Q&A 40: Ian Sabotages the Elbonian Army and Throws Shade on the Taurus Judge

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another Q&A video on forgotten weapons I'm Ian McCulloch man I believe this is number 40 of these that we have done which is pretty cool that's a lot a huge thanks as always to my supporters on patreon it is thanks to you guys that I am able to continue doing this and I have a couple pages of questions from you that we can go through today so I know you guys are all bored on lockdown or many of you are I can sympathize let's see if we can take our minds off of that for a little while with some interesting questions we will start with one from chatty who says could you please elaborate what makes good reliable magazines relatively hard to achieve and yeah there are a lot of military firearms that are let down by inferior or substandard magazines so I think really the problem is cost talking in a military context here you're making a lot of magazines they're kind of considered disposable items which means nobody wants to pay very much for them because you're planning on throwing them away at some point sometimes they're legitimately considered single-use items to begin with like ar-15 mags early on that of course never actually follows through everyone always reuses magazines but even when they're not considered single-use everyone knows that like they wear out there they're replaceable items so no one wants to spend much money on them so they try to economize as much as possible on the magazine and that means you only have so much work and material that you can put into a part that is one of the core elements of making a firearm reliable you make that sheetmetal just a little too thin on the feed lips and it becomes easy to bend and once it bends the gun just don't work when one wants to make a reliable magazine and there's willing to put the time and the expense into it it's not that difficult it takes time it takes a lot of repetitive trials just to make sure you get every little tiny quirk right and it requires specifically trials in the exact gun or the model of gun that you plan to use the thing in there are issues like the semi hell allegedly sort of does to use standard ar-15 magazines except not quite the angle of the the magazine well is slightly different and you do end up with some issues with followers there have been issues with early pmags that wouldn't quite necessarily fit and feed in everything may Magpul has done its due diligence and gotten around most of those issues a while ago now but you have to be willing to consider the magazine to be as important as any other element to the gun in fact I would put it up there with like put as much time into making sure the magazines are developed properly as you do the bolt the locking system the most important core parts of the gun because that magazine is going to be used every single time and is going to be absolutely the cheapest part in the gun considering the relative to the amount of of work and the importance that it has we do see some magazines that are universally regarded as being fantastic the a.k magazine is one of them they were willing to put the money in to make those things extended use items and they're incredibly durable they're also way heavier than ar-15 magazine and that's a compromise that was made and they decided on the side of let's make this thing reliable and durable even though it's gonna add a non-trivial amount to the weight of just not just the gun but to a soldier's loadout when you're carrying three or four or six or more of those things with a couple other good examples would be well the Thompson magazine it's actually probably a decent example the Thompson mag is a pretty robust thing there's a lot of money that went into designing it it's not the most efficient design with its locking system but that's partly due to the gun itself compare that to the Sten gun magazine where there was much more of an urgency to its manufacturer and a willingness to just let's make it cheap let's make it simple and let's knock out a gazillion of them and as a result they are probably be a kill one of the biggest Achilles heels of the Sten gun when that Sten magazine doesn't work the whole thing doesn't work and he gives the gun up a bad name of course the shoshone magazine so comes to mind where they were trying to economize on weight and on material and they were trying to do the whole thing very quickly and didn't have the time to put into a proper real development setup development time on the magazine a couple of course with the terrible cartridge that it had to use but yeah I think I think at a core the problem is people underestimate the importance of getting the magazines right they underestimate how long and how expensive it will it will be to do that and they're not willing to put in the money and the time if they do realize it our next question is from Joel who has asked this question several times and I finally sat down did some research to try and figure out an answer form and I think I have it during the interwar years the Finns were buying and trading all over Europe to get most in the Gaunt rifles most of which had some level of use and abuse at the same time the US government had a hundred thousand plus Muslims in good condition that they had bought to bail out when Remington and Westinghouse for $30 a piece in the 1920s the US government sold them off for $3 a piece why wasn't there a deal to sell them to the Finns even if the government do it surely Bannerman etc would the neutrality acts didn't come into the 30s so there was certainly an opportunity I think we have a couple of things here first off the US government didn't have as many of these as you're suggesting it was less than a hundred thousand a lot of the surplus a lot of the extra production was actually paid by the Brits and the guns were sent to them and they handled those so a lot of these guns didn't actually end up in US military surplus control the u.s. sent a bunch of them out to Siberia there's a report in allied rifle contracts about 50,000 of them being sent somewhere into Russia and being intercepted in China ended up in the hands of some of the Chinese warlords and used by them but then I think more substantially the time frame isn't quite right so the US was selling off surplus Mo's ins for about ten years after World War one so basically through the mid getting into the late 1920s the Finns yes they started looking for armed and dealing in arms right after the end of the war in 1918 1919 when they got their independence and the Civil War ended but for the first several years they were primarily as far as I can tell looking for heavier arms or more complicated arms they were looking for pistols submachine guns and machine guns and probably artillery as well although I didn't look directly into that the thing is they had gotten a boatload of Mosin Nagant rifles from russian troops and from the the defeated red fins in the Finnish Civil War who had gotten more Muslims as material aid they didn't really need more Mo's ins early on that they wouldn't have turned him down for free but the money that they had it seems they were much more interested in trying to use for the guns that they were much shorter on machine guns and such now by the mid 1920s that's when they start realizing that you know what a lot of these motions that we have are kind of in bad shape got a lot of bad barrels or bad bores you know guns that have been probably used with corrosive ammo and not clean well and they they're in need of a lot of reconditioning and so at that point there's still not so much looking for new motions or complete motions they're looking for barrels they're looking to refurbish these guns because that's going to be cheaper than buying complete new guns it's not until like the late 1920s that they start actually making deals to get more Mosin Nagant rifles in general now I think the first one of the big ones they do is with Poland where they actually trade a bunch of their leftover surplus mousers for Polish leftover surplus Muslims because the poles are focusing on 8-millimeter the finns are focusing on seven sixty by fifty four and it's actually a very cool convenient trade for both countries by that point we're talking like 26 27 28 there aren't really that many surplus Muslims left in the United States for sale yeah they still sold slowly but by the end of the 1920s they were pretty much all gone so the opportunity that you're talking about here I don't think really existed when there was a big glut of Mose ins available in the US the Finns weren't actively looking for them because they had enough and by the time the finns did start looking for them they weren't in the US anymore or they weren't available anymore so as best I can tell that is the answer there if someone's watching who happens to have a more detailed understanding of finished procurement I would love to hear from you if I'm wrong I'd like it's an interesting and good question and if I've got that wrong I want to know it next question is from Thomas who asks where does the hub Hollywood ricochet sound effect come from I can't speak to if you're referring to like a specific sound effect like the scream of the guy falling off the balcony I have no idea but if you're talking about just the general sound of a ricochet that is very much a real-life sound it doesn't come from the bullet bouncing off something it comes from a bullet tumbling in midair and I've heard plenty of it at shooting matches when someone hits a steel target or a rock or usually not steel target a properly designed steel target will splatter a bullet and drop it into the ground but if you miss a target hit a backstop hit a rock something like that sometimes the bullet will hit something hard enough to bounce it off it will ricochet when it ricochets it tumbles end over end and it's that high velocity tumbling that creates the sort of characteristic whirring zipping sound that is the ricochet less says at one time sporter izing was a thing what made it popular and why did it go away sport arising was a thing because at the time and we're talking mostly 1950s 1960s surplus rifles were a heck of a lot cheaper and in greater supply than new production rifles maybe not in greater supply but they were a heck of a lot cheaper than new production rifles so if you wanted to go out and buy yourself a hunting rifle it would cost you a whole heck of a lot less to buy some cheap surplus German Mauser or an often German Mauser or you take your Japanese arasaka it's gonna take a little more work because you're gonna have to reach aim burr it for a cartridge that you can get you take your Mauser and you cut off some of the excess stuff that you don't need for hunting rifle stock down rid of the sling swivels in the nose cap and the band maybe drill and tap it for an optical sight for a scope get rid of the iron sights maybe or replace the iron sights with something fancy and even if you do a pretty elaborate job of sport arising you probably gonna spend less money than if you went out and bought a brand-new factory made hunting rifle at the time these surplus guns were not particularly you know that there wasn't a whole lot of historical value attached to them because they were so in such great quantity and so cheap and you see the same thing even today when you look at when the big glutes of surplus rifles come in people just don't care about them so much we saw it with most in the guns fairly recently you'll see it with SKS's when those things were under a hundred bucks nobody cared like everyone was out there coming up with modifications to their SKS you know add on extended magazines and come up with scope mounts and you know this Batman if you can convert it to use a K mags great there was a lot of that and the same thing was true when there was a glut of surplus rifles from World War two now the reason that it went away is supplies of those rifles dried up as they got scarce or people started attaching more collectible value to them and start to be less and less interested in cutting them up to use for hunting rifles and by today those rifles are generally stairs enough that they actually cost more in stock form than going out and getting a basic stock hunting rifle from someone like savage or Mossberg or Ruger so if you want to like you know even if especially if you want to customize your rifle you're gonna spend a lot more doing it on a military action than you are on a commercial action and that's what's changed Straker says of all the guns you have owned what has been the most difficult time-consuming and or expensive to get in reliable operating order so I would have kind of expected it to be a show shop but I actually have to show shots and both of them just work kind of miraculously well and the one of them I even reactivated myself having filed the proper forms and much to my surprise that one just worked pretty much great with the new open barrel in it definitely the one that I can think of that has been the most pain has been this little guy this is a mas 38 that I acquired years ago it's like three or four years ago now and never ran well ever it was such a nightmare initially my initial assessment looking at it was someone had poorly reactivated this like the the chamber had been plugged and someone had done a bad job of dragging of drilling out and re reaming the chamber and it was causing the cartridge to go too far in which prevented it from getting a good firing pin strike I thought that was the issue I got a new barrel for it I replaced the barrel on it myself I ended up getting a new parts kit replaced a couple other bits put in you know tinkered with a new recoil spring add some tension to the recoil spring with a spacer replaced the bolt tinker with the magazines spend a lot of time thinking it was bad ammo getting and and went through a bunch of Hoops thank you to a number of viewers who are very helpful in trying to get me proper ammunition none of that ended work ended up working I finally sent it to an NFA specialist gunsmith fairly recently he spent a couple months on it sent it back and I'll have a video on it coming up soon but spoiler alert it runs now and I'm very happy about it this thing has definitely been the most pain in the butt of any gun that I've ever had and if it weren't a machine gun I don't think I would have I think I would have gotten tired of dealing with it and either sold it or just accepted that it would be a wallhanger but no I'd kept plugging away on that thing and it finally came through so that videos coming I think you guys will enjoy it I enjoyed it next up is Jacob who says why have the French stuck with rifle grenades for so long do they have any any advantages other than reducing the bulk of the users rifle compared to an under barrel launcher yes there is a major improvement a major benefit to rifle grenades and that is that they can be a heck of a lot and more effective you can do a lot of things with rifle grenades that you cannot do with underbarrel grenade launchers the reason is of course an under barrel launcher the diameter of your projectile is limited to the diet or diameter of the thing and you have to have a separate pressure bearing barrel and chamber to withstand the firing of the rifle grenades when you have the underbarrel grenade it's a tonne standalone cartridge when you use a rifle grenade that just goes on the muzzle of an existing firearm you already have your pressure bearing system that is the chamber and barrel of the rifle so you don't have to add the bulk of that which is as you say but you can also make that rifle grenade as big as you want within the limitations of how much mass you're trying to launch with how much bullet and what sort of force the the rifle itself can withstand so especially if you want to have like an armor penetrating shaped-charge or hollow charged style of warhead that can be tricky to do if you're limited to say you know a 40 millimeter bore diameter instead on a rifle grenade you can make that thing 3-4 inches in diameter give it some fins it can be this long it doesn't matter it just slides over the end of the barrel and away you go so yeah there are some definite advantages to rifle grenades the downside is they're not generally as accurate with an under barrel launcher you have rifling you can spin that projectile and you can make it a more accurate and more accurate thing so which do you want do you want a bigger more multi-purpose variety of projectiles but perhaps less accurate you want more accurate but smaller that's that's your trade-off Brendan says what are your thoughts on an electric firing system in small arms it seems like solid-state electronics would be more real more reliable than mechanical parts easily hardened against EMP would allow for programming things like rate of fire or length of burst and an automatic weapon on the fly I tend to agree there are going to be a few issues a few of those electronic parts are per not quite as reliable as strictly mechanical parts I'm thinking solenoids like you've got to have something that translates from just electrical impulses to a mechanical action to drop a hammer or drop a striker unless you're talking about a fully electrically primed cartridge which we have they use that in a lot of aircraft cannons bigger guns use electrical primers but it's not something that has yet translated into small arm size largely because what I think one of the the main problems is going to be civilian use so a lot of firearms manufacturers are looking at at both they can't rely on just military contracts because those come and go they can be big but they can also be sporadic and temperamental most of the big companies are also largely dependent on civilian sales and the problem with an electronic firing system in the civilian side is I think it is too easily made into a machine gun to pass a lot of government scrutiny so what you say about it being easily programmable is both a benefit and a detriment when it comes to civilian sales if I have an electronic fire control mechanism like I can totally see ATF kind of like taking a position that virtually any electronic firing mechanism is easily convertible into a machine gun and prohibiting it civilian sale so I don't know of any actual case law or or anyone trying to submit this sort of thing to ATF where they get this reaction but I suspect that a lot of firearms manufacturers are too skittish about it like they assume that's what's gonna happen and so why waste your money trying to develop it when you know it's gonna get rejected sooner or later I think it will come on the military side it would be best done in conjunction with electrically primed ammunition but that becomes like that's a lot of logistical change for maybe a real benefit like it's cool but we don't really have that much you know of all the mechanical unreliability issues and firearms they're generally today not in the fire-control mechanism like we don't really have trouble with light strikes so much unless you're using old surplus ammo which isn't something the military is really concerned about you don't really have trouble with you know the rate of fire being wrong or being sporadic or not working right fire control groups generally work so I don't know that there's a lot of benefit to be had for a military force in going through a lot of logistical upheaval to change its ammunition and adopt a new firearm just to avoid those issues it is something I think is coming like anywhere that you can integrate modern electronics into a firearm people are gonna look at and gonna do its predominant Heon sighting systems right now but you have triggers for your systems I think we're coming next question is from Sean who asks what is your opinion of the 10 millimeter automatic cartridge I have a Glock model 40 it's fun to take to the range but it's not the cheapest caliber to get by the way of course the 40 is in 10 millimeter which is nice and confusing with ant the mo craze right now the fact that it's available might not be a bad thing honestly I think the 40 the problem with the 10 millimeter cartridge 10 millimeter automatic is that it's just more powerful and people really need there's not that much justification to it it's a physically larger cartridge than 9 millimeter which means you're reducing your magazine capacity there are not that many automatic pistols out there built around in it so if you decide that you really want a 10 millimeter your options are a bit limited and and there's always the question of why you're gonna discover that it makes the same size hole in paper as 40 Smith & Wesson smaller than a 45 a little bigger than 9 millimeter but it does it at the expense of significantly more recoil and a lot of people have the idea that this is cool but then they get out to the range to actually shoot it if they go through the process of actually acquiring one and discover that wow this is actually kind of a lot less pleasant to shoot and it costs twice as much or more and like what real benefit am I getting out of it there are other cartridges in the same same area as ten millimeter things like nine by twenty five and how common are those well not common people just don't really use them so there's nothing necessarily like wrong with the 10 millimeter cartridge from a cartridge design perspective I think it's just an answer to a question that most people aren't really asking Nick says I've seen the AKM you said you built and brought to Red October with you have you done any other builds what build interest what build would interest you the most if parts were readily available there was a time when I built a bunch of aks actually because that was when parts kits were under a hundred bucks you can get receivers for like a hundred bucks fire control parts were cheap perhaps most importantly parts kits which were cheap still came with original barrels you know there's this huge glut when I was doing it of Romanian parts kits out there unissued brand-new barrels just chopped the receiver and and it was really a fun project to take off the old receiver parts drill out some rivets either buy or make your own receiver that was a lot of fun and at the end of this you came out with a nice functional semi-auto a can't you forgot 250 bucks which was a lot less than you could buy one for at the time well now of course parts kits are more than that much by themselves they no longer come with barrels so you barrel you have to deal with the head spacing the kits I was using were matching-number kits so they were already headspace just didn't have to mess with headspace things we checked it but we never had to actually change any of them so I built a bunch of those I did actually also build a Browning a semi-auto browning 1919 and that was a cool project that was kind of similar actually sent off the internal parts to have the semi-auto modifications made to them so I didn't have to do the milling work myself and from at my end it was a lot of rivet hammering and then boom you got a 1919 and that was pretty cool once again those parts kits are way more expensive now and it turns out the semi-auto belt heads are not they're really cool to look at they're a little bit of a disappointment at the range I've discovered at any rate what would I do today there are way it's a tough question I would want something interesting that I couldn't easily get as a factory built gun it'd be really cool if you could do something like a bee's on you know the the helical drum fed a case that would be a fun build if the parts were actually available kind of in general though I've moved away from the gunsmithing and building side of things I wasn't frankly all that good at it and I with a limitation on time because I'm doing a lot of things now a lot more things now than I was back then I'd rather have someone else do a build and buy a finished product personally see next up Craig says if Britain wanted to adopt a rimless cartridge post-world War one could they have created a 303 with the same bullet in a rimless case if so how much modification would the smle have needed to function yeah they totally code out the bullets really not related to the case at all 303 is a 0.31 one ôs you just I mean you could take that bullet stick it in a 7/16 NATO cartridge case and call the thing you know 311 NATO 311 Winchester the real living Birmingham something like that as for what modifications the smle would need to work with a rimless case we can actually see that with bishop or SML ease because after world war ii the issue for Arsenal continued to build effectively number one mark three rifles but in 760 to NATO after NATO was the NATO cartridge was adopted of course and there under the designation the the 2a rifles and they're actually out there pretty easily available on the surplus market a bunch of them came in a while back basically you're gonna change the bolt face and extractor a little bit you're going to change the barrel obviously to have the right chambering and then they change the magazine to have a slightly different feed lip sort of profile you know what you know the follower also is a little different because you don't have to worry about rim lock that's basically if the bolt face and mostly meaning the extractor and then the chamber and the magazine and you can change that thing around pretty easily to a rimless case easily from a factory perspective like taking an smle and modifying it as a one-off project the 308 that's a lot of headache but changing the design to manufacture them for 762 nato that's not a big deal let's see Matthew says why do so many handgun designs wind up with magazines that are like 80% compatible with other recent models typically like they'll fit and would function but they don't have a magazine catch in the same place why don't they go all the way the interchangeability this gets back to our very first question of why are so many magazines problematic and one of the solutions that manufacturers will take he is to use already existing magazine body designs especially if you're gonna do something like outsource your magazines your magazine production to a company like Matt Garr that makes OM magazines for a lot of different companies well if you can start with a magazine body profile stamping machine a you know the the actual raw raw body of the magazine that they already make that's gonna cut your costs a lot you're not gonna have to do much development however you're designing your own new pistol so the trigger guards not quite at the same exact position on the magazine as it might be on whatever the mag body that you're using was developed around so you know you put your locking catch wherever it is that you want it on there a lot of gun companies are going to make us a non-trivial amount of money on accessories like spare magazines in addition to the markup they make on guns generally accessories have a far higher markup than firearms themselves so they might actively not want to have their magazines be a hundred percent compatible with someone else's because they want to be a sole source or at least sort of a limiting source on those magazines to keep the prices up so that they can actually make some money on the project right Donald says what was the biggest or most powerful standard-issue general-purpose infantry cartridge ever issued and how did it go for them so the biggest one that I can think of is the Swedish 8 by 63 millimeter which is it was basically like 150 grain projectile at like 3,100 feet per second so 30.6 + p and it didn't go all that well the idea was we're gonna make a machine gun specific cartridge that's extra powerful for use as an anti-aircraft weapon and long range maybe indirect fire but we want to give the crewmen for those machine guns rifles that are compatible with the ammunition that they've already got like why do we want to issue two very similar cartridges to these guys when we could just give them rifles that use the machine gun ammo and so that's what they did it was adopted as the Gewehr give our I don't know the exact Swedish pronunciation for T and it was basically a car 98k chambered in a I sixty three which is chunky this was like this is a high-pressure powerful round and it was of course too powerful you know excessive recoil lightweight rifle what they ended up doing was scrapping the idea completely I I think they just got rid of the rifles and gave the guys standard rifles which for Sweden would have been six five by fifty five which is a far nicer cartridge to actually shoot in a lightweight shoulder rifle a couple of others that come to mind the British came close to adopting the 276 Enfield which was seven by sixty millimeter kind of on par with a seven millimeter Remington Magnum that was another high pressure very powerful round they wanted to get a very flat long-range trajectory after their experiences in the Boer War you know trying to shoot out on the plains of South Africa that got that went through like early field trials it was going to be the pattern of 1913 rifle which I have a video on the pattern 1913 you can check out ultimately World War one got in the way they didn't have they decided it wasn't too much trouble to try and change all of the infantry rifles around we'll just stick to the smle through World War one and then they ended up sticking with it through World War two as well or the 303 cartridge at least the 280 Ross also came to mind I don't think that was ever actually really considered as a military cartridge but kind of comes close that one was 7 by 66 which is another one that's definitely in the light Magnum sort of category all right Dave says what are your opinions on small arms that use a relatively unique ammunition like the mp7 or p90 do they really have a place in the Armed Forces due to their incompatibility with other weapon systems yes I think they totally do I think ammunition compatibility is much less of an issue in in a case like this then some people might think for a military force it's more about how many cartridges are you issuing and how like under what circumstances so if you've got something like an MP 7 or a p90 are you issuing it to your standard infantry division's is it something that you're gonna have to resupply a lot during an armed conflict and the answer is typically no like the P 7 MP 7 or p90 are meant for support troops more so or Special Operations guys in this case the Special Operations guys we don't care about for the purposes of this question they're small in number they're going to have their own supply dealies like they can handle their own ammo for a small group of guys that's not a logistical issue if you are trying to issue see the place this would become a problem is if you're gonna give you're an issue out a handgun in nine-millimeter and an mp7 in 4.6 and then let's say you've got a submachine gun in nine millimeter and a rifle in five five six like okay now you've got four guns in three different calibers and that becomes an issue but if you're gonna use the mp7 in place of a pistol and you're gonna give it to guys who wouldn't normally be intermingling with guys who have rifle now your front line infantry you're supplying them the same old like nine and five five six that you normally would be the four point six millimeter ammunition for the mp7 s is going to a different group of people in a different place unlikely to get mixed up also unlikely to be needed in huge numbers huge quantity so I don't think that's really an issue the other thing is military's arrange to supply their own ammunition military's aren't like going out to Walmart to try and find someone who's selling their ammo when they adopt a system they put in place substantial contracts to supply the ammunition so they could pick whatever they want and they're gonna get a major ammunition factory to make it for them specifically and so it doesn't matter if that ammo is commonly available on the market somewhere else or not because the military is not out trying to source it from the same place that you or I would be looking for a mold nick says if you could choose between two equally priced firearms which one that was rare and mechanically interesting like a one-off prototype or one that was historically interesting like a common pattern rifle with a solid provenance to a famous person or event which would I take I would take the mechanically interesting one to me the most interesting element of firearms is their mechanisms and their use and if I had a rifle that was specifically tied to a particular historic place or person first off if it's a standard pattern rifle there's not a whole lot that I have to actually learn from owning one with a specific historical context and I'd be a little nervous about damaging it about you know impacting its value you know I want to take really good care of that I might I choose not to go out and shoot it if I was going to have that gun I'd kind of rather have just a run-of-the-mill standard version of that same common pattern rifle I'll sell the the one that has specific historical provenance to someone else who's more interested in that and use the money to buy something that is mechanically weird that is going to show me something that I haven't seen before or give me an opportunity to shoot something that I haven't had a chance to shoot before so I guess the mail just arrived and right right I don't need that quite yet all right let's see where were we here we were at tors question which is I think I spotted the book Kongsberg Colton in a bookshelf behind you once assuming you don't read Norwegian I do not in fact read Norwegian do you buy weapons literature in other languages than English how do you do the research if the documentation is not available in a language that you can understand so yes I do buy gun books in languages other than English that I don't read part of this is if I this is specifically if I find gun books in another language that have material that I can't find written in English so if someone writes a book on the m16 in German or in French or in Italian I'm not really gonna go out of my way to to get it because we've got some really excellent sources in English however there are some subjects where there isn't a good book in English the Mosin Nagant comes to mind I don't really have a good full scale book in English but there is a two-volume German set called dry linen or three line rifle which I bought and there's also a recently published Russian book on the Mosin Nagant I don't read Russian or German I got both of those books basically because I don't think it'll be very long before computer-assisted translation technology will make it basically irrelevant what language a book like that is written in now they're already a few translations sort of apps or tools there's the Google Translate app on a phone that you can just hold your phone camera up to text and it will auto translate it at this point that app is not all that good it's fine for restaurant menus or street signs it's not good for technical literature what I will do on Kate occasions when I need something out of that book generally I can you know I can muddle my way through and figure out what section I'm trying to read I will then either scan or photograph those pages I'll run those pictures through an OCR program to get plain text out of them and then I'll drop the text into Google Translate on the web which is a much more robust system than their phone app and translations not perfect especially a lot of technical terms don't get translated properly but because I understand the context of what I'm looking at I can generally get really good understandable information out of the process now that's a very slow process you can't read a whole book that way not effectively not efficiently but if there's one specific thing the moats and Shoei books on Austrian self-loading pistols for example are grading they're a great great example where I've actually done this you know a couple pages will tell me what I need to know about a specific weird model of early Roth Conca pistol or something similar so yeah I'd buy gun books and other languages when they look like they're particularly good so let's see next question is from Peter says have you ever been asked to be a consultant for any kind of media movies TV shows websites etc I've done a few video games I actually did some legit like contracted consulting work on battlefield one although not very much I know they used my videos as reference material for like what guns to put in to be f1 and I think also bf5 as well as using them as a basis for some of their 3d renderings that's cool I've been on a couple of TV programs but they're all very gun specific I've never been asked to do any consulting on like as a firearms consultant on a more general interest movie or TV show also something like that would be really cool that'd be I think that'd be a lot of fun to try if someone had a show that actually called from my particular sort of understanding of firearms most of the time you're looking for like what was the standard stuff in such and such time period and there are lots of people already in the movie industry who are good at that they don't need me for that Blaz says what is your opinion on ALS scotches I love them but it seems a very acquired taste it is an acquired taste and I am thankful for that because the fewer people that choose to acquire it the more of the really good stuff like Lagavulin 16 there is for people like blaze and I I'm a big fan of Eilis scotches this is the whole point of Iowa is that they're heavily smokey heated scotches and the reason is Iowa is this big island off the west coast of Scotland that for a long time has had no trees and part of the distillation process is you have to get your barley wet and then it starts to germinate and you then kill it once the starches in the barley have turned into sugar use the sugar to ferment and distill well you kill it by heating it to heat it you need to burn something traditionally that's wood and wood smoke doesn't really impact the flavor of the barley all that much however if you're on isla and there are no trees you're out of luck so instead for fuel you use peat which is basically very very old compressed plant matter you cut it into bricks dry it out burn it in a kiln or a furnace and it has a very distinctive aromatic smoke that it puts out and if you run that smoke actually through the barley itself the barley acquires that smoky flavor and it persists all the way into the finished whiskey so there are I think eight different distilleries on Iowa I like pretty much all of them but Lagavulin is my favorite next up is Noah who says any thoughts on why the tourists judge and Smith & Wesson governor were relatively well received but the mill thunder 5 which predates both by over a decade never became as popular so if you're not familiar these are all revolvers that chamber the 45 colt / 410 shotgun cartridge and they have very long cylinders either two-and-a-half or three inches long to accommodate a full-size 410 shotgun cartridge and they are marketed as being well they're generally understood to be very effective like really powerful guns because they'll fire shotgun shells and they you know ton of pellets going out and it's way more effective than a bullet the reality is that's kind of nonsense they are absolutely not a firearm I would want for any sort of defensive use they tend to be have poor accuracy and with 45 colt they have terrible patterns with for ten for ten buckshot is like three pellets traveling about as fast as you can throw them for ten or shot is next to useless no one should use one of these guns as a defensive firearm however they are very meanie and that gets to part of why the governor and the judge are popular and the thunder 5 was not a thunder 5 came out before the era of online social media that's not the only reason it was a gun that like you could find it in magazines or in shotgun news and that's how people found out about it and if someone you knew didn't own one you were unlikely to hear much about it well you can much more easily find discussion forums if we go back to when the Smith & Wesson are the governor and originally the judge came out you can find discussion forums easily of people touting how awesome they are or Facebook groups nowadays or Instagram posts and it's much more easy to to spread marketing about these guns basically viral marketing in effect people who get them think they're awesome and want to convince you that they're awesome in addition Taurus had has is a major gun company it has a lot of money and it's able to do things like easily stock tourists judge revolvers in gun shops the thunder 5 was made by a small startup company that didn't have that kind of funding behind it and they didn't really show up in gun shops you had to order one by mail they didn't have this great distribution network that made it possible for them to just appear places so you couldn't really impulse buy a thunder 5 you had to find out about it and then very deliberately go get one chorus judge you show up at the gun shop and you're looking at cylinder cylinder cylinder cylinder oh that one's twice as long it must be twice as good and at fire shotgun shells and my my buddy online in in the facebook says it's fantastic because man look at fires like a thousand pellets out of this little bird shot round anyway that those are the two main reasons why the Torah's judge and the governor trying to pick up on its marketing succeeded where the thunder 5 did not nobody should actually own either one of them for anything except recreational purposes and frankly I don't see all that much recreational use for any of them either next question is Daniel who says is it worth it to buy a mas pistol now that ammo is being made for them yeah like I think I thought it was worth buying him before there was ammo so my answer to this is obviously going to be yes there are two versions of the the mas 35 pistol there is the mass 35 a-any mas 35 s they are not mechanically related really except by coincidence and in the ways that most automatic pistols are related these days they were both competitors for the original French adoption they ended up adopting the 1935 a and then when they realized they didn't have enough manufacturing capacity for that alone they just decided to adopt the S as well and so now we've got both companies both factories making them and we get more pistols the a is the better gun I think the S is the more common gun they're both cool but the a in particular I think it's a fantastic gun and it's a great-looking gun and now that there's ammo available you can discover the digital also a very nice shooting gun so yeah I think absolutely it's worth getting them I've already seen the prices of them going up because the ammo is available Nicholas says how do you think the pandemic will affect historical firearm prices long term good deals to be had from liquidating collections lower demand etc have you enjoyed not travelling constantly for a bit or are you sick of being home by now so we'll address these in order I don't think this pandemics gonna affect things long-term really at all I think there will be a short-term effect and I think it depends on how long the various lock downs go I think a lot of the people who have large collections who might be you know who could liquidate those collections because they need money I think a lot of those people are in a position to more easily whether a couple months of lock down without needing to sell off a gun collection to make grocery money either because they have jobs that are more easily done from home that they can click Ewing or you know they're on salary and they may be furloughed but their jobs gonna come back they have more savings or they're retired and you know already have a fixed income or partly a fixed income so they're gonna be making they're gonna make enough money to cover the expenses without having to go to a job that they may have lost the people most likely to lose jobs especially in the short term are people less likely to have really substantial collections so I don't see any sort of real collection liquidation thing being having an impact on the market there's a possibility that we'll see a little bit of a residual effect on things like auction houses if people look at it and say well I was planning to sell a bunch of machine guns you know and there's a long lead time for that because they have to transfer over to the auction house before they can be listed and sold but you know what I'm looking at the the current pandemic and I'm worried that people might not be willing to spend their money right now so maybe I'll decide to hold back on on guns that I was going to put up for auction but ultimately that'll probably balance out with the the small but real number of people who do decide like I'm I have to sell this right now because I need the money so long term I really don't I don't see any impact on it even if this thing goes a year I think the economy will recover relatively quickly all things considered I mean if you look at the long term economic impact of say the 2008 Great Recession for a couple of years maybe we saw impacts in the firearms market but they're they're long gone by now and the pandemics not going to be as long-term impactful as that oh and have I enjoyed not traveling constantly yes actually I got a lot done and I'm still in the process of getting a lot done right now which is made a lot easier by not going out to film stuff now it helped that right as the the lockdown sort of broke all right as it was set up I had a month worth of Rock Island videos that they postponed the auction but they very kindly didn't object to me running the videos a bit prematurely so I had a lot of content already I've had some great companies step up and send me some guns to to film from home without having to travel I can handle this for many months to come although there are opportunities that I am missing that I would like to be able to get back out get around and and return to my normal routine so let's see next collect next question is from Stokes says haein I've heard you point out ways to spell a fake in many videos for us non collectors just how common is attempted counterfeiting of sought-after variants of collectible guns what are some examples off - faked guns it is it's a mixed bag there are a lot of factors here so it's a matter of how much more money can you get by turning something common into something rare which is a combination of what's the difference in value and how much work does it take to make a counterfeit so the very simplistic things would be some stuff like steyr mannlicher m95 straight-pull rifles Austrian military rifles refurbished for world war ii that some importer and i don't know exactly who it was stamped fake swastikas on swastikas and Wathan ops and the idea there was it's a pretty cheap gun to start with there's a lot of them out there and they're not really in high demand they're not worth all that much but if you had one of those rare ones that was actually German stamped because it's got that swastika on it and people love that thing then you can you could probably easily double the price and the work required is adding one fake stamp so that's something where there's a whole batch of those guns out there we see the same thing there's a batch of star model B pistols that were fake Waffen opted by some importer for the same reason they were a cheap gun that can become much more expensive gun with very little effort now when you start getting into more valuable rare guns often you're looking for things that are going to be more distinctive so for example let's just say you wanted to fake Finnish Mosin Nagant sniper well there's real distinctive elements to that thing and you're gonna have to put in a lot of work to do it and because that guns going to be because that gun is very rare and very desirable to a group of niche collectors people are gonna look at it a lot more carefully than they might look at what they think is going to be a of something common like oh it's a Nazi marked star model B when it comes to French guns like the ones that are copied are again you'll sometimes see fake of off noms although I haven't seen very much of that the paratrooper mas 36 is with the under folding stocks those got counterfeited basically only because a group of demilitarized guns was imported with actual real stocks and so people converted standard guns because that really distinctive part the under folding stock that's real it would be really hard to fabricate became readily available in small numbers for a short time so most of the time when you get to really high-end fake guns they become relatively easy to spot because people have done a lot of research and it gets really hard to make a convincing copy of someone's looking closely enough serial number ranges are a great way to spot fakes because if you have to go renumber a whole gun that adds a tremendous amount of work you have to get rid of old numbers make new numbers refinish the whole thing in a way that still looks original that's that's the sort of stuff that kind of you can only do two guns that have very few distinctive mechanical elements where just a serial number ranges of make enough to make it really valuable so as a general rule it's the low effort ones that we see a lot of like I said fake coffin op stamps party leader PPK pistols where all you have to do is go buy a fake reproduction grip off of ebay because there is no serial number range known for the pistols you drop the fake grip on the pistol and presto now you've got a ten thousand dollar gun instead of a one thousand dollar gun so those are the areas where you have to have to watch out Thomas says I was reading her book and wondering if the Meuniere Asics was better than the RFC 1917 in a couple of ways it probably was it is certainly a more refined gun it might be more accurate although the artist were actually known to be pretty darn accurate guns as a general rule I would say however no the RSC is the better rifle for a lot of kind of big picture reasons the RSC is a far more resilient rifle in dirty conditions the mini air is a short recoil gun where the barrel is actually sliding inside a very closely fitted barrel band and it does not take much at all to jam that up and then the gun simply stops working it's a long recoil system which is just one of the most common or complicated actions in general it's a far more expensive gun to produce certainly the French military was far better off with the RSC 1917 than they would have been trying to manufacture a large number of Meniere's and if you told me I had to go fight in World War one with one of those two guns I would definitely take the RSC the RC has some hindrances you know it's clip loading system is awkward at best but in general it is the better of the two guns in our last question we're gonna end with kind of a fun one so I often get virtually every Q&A that I do someone will ask usually a couple people ask about like you're in charge of the army of blank at blank period what guns do you pick for them Peter today has asked its 1945 and you're the head of a newly independent nations ordnance department and charged with choosing from all the world's small arms to equip your army but you are a traitor what are the worst most expensive or least compatible infantry weapons you could choose that is a fun twist on what has otherwise to be honest become kind of a boring question to me and so I thought about it I think I came up with a pretty awful set of guns for the newly founded country of ellonija first off so I figure we'll go with a pistol a rifle a submachine gun and a machine gun and then there's a debate about like would you need a light and heavy so we'll get to that in a moment we'll start off just off the bat with the submachine gun and I'm doing this entirely with guns that were in use in World War two so it'd be easy to go back and go oh well the show shows the worst light machinegun really ever put into major service let's do that well they didn't really use it in World War two yes I know a few places few variants but I tried to do this specifically with guns that were in active serious use like people deliberately chose them so for us that machine gun I would go with a Swiss mp40 1/40 for largely because of expense and I would chamber it in 30 Luger now the Swiss used it in nine millimetre parabellum the Swiss were big fans of 30 Luger and they would have been thrilled I think to manufacture that gun or really any gun in 30 Luger for sales so we've got our MP 41 44 it is a super complicated locked breech it's a toggle locked submachine gun the rate of fire is too high it are too expensive like that gun alone is going to bankrupt the new elbonian military the 30 Luger cartridge isn't bad though then for our handgun what I'm going to do is argue that as we've seen with developments in countries like the United States we want a little more power than just a handgun for our support troops so instead we should up the firepower availability not by giving them a carbine like the m1 carbine because that's a little too big and too clumsy but let's give them a machine pistol in fact let's give them a German machine pistol so I'm going to equip our army as a handgun with the schnell Feuer the full auto version of the c96 mauser it seemed 30 Mauser so now we've set up a logistical system where we're trying to supply 30 Luger and 30 Mauser and that's gonna mess some stuff up because that stuff's gonna get mixed up all the time because those two cartridges are both very similar bottlenecked cartridges you've got 7.65 by 21 is 30 Luger and 763 by 25 is 30 miles or so I kind of like that that little devious plan there and then of course the schnell foyer is an awkward gun to shoot if you don't issue stocks with it the guns are may uncontrollable and useless far worse than a typical semi-auto pistol but I think I could make the argument to people who don't know better that it's a machine pistol so it's definitely better to have them a semi-auto pistol now for a machine gun I'm trying to come up with like what's most of the World War two machine guns were pretty good and I have an ulterior motive here so I want to go with a heavy machine gun and I went with the check ZB 53 because it weighs approximately a million tons it is a ludicrously heavy gun it has a set of kind of Spade grips on the back so it doesn't have a pistol grip and there is absolutely no way you can hold this thing and fire it from the hip so even if you took a heavy gun like a Browning 1917 you could still have troops you could manage to shoot the thing from the hip and make tactical use of it that way with the ZB 53 there's no way they can do that they're gonna be stuck only shooting this thing from a tripod and then on top of that well I mean it's super heavy it doesn't have interchangeable barrels so it's it's gonna be awkward we're gonna chamber it for as we touched on earlier in this Q&A we're going to chamber it four feet by sixty three the Swedish machine gun cartridge again well under the guise of we want a good powerful machine gun round it'll penetrate a lot it's great for long range we can use it for anti-aircraft use as well you know more power is more gooder right and then for the sake of logistical effectiveness like we don't want machine guns and rifles in different calibers so we're gonna equip our troops with a bolt-action rifle we're gonna give them the give RM 40 from sweden chambered for that same 8 by 63 in fact we might even cut it down a little bit because well again we've seen from world war ii is that you know combats taking place at relatively short ranges we can go with short barrels we don't really need you know full size rifles white handy carbines are better than big heavy long guns so what I want to do here is take the biggest heaviest recoiling infantry rifle cartridge I can possibly find and pair it with the handiest lightest actual done that would have been in use so a car 98k an 8 by 60 three or like if we could figure out let's take a German g-33 like a 3341 of the mountain troops carbines it's got an even shorter a little Barrel on it and stick that in this fire ball like Magnum cartridge that'll make that will basically make the infantry totally ineffective with rifle fire and because we have given them a big heavy machine gun and the idea is we're gonna screen and emulate German German squad organization where each each unit is built around a heavy machine gun and the rifleman supply ammunition and protect the guns and the gun is the strong point well we've given them a gun that just isn't movable the mg42 you can pull off the tripod and make it pretty mobile but we're giving them a ZB 53 is that are just boat anchors and making their rifles effectively impossible to shoot accurately because of their incredibly heavy recoil you know if it is possible that the Ordnance the the military leadership of Al Bonilla would see through this plan a little bit or would at least be concerned about the lack of an intermediate between the infantry rifle being a bolt-action and the belt fed tripod mounted heavy machine gun if they really pushed the matter I would I would be willing to equip them equip the troops with something like a VAR in 8 by 63 so I would try to make it a light machine gun with ideally no bipod like give them an automatic rifle so they still don't really have a squad support weapon of any use if we had to we give it a bipod but we try and lighten the be AR as much as possible to make that full auto fire again uncontrollable and useless limit the magazine size as much as possible 20 rounds is probably the best that we can do the smallest that we can get away with I definitely don't give it a quick-change barrel so that especially with that really hot cartridge let's try to get the barrels where they can overheat as quickly as possible I think that's a pretty awful combination of small arms so thank you Peter that was that was a lot of fun to go through let me know down in the comments if you think you can come up with something even worse for the troops than that combination and until next month that is our QA before April thank you guys all very much for watching on patreon thank you very much for being the thing that makes Forgotten weapons possible I am greatly indebted to you all thanks

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 320,189

Rating: 4.9452429 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, question, answer, q&a, meunier, roc 1917, rifle grenade, 276 enfield, 8x63mm, fake gun, collector, collectible, Taurus Judge, elbonia, ww2, world war, magazinem, s&w governor, thunder 5, 410 revolver, mas 35, 1935a, 1935s, Finland, Mosin Nagant, Remington mosin, mas 38, 10mm auto, kongsberg, Colten, mp7, p90, pistol, sidearm, pew

Id: _19y3ZWCbNc

Length: 62min 41sec (3761 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020

Reddit Comments

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[u/RamTank]

Really enjoying the worst possible gun combos in the comments. You could probably scale it up too. ZiS-3s, M10s, and 76mm Shermans would be a fun combo.