Small Arms of WWI Primer 080: German MG08

we cannot discuss the small arms of the Great War without an in-depth look at the machine guns and among them one design was far wider in use than any other [Music] hi I'm Matthias and this good this is a German machine and Gewehr Oh ATM go8 a beautiful World War one era Maxim machine gun now let's get it over light box shorter than some of the rifles we've seen this gun is only 44 inches long but weighs in empty of ammo and water and without a mount at 40 pounds as we'll see this is the lightened version of this gun the weight goes up almost 80 pounds with the addition of the sled now although it does carry most of the accessories for the gun as well it was generally fed from a 250 round cloth belt although 500 round versions were available for aircraft those belts feed the 7.92 by 57 millimeter cartridge Spitzer bullet all right gang big gun big episode I'm sure you can see the timecode by now so you have one advantage on me now this is one episode of two and it's going to get a little confusing if you're used to our usual format because I'm gonna have to change things up and a lot of that has to do with the fact that the MgO 8 and then the gun we're covering next time out of Russia are both towards the end of the maximum development cycle so I want you to be prepared that if you're just here for the shooting segments they're gonna come much later than you're used to so start scanning from back to front that's because there's a lot of development history with a lot of big names big personalities and the biggest of all sir Hiram Stevens Maxim oldest of what would become eight children Hiram was born in February of 1840 near the village of Sanger Ville Maine a child prodigy of sorts he was known as a dedicated student and extremely hard-working in his youth he would journeyman out to various skilled trades giving him a broad engineering base early on it's a common story to hear that young Hiram Maxim working at grist mill designed his own mousetrap that was capable of resetting itself thanks to winding up but it would go a step further removing the spring power in favour of having the first trapped Mouse likely panicked in its captivity reset the trap for the next Mouse to be caught what perfect foreshadowing for the man that was going to take otherwise ignored forces and turn them into the whole principle behind autoloading well firearm in this case many different iterations thereof now he was not the only inventor in the family his father had the bug and there's actually an invention of his that would lead to the development much later in his life of this gun here and that was really a chain fired Hand Crank rapid-fire gun now this is not that gun obviously that design was lost to time and we only have Hiram's word for it but this much later patent by someone else covers the core idea that we're worried about linked steel cylinders with priming caps pre-loaded powder and ball fed through the action now Hiram would claim that his father's gun was never really patented there may have been some paper copy that is lost and then supposedly he made a wood model just a proof of concept but that also has been lost a time he did say though that that gun used a sort of jointed arm like we're used to as you'll see in this gun although I don't know if it provided the locking principle or not because we're gonna see Hiram go through several locking principles despite using roughly the same idea for each of them anyway back to the man who is still in his youth hiren continued working odd jobs from farming to wood turning until the outbreak of the American Civil War they did not enjoy the prospect of being a soldier and so avoided enlistment coincidentally he spent some years living in Canada he promises these are unrelated they are he quarreled with a local school board over his invention of blackboard paint now at the time the US would not draft three brothers of the same family and so once two of his were sucked up by the machine well he was safe to return home which he coincidentally did again not because he was avoiding the war or anything these things just timed out that way now post-civil war hiren would try to look into his father's inventions in terms of firearms one more time and as part of this he would actually journey down to Savannah Georgia where he spent some time target practicing with some former rebels and in the process apparently received a fairly good bruise and noticed sort of the gush of energy coming out of the front of the muzzle that was moving the grass and ball we've heard this before from browning you just happen to notice that there's a lot of extra things that are going into this rifle there causing effects on the outside environment something to keep note of that it's probably wasted energy again believable from a man who had a mouse powered mousetrap so at this point he didn't really do anything with his idea he just had that inkling in his head because Hiram wasn't a firearms man first and foremost he was really an inventor of everything he just kept studying drafting chemistry electricity he designed carburetors lightbulbs the methods to make the filament for those bulbs current regulators and more he would eventually found the maxim gas machine company and profits were good he became a wealthy man of note now I'm going to go very simple on what is a complex history many of you know that the years leading up to the widespread adoption of electric lighting were chaotic to say the least by now I think it's fairly understood how vicious and aggressive both Edison and Westinghouse could be in their feud we also have something akin to folk heroes coming on the same period like Nikola Tesla it was a messy rival risk in down and out patent race at that time what we don't often hear about however is that the comparatively quiet Hiram Stevens maxim was beating many of these men to the punch so much so that his own partners would push him to the side in 1878 he had joined forces with Edward Weston and Moses farmer the latter of which was a very early innovator in electricity they formed the United States electric lighting company which would later become a subsidiary of Westinghouse also just an odd note one of the vice presidents would be more Seles Hartley what a small world so this is kind of interesting it because there's not a clear example of why this happened but in my mind best guess there's some vanity here and some elbowing like electricity is the big new thing Hiram Stevens Maxim is very skilled at it but he's not necessarily a front man not in the way that we see like Edison and Westinghouse going at it so it looks like for his part his company says look we don't need you here stirring the pot we want you to go over to Europe and make sure we're not missing anything so they pay him 20,000 a year on a ten-year agreement that is extremely high pay for the time in order to go to France and make his way through as many patents as possible and he did and then the ones he did that actually very well with lots of comments and notes ending back to the u.s. to see if there's any room for innovation he then went over to the London office where he was meant to clean things up because it was running kind of erratically now in London he got bored he's no longer in at the front the forefront of this inventing technology he's not as good administrative Lee as he is in terms of just figuring out the solutions to problems and so he's kind of listless he's talking to his friend they were lamenting over this and his friend is saying look it's nasty because with electricity I mean you guys have seen the ac/dc Wars and all this other stuff there's a lot of red tape that's starting to form around these sort of inventions like people are getting electrocuted poles and governments are stepping in or not stepping there's all these arguments around it and so he needed to look at an industry that was less regulated where he could it be more free to invent and be even more careless than ever I met an American Jew whom I had known in the States he said hang your chemistry and electricity if you want to make a pile of money invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each other's throats with greater facility now if any of you are a bit worried that he identified the religion of the man I can't help you it's a direct quote so if you don't like it you'll have to take it up with Hiram not me so by 1883 we're seeing patents show up from him for semi-automatic rifles blowback operated rifles very simple things but he's experimenting right he's getting back into the flow of firearms and he's getting ready to rediscover some old ideas he had but first he surveyed the field because remember the quote was you should find a more efficient firearm or deadly firearm militarized firearm this isn't just tinkering he has an idea to sort of slot into this growing field of rapid-fire lighter than artillery bigger than a rifle fire okay and so for that he starts looking at the comparable guns already around the infamous Gatling gun the Hotchkiss revolving cannon the Nordenfelt organ and the often twin barreled gardiner gun just a note all of those have been animated by V BBS my T over at his YouTube channel and we do license our machine gun animations from him so that Bruno doesn't have to have a painting spell so if you want to see what Maxim was working against go take a look it's fascinating now back to him Maxim saw what you're seeing now and had several concerns with the designs one they all depended on human muscle power cycle - they were massively heavy three they were slow part of this was dealing with the possibility of hanging fire so you had to rotate at a rate that would allow for the slowest reacting cartridge and for gravity-feed magazines exposed the loaders to enemy fire Maxim would gather some business investors to the tune of 10,000 British pounds to help develop his machine gun ideas step one and fixing all of this was to finally cash in on that recoil idea he had had all those years ago he developed a patent around a Winchester lever-action with a spring-loaded but this was not going to be a production firearm but rather a means to lock up the rights to recoil operation now Hiram worked this up in stages he didn't just go out like John Browning and design an entire system he crept up on it so first concern is can I get the recoil action to work so he sets up a a barrel and a sort of breech and he wants to see how much power it really takes to get it moving and as part of that you know he finds the usual problems that we now understand very well which is that too little power and it doesn't cycle and too much and you blow out the primers and have other problems so that was very I mean that's really educational we take it for granted that we understand that now when we're tuning a gun that has spring problems or something but back then I mean that's new so once he's done with that he sort of sets it aside or scrap said that device is missing and he comes up with a second device now this one again I don't have drawings on this but he says that it managed to feed multiple rounds now whether they're by belt or just a little gravity feed I can't be certain but he lines he sets the whole thing up and he's just doing a basic test just to kind of see how far he'll get and he puts like five rounds in a tray and then he hits the trigger and they're all gone before he can blink like just he was he didn't even have time to understand that all that like he thought something had gone wrong no it had just shot them all they were all gone before he can even process what had happened and at that moment he knew that he was going to have a success like in his mind from his own memoirs that's it I got it now it's all detail work from here following those two he'd developed this in 1883 nicknamed the forerunner likely the world's first true machine gun forerunner used to star-shaped spindles to feed ammunition from a cloth belt it had a hydraulic buffer at the rear with a reservoir this was done to allow maxim to change the resistance on the breech at will this would aid greatly in experimentation the action was unlocked and while nominally recoil-operated the activating factor was a piston fitted into the base of each cartridge which was blown back into the breech when fired so this is a primer activated gun so obviously requiring special ammunition makes four-runner more of a testbed than something Maxim would sell he actually didn't want to show it around very much realizing its inherent weaknesses instead it served to lock down more concepts in patent form and then was quickly done away with after this piston primer forerunner maxim would actually get into gas-operated design at first we'll see him go for the good old gas trap although at this point it was very new technology now while this idea gave a general form for the receiver and contributed to the feeding mechanism Maxim would only tinker in gas operation for now from his other notes we can see that he had a hit not only on the gas trap but on the gas piston as well designs usually more associated with John Browning who would come later with the concepts proven it's time to actually make the facility so he opens up a small workshop in London with a handful of talented individuals to help him make parts and things like that and he designs a gun a rapid-fire gun now he's using a short recoil locking action with a piston arm somewhat reminiscent of what his father had designed years ago he's using a belt feed again a much simpler version of what his father had tried to do years ago single barrel which by the way is neat at the time most things were multi-barreled as you saw earlier in terms of rapid-fire guns that's to do with heat more on at the moment and then he selected the 45 caliber Gatling gun cartridge as his testbed cartridge because it was already popular and in widespread use so you end up with this crazy-looking box and by the way it featured a prominent rate adjuster on one side looking under the skin oh boy that's a lot going notice a rotating piston action which actually goes back and forth alternating for each round this two spool gun has a belt that feeds onto a star wheel which passes the cartridge up to the bolt where it is driven into the chamber that green bit up top is the lock keeping the bolt and barrel together for a short distance before unlocking we can also see how the breech extension rotates the feed wheel changing a linear force into rotary force okay this goes a lot deeper and you again should check out V BB s myt to see more of this gun just know that it also ejects the spent cases and has a mechanical accelerator to help punch up the recoil force so like the 4runner this gun got a nickname the prototype and this 1884 prototype really explained one clear thing to max him right away which is that when you burn rounds this fast you make heat and so cooling was going to be very very important and for that he got out his pen and paper and did some quick math along with some observations one round of 45 Gatling being fired produced enough heat to raise one pound of water 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit so he declared as it requires as much heat to evaporate one pound of water as it does to melt five pounds of iron it will be obvious that weight for weight water is much more effective than iron and absorbing the heat that would mean the birth of the water jacket and obviously why it was included for a number of years in any sustained fire design finally satisfied that he had a gun worth showing maxim would exhibit the 1884 fairly widely earning praise and even a gold medal at the international invention exhibition now at this point the prototype is doing pretty well and it's getting a lot of attention but there is one sticking point and it's a sticking point that affected other guns before the prototype as well that is ammunition at this time early centerfire cartridge things are very unreliable I mean consistently making the correct powder the correct load the same performance wet dry weather atmospheric changes no you get a lot of variation and ammo in that time and this is actually part of why Maxim designed his gun the way he did you see with the hand cranked guns like I kind of alluded to earlier if you had a hangfire something well you gotta go slow enough to prevent that so you if you really crank the Rihan crank gun yeah you can fire a lot but what happens if you get past a cartridge that took a couple extra seconds to cook and then it goes bang either fed off somewhere where it shouldn't be and therefore destroying part of the device or now just out of battery throwing brass and sparks everywhere it kind of depends on what gun were talking about here is to help dangerous that can be but it's not good well the good thing about Maxim's devices since the cartridge has to go bang in order to cycle the action well then you just get skipping the fire rate like it just click and there's a hesitation hang fire and then boom and then you don't have any out of battery problems and if the cartridge is bad you just manually cycle the action you're back in business yeah there's other problems with ammunition this time which is that he's still dealing with black powder and yet he's firing it very rapidly and this is an era in which you know you get through 50 rounds on a rifle and you're starting to get some real problems in terms of fouling and so when you can do 50 rounds in a second yeah your guns filling up with this suit and so he really tries to invent around the problem of black-powder ammunition not knowing that smokeless is just around the corner he's not psychic he had actually started back with his older gas trap design using an automatic chamber oiler he now applied it in a new patent this document also covered an attempted suppressor which was well ahead of what would be his own sons later and mentioned they didn't use baffles though just bled off into a compartment full of fibrous material in the oily gak which would help with the sound and in the blasts of smoke also at one point he worried about the weight of the belts jamming the action and so naturally he invented the top mounted multi-level pan magazine well before we'll see it on the Lewis gun so this is an interesting position we have a man who's already wealthy and famous I mean he's famous he's a he's a well-known inventor in his time he's well appreciated and he's casually inventing things like gas operation with a piston direct impingement recoil force he's casually inventing drum magazines and suppressor is it he's just I got problem I'm gonna fix it I got another problem I'm gonna fix it and he's one man and some of these things are so unprovable at that moment that they're just being ignored to be rediscovered by other men later so as much as he's famous and well-known and considered a genius he's Ajith it's like it's more than you even think like we hear his name and it's sort of it's held up here already and then you go into the papers and the patents and you go oh no no no no like he's he was ahead of so many other men the thing is he just if you had to compare maximum two browning Browning's true genius is that he's what you get if you took maximum and combined them with key judo Dumbo you get someone who's good at invention and good at refinement of an idea into a closed system that is efficient so maximum while very good on invention is not necessarily efficient and that's how I think he gets sort of lost under the the john browning mythos but for that being said he has a very wide wide spread on his Designs and Patents and very early to the game all right just a point no matter how much you love Maxim you could probably love him a little bit more especially when he opens his mouth we're gonna see some quotes anyway by November of 1884 he's got enough into his gun that he feels comfortable founding the maxim gun company and one of those founding members would be Albert Vickers who with his brother Tom ran an old family Steel Works known as Vickers Sons and Company Limited we're gonna see their importance a little later on forming the company means that now we have to look at this much more practically so the 1884 was really cool and it worked but it was made one-off in such a way that did not take into consideration savings in Machine time or parts or fabrication it was also very heavy and he felt that he could lighten up the entire design basically you're going from prototype to product like appealing to people usable and producible and so he would do what he always did which is invent right patent to save weight and simplify the two-wheel feed system is gone we now work directly from the belt which is set above the action dropping the cartridge down into the path of the bolt locks props hydraulics and plungers were all ditched down to the bare bones also we see the introduction of the frizzy which was based on the watch spring of the same name and at this point is an actual clock spring style spiraling in on itself also this design has a fluid rate adjuster that ranged from 650 rounds per minute down to one you did hear that right a one-round permanent fire rate I actually debated going into detail on this with animations etc but we're pretty limited on time and this feature would be abandoned now supposedly the reason for this is so that you could set up a gun in the daylight point it at a target that you can see a hot spot or a break in a wall or something but you fear enemy coming through or congregating at and then sliding it into daylight the Sun Goes Down and you can let that gun run once a minute or however slow as possible to harass that position to keep people out of it overnight seems a little strange of a request but that's supposedly where it came from now the French it appears did ask for this and they were trialing the gun and there's actually a story that maximum self relates which is that while displaying his gun that had this mechanism apparently fired around and just as it had fired a French officer on horseback shows up and says oh is that the new automatic gun I would really like to see it being fired and Maxim he was kicked back in its chair gestures at the gun some 20 feet away and says oh it's being fired now and he goes what are you talking about crazy man they have a small argument and the next thing you know the gun boom goes off for the next round which was very startling and very impressive you know while this feature was never pressed into production I think there is at least one occasion where it could have come in handy of course the British found other ways regardless anyway back to the rails while helping the British government to unravel the formulation of some German gunpowder Maxon would meet the then Inspector General Sir Andrew Clarke who led some sage advice to make the gun capable of being fully serviced and inspected in the field strip clean and minor repairs should be easily done bare handed and Maxim took that advice to heart and I'm telling you we've done machine gun work behind the scenes at this point serviceability ease of disassembly they matter a lot granted it's been a hundred years of service or non service for a lot of these guns but there's not a single machine and I have touched that has run flawlessly yet we will see and I will tell you if that happens but generally it requires me to do a lot of little tinkering and adjustment and tuning it just into place these Kevin's have a lot going on and so the ability to work on them on the go is the difference between being able to have them back in the fight in ten minutes or ten days it's pretty critical this mentality led to the patent of July 1885 known as the transitional model the big focus self-contained sub assemblies part groups that can be swapped out as a whole it also embodied a number of simplifications to the operation of the gun itself bringing the parts count way down and really it is 90 percent of the gun I have today felt Fred from over the top it was the first design to use the now iconic multifunction extractor this vertical slide action would rise to pick up the next cartridge on the belt fall to align it to the chamber rows again while the chamber held the live cartridge in place and it picked up that next cartridge up top and then after firing fell again to shunt the spent casing out of the action this design also sports the coil spring powered physi that will recognize in a moment locking is accomplished by a cylindrical crossbar riding in a curving channel in the breech block when first fired the barrel and breech block traveled together locked but that cylinder is turned by striking a projection on the outside of the receiver tipping it down and free of the breech block this allows the breech block to carry on rearward alone notice this is not quite the toggle arm that we'll see later despite being a sort of inside-out toggle action and clearly the same principle over all the sear and firing pin setup will actually mostly stay the same with minor adjustments including the out of battery safety up top now in some ways this is where the design family tree splits because branching off to one side Maximas now figured out that this gun and the way its action is set up can be scaled quite a large okay maybe this is a little excessive but by 1885 he had produced an example or a naval deck gun in the British Navy love them the design would actually survive nearly unchanged for decades heck here's some World War 1 footage of what are basically called pom-poms and use by the Germans nickname for their huge rapid sound well the pom-pom seems to have helped maxim finalize simplifications to the 1885 because by 1887 we see the perfected design it's so close to our gun today that we'll catch it in our later animation some of you are looking at the clock and saying okay good we're getting close to me actually handling this no sorry guys there's still a lot more history it's a big story now we have the gun mostly we need to talk about who's going to adopt it like who is actually gonna take in something like this and filled it not really knowing the full potential of it just yet well generally when we think of the maxim lots of people think of Germany or even Russia the truth is just about everyone adopted at some point but at first the maxim gun company put its native Britain in its sights now the British government had been watching the maxim since the successful 1884 model and they even put together something of a first machine gun board to determine just what they wanted from the new system in order to consider adoption the gun should be no more than 100 pounds in weight it should be able to fire 400 rounds a minute and 600 rounds in two minutes and 1000 rounds in four minutes those last two are really there to force magazine slash belt changes into the equation well by the time these prerequisites were established Maxim had already smashed them with his 1887 so he sent along three guns two standard models with water jackets these weights 60 pounds or so basically good for use anywhere and one lightened model in which the gun was only 40 pounds because much of the cooling system was housed in a navel cone mount this was specifically fitted to handle cycling fresh water into the jacket with a compressed air reservoir and testing this gun fired some 3000 cartridges continuously while remaining cool enough to operate all three were purchased but no contracts resulted right away brent was still trying to figure out what they were looking at and how to apply it and so while they were thinking maxim still had some guns to sell so he went to the world market and started entering trials or while kicking down doors more on that in a moment what you need to know about the sort of stage as it's set is that a number of countries are either considering or have just adopted small numbers but not large numbers of these repeating guns that were already in the market we mentioned these before but the big three manslaughter wreaths we've got the gardener we've got the Gatling and we've got the Nordenfelt well they were competing amongst each other to be the best manual action but maximum made his gun specifically to undermine the basis of these guns marked them as inferior for the reasons we've already stated well guess what happens when you show up with a gun specifically designed to discredit the operating principle of the other guns and you are right you clean house he showed up late to the Swiss Italian and austro-hungarian competitions each power had already adopted either the gardener or Nordenfelt or both to some degree each had contracts pending final decisions and he just waltzed in and smoked months or years of testing his gun was four times lighter four times faster firing devoid of a myriad of technical issues it was easily operated by two men wherefore struggled to man the rest in one Swiss test they had him take aim at a mock artillery battery some 1,200 meters distant but he had only calculated up to 1,000 meters on his site so he took some kentucky elevation and let loose with eleven millimeter mauser ammunition still not even smokeless the swiss estimated three-quarters of all men and horses were killed in just a one minute of fire I think I'm still under selling this I mean this thing is one man poor I can pick this up you saw me pick this up it's one man portable although at that point it was a little heavier than this I mean this almost 20 pounds more than this but still and one guy could you know Hulk it up and trot along with it and then like one guy could theoretically run it I mean it wouldn't be great it's better to run it with a team it's more efficient but I mean it's not hard to just sort of get this stuff in their racket up and then pull the trigger push the trigger in this case so realistically if I wait you're not exhausting yourself cranking it the whole time you're trying to fire and aim the thing is hit a button and then it runs like voodoo magic it does everything on its own no real attention needed and then it decimates everything I mean just cuts down everything in its path it's absolutely phenomenal in comparison to its precursors it sweeps the deck it's perfect and so I mean by the way it'd be fine if it did all this stuff and then it turned out to be kind of weaker than the other guns like it's sensitive its delicate this looks a little fiddly bits right the italians took the thing stuck it in the ocean for three days pulled it out and just loaded it and fired it and it fired fine after three days in saltwater it's reliable it's strong and it's just amazing so of course they wouldn't actually be the first to adopt taking in like twenty six of them in August of 1888 they're Italy led the way they're like no no no we're going with that not a lot because we don't have a lot of money but we're going with that with that little order locked in Maxim would head to austria-hungary again crushing the Nordenfelt and selling 131 guns this would be the first significant order arriving in time for the 8 by 50 millimeter rim the cartridge making it the first small board smokeless Maxim as well now this Maxim gun was troublesome for Nordenfelt who had years of development and tons of cash on the line in the form of his gun purchased from Holika Palme Krantz without the maximum on the scene it was going to be a huge financial success but now it was practically worthless Nordenfelt was a proud man but thankfully his biggest salesman was not nicknamed The Merchant of death basil Sahara is worth doing your own research on I recommend the great war video about him as a brief introduction to his notoriety the short story I can tell is that he was as brilliant as he was unscrupulous and knew that no matter how well he played his hand the Nordenfelt was done for so Zahara off convinced Nordenfelt to partner with Vickers and Maxim once I got in on the better gun instead of being beaten by it and the other got access to a worldwide network of government officials ordnance departments and one extremely talented salesman now I should say maximun Nordenfelt the individuals did not really like this idea both thought they could stand on their own merits but luckily their business partners convinced them of the extreme potential profits and a deal was struck in July of 1888 forming the maxim Nordenfelt guns in a in Company Limited with this complete sample guns and various chambering started flying outdoors granted they were two or three units at a time but this was a weapon so advanced people needed to see it to believe it now these sample orders were very small and the company not yet profitable this lack of income doomed Thorsten Nordenfelt to personal bankruptcy because he had already spent money that he didn't have and so he sold out of his shares in January of 1890 returning home he would discover a machine gun designed by a Swedish army captain W Bergman not that Bergman he would actually try to pit this design against the maximum clearly attempting to head it off as his Nordenfelt had been head off by the maxim I'm not sure why he tried this because he had already signed a 25-year non-compete agreement and would be sued into retirement all right so 1890 the world is now where that this gun exists and it is potentially very dangerous and useful they've been sold to Austria Hungary Italy and a number of other smaller powers in even smaller numbers really at this point austria-hungary sort of the one that has the first three digit you know let's do this thing now it's time for the UK to finally step in because they've decided a 1890 this thing's doing pretty well we want it we're gonna order 120 and you guys seem a little overloaded over there because they were I mean it wasn't a huge factory at this time and it didn't have a lot of capital on hand anymore we're gonna go ahead and produce these over at Enfield because we like producing things over you know royal small arms factory Enfield so you just get us the plans and we'll get this sorted out we won't get to work now this would take some time parts production would start in like 1891 and then the full guns would start rolling off the line in 1893 this resulted in the gun machine maxim for five inch mark one for the navy that was in 45 Gatling a cartridge they already had the service the army and Indian forces would go with four fifty five seven seven are teeny Henry by 1899 that cartridge was getting dated though so the British would convert nearly all existing Maxim's to 303 this was done two different ways one with a thicker heavier barrel and the other much lighter the guns had been produced for the heavier recoiling black powder cartridge it would not cycle 303 without aid luckily Maxim had already done some research on forcing recoil thanks to making blank fire adaptors for his guns so a set of muzzle boosters would be worked up the mark 1 and mark 2 with the version depending on what sort of barrel weight you had to shove around that conversion process would be done by about 1915 although a good number the Indian ones because of the you know five seven seven still being in use there they stayed in their original cartridge it was just easier to deal with on the frontier no I wish I had a mark one to show you here they're actually not that common in the US market surprised surprised they were an ally of ours we don't really have a reason to be capturing many of them and they weren't a huge sales export and as we're gonna see there weren't that many ideally if I had had one it would've been easier to split up these two episodes into three we could have talked about the British history up to this point and then we could gone on into the German and then the Russian that just was an option and I like doing the videos when there's always something for you see fired so you guys aren't at the buckle down because now we get to go into the part that is really where we care because realistically Britain sort of froze at this point despite being their official machine gun there actually weren't all that many of these in service in World War one the total production from what was Maxim Nordenfelt and would later be Vickers sons and Maxim's more on that in a moment would only be about 1300 units in the total Enfield production from start to finish in 1917 about 2,500 or so if these numbers seemed crazy small and do not worry you are not crazy they are crazy small in the context of the Great War now you'd expect to see them balloon by 1916 as reality and demands set in but I actually Britain would mostly focus on a later adaptation of a maxim they came out during the war the Vickers we've actually already laid hands on one of these so this set of episodes is making the way for that episode to be possible in the not-too-distant future so that just leaves us with this gun today a German Maxim which is actually quite different um you can't tell yet but if you're paying close attention to the images this whole thing is very different looking this is much smaller Vulcan all that in just a moment but first we got talking about why Germany is even looking at this gun now they had seen it right after austria-hungary but they hadn't taken a strong interest at first this would change with kaiser wilhelm ii who visited Spandau n8 on the insistence of Prince Albert Edwards who is incredulous that he had not seen the gun yet Maxim himself was on hand and despite a small miscommunication about walking the Traverse one that led to the Kaiser almost mowing down most of his guests had Maxim not been handy to halt the gun yeah despite that everyone was quite impressed wilhelm ii is even quoted as saying that is the gun there is no other and personally ordered a few for his Dragoon Guards regimen following this display Germany actually got moving a bit Fritz Krupp would negotiate a deal in May of 1888 for production but this would fall through by 1891 instead Crump only worked on pompons into the void with step of the big lova although as you may recall it was being led by Isadora lova at this point they say the seven-year agreement with Maxim Nordenfelt Bulova would produce for Germany but any exports had to be approved by Maxim Nordenfelt now Louisville would produce a clone of the British model starting in 1894 but quickly the company would change names remember from our Kaveri 1888 episode that the company the big lava would become embroiled in controversy over what was known as the Georgian Flint then watched that episode for all the details but know that this was a whole mess of anti-semitism this caused liquid lava to break out their arms fabrication business into deutsche waffen and munition fabricant now in terms of sales the German Navy liked the 1894 maximum because they were unconcerned about weight or maneuverability at this point it just ran so they would get to buying the army was less impressed and it would take up until 1899 for them to adopt okay we're almost there right we've got the German army actually adopting in 1899 we're in Germany look we'd love us producing now the WM this is made by DWM we're nearly there we've almost got the mg oh and I can finally start to show you this gun is a very long story so instead I have to tell you that while we're talking about this period one member of the low of a family would get fed up with the anti-semitism and take a trip over to Britain cygwin lova younger brother to Ludvig n' is a door would flee to london to serve in Nordenfelt vacated role at the maximum company this would be the managing director he arrived just in time you see Maxim Nordenfelt was still not making a profit and it's no wonder why it was kicking samples out around the world in only smaller orders were coming in so far but its various growth phases had taken on a number of workshops and factories I mean we got shops in Aerith Craver Dartford Wilmington Birmingham Stockholm and an association in Spain that demanded attention and parts exchange in addition for the first time a true competitor had arrived on the field Nicolle 1895 now this gun would kick off a fight between maximun browning this gets into like recoil-operated Browning's and gas-operated Maxim's well talk about this more when we talk about the Browning 1917 anyway Maxim would also create an extra light air-cooled model then I'm not gonna go into huge detail today but that thing was dangerous beyond 400 round burst and that's Maxim's words it went nowhere and it didn't need to as his gun was still secured we'll talk more about the potato de guerre another time I hope the point is Maxim found it very annoying and considered a violation of his patent on gas operation so it got him tinkering competing again but this is just as his guns are supposed to be going into full production in Britain he just kept showing up at Aerith and in field making last-minute adjustments to everything it stalled production by up to a year and started to cost a real money it also didn't help that he was going deaf and after 10 years of displaying the world's first machine gun with no real hearing protection I can't imagine why so he was barred from the production lines and given his own personal workshop to keep him busy meanwhile Albert Vickers had let his family on a quest to no longer be steel workers and arms makers but to produce whole warships from scratch in a house to sell them to the government ships engines guns all under one name Vickers Sons and Maxim Limited formed in 1897 by purchasing Barrow shipbuilding and Maxim Nordenfelt for those of you familiar with trying to organize even a family picnic this prospect was insanity itself and yet Vickers had a secret weapon Sigmund lova he sorted the company simplify the asset streamlined the holding process for everyone he was loved and feared and equal measure a taskmaster and Saint wherever there was inefficiency he sought it out in crush that navigating strikes handling rogue inventors and even marketing the gun personally heck he leased a country estate so he could host foreign diplomats including Chinese statesman Lee Heung Chun who delighted at cutting down trees with the maximum guns on hand and further earning sales unfortunately in 1903 much of the hardest work out of the way lova would be killed in a traffic accident leaving a sudden hole in the company now this would be filled by Arthur Trevor Dawson a naval gunnery specialist of merit whose name would dot the upcoming patent improvements he had already been working for the company heading a multi-year project to further refine enlighten the maxim gun this would be the model 1901 new pattern now it's a lightened gun that actually borrowed heavily from that failed remember dangerous almost 400 round Mashburn Maxim ultralight model a little whatever well in trying to pair that gun down to its bare minimums he worked out a better way of presenting this sort of lock work and so that guy rolled in by Dawson and some of the other engineers into this new 1901 gun note the older 1889 pattern used an overhead projection to drive the joint out of lock the 1901 used a simpler roller system relying on an s-shaped crank arm to provide the tipping action that would unlock the joint this was not the only change however as the 1901 benefited from a simplified enlightened feed Block steel water jacket for weight reduction over the previous brass improved connection to the fuzzy spring improved connection to the steam tube and perhaps most importantly a simplified lock for easy disassembly the 1889 lock on the left is a mix of cross bolts and cotter pins several have to be pulled to disassemble and it requires three hands to get it back together again the 1901 on the right was designed to be taken apart for servicing on or near the front line so there's only one split head pin tying it all together it also had adjustable head space which is pretty critical the 1901 an export pattern was not adopted at home but it was in Italy Portugal and eventually the United States now thankfully that u.s. model 1904 maximum was of limited adoption and never served outside of training for the war I say that because despite being a light model it was tremendously heavy with an extra thick barrel and extra-large water jacket an unlovable tripod overall it was a messy slow adoption riddled with government delays in Colts usual casual pace this thing is worth a Lewis gun like episode all on its own someday so if somebody knows someone out there that I can borrow that'd be great but it's definitely to be outside of World War one returning to Germany at this point DWM seven year lease agreement is up and they start selling at will to whoever will buy they do still have to pay royalties though the German government also took note of the new model 1901 but they wanted to keep them compatible with their previous model 1899 and so requested the improved guns with the old fixed headspace hard to disassemble walk this results in the mg o1 this pattern would also be adopted by countries like Chile and Bulgaria but nowhere near enough were purchased in Germany itself no for the sake of time insanity I have to start splitting this between the next episode you see right about here is where we really start talking about Russian involvement in the maxim I'm not gonna try squeeze all that so we're gonna push Russia and some tactics over to the next episode let's stay with course with Germany and work our way towards the mg OE in this episode for now you just need to know that the Russians had the maximum in hand for the russo-japanese war the Japanese had tried the maxim in their black powder Marauder cartridge but went with a clone of the French Hotchkiss now in 6.5 the russo-japanese war really hammered home the importance of the machine gun on the battlefield and despite a Russian defeat they fared way better when the maximum could be employed properly German observers noticed and took the lesson to heart Germany now truly wanted the maxim now Germany knew it wanted to buy in bulk and they wanted the future proof their design before they just adopted it so they took a look at the maxim as it was at this point don't forget the 1894 naval / army 99 it's just the same as the British 1889 / 90 it's the original you know I mean it's the big heavy 56 pound maybe plus maximum gun they're going can we shave some weight anywhere we can and so with fan downs help working alongside of DWM they really start to trim things down they go how think and the receiver walls be how small can these parts be before they break can we use a better quality steel can we get away from brass on this part can we go away from and so it's just every little tweak to shave as much weight as possible now there's one thing that they did add more weight in for though which was a bracket on the left side of the gun that is actually not currently on this gun and that was so that they can mount one of these this is actually a ZF 12 which is a two and a half optical if I may hey that's pretty cool right now we don't have the room to actually use this device but it was nice that we were lent it so that I could show it to you this is a really good idea because this is putting into mind how the machine guns gonna be used not just direct fire but also indirect fire and also a good range I mean there's a lot of faith going into this gun if you're going to say that almost standard you're going to include an optical you know glass complicated sight this is fairly expensive stuff for the time that it came out in so again I'll give you some nice photos of that in just a second if you want to see it closer but we did not have the range to fully use that particular site just thought you'd enjoy seeing it a little closer while we had it here now that all wraps up in you won't guess what year for the mg o 8 yes 1908 now I should say by the way the reason I couldn't even show you that optic mounted is that this gun is a Mixmaster and we're going to look at it closer obviously but just be warned this has had a very well-loved history it appears to have been capture at some point in peened it's got the drill holes for where the mount would have been but the mount is now lost to us stuff like that so this is not like the world's most perfect Maxim this is a rugged ready to go Maxim and there's we're gonna see shooting it and playing around with it here on the show this kind of sivadas poor condition as you can get and if it had been any other gun I don't think it would have run I mean there's some pitting that's been cleaned back up and some other issues and it just goes it's just the gun functions as long as you get it set up correctly that's good this is poor condition as it might be in some ways is excellent as an embodiment of what is the rugged durability of this particular weapon anyway let's go ahead and get a closer look as I bring this gun or where you might be able to see it so let me just correct my bench a bit and I know that I have to be careful of my focus plane for you guys so this should be nice and sharp by now alright so oh let me push that forward this is gonna be a fun experiment we have our improved post 1901 roller with our handle and if you're curious this guy right here and I'm sorry I'm not patented plastic but I have a lot of room anymore this guy is actually a rebound preventer so in that nanosecond that this guy hits down on the roller that guy pops back up and prevents it from sort of vibrating you saw this kind of on the Luger this prevents it's some sort of like bouncing in and out of walk and having some mechanical problems or jams there nice little system all right we have our feed tray where we would feed a belt more on that in a moment and then if we turn around to the rear and bear with me as I turn this mighty ship and scoot and scoot we've got our ability through fire so we have a safety here and all that really does is it lifts this little guy you could actually do that and push it into fire but in this case see how it's sort of this freewheeling now that's all it does it just lifts up that guy that's just a block that keeps you from being able to depress the trigger it's just a trigger a walk so you would flip that push in let's go start the gun rocking and rolling well we're back here there's an inspection covered here if you flip that over I should say inspection actually this is actually for cleaning this guy lines up with the hole in the interior which if the lock is out you can then see all the way through the gun and out the bore that allows you to run either cleaning rod or most likely a pull through to quickly clean out the bore of the gun without having to disassemble the whole thing pretty cool and again there's like a hole through here I'm not sure how well that shows but you guys get the idea at the rear also we have our sight so I'm just gonna bring this till she's in the correct plane this is actually down and you can't read it in the down position you have to put the site up now once you're sighted in you could just pop it down because the guns already dialed in on the cradle where it needs to go so that's fine this is adjustable it's not showing up well in screen I'll get your photo in just a moment so site back down and if we look at the left side of the gun which is going to be very complicated because I'm here alright there we go we've got our fuzzy cover and we have the ability to set our spring tension here for the fuzzy this affects rate of fire on the gun and is adjustable for ammo so I can just crank this little guy and we're gonna see more of this later on in the show so how do we get into this gun is what a lot of you are probably thinking but you have to wait because there's still more external features because I got to scoot this down and so you can see the barrel jacket and then try to keep my depth of field so on this side here this is where we would fill our water jacket and then all the way at the front which I'm going to have to now do all the big turnaround problems I'm getting better this would practice oh and I'm completely eradicating my mark that tells me where I'm in focus so let's hope for the best alright we're back around walking our back okay this guy has a lever to control draining the barrel jacket so that we can go ahead and get our water out when it's necessary this unfortunate soul had some left inside and she's getting a D rusting before she goes home and then if I roll her back over a little bit I've taken out the chicago-style fitting but right there's a hole that would normally have a fitting on it with a piece of hand-grabber that's gonna go to a tube that's for the evaporating gas to come down drop into a box and condense we'll talk more about that later at the front we got a muzzle booster and I'll show you that in just a second so Oh still going and for those of you hate it when I grunt I'm not give you one inch on this one I'm grunting all the way through so gung forward hmm button at the rear right we're gonna pop this cover it's gonna let us see down into the action turn this guy over and there we have her in all of her beauty let me get her settled in just a bit so you're looking down from the top and if I can give myself just a little clearance on this side yep there we go you can see how the lock works so there's the arm bending down inside as i rack forward and that's prepping for the next cartridge I'll show you that actually in just a second and then release forward she's all the way at home now how that works is actually pretty cool I want to pick this up for just a second so she shouldn't fall you stay there and then I'm gonna reach down here we have a actually technically vicar's cloth belt he's just worked a little bit better and it's what we had on hand but it's gonna run and reasonably it's just the same I mean there's not a lot of difference if you want to get into different belts for one more one there's a number of evolutions and I would really recommend the reading down the link these orange snap caps were actually provided by somebody who I've recently made contact with 3d Arsenal they're setting up a website and everything just so that they can start doing custom stuff like this email emails are fairly common but we're already talking to them about custom 3d printing things like crop a check so that we can better show you how some these pieces work if you've got an unusual cartridge that you kind of need to have to sort of function check maybe check them out because they've really done us a favor on these guys so let's take a look I will try to get this back into view in focus and then we're gonna feed her in to our well feed block pull her in all the way now I'm a tipper over and hopefully there's just enough clearance to show you how this is going to work I'm just gonna move the belt out there we've got a couple of fake rounds and we'll settle her in okay so as we rack this forward we will then be able to pull the first cartridge right there see the bright orange this is why I like this system let me make sure absolutely certain that you guys have some level of focus on this there we go first one's ready to go see you're in there there we go this is experiment number one for giant machine gun showing so if I let this back forward I would normally do with a very quick sharp snap she's going to go forward as she goes forward these guys rise up this whole sliding piece rides up we'll see it better in the animation it grabs the first cartridge now if i rack her again see this is why I get snap it on there's a lot of drag here once again snap it there we go and then she's gonna pull her out drop her down which gravity's not helping with at the moment but still should be fine see how she dropped down and it's aligned with the chamber now so as it comes forward again it would put in the chamber now if I'm loading this gun I gotta make sure I pay attention to now yanking this guy all the way over this would be a two-handed operation on a mount I'm doing this on the table like an idiot so there we go I'd yank it over one more time you're gonna see me do this by the way and then I would let it go and not have a lot of spring tension although I've let it all out for this demonstration so I'd let it go again it would snap over let me see those yeah they're sharp enough so it would snap over so now if I pull this trigger or push this trigger in this case and fire the weapon with these dummy rounds you know boom okay in theory well that would have discharged our one low line with our bore and we'd still have a live one up top so the gun would go bang it would cycle back not with me doing it and when it cycled back it would take that lower cartridge which now spent drop it down and aligned it up with an ejection port and then it would take the next cartridge and line it up with a chamber now in theory if this had gone bang the whole system would have already pulled the belt over during the bang period and this cartridge would already be picked up but you wouldn't be able to see what I'm doing at this point again gonna be a lot clearer animation don't feel like you got to memorize anything at this point so if I take the gun mmm-hmm close your back up for a second and move her around to the front where you can see there is an ejection port right at the front and I am running out of cloth in space haha right there right well if I let her back forward notice nothing's come out and that's because the first cartridge or rather the last cartridge that was spent the spent casing is sitting in there that is held by a spring and it keeps mud and muck from re-entering through the ejection port until the second one comes around now I'm not sure if these snap caps are gonna be fierce enough let me see real quick yeah there we go look at that OOP get right out so this would have been the next one around and by the way for being 3d printed these are holding together really well and beating the crap out of them with this gun okay so that's operation what about actual assembly disassembly let me get this line back up for just a second if you want to take your cartridges out because you're tired of this belt or whatever push the button pull free and we are good to drop these thank you again 3d Arsenal these are super cool now I'm gonna swing it back around and we'll look at this assembly so push button at the rear pop open now I'm going to rack forward I still have some spray dummies in here so I'm gonna move those out of my way well one of them's gonna live in there because that's where it wants to be all right we make sure she's clear there you go and then holding her forward you want to lift this action out from the front and then turn now this gets tricky because this thing can realign and actually be accidentally discharged out of battery the Germans would really emphasize holding it in such a way that you could not have an out-of-battery in this case I just make sure it's absolutely clear i clear getting off of it and I take it out of a gun but I'm not in a war zone so twists just about 45 degrees and boom she pops right out this is the lock that we were talking about before I'm gonna set that aside because it's not getting disassembled any further because that is the old-style lock and I don't want to mess with that instead I'm going to close your back down for just a second so I can show you that fousey so I've got the spring tension dial pretty low and in order for you to see what I'm doing I'm gonna have to flip this gun upside down essentially there we go this is probably good as we're gonna get for the moment there's a spring here that needs to be depressed and that pushed the whole frizzy cover forward off of its mount and away from the body of the gun which is easier said than done on camera when she comes loose you just gotta make sure she let me get this back in the frame this little hook needs to come off of this little armature here and that's what's transferring everything it over to the lock so Oh Susie's off everything's floating free by the way this is not necessarily the recommended order I'm just doing things as quickly as possible to sort of thin this gun down so that I can do it on a desk anyway I'll pop her back open you can literally just lift the feed block assembly out and I could have done that a lot sooner but again these are all sub-assembly so there's not there's an ideal way to do this efficiently but you're starting to see that so many things in this gun are sort of independently related you can service parts of the gun without taking the whole gun apart and that means that you can tackle it from different approaches so feed block out of the way cover needs to be up for this next part I'm going to move back into frame and lower her down where you can see that there is a thumb pad slash cross pin push that up push the pin through and then the pin comes out all clear and that allows me to do this which is drop this whole handle assembly back and then from there I can actually start pulling apart the sort of barrel and lock so you can punch this pin and further take it apart that's actually not set up to do quickly and it requires a little more force like you guys take - it popper all the way out and it's not really that necessary for field servicing so I'm going to leave it now at this point I've got basically two tabs at the rear that need to come off one of them on this gun is very easy to just pop off and that was just part of one of those three mounting points for the fuzzy cover and then on this side for whatever reason this guy's always been stiff so I'm just gonna turn her over on our side and instead of fighting her or slamming her around and making a ton of noise I'm just gonna take a rubber mallet now you don't have to use a rubber mallet for this if it is even a little stuck you can just take the bolt arm and work it back and forth that's gonna be a lot of metal clanging so I'm just gonna do rubber on metal again not necessary just a little easier so what does that get me I got me our rebound preventer and our roller block that's designed to sort of let this arm bounce off of it this is the cool part so now that I've trashed everything around me I'll liner back up and pull and pull and pull now there's a little moisture in here because she was running with a water jacket and as much as I have been in there oiling her there's still some residual moisture it's very hard to pack these things down that water jacket really holds on to moisture oh so now we're dealing with pretty much a skeleton exoskeleton except for that booster more on that in just a moment i'ma set her aside and by the way the reason to leave the front booster to last is that would be where the seal was we'll talk about that in a minute but basically as it is you've disrupted the rear barrel seal let me show you that so right in this groove here you would have some asbestos string wrapped around and then that would seal all this is water you can see some moisture on it - all this is suspended in water you don't want water coming back in here so there's a bestest string that goes here that keeps the water from coming back while it's moving back and forth in there and there's a big cowling for that and at the front you notice there's no relief be the washer is being carried by being pressed between the muzzle booster and the jackets that's also biggest bestest ring those are no longer available so you're gonna see ours drip a little bit anyway more on that moment but basically the way that's set up I can pull the barrel out I can check this rear seal and the front still remains mostly intact because it's being held by the booster and the water jacket all right at the rear if we need to swap out the barrel itself it's pretty simple just pull this guy away pull this guy away there's sort of the body of your lock sort of the carrier I guess you could say and the lock itself which is just this little elbow joint and again you'll see this running the animation and then here's our barrel and it's that straightforward now you're watching me struggle with a lot of this sitting in a desk in a room but realistically when it's on a mount it's extremely easy to do this like you just sort of the gun is suspended you pop the top you pop the bottom it all comes out in moments and I've done it six or seven times over trying to feel diagnose this gun when we were getting it running it's super easy and as someone who's had to sort of work on one I really like this system I think it's very productive and very good alright so I promised you one last look at that muzzle booster now I pre loosen this normally you would have to take a wrench to it and that's one of the few things that are actually sort of pressed in there there's a muzzle booster so you would wrench it off and this thing is pretty simple it's got sort of a flash shroud to it and this is sort of an earlier pattern there would be another pattern that came out with the MgO eight there's a little simpler but the idea behind this guy is to take some of that excess gas pressure and really we're turning the barrel into a piston so even though it's a recoil operated gun we can oops up on the recoil by putting gas pressure backwards on the barrel you can hear it's just a slight II bit of metal in there this is really pressed in there I'm not going to break this apart for you this right now but all it is is there's enough room in there to sort of push gas away and back on the barrel and then have it bleed off as the barrel retracts and so that just pumps up the pressure keeps the ryuko running well a little bit of a flash hider there now there is one thing that is not on this particular gun that you've seen a lot of photos which is a big ring around the muzzle booster just so you're aware that part is one specific and interesting function it's actually meant to block any flash or vapor that might come from the sides of the muzzle booster helping to further prevent giving away your position oh all right well I get all this back together let's go ahead and get it over to an animation because I feel like as much fun as it was to watch me struggle with that and especially I'm not taking this thing apart guys this thing is a bajillion pins it's a complete pain in the butt and realistically it would not be taken apart actually Germany issued three of these per machine gun just to prevent exactly that you would use one up and if it had a problem you would get into the other two and then that way there's plenty of time for field armor to really look in the block most countries would use only like one anyway excuses aside let's just use some x-ray specs and again tune in to our good friend VBB and see how this thing really works down to the nuts of bolts right away we can see the adjustable fousey spring at work on the left side of the action and how it Yanks the action back into lock using a linkage to take that linear spring force and turn it into the rotation of the locking arm follow the ammunition from the belt dropping to the chamber and then to the ejection port from here the red indicator marks the point at which the extension on the Left plate drives the overhead arm on the feed block this pulls the belt through the system unlike the example I made on my desk with the lid closed a set of leaf springs drive the vertical slide on the lock downwards allowing for it to work in any orientation here we see how the action is unlocked that knee joint is bent by the s-shaped crank arm striking the roller once unlocked the recoil force folds the joint retracting the lock you can also see that as the joint Rises it tips a set of fingers that then tip another set of fingers that lift up the slide back into the up position all right now let's look inside that mysterious lock along the base of the receiver in gray is the transfer bar from the trigger when depressed it pulls back on the blue sear which releases that little pink part there essentially it's a rotating cocking piece releasing the striker forward and being cocked at the rear by the shank at the rear of the lock when it turns downward almost like a thumb pressing down a hammer the green bit is a safety preventing out of battery fire until that joint comes all the way back up and puts everything into lock and really that's the whole of the action it seems incredibly complicated from afar but hopefully quite simple now there are some little fiddly bits that require a bit more detail but I think you got it so let's get this over to may for proper demonstration [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh alright so number one I had told you guys that the original weight on these was like 56 pounds not sure so I'm gonna make sure I say it again they brought it down to 40 pounds I think I missed that point so not unmanageable but still fairly heavy I mean yeah I can pick it up but it's it's not it's an awkward weight especially since a lot of it is over here to the rear at this point alright number two I'm sure some of you had some concerns about that video that you just saw I just have gotten used to the way I get comments so let's start off with the fact that yes it was dripping that's because we did not have any orginal asbestos seals from a hundred years ago that were perfectly fit for the front of this gun and we went with what we could work up at the hardware store that would take the heat and it did well enough that it only dripped a little and blew some vapor that's fine the guns functioning finally hold it back up it's not going to rust in warfare that would not be happening because they would have had the specific seals for this specific gun this is just a hundred years later making do number two some of you might notice that it had a very high fire rate now we did also lend this TV 8888 and there were a lot of comments on that that particular day the lock work had a little slop in it and at a higher fire rate it didn't have the time to wander left and right and it just stayed running for us instead of jamming after we left that film day mark did some tinkering we managed to get her running a little bit better so we're gonna see later in this episode some lower rate fire as we loosen up this spring stay tuned now part three I'm sure some of you will part three of the concerns part four of my points I'm sure some of you were concerned about that hose hanging off the front of the gun because that seems pretty cool and steampunk literally steam that hose is actually so that as you run this gun and it heats up the steam can go out of a hole down the hose and into a handy-dandy watering can now there is actually an earlier version of this thing that I want to make sure you guys are aware of the earliest design was cylindrical but it proved too heavy and awkward to use so it was replaced with one ingeniously dimension to match Nishan box so it could be more easily carried with the equipment and since I have one here let's just go ahead and take a look so this guy is designed to fit where a normal ammo can wood has two great little handles for actually getting it around and then let's cling heal up and then if we look over in our zoom camera you can see that we have a filling cap and we have a faucet II lookin tap more on that guy in just a second so here it's sort of spring lock so you gotta put some tension on it this is exciting and then boom damn it oh listen it about so uh obviously this guy's got some age on him by the way thank you Jeff for what jeff has long as so much things like the Lewis gun no 815 that you guys haven't seen yet this stuff this go late Jeff you're the man anyway notice that this is much larger I'm sorry making long voice this is much larger than the hose which was about the size of my thumb that means no seal so you're wondering hey how's they can hang on to that steam well you'd actually preload this with some water and then put the hose below the water level so that any steam coming in would then join the water and not evaporate out of this particular container the idea is to conserve the water now a lot of people think that it Otto recycles it does not you basically fight this spring I got it I got it it's very annoying sounding you basically fill this guy up and then when you want to reclaim the water you would then just turn this spigot around take it back over to the gun and line it up with that little hole on top and pour it in that's really the whole treat it's not any fancier than that now this particular invention was not just a stroke of genius it wasn't something that just somebody said hey this is getting really annoying carrying these cans around on training no it took a little bit more for something like this to be invented as a matter of fact it came about after war were declared [Music] I'm sorry guys I had to fit that in there somewhere oh you really love war where declarant according to comments so now that we're in the fight exactly how is this thing being used by the Germans and I don't mean down to tactics that's coming next episode but where are they putting the thing you basically get the name anything we mostly think of ground use direct fire on infantry but also as light artillery more on that another day they were also like other mgs employed for anti-aircraft use which was actually fairly effective given the planes available at a time the guns were ubiquitous fielded by the Navy with their own special mounting brackets and cover hold opens and in Zeppelin's note this one has a special left side mount for stowage on a Zeppelin a relative handful of MgO eight were converted to air cool for heavier-than-air flying contraptions some were even made as dedicated air cools from Spandau early-on likely fewer than 1000 in total rapidly replaced by the LM geo 815 they would also be provided to allies like austria-hungary and just for fun this image shows one of the simple Express mounts available for the MgO eight making them even more rapidly deployable and hopefully making up for some that lack of a light machine gun available to Germany rolling back to 1908 these guns were first produced actually by Spandau and with the word written prominently on it it's no wonder that non Germans started to call it the Spandau this is not a thing that was shared quite as much at home but still cool name I mean sounds bad but anyway these guns within the year were also produced by DWM so it wasn't that far behind that both got really rocking it rolling my reading says that by the time production halted in 1918 Spandau had assembled 40,000 plus mg o eights they halted early that year to focus on the O 815 by war's end DWM had done at least 30,000 mg o eights now spanned out did have one extra advantage in that they took over a construction or assembly line rather in 1915 this was after the capture of FN in Belgium they had a machine gun assembly line we'll see a version of this gun and when they rolled in they said hey FN you're gonna produce for us and they said no we're belgian not German and so it's sat for a bit before they went alright pack it up take it home we'll use it they're kind of a cool piece of history after the war Germany was limited to only 1500 machine guns in total a number they would very likely exceed very quietly when turning over the guns they only provided one lock pocketing the other two just in case they were needed down the road this wouldn't be all that necessary though because post-war Germany would really go on the hunt for a universal machine gun which kind of left the standard Oh 8 on the back burner into World War 2 where they were present but in a very limited role ok that wraps up the mga gun but I know a lot of you have probably noticed that sweet sled Mountain well it was developed over several of Germany's maxim guns into what it was at the time of the war these early versions were also four-legged and easy to work with but ours today is even lighter it's designed for a two-man team to be able to carry it like a litter and also set up quite easily it's layout allowed it to be prompt into any number of positions and the sled bit allowed it to be shoved by a lone soldier if necessary the slitting Oh 8 also carried spare parts barrels seals oil etc all the things you need for the gun I mean a lot of stuff came along with the MgO 8 and without a sled well I guess you had to have like six guys playing with it all it is a fantastic piece of kit and we're very lucky to even have one to use because it did not come with this gun that is owned by an individual so let me cover a couple things this gun like I said Mixmaster loaned to us by Chris thank you so much we're trying our best to get it tuned back into shape for him and it's running fine now as you can tell which is a testament to how strong and durable these guns are he had a swiss mount which is not uncommon because it's more available especially for you know sort of a side plate gun like this and then we borrowed the ZF 12 off of Jeff who lent us a lock which we use to get the dimensions for the walk for this one fixed and then there's so many players in all these guns and sometimes something like the mg o 8 which by the way I was promised one for loan that sort of fell through like two years ago so we already filmed in Oh 8:15 long ago expecting the next month to have this and then run all the machine guns then it back piled a back pile so when you guys have something on hand just let us know and then the worst case scenario you get filed in our to-do folder for down the road but it's really helpful and the guys doing these things who are willing to loan them and to take them out of sight that's a huge deal that's that's the same as giving money or time it's it's trust and we really appreciate that trust that you've put in us now as part of that I want to especially thank the South Carolina Military Museum so these guys are at the National Guard base over by the stadium in Columbia if you're in the area check them out and especially say thanks because what they did is they couldn't lend us the gun that they had on hand it was missing bits and bobs but they could lend us the sled and they willingly did it I went up there picked it up they took it out of the case for us all this fur stuff it's a hassle and it's a headache and it's a liability and they just hand it to some weirdos who took it over to Georgia and you know played with it with some friends and then filmed a nice history piece and if you enjoy that level of detail then say thank you to them and to everybody else that puts in for these things because it's hugely important that we be able to get that help to even get this mission done we can't buy our way out of all of our problems we have to borrow for almost all of our episodes alright so I covered our thankfulness for this slide and I covered how much we like it how cool it is but while we had that Swiss tripod I might as well talk about that because that thing's actually based off of the commercial DWM 1909 models tripod now the 1909 was DWS attempt to compete with Maxim's model 1901 basically an mg oh eight but with the improved takedown lock and adjustable head space that this gun sadly lacks you can spot one of these by the step at the front of the receiver base the swiss mg 11 is in this family hence the use of the tripod these would sell in Brazil Bulgaria China Costa Rica Mexico Persia Peru Romania Serbia and the Ottoman Empire Belgium also adopted the DWM 1909 as their model 1912 and produced some of their own fabrique nationale just before the war this is the assembly line that was captured by the Germans small curiosity here by the way the Belgians actually used dog carts to transport their machine guns kind of cool anyway the short story is you will often see some variant of the Handy 1909 or its tripod in photos of the Great War with a lot of minor powers it was a very popular export now I do not have a DW M 1909 it realistically is this gun that shaved a little bit of weight by coming up on this section you can see the hump here and it has the better lock so otherwise it should behave just the same and since we had what was a 1909 derived tripod why not run it on this gun and also play with that adjuster get the fire rate down let you guys really see some more of the mg o8 since this is such a long episode so let's get it right back over to May [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] now it's a little unfair of a comparison on video because we ran the lower fire rate with the lower set tripod we could have taken that sled mount and really lowered it down lower down the firing rate gotten much better performance out it so don't just judge the sort of shakiness of it I'm gonna tell you in terms of carrying those things around that 1909 tripod is a huge pain in the butt compared to just grabbing the sled the 99 is like compact enough that one guy can pick it up better than one guy can pick up the sled but it's still kind of struggle it's awkward you got strapped things down and you got a it's weird and it's dense the sled you just go hey man grab the other end I grabbed the other end it's designed to fit around your hips it's designed with little wood blocks to keep from banging them to death and then you can leave the gun mounted on it and still carry it like the the 1909 mount trying to carry it with the gun still on it complete pain in the butt I love the slide it's super cool alright so today what have we done we've covered all the way up to the German Oh 8 and then commercial oh 9 with the improved lock that's where we stopped though and normally this is where we kick off to a mate verse Asian but I think that this episode is so incredibly long as it is before it starts to become like a 2 plus hour whatever I mean I'm we're filming this now I am not even sure what this is gonna time out to be and we're basically going to talk about the maximum both times so we're gonna let me off on this one and we're just gonna end it right here sort of in limbo we haven't really talked about service life or serviceability and we haven't talked about the Russian program so that leaves that it's all of that for the next episode and that's gonna fit because we had to go through the whole development history right up to this gun and then there's basically two models to get in the next episode and then we could talk very long about how the heck these things were used and then we can get may's opinion should sort of roughly balance out so a lot of you tend to watch the first episode of these two parters I highly recommend you watch both to get the full picture and then I am honestly going to turn in for a nap and then we'll start work on the second episode all right thank you all check after the and music for the updates and we'll see you next time [Music] you [Music] all right gang sorry for the low quality update but I got a couple things to rundown and I figured it's better than talking into the void so number one please check out patreon and not just to support I have a public post everybody can read it over there in which I suggest what would be the format for episodes to cover guns that we can't necessarily find a fire yet in a way that leaves them open to being edited later when we actually do get to fire the gun when we find one this would allow us to sort of smooth out production and still cover some of the necessary history as we move through and maybe even bait the guns too coming to us number two we are just about to launch t-shirts it's a little delayed because I'm waiting on samples and things like that but again we're gonna be doing our summer t-shirt campaign watch out for a video coming on that in the next couple of days hopefully you guys usually love these things and they go a long way into making sure that we can meet the bills for getting this show done that in prints at the end of the year tend to sort of float us whatever we're actually able to sort of invest in in terms of equipment upgrades and I have some ideas after talking to our friend Chad over Ivy 8888 all right and then number three this is more personal but I have a head of vacation since the show started and I don't think I've had two days off in a row and I'm supposed to be do out in Denver Colorado so I'm actually considering taking about a week to ride my bike all the way out to Colorado a motorcycle that is so I haven't done a long distance trip and a good while except for doing it for the show if you guys know of anything between Charleston and Denver I'd be passing through st. Louis let me know I just need to put together some sort of itinerary for my own travels and then wish me the best of luck because I haven't done anything over 900 miles I don't think and this is a good double all right so that's it let us know you feel like comments and don't worry if you're upset about no man she'll be back for the next episode with a nice long conversation about the Maxum platform as a whole

Channel: C&Rsenal

Views: 220,238

Rating: 4.9324827 out of 5

Keywords: firearms, guns, WWI, History, greatwar, bf1, battlefield1, worldwar1

Id: 5sn346sYXys

Length: 87min 28sec (5248 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 16 2018