire control group lower and magazine assembly so the problem is it doesn't really do anything that the standard AR doesn't so I think they're great rifles I think they're well made maybe be careful of yanking too hard on the charging handle lest you snap it off but beyond that I think you're cool in fact I think they're much cooler than the K 1 a1 semi-auto carbines interestingly the K 1 a 1 semi-auto carbines are 100% ar-15 they've got the same internal piston thing long gas tube thing that the ar-15 does the K 2 is a completely different mechanical beast why exactly they did that I'm not entirely sure but they did Klaus says I've seen a couple pictures of French soldiers doing what I assume is trials our trials with a Madsen light machine gun in 85 58 millimeter Lebel did they ever use them in combat or field trials to the best of my knowledge new French virtually everyone tested them ads in it some point it was a commercially available gun there were salesmen roaming around trying to develop interest in the gun but as far as I know it never went as far as an actual medium size you know a purchase for true trials Matt says as a fellow southpaw I'd like to ask you what rifle and pistol do you find to be the most lefty friendly with rifles it is basically anything that has a right-side charging handle so the two very common ones that come out are dak the entire EK family with the exception of the new Dahlia laces where they specifically move the charging handle to the left side to be more righty friendly that and the m1 garand with pistols oh by the way on those things I almost never have any issues with brass coming back and hitting me really the only guns I've ever had do that are a RS that don't have case deflectors other than that the fact that I'm left-handed and the guns ejecting that way just doesn't matter with pistols the only thing that I look for to be lefty friendly is to have a safety on the left on the right hand side so that I can use safety with my left thumb magazine release I've just gotten so used to using my trigger finger on a mag release that it's actually much more awkward for me to try and use a left-handed mag release with my left thumb so to my mind is any rifle is usable as long as it isn't a bullpup that is ejecting brass into my throat or face any pistol is usable as long as it's got a safety on both sides James says best source of literature sources on four point eight five millimeter how does it compare to five five six the book I would recommend is the last Enfield published by collector grade I can't remember the author's name off the top of my head but it is the story of the British saat program and that includes the four point eight five millimeter that's the only thing that the four point eight five was ever used for it was submitted for NATO trials where it lost to the Belgian five five six ss109 by the way the US did not win those NATO trials it's not us five five six that won and the US had to repair a lot of guns with different rifling as a result of those NATO trials my understanding is it's effectively the same you know it's it's right in there with a lot of the other intermediate cartridges alternative cartridges we have today I think the standard loading was actually on paper like exactly the same as m193 it was a 55 grain bullet at something like 30 150 or 32 hundred feet per second but of course it was a skinnier bullet and longer so a little bit of different ballistics involved I believe part of the issue with it was it was smaller in diameter and that's more difficult to fit with different payloads so like an armor-piercing version a tracer version not a hundred percent on that but the best source of info I can recommend the last name field I'll include a link to that in the video description chairman says you spend a lot of time at Rock Island Rock had auction company what do you usually have for lunch when working you have a favorite local place to have a break interesting question for a long time I would kind of cycle to a different restaurant in the area every day Rock Island is in the middle of the Quad Cities and there's a lot of stuff in the area so if you're willing to take an hour hour and a quarter lunch there are a lot of places you can go there is a high V grocery store just down the road from Rock Island that has an in-house restaurant that rather like although my last couple of trips I've gotten more into the habit of going to the high ve for lunch the first day picking up a bunch of groceries and just packing sandwiches after I find that it reduces I would rather eat a quick lunch and be able to get back to filming and yet all of the the work that I need to do done within the workday when Rock Island open and I can be there rather than take a longer lunch and then have to rush more not necessarily rush but then have less time to to finish off my videos when I get back from lunch it's also easier to eat healthy when you pack it yourself so my go-to sandwich is my preference is ham some sort of salami product and pepper jack cheese mayonnaise lettuce on whole grain bread just a couple left here Isaac says it's 1936 and you're going to Spain to fight against Franco what weapons do you take with you assuming ammunition isn't an issue that's an interesting question the vast majority of the infantry small-arms in the spanish-american uh Spanish Civil War were bolt actions or Spanish mousers I don't want a bolt-action rifle if I'm there the the level of benefit you get from a self-loading firearm is so fundamental that anything to me is better than a bolt-action however 1936 not much out there in options for self-loading rifles so the major military ones are not available yet you know the Soviets are just on the cusp of introducing there's the u.s. is just on the cusp of finally adopting the garand I suppose a pettersen self loader in 276 would be a pretty cool option if I was confident in it running reliably and then of course you have the issue of getting the ammo in the clips and all that but they never made very many Petersons and I don't know how well I want to trust it probably okay that would be a very cool gun to have and a reasonably effective one like it's not quite as small as what we would consider an intermediate cartridge today but it's certainly less powerful than at 6 an 8 millimeter that would be cool for a more conventional actually available firearm at the time I would look at maybe to Winchester 1907 self loader but I'd want to have access to magazines for it not a ton an ideal gun but that's a true intermediate cartridge in the 351w SL maybe not a bad option or a submachine gun and if it came to a submachine gun which I could very easily see being the best choice I would probably honestly like the some of the the German inter the German 1930s production guns would probably be my go to the m2 35 in particular handles better than a lot of the others it's not that heavy the old system is stupid that you know trying to duplicate the handling of a Mauser is dumb but or my EMP would not be a terrible choice either or uh you know actually now that I'm thinking about it like a Steyr Solothurn MP 34 would that probably be the best so yeah does a submachine gun die result with an MP 34 if it had to be a commercially available semi-auto rifle winchester 1907 I think and like exotic fantasyland Paterson PB Jesse says what firearm operating or locking systems do you find to be the most mechanically interesting complicated ones I've seen a lot of most of the systems and the ones that are really funky and weird and hard to figure out art at this point definitely my favorites and I'm a sucker for anything that is either primer activated or forward-operating so that CJK 53 some of the variety of weird primer activated systems hey eyes spew prototypes were primer activated and that's super Indy and cool that's that's what I find the most interesting and then our very last one Abe says what forgotten weapon would you most like to see come back into production and this tricky question because to my mind most of these things what makes them interesting is not that they're guns that I want to get and go put five thousand round through and shoot every day their interest to me comes from their place in history as they were used as you know as they show the development of firearms technology or you know their place in history as they were used in various conflicts or periods of time and the most interesting Forgotten weapons are often ones that aren't very mechanically good anyway and I having a brand new production one kind of defeats the point like I'm interested in this because it was historical not because I want to shoot it a lot so what do I get from a new production one yeah not that much the exceptions are the guns that were at one here's the other thing if a gun was really effective and very successful generally speaking you don't get reproductions of them because there's still lots of them around since they were successful they tend to be manufactured in large quantity so you know like do I want a reproduction FM 49 no because I can guarantee you it would cost more than buying an original one right now on the open market so there are not very many guns that are both really desirable and an effective and good firearms that aren't that also are justifiable from a new production standpoint and there are two that come to my mind as being exceptions so one of them is the FAMAS valerie say the modernized version of the FAMAS that's kind of been upgraded to handle optics and I would love I don't want it in production I just want one of them myself so that would be really cool do I think that that's fundamentally a better gun than the ar-15 it's a really tough question that I I'm just going to avoid answering I'd love to have one because the original putting an optic on the original FAMAS is kind of necessary to bring it into the modern day but it's dead pledge to do it so the other one that comes to mind is the Germans Germany where because and that's an exception because basically it was developed for a proprietary cartridge it wasn't optimal it was optimal for the Germans during World War 2 to use eight millimeter Kurt's once the war is over there are much better cartridges to use for that sort of firearm and the soviet 760 by 39 is the perfect example you know you don't need the case had to be as huge as acres you can make your magazines more compact you can improve a lot of things by changing the cartridge design so that's why nobody really used the term Giver after World War two with a few exceptions like East Germany in Yugoslavia and then of course it was in larger scale production but it ended because of this unique circumstance of the people who were making it lost the war and all of the factories were blown out so I would love to have a reproduction Sturm Guevara there in a number of them have come through there were some manufacturers in Germany still are actually I think PTR imported a bunch of those as the PTR 44 they had issues they had reliability mechanical issues and they're incredibly expensive now they're I guess they're not as expensive as fossils but there seven to ten thousand dollars now seven to eight thousand dollars and then you need to get some original parts to keep on hand for when you've read that PTR's break not PTR's fault they were just the employer on that not the manufacturer and then of course Helen Mack advertised a reproduction streaming aver I don't know what the status is on it yet I'm kind of tired of waiting for it but I really wish someone would do well I don't wish it would because I don't really expect forgotten weapons to be put back into production because there's an almost complete rule I don't think it would be economically justifiable to do it so if I could wave my magic wand and have one it would be a famas Valerie say or a stripper and that's it for our questions for today so thank you guys for watching if you're still watching now you clearly have some time to spend and you're interested in this sort of stuff a big thank you to all the patrons of forgotten weapons who make this channel possible if you would like to get your question into a future Q&A go ahead and sign up over on patreon there's a link in the description text below they're a bunch of other perks that you can get at the same time for your support so thank you very much see you back tomorrow with another video

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 187,416

Rating: 4.9333849 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, q&a, question, answer, sig 550, sturmgewehr, ebook, chassepot to famas, masada, acr, magpul, en blog, mannlicher, mauser, stripper clip, besa, zb53, zb37, doursoux, reproduction uniform, dreyse, em2, daewoo k2, madsen lmg, pedersen, steyr mp34, winchester 1907

Id: OmsYcV6BxI0

Length: 54min 38sec (3278 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 20 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Shaggy0291]

I don't consider myself a very gunny guy, but that pistol in the thumbnail is gorgeous.

[u/anafontana]

Ian is a leftist, confirmed!