Small Arms of WWI Primer 084: French Contract Winchester 1907

autoloading rifles were still new technology at the time of the Great War and an acceptable full-powered solution was actually many years away some lower powered commercial carbines however were already available [Music] hi I'm Matthias and this petite little thing honestly is a commercial rifle it was not designed for the war this is a Winchester self-loading model 1907 let's go ahead and get it over the light box with an overall length of 38 inches you would expect this to be a very handy light carbine but its weight is at seven and three-quarter pounds very dense for its size it has a magazine capacity of five standard there is also a ten round option both of which are only in 351w SL now I know a lot of you have been waiting for this episode and I'm pretty excited too but I actually turned up a bit more data than usual for these oddities and so in terms of being able to spread it out and allow you to not only see this gun but it's big brother who would be next in the line I'm sure you're excited this is going to get split into two episodes and it's not going to be nearly as awkward as we had to do with the crow patch I can order to cover all that history but I'm gonna leave some things out towards the end of this episode and then pick them up next episode so if you're one of those people that just needs to see it all at once or not at all go ahead and wait for the next episode release or get them both together if you're watching this sometime later but that aside let's get into the history that led up to this gun being actually developed in my hands so let's go with TG Bennett of all people we've seen him before in our series of episodes on the Winchester lever-action z-- he was the head of the company during some pretty wild growth and a lot of it brought on by the designs of John Moses Browning we just keep bringing this guy up and if you watch the winchester 1892 94 and even 95 episodes you'll know that he made a lot of money for Winchester with his designs well this time he had cooked up something entirely new an Auto loading system for both rifles and shotguns actually at the same time he was also working on autoloading pistol designs and since Winchester wasn't interested in handguns he took them over to cult cult picked up on the larger locking more military ready handgun but passed on his nifty little blow back instead a Belgian firm would take interest in that fabrique nationale and we've covered that story as well his model 1899 would become the FN 1900 the first slide operated handgun and the design that made Browning's name synonymous with pistols in many places around the world it also created the pocket pistol market dominated by diminutive 32 ACPs his invention and its subsequent copies sold millions for decades to come so yeah browning had not only developed a successful gun but an entire market of course at this very moment in 1899 none of this had quite come to pass instead he was doing his usual thing I'm showing Colt the handguns in Winchester the long guns Bennett however wasn't super excited this time there were no real Auto loaders in the market and they had no idea if it would be profitable or not so he stalled and this would prove to be a very poor choice for Winchester now I don't really want a mar Bennett's name on all this or make him seem like a fool you gotta understand Winchester under the leadership of Bennett had become more conservative the older he got that's tends to be how things go he has a very big empire he doesn't really want to blow it on all these sort of random concepts that may or may not make money and as we're gonna see Bennett was half right about his prediction that the autoloading market just wasn't there yet but he was completely wrong about which side of it was messed up so Bennett is worried he's going I don't know that I can sell an expensive multi-part autoloading gun to the American outdoorsman because that's who we're marketing to the American outdoorsman there's anybody really calling for a rapid-fire rifle or carbine to go hunting with because that was their market more than anything else at that time well browning is a little irritated that he's been pushed off but at the same time in the time that he's pushed off a lot of things change very quickly in just about a year year and a half for him and it takes about two years for him to come back around the talking to Bennett so here's what happened and we saw this by the way in RF and 1900 episode browning has a little pocket pistol that he sends over to from preconnect now he has a bigger military pistol that he gives to Colt now both companies offer to license the ideas but Colt does nothing with it so he makes not a lot of money out of that until many years later we'll talk about another Browning handgun now on the FM 1906 more Bank than he's ever seen before and realistically the numbers aren't exactly better than his Winchester 92 and 94 s and all these other things that he's developed for the Winchester company in terms of production and sales but they're great for handgun market hanging up market hasn't seen anything like that and he makes tons more money this way than he did just sort of selling everything outright to Winchester so when he comes back two years later to talk to Bennett again he goes look I really want to go with this automatic rifle and shotgun idea I need you to tell me whether or not you're Licensing my patent and bet it's going Aria well how much are we paying and he goes well you're actually doing a royalty payment this time you can pay me a lump sum and then that goes towards my royalty payment and then once you sell however many units then I start getting more money too because this is what I'm worth like these designs really benefit you and Bennett's not having it because he's never done this in his entire career he's never paid for a gun a gun at a time he wants to just look it's worth what it's worth I pay you you give me the paper the papers mine and we make the guns we're Winchester well this doesn't work out so well for browning and he takes his designs and he walks alright so here's where doubt starts to creep in because okay maybe the autoloading rifle market isn't gonna be all that hot but we definitely don't want to be left behind so let's think about this Browning is about to take patents and he's always got the best patents and he's gonna take him over to FN who don't really have a stronghold in our market but we don't want him to gain one and then there's other people out there that he might sell to that would irritate us like Remington we compete with Remington yeah just in case let's just go ahead and be prepared let's put somebody on this whole autoloading rifle and shotgun thing although we're really gonna focus on rifle because nobody wants an auto loaded shotgun those are cheap things that's silly so Bennet would tap Thomas crossly Johnson who was born in Connecticut in 1862 son of Samuel C Johnson president of the Yale safe and iron company he was highly educated and TC would graduate the Yale Sheffield scientific school in 1884 he was Winchester's first college - company engineer starting out and drafting but soon being placed under William Mason in development where he eventually started making improvements refinements in easing designs for manufacture things like that now we've seen Mason himself before in the revolver world but he is also linked with auto loading rifles and shotguns as early as 1891 and by 1899 had an example of each the shotgun was a 20 gauge and the rifle was a proprietary 44 caliber cartridge both rifle and shotgun were recoil operated toggle lock designs which actually riled up Hugo Borchardt he need not worry however as they're high cyclic rate and tendency to jam were never truly overcome so Mason was bogged down with a design that really wasn't going to go anywhere it was very complicated TC Johnson however well he had experience with the auto loaders and could therefore comment on he also had quite a bit of ingenuity we're gonna tap him to look into this whole Auto loading system thing there's one problem though which is that TC Johnson had to compete with well technically Winchester and browning because well up until this point all the Browning's long rifles had gone through Winchester and so they developed this sort of relationship where browning would have an idea and he would sort of just it'd just be a lump of metal that sort of did what it did he come up with these devices in his head and he'd render them in steel and send them over to Winchester with no polish no refinement no thought to manufacturing and so Winchester then had to take these concepts and what their engineers had to tighten them down and turn them into an actual firearm and at the same time is helping with the engineering Winchester had lawyers who were very good not just patenting the thing that browning invented but everything around it like coming up with a patent that covered as much as possible and was as defensible as PAH well because browning always sold everything to Winchester there really hadn't been much difference when it came to patenting his autoloading rifle and shotgun design Winchester had helped him with it without having paid for it yet because they just assumed well this guy always rolls over when we offer from cash he'll roll over again and then they threw that out the window so that means that when Johnson wanted to produce an auto loading rifle he had to take probably the best technology available in Winchester at that time the technology that had come from browning in the refinement thereof and throw it out the window it was already protected I mean the results for Winchester were horrific his new design locked out two very important points short recoil operation and he tied down the notion of a bolt handle or latch that opened vil breech yeah those are both huge points in autoloading rifle or shotgun design and now when Chester had to dodge both whether or not you think the 1907 was a perfect gun from here on out I want you to appreciate TC Johnson's genius at avoiding this patent setup well with the best locking tech locked up Johnson began to work on blowback actions just to be clear this means using an unlocked breech when the cartridge fires it simply shoves the bolt rearward the trick is to make the breech block heavy enough that the bullet clears the muzzle before everything starts to move in theory you can do this for any cartridge you just have to keep dialing up the weight I believe it's estimated that if you wanted to do a blowback 30.6 rifle you'd need a 27 pound breech block so not a system you want to use for full-powered cartridges the other problem is at this point all that weight is at the rear of the gun unbalancing it and putting most the strain all the way at the back well we've seen a solution for this problem before way back with the Germans Rises a pocket pistol episode we kind of talked about this although that gun actually comes after all of Johnson's work on what he came up with which is basically the balanced bolt blowback system in this method Johnson took some of the required mass of the breech block and shifted it further for word initially on a simple extension of Steel now we have the same weight more evenly distributed for better balance this will also give us a chance to nest the recoil spring further forward avoiding any overly long gun designs now while Johnson is sort of tinkering with this idea you gotta understand there's a vague time clock running but we can't know how long we have we just know that browning is out there with a browning patent for autoloading guns and one of our competitors may pick it up we're not sure probably FN and that doesn't threaten us very much but what about dreaded Remington and how fast could they get on it and what could they do with it and how could they market it and it just it's a nagging doubt for Winchester that they might be walled out of a market that doesn't yet exist I mean and there's kind of proof of it because the longer we get into this process maybe the first year we're not so worried but this little 1900 Browning pistols are going like gangbusters and not that Winchester makes pistols after the sort of agreement with Colt but they certainly see that browning makes money on almost every design and even though they weren't willing to sort of Bank on them this time or at least they were really unwilling to change their methods of payment for him there's still a real threat that he could hurt them in a market that they were not able to enter so there's a rush there's a push to be like alright we got to get something moving to get this concept out there so that people associate Winchester with Auto loading rifles before they associate anybody else with it so Johnson rolled up his ideas as they were into a patent since lighter smaller cartridges were easier to work with on a blow back he went with a 22 caliber tube loading rifle but the very common 22lr wasn't going to cut it this blowback action was going to need very consistent ammo 22lr the day was actually very erratic any number of powders were in use in mostly they were still in black powder they were messy and well inconsistent so Winchester would at least a proprietary 22 Auto cartridge very very similar to 22lr but loaded with smokeless powder a very even presentation across all cartridges and so with that action in this mo we get the winchester Model 1903 and honestly despite not using the most common 22 out there it was very well received now the brisk sales were likely from the Curiosity of being America's first commercial auto loading rifle in the market the average person was not buying a 1903 though it would run until 1933 and it was reintroduced as the model 63 now and 22lr which had become much better by this time and could actually function production however would wind down in the late 1950s with a total manufacturing count of about 175,000 so nothing amazing but still quite good the reception for the little 22 is actually good enough that it really sort of inspired Winchester to pursue this sort of auto loading rifle thing a little bit more aggressively because they thought look if we can make money on a 22 then if we can come up with a good North American game cartridge rifle well I think that we can actually really take home some good cash here and at the same time they also had already seen Browning's patent for what would become well technically the Remington Model A and they knew that that gun was capable of dealing with a cartridge equivalent to 30 30 or better it's a locking action so that is a good all-around North American game cartridge and one that has been very popular before so they're you know they're getting kind of worried so yes we should chase this market yes we're very worried that somebody's creeping up behind us and they may or may not have known about this Third Point which is that FN and browning had started talking about the ability for them to sell in North America and realize that the import tariffs and cost of shipping and things like that just weren't profitable enough to make them pursue it as much as they would rather just relicense the patent to somebody else and so they did they took it over to Remington exactly what Winchester didn't want now whether or not they knew this I do not know but that's where we're at Remington now holds the option to produce both the autoloading rifle and shotgun and Winchester is really nailing down on the rifle part they're going we still don't care about shotguns we're gonna look at the rifle situation and we got to get to Remington we got beat Remmy to the punch on this so they get up in a hurry all over again and so once the 1903 production line is established they immediately send Johnson to work on another gun this time they want to get up to a good 30 35 caliber cartridge so that they can compete with thirty thirty sort of but honestly the research isn't in there and it's a blowback action it can't handle it so they have to make some compromises remember Mason's experimental toggle lock well that design was rated specifically for its ammunition Johnson reworked that 44 semi rimmed ammo into a thirty five caliber compatible with his work this resulted in an anemic cartridge but one that was safe to use in a blowback design he did not however fit in the buttstock that was in the little 22 so he introduced a detachable box magazine which is very advanced the design unfortunately this got in the way of his balance bolts forward weighted portion so he had to make room in the middle this whole thing had to be scaled way up and built to wrap around the mag this resulted in the model 1905 which beat Remington's automatic rifle to market by several months however it's a beefy seven and a half pounds in weight it really pushes a fairly light cartridge now they did add another chambering the 32 Winchester self-loading but that was obviously smaller and weaker and didn't make a huge difference in the appeal of this gun I will say however this cartridge does turn out to be influential later yeah those two cartridges for the 1905 they were never used in anything else and for good reason they're just uninspiring in a lot of ways no the 1905 itself again just didn't fit the bill it's a little bit of extra weight to lug around for less power and the only thing you get out of it is this gimmicky autoloading thing all americans want that big into it like hunters aren't gonna pack a heavier gun into the woods to get less power out of it so they sort of waffle on it and the whole thing really just did middling to poor sales for a number of years in 1914 they sort of stopped production in terms of an efficient wine they just sort of left it sit occasionally would go back and put together a couple up until 1920 but is officially dropped total production was just thirty one thousand five hundred units which sounds like a pretty good number but when you're Winchester and you are used to selling you know five times that from a single design and one year yeah it's not so good it did however get a little bit of praise in certain situation a model 1905 in thirty-five caliber was taken on the Harry Whitney Arctic expedition it was found too weak for large game though but notably resisted the freezing temperatures in fairness Johnson probably knew this was going to happen it was definitely compromised cartridge and sort of a compromised rifle you gotta understand 1903 to 1905 with other responsibilities and by the way its releasing in 1905 so it's much more compressed than that but with other responsibilities on this plate in being a lone man with a little backup from the other engineers he has to sort of rush a process in which they take a buttstock tube loader and fix it with a detachable five round magazine you know detachable magazines are no joke we take them for granted now because the technologies figured out but it is pretty hard going to add that feature to a gun so he's gotta get the magazine feed just right the design and expense the magazines being made he has to get the balance bolt torque around the magazine reliably without being damaged and then he's got to come up with a cartridge which obviously he borrowed from previous research to speed that process up I get it like there's not a lot of time to get a lot done and they're really just getting pushed out the door okay well now that that guns out he can finally turn his attention back to the cartridge because everything else is settled it's just minor adjustments from here so he takes that 35 caliber and he adds a quarter-inch of length in order to get a little more oomph out of it this results in the 351 Winchester self-loading cartridge which is actually what we're starting to see as an intermediate cartridge in its power range that's much more suitable for North American game but not perfect by far not yet he beefs up that breech flock again now weighing 2.5 pounds all on its own and many of the small parts however remain unchanged in the end we get the winchester model 1907 now there were no changes really to this gun until after the war so we can just go ahead and take a look right at what they'd whipped up so zooming in hmm they're actually quite beautiful they're slick they're sleek we've got a semi pistol grip stock I'm sure they'll be happy with that in the high comb and thin wrist deep tang I'll tell you more about that guy in a second coming back there's our breech block noticeably with no handle remember browning ahead patented any way of grabbing this breech block here on the side at the rear so we either have to come up with a way to sort of do a weird something or back at the front which we're going to see here's our detachable montt magazine I'm gonna go ahead and pop this out which is actually quite stiff there's our 5 rounder these are just sort of one formed piece and then you've got your follower and spring down in their replacement mags I've heard do not work nearly as well as originals which are quite pricey today and I've also heard that these had to be fit by the factory for proper function I haven't really gotten to play with a lot of different mags on one gun although I definitely put a random mag with this one for filming the show and it worked just fine so set that aside there's our four stock which hides our recoil spring in the forward master breech block this is only a portion of the breech block a lot of it is routed down and is in here and a lot of that mass and the thin wood here has led to some cracking it's a matter of fact this one has a fresh crack in it just from us filming that bit that you are going to see later in the episode so I mean I just repaired this may be all fresh and clean with Marc's help I mean mark did a ton of work on it to get it back to this condition and a brand new crack blue in it while we were doing the episode these are very weak for stocks you'll see them refined later on as I bring her back we have a plunger here which is what actually operates our breech brief lock so push and it opens and that is extremely stiff I assure you and it wants to pinch the top of my finger between that in that gap there between this which it's just a little bit of vertical play as you can see and catches me right in there so this is very pinchy very stiff and worse yet there's a third function which is gonna be almost impossible to do in the zoom camera you have to be if you want to lock this open you have to push this guy down all the way which is significant force I should take a measurement of this but I'm gonna estimate at least seven or eight pounds of pressing on this thing and then you have to twist it but let me show you a little closer the face of it is smooth I mean polished smooth the edges are a little textured but it's half the thickness of a freaking dime I mean it is very thin blade there's not really a way to get a hold of that thin edge while pushing down well you're supposed to push and turn so you have to give it all the way in and then turn it which I've started to get down to an art but you notice I still take it into my left hand bear it into my leg a little bit push in and then I've got kind of used to tweaking my finger over it a bit so I get a little bit of texture and then twisting over hand to my right to left over hand from my perspective you can go either way technically and they'll still walk open but that's the only way I've been able to do it as a right-handed person and then what that does is it leaves their lock down it leaves your breach block locked open it just seems almost dangerous in terms of trying to handle a loaded gun in such a finicky way to get that to lock open but it does walk over alright so she's very short barrelled she's a helo carbine with a dovetail front sight to my knowledge the most common factory sidle that you could have whatever you wanted was a steel bead this is the same sort of bead design although there's a plastic bead at the end not that plastic off and you're looking at pretty much the original and otherwise pre Street for a gun except for what I already skipped over which is at the rear this is confused a lot of people and when you're new to this gun are especially the shotgun based on this action a lot of people think this has something to do with cocking the action but no this is a takedown so there's a button here right there that you push down and in that disengages what would be I would say the clicker but in this case it's a not it's a it's a raised lug that fits in these notches that allows you to rotate this to the left and I know this is riveting television so let me back out for a second while you watch my face so I'm just gonna roll this all the way out and once she's nice and loose there's not really an elegant way to do this you just gotta kind of once she's loose kind of wiggler and give her a couple smacks cuz they get kind of tight they're certainly well fit and I've never found the one masterful way of getting it to let go there we go I just tend to whack both sides gently with my knees so she's popped apart we've got two pieces one is a lower group including the buttstock the trigger group the hammer which is predatory grip in this case the magazine well and magazine latch and all that good stuff the safety is here and then if we look at the top we have essentially a barreled action with the breech block and our operating rod of sorts our push rod for working the breech block which by the way is detached this part does not reciprocate with the breech block it's sprung forward so that it's independent when you're firing and then when you press on it engages and pushes it back inside here is our recoil spring basically all the operation of the gun except for the trigger grip is here in this upper receiver II section I can't imagine what this is reminding me of in terms of a modern rifle it's almost like in 1903 they'd already figured out what is considered very modern today now getting it back together if you can see is not again there is a spot at which this thing wants to be and I have yet to find area find it universally every time but once I have that I'm holding it kind of carefully I can just push this guy back in who is captive so he can't be lost and once he's lined up he starts threading in and listen that's that button that we were pressing down earlier that means it can only be Titans making hand tightening very easy actually is a very convenient takedown gun the problem is all of that Rico before this cracks getting worse all that recoil stuff is up here the recoil spring the other part of breech block some of it like real goodies are up in here and you need a special tool to take this front end off and part of the big reason for that is you start taking this apart and the recoil spring is under such incredible tension in there that it is a three handed two-person and lots of cursing operations as a matter of fact Jay who had to work on this before anybody else got ahold of even before mark he ended up drilling a hole through the rod so that he could have put a brass pin in there so that he could then wind the spring down the pin which is the way that was set up on the later shotgun intentionally he just modified this one to actually do that because he couldn't figure out a way to get the dang thing back together you do not take this apart in the field it is not an easy operation even with that trick I've had to go into this gun - it's nightmarish I mean once that recoil springs in there you better oil it as it's just roll this guy off slip off the for stock and then dump oil in there don't bother trying to take it off unless you got a Saturday to burn otherwise super cool gun let's get one last look from rear to front handy portable oh and last point I can't cover this the rear sight is adjustable for distance it's a vertically adjustable so this is just a spring with the rear leaf on it this separate piece is sort of a key that just rides in there is held down by the spring tension it's actually not attached to the barrel which means this is very much not a military design because if you lift this guy up or if it gets caught on something this little tiny sucker can go and that's sort of the end of your adjustable rear sight I mean it works at you know close 100-yard range just resting on the barrel like that but if you want any adjustment well you've got a to hand control the crud out it's like I'm making it hard for you see because I don't want to lose anything but you can actually lift this and walk this back to adjust the sight although I've noticed after time spring start starts to rest in that position it gets kind of looser on the lower settings now 200 these guys were made if 200 were made in 1906 but they were all branded for the 1907 year because that's when they were releasing them nice and fresh get that first year name on there and then thank you no semi was when they really started selling them out of the catalog now at very first these guns were actually made with barrels that were made out of that same sort of nickel steel that the Winchester 1894 was but this quickly gave way to a chrome moly because nickel steel is terrible at holding blue it just sort of rushes right off after a couple years walking around oh and don't forget five round magazine but also optionally sold with a ten round magazine I'm gonna go ahead and put one of these guys in here because it's a little more fitting for what we're doing now look at how big that is just a good 10 rounds that's pretty wild all right so let's get this over to an animation and see what it looks like down on the inside all right we'll load up our magazine press the plunger and release and we're off notice that cocking plunger does not reciprocate instead we see a simple recoil spring acting on the massive breech-block extension under the barrel [Music] the gun is hammer fired and works off a very simple trigger and see arrangement but they slip off style disconnect er the manual safety really is just a trigger block acting on an extension of the trigger itself and an automatic out of battery safety is set in the left side which again locks the trigger if the breech is not sealed we opted to cut the bolt in half so you can't see the extractor at this moment but it's a simple claw the ejector is mounted on the left wall all right let's get this over to Meg [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] pew-pew you know fun fact Henry Ford in 1908 stopped by the Winchester Factory and oversee what was what here's actually they're very curious about how they did their gauging and inspection for parts interchangeability he wanted to use the Winchester method on his assembly line and while there he did test fire several models including a 1907 he didn't actually buy it but he did get several others for his own collection now remember the goal for this gun is to be a sort of universal North American game rifle and it's falling a little bit short that 351 is a nice little cartridge don't get me wrong but you don't want you to moosh with it you don't necessarily really feel that comfortable with bore bear with it I mean it might get the job done but I'd like a little more confidence and we're gonna see that Winchester considers this a potential problem and goes for one more cartridge upgrade we'll talk about this next episode with the model 1910 as far as this gun goes in terms of combat because that's where our focus is right we're a world war one show or not sportsman show I wouldn't be completely out of doing a sportsman show it just requires a complete change of venue but again we're looking at man-on-man that's sort of how we tend to think of things in this show as gruesome as that may be and so did the Winchester 1907 have any combat chops before well the big kerfuffle and the answer is yes sort of you see it turned out unexpectedly to be kind of popular like as a small it's like the indie band that they like within the county and then some people have heard of it you know that but some people forgetting word of mouth that these were turning up in police departments because the 351 cartridge as an early intermediate cartridge was doing a very good job of taking down bad guys at a longer range than a service revolver but without over penetrating walls and cars and things like that it tend to hit and then stay in what it hit which is very important for police activity when you have a backdrop of civilian life and so there's getting a little reputation there nothing outstanding just yet but it was something that gave it a little bit to work on it might have been the new direction for this gun 1915 1916 if it weren't for the fact that before that war were declared [Music] a whole man and as we've covered before just about everything in the Winchester catalog somehow got dragged into this conflict because it was there to be bond I mean only one of these was actually designed for the war the rest were called up due to shortages that put to work with seamen guards or even on the front lines in some cases but what the heck would call for an auto loading carbine of intermediate power well that would be from airman early in the war planes were used more for observation as they started to encounter the enemy in the sky well they also started shooting at each other at first with handguns in whatever rifles were available France would eventually order three thousand three hundred 1907 s by the end of the war an ammunition totaling get this two million seven hundred thousand rounds Russia is claimed to have purchased five hundred 1907 s in 1916 I had been unable to confirm this figure so far there's also note of up to 1.5 million cartridges ordered although it's unclear if they were all three fifty one or some of them might be the later 401 in 1926 the Winchester company received an order for 200 thousand rounds of definitely 351 from the Soviet government so they stuck around to some degree Britain took in 120 1907 rifles through the London armory and 78,000 rounds all destined for the Royal Flying Corps now Winchester records show total sales to foreign governments as 4650 overall so that difference may cover what Russia received or there are some unaccounted for French or British orders the u.s. actually did take in 19 rifles and 9,000 cartridges to the first aero squadron stationed in New Mexico these were most definitely used by observers during the punitive expedition and probably not used it all in Europe now here's the thing about that large number of French rounds not just that they wanted a lot of rounds per gun but also they wanted extra magazines per gun not just one they rewarding 10 rounders wherever they could but they take five rounders if they could get them there's evidence of that as we're gonna see actually in the next episode but here's a 10 rounder right well they wanted as many of these as they could get to so much so that they set up their own manufacturing in this one right here this gun I can't prove anything I don't know of any markings of 1907 s and there's no way to tell if one went to the war or not but this magazine well this is a French made magazine took me a little luck to find it it and all others were produced by establish semaine do payroll some attend and my French is terrible I'm so sorry gentlemen this production started in either late 1915 or early 1916 and may have been because Winchester couldn't guarantee supplies of a lot of 10-round magazines so like I said you can tell a French magazine it actually says do payroll W 351 on there I think you saw the photo by now and there's no real way to tell the gun as far as I can see there's some serial ranges that work there's some design features those guns that were specifically modified that we'll talk about later that are one-offs that you could identify but they probably didn't actually go out in the field instead I've seen one example of a known French gun that had the initials a B on the receiver and that's it I've read that they were branded armed a francais but I can't find that on any example I've seen and that sort of lends itself to the army aviation story post war so if it's out there and you know of a photo somewhere or tucked away in a museum snatch it send it to us we'd love to see it but five far and wide most of them were probably just bought as is and handed out without any special markings markings that were put in the butt or the metal were probably done by units at various times in order to handle their own inventory but not through the purchasing system so there's not really a way to know what is a French Winchester 351 other than its individual prominence all right so this is where things get a little weird because I want to tell you the story of these guns in the air I mean I just told you about how they were all bought for aircraft but I need to split this across two episodes it's the only way to not make this into a two-hour long stint that just blew out three weeks of work to get one anyway I want to break it up and while I break it up you get the benefit of having an episode on this guy and a very clear understanding of this very different and obviously very different model I'm gonna sit that back down but that gun almost exclusively served in the air there's no evidence of that one being used anywhere else so we're gonna talk about aircraft use in actually pretty good detail next time and instead today we're gonna deal with something that has never actually been confirmed which is the use of this particular gun on the ground so this image of King nicholas of montenegro visiting france is the only evidence i can find of a 1907 being used on the ground here it is the hands of a lone royal palace guard by the way thanks bojam for sending me this now let's be clear the claims have almost always been on the internet i've also seen at least one author make the claim and then the problem is source wise the material is look how many were bought so we'll talk about that in a moment but realistically I'm stuck with this sort of proving a negative issue where I have found zero evidence of ground use of these guns from a primary source I just constantly see it on Wikipedia and forums and things like that and when I try to track it back I turn up bupkis and we know how hard it is to prove a negative if I want to make the claim these were never used on the ground I then have to find every one of them ever issued and track it through its entire service life or there's no proof that it was never on the ground so I can't say it was never on the ground but I also can't find any proof that it was on the ground there's no evidence of memos or photos or orders or you know inventory I can't find any of it and by the way there's lots of stuff I haven't found inventory for there's tons of data that's missing funny thing about being it primarily used by the French arm and also being used in Russia arm we know how many British ones and US ones are and basically where they were they were in the sky and we know that France and Russia both went through periods where lots of documentation was lost or buried and it's very difficult to get to even today it's not even like well France and Russia have turned the corner now you can just go look anything up no it still takes some dedication to get in there it's not just sitting out digitized for everybody to read so there might be key information out there that will be turned up in a later date so I want to make sure I'm open to a story that has mostly been sent down the line by word-of-mouth and as we've seen you can make a lot of assumptions about how insane an idea might seem but it might just turn out that it really is the way it is look at the air service rifle I mean this modification of Springfield 1903 that we covered in our previous episode seemed so silly and stupid of an idea that people thought it must be a survival rifle or something else because it makes no sense and then it turns out that it just made no sense the Ordnance Department was insane so even without evidence the claim is that these were used on the ground by assault troops in Russia and France almost both of those are both assuredly said and theirs claims that France sent a bunch over to Serbia they were also used on the ground by Serbia I don't have any evidence on the third one by a long shot I haven't even seen Serbian claims to it I've just seen it mentioned so focusing on France and Russia Russia's claims in terms of guns ordered in less France gifted them a lot of them are pretty low I mean under a thousand units from this and the next model will see combined so we can almost be completely dismissive of Russia because even if it got fielded it's such a low number that for one big offensive it's still not a lot of rifles by the way the claim is that they were used in the Brusilov offensive so let's discount Russia for a moment just because it is such a drop in the bucket now if we're talking about France sort of the two big points that are pushed on is that France ordered a lot of these guns and at some level this gun ended up coming with a bayonet more on that one in a moment so in terms of the France ordering 3,300 guns in 2.7 million rounds of ammunition that means they must have been actively using them on the ground in assault positions well it sort of flies in the face of how many Frenchmen were flying as the largest aviation force in world war one France produced some 67,000 aircraft during the war and in 1918 they had over 4,000 aircraft on the front so yeah if you wanted one of these for each and every observer up there in potential combat you were still short 7,000 rifles and you know all those extra magazines and things it's kind of funny but aircraft tend to spin around and do all sorts of wild stuff in the air and if you're fumbling around with gloves and trying to fight chances are these are just gonna go flying wherever especially when they're unloaded and light and you're just ripping out to get the next one I mean it really gives the idea that these were disposable by aircraft rights because the idea of keeping this somewhere in your cockpit will you'll be able to recover later it's sticking in a pocket when you're in the middle of combat in the air or on the ground is kind of crazy on the ground you'd throw it away on the air you'd go if you're in combat especially in the air you get it out of the way the Erika pitch it right so having a ton of spare magazines makes sense for both the Cajun in the rounds makes sense even more so from there because 800 rounds plus per gun that seems a lot I don't see somebody packing 800 rounds on an offensive maybe you want to take it out for multiple offenses I get that but like in the air you're also probably to fire a lot of misses and then you're gonna have to train before you even take it up in the air in order to fire those misses so the animal situation to me does not explain ground offensives it just it doesn't it fits for aircraft and ground the second point however while that's the bayonet and that gets a little bit weirder this is what we were concerned about a gun with all the early features of the 1907 and still bearing a bayonet look this makes us very curious but here's the thing though the bayonet log was supposedly introduced in 1934 and why well technically for police use like I said earlier the 1907 was getting pretty popular with police forces and after the Great War well it was a potentially lucrative market and otherwise down economy during the Prohibition years organized crime had steadily become better armed drum runners were fighting it out with the coppers in the streets add in the effects of the Great Depression you get a lot of poor desperate people ready to try their hand at straight-up robbery some colorful characters actually emerged from this period like the infamous Barrow gang managed to elude the National Guard Armory adding surplus Great War goodies to their personal Arsenal heck John Dillinger had a 1907 modified by Texas gunsmith Hyman Ludman with a short barrel for grip and compensated this escalation of force among the criminal element resulted in police forces rising to match them in many cases they were hesitant to go full army man just yet though friendlier looking but still effective carbines like the Winchester 1907 looked like just the ticket for a while and again that 351 the intermediate cartridge was much safer to bystanders than going right up to 36 as sales started to tick up Winchester saw this and responded with a dedicated police carbine a larger non-slip magazine catch was added a buttstock modeled after the Springfield 1903 a3 a thicker dovetail for stock for strength sling swivels and that cocking rod tip is no longer round it has an improved L shape for easier manipulation without having to look at the thing also it doesn't pinch your finger now optional features included a fixed rear sight only so that you didn't lose a little bit we were talking about and a bayonet log that you might want to order factory records seem to indicate that the paint itself was an evolution of the Lea Navy bayonet which in my mind is a reach back because this bayonet design went through that Russian Winchester 1895 export contract that we saw in a previous episode and therefore evolved it's fairly similar in design just longer now the Russians had this shortened as we saw in a later episode but it looks like Winchester kept the long profile and modified that muzzle ring to fit this particular carbine but otherwise sharing a lot of the tooling and likely recouping some materials in time sales were pretty middling there is a premium on that particular model and police forces that wanted to have a carbine like this we're still fairly conservative with their money they would just buy a regular 1907 and put a 10-round magazine on it and if they wanted slings they would just add their own slings however they could and then they'd be fine they don't need a bayonet lug they don't need a fixed rear sight all that badly and they save quite a few bucks in the process now at the same time they were also put up against a dedicated Remington police carbine which was pretty cool and had a more powerful cartridge but both were just swept away and faded into obscurity because of one heavy player that entered the market a little bit later federal laboratories incorporated had been supplying tear gas to the police forces and opted to market the Thompson 1928 submachine gun very very aggressively and with great success yeah so most police forces went with the tommy gun it was seen as a way of matching the criminal element firepower for firepower so in 1937 the police model 1907 was withdrawn but most of its features were merged with the base model as a matter of fact - the fixed rear sight and bayonet lug it's more correct to say that the original model was retired in 1937 and that the police model just lost a couple features and stayed on as standard now all this is a long way around to say yes the 1907 had a bayonet lug starting in 1934 for sure but here's the thing why do police want a bayonet I mean arguably prison guards are something similar maybe but it's a weird freaking choice I mean it's not really in the police handbook at all and it feels like an option provided to clean up old stock so yeah the bayonet lug feels weird and it feels like it probably existed before this moment as a matter of fact the thing that look really feels like the kind of thing you would add during World War one now if this was added and marketed and not actually sold or added as a prototype and tooling was made up and not actually sold or if it was actually produced and we've just somehow lost a thousand plus guns that had bayonet lugs and we don't know anything about them I cannot say I cannot find any references internally to Winchester about a bayonet lug or provided bayonet however the bayonet lug and the intended bayonet they line up pretty good the other mystery in all this is that you can find photos of these guns with bayonet logs taking Krag jorgensen bayonets that's super bizarre because Winchester never made the Krag gurgenson bayonet why would they pair it with one and then if they did pair with one no other country was using that bayonet standard so it's lynch ester wouldn't have a supplier than laying around other countries want to have a supply of them laying around now the US no guard or other sort of second line troops maybe they did and maybe it was designed as a guard weapon for them or maybe the export bayonet that Winchester design just happens to fit a craggy organ sin bayonet and people put them together hang on huh aha and just held it up I don't know it's a complete mystery at the moment there's not good documentation for it so if you manage to find anything of primary source provenance that says this bayonet lug was on this Winchester 1907 before 1934 that's a big leap so keep your eyes open and certainly let me know if you see something like that I'd love to be able to an update someday now the second half of all this are claims that these guns were produced full-auto now the story comes from a number of authors who have worked out of the cody firearms museum's archives and I have medium access to that at the moment thanks to our friend Danny I love your Danny I do not have the time to get out there and dig through them though they're physically inboxes and I have to produce a show every other week and I've tried he and I both have spent the past week sort of going over whatever he did have available and Danny who is a hero everybody clapped for Danny came up with this document 500 Auto carbines em 1907 which was reduced by 150 later on I'm gonna say that auto really likely means Auto loading as there is no price increase or special instruction with this document I have however found somebody referencing the full auto order and they sort of knocked and generally it's the topic the article mention that this gun was associated with a code book from 1909 this gets really crazy this comes unfortunately from a brand horst who has done a lot of great research and running from Winchester unfortunately is not around anymore so I can't ask him but let's kind of get into what the heck I was reading he titled his article meeting Mirim and explained these two words mean rapid fire and self-loading rifle model 1907 in the same article he quotes without real explanation 500 full automatic versions of the model 1907 were supplied to the government of in March in april of 1915 here's where the confusion starts there's no clear statement that this message was decoded using the phrase meeting miriam but there is no other reason to write this article in this fashion now what he's talking about decoding from is a 1909 Telegraph code book for Winchester their sales force would go out and they'd have code words for different guns and features and important people and blah blah blah there's also they could sort of obscure their contract information while talking over the telegraph lines and it also allowed them shorten down phrases in to single words which is also very cost effective so in my mind he's saying that there is a 1909 codebook coded message that references rapidfire model 1907 which again is probably how we got this particular document I mean it really reads as if it was decoded from this system so unless something else comes up I'm leaning against the notion of full-auto 1907 but that sort of covers our ground history will talk about aviation history another time we also are very aware that they managed to get to the ground in France in some regard because after the war we see a lot of inventory orders moving around so there's some orders about this gun starting in 1922 is no longer considered an emergency use rifle we're not ordering anymore be conservative with the ones you have and keep them where they are if they start to fail and break send them back to sont at the end they will not be replaced they will just be rolled into parts production for other guns that may break down and then that's really the end of it until the 30s when we actually see one last modification by the French for this gun in 1932 army aviation wanted to add while the Bertier musketoon style sling swivels to the gun now this was a way for them to use the same Bertier sling and be able to actually carry it around and it looks like most of these guns were out in the colonies at this point perhaps five hundred were affected by this modification and that is about all I know on these guys in terms of ground combat mostly mysteries and a few evidences of post-war modification for actually carrying around by troops but by then the fight is off they're really not to do anything and we don't know of any years in World War two so overall a middling North American game cartridge if that may be a bit poor a modest selling gun at only fifty eight thousand six hundred made between the introduction in 1907 and final production ending in 1957 1958 the dates are long clear it's probably likely the production lines were halted in 57 and then the last assemblies happen in 58 but you know decent life for a gun but in terms of Winchester those numbers are quite poor for that long of a period you're talking about like you know a little over ten thousand a year when a lot of the guns were doing over a hundred thousand a year in their same lines so the self loaders were never Winchester's big thing a lot of people are still not that familiar with these guns like you hold them up until I mean really until this was featured in a very recent video game it didn't stand out to a lot of people right like you didn't necessarily recognize this from some prior history show or some prior experience with it you tended to recognize it from a game or from the fact that you're just getting into the World War one stuff on the show they're fairly obscure but we cover ground as best we could today I know it was a lot of maybe maybe maybe and I'm sorry about that what some let's talk about aviation next time though because I actually have some real goodies on that one and in the meantime let's go get Mays opinion on handling this particular carbine and we'll go ahead and get her imagine what it might be like to use on the ground all right gang we pave room for May and there's plenty of room for this little guy he's awfully handy but let's get this in your hands and as usual we're gonna have to talk to you about ergonomics although this is a little different right I don't know that we've done a semi-automatic rifle yet and maybe our first yeah so let's I mean we've we've touched some stuff behind the scenes it's it's odd this is a challenge for us I have to remember what we've actually would you get its behind the scenes I'm touching this in the scene okay fine so we had to keep straight what we've actually shown you guys in what we have been because some stuff get stuck because of research or animations or some other issue that we have to walk down 15 oh yeah so where you do have finally the Winchester in our hands we actually put a lot of work into this to at least get you the good research it took some time and we got an original French magazine since we couldn't identify an original French gun there's just no way to isolate exactly which one went to France as I told you earlier so this is as good a package as you're gonna get for what would have been I couldn't get the 20 around or the 15 router yeah I've seen examples loan examples never any sign of those actually being produced in large numbers so the 10 rounder should have been standard especially for French aviation but before we talk too much about this don't forget we're splitting this into two parts so we're gonna talk about in theory using this on the ground even though practically it probably wasn't and then next time we're gonna talk about aviation and another mall so go ahead and tell us about the ergonomics but keep in mind we're gonna talk about the potential for ground fighting today you know era ground it's really not gonna change how this fits in your hands when it's first handed to me I'm thinking Oh awesome size-wise it's like m1 carbine I'm thinking m1 carbine m1 carbine handed it no this is very dense there's a lot of heft to this gun there really is it's quite surprising I mean that bolt alone is two and a half pounds guys so this is not light for what it looks like it's it's insane how heavy it actually feels but it is it is very compact that is that is a definite good thing the for stock it's got a little bit of it is a little fatter but I want to say I do kind of like that it's got it's a little bit fatter up top because it feels like my grip I don't know it's it's a bit more positive up here with how fat it is and then when I put up to my shoulder it's nice and thin I've got this in my pistol grip I've got this high straight comb to rest my cheek on it feels right it feels really good I'm not gonna lie about that one releasing the magazine so it's not it's doable one-handed it definitely is problem is is that it's it's kind of this little button that you need to depress you've really got to pull out a force onto it it digs into your thumb a little bit and then you got to give it a magazine pull a good bit of force in order to pop it out and yeah you can get it back in there one handed two just not the easiest thing to do I would say in my book operating the plunger now honestly I was expecting to be able to do this as my left hand on range very easily it's just it feels like the first few like first inch pull down you're like okay that's not so bad it's just you know like maybe seven pounds ish and then suddenly you get to the second part you're like good god that's not simple so not only am I having to probably do this in my dominant hand to get more comfortable but there is an option you can pull the plunger down rotate it slightly to the left and that locks open the action it's not the easiest thing to do because this plunger and I'm sure with eyes to see um y'all it close to this before it's very round and flat and these edges have like little serrations on it so that they can just dig into your skin deep enough that yes gentlemen it will cut you if you're not careful it will take some of your skin so I'm gonna try it here on camera just to kind of yeah it's really nervous because you don't know if it's just gonna fly out of your hand or not so no leash it rotated to the right okay I did it alright solid plus it and screw up the first take on camera good um but yeah aside from the plunger everything about this does feel right I mean it even the safety feels modern although you can't really tell if it's on or off in the situation I know from memory this is safety on there's a little notch underneath it I guess you can go by yeah there's no notch on this side yeah so I do know that that is safety on and this is safety off but it'd be nicer if there is something a little more obvious that that is that is like fire it is a ready to fire in this position but other than the plunger and they're not really being any simple marking on the safety feel wise organ ah mcli this this feels like a modern gun this is actually very comfortable just a little bit heavy yeah you can tell that this is a commercial firearm and not a military one there's a couple features may I the thing for stock is already cracked again as a matter of fact it's almost 3/4 of the way up I'm going to tell you when we go to rebuild this one again I'm putting a metal shim in here I'm asking mark if he has the time to put a metal shim in there there's no way this is just gonna get glued because it's already been glued three times over yeah it shattered a little bit again after we took it to the range the one time and we didn't we didn't go crazy on it guys yeah and this this was improved later on as we saw now thin wrist at the rear although it does have a deep overhanging Tang not as much at the bottom another potential weak point for military service although it still feels preferred to me I haven't seen a lot of these crack there so maybe not that big of a deal in terms of the but though this is something we've never seen probably in the show right I will admit plastic but plate and I will say when we get into the firing portion of that it was it was a better feel I feel like with a metal one that would have kicked me even worse this has some age on it it's I mean the I can't really show very easily but like the Winchester Repeating Arms logo has gotten smoothed out somebody's had this up and use over and over and over again it's sort of worn itself down this is a well-used 1907 by the way we can find them in much better condition we wanted to go with something that looked like it had been through the war and back that kind of matched our magazine we really based the gun on the magazine so this give us a chance to see one under heavy use right and the good news is it works it's just certain things like the four stocks are starting to give out so that's fine not the worst field repaired we're gonna see some other problems with Marshall use of this gun in just a moment but generally good fit good finish it's an early Winchester problem out early earlier with said early nineteen hundred's Winchester project product so it's going to be a beautiful piece no matter what like the machining the wood fit all that so things are great back then but we do know that this is uniquely a blowback and you're shooting a rather hot little cartridge out of it so what's it like actually firing this gun do you think it presented well once you started pulling the trigger alright first off lining up the sights you know this is not a standard military leaf sight it's not it's not a v-notch I'm trying to line something up in between it no it's it's kind of like I'm trying to put a bead like at the top of a basket like I can't put it all the way down in there in the sights otherwise I end up shooting a little bit too low I actually have to put it like the bead sight right on top of that little little u notch in there in order to hit just on target for us so that was a little bit different but if the only thing I wish they were a little bit taller too so they were easy they were kind of tiny I will say that the trigger on this one it's a really heavy single stage it's clean once you get going it's it's very smooth pull through but it is very heavy so just keep that in mind when you're shooting and then firing 3:51 out of the sky I will say it's not what you're expecting for me I guess I was expecting something like shooting 30 carbine or something like that like I was expecting not quite as much power as there was I mean there's like 40% more power with this one when firing 31 and that's coming on back into your shoulder not unmanageable we've shot we certainly shot cartridges that are much more powerful than this one before it was still just not what I was expecting for how small the gun was so your first push shot you're just like oh you're only taking it back for a few seconds and then you get used to it Niq Niq going on but I will say it was a bit startling the first few times it did give me a very very very light bruise but other than that it was fun to shoot I didn't enjoy it it's just there's some small improvements I feel like they could have made like maybe a slightly lighter trigger slightly taller sights and I don't know it's just the feels like the cartridge didn't quite fit the gun on this one and to be fair the cartridge that did fit the gun was terribly unpopular we're going back to the 35 and the 32 just not good game cartridges and the thing is it's that blowback action you cannot have a blowback action compact it down to this size and expect easygoing recoil so this gun fools you as a modern shooter into thinking m1 carbine I agree with Mei like that's the most equivalent thing I can think of that we are accustomed to so that you put your shoulder in this sort of scale with a 30-ish caliber card cartridge and then it's totally different experience then when carbine is light and the recoil is light this thing is heavy and the recoil is I'd say moderate heavy maybe more moderate moderate range but you don't expect moderate like admit and maybe if you had never shot anything and you were handed this and you were intimidated by guns you'd be like oh that wasn't as bad as I thought but when you're handed this and your experience has been things in this sort of size and weight tend to be very easy to shoot because they tend to be pistol caliber carbines and things like that then this is very surprising for you and I agree with her on the sites as well you got a line up that bead in the basket the use site very unnatural once you're used to sort of v-notch the first time I shot the gun just out of habit I lined up the tops real quick and didn't think about the fact that I was dealing with a bead sight and I just shot low the first few rounds test firing the gun until I realized oh no no no I got to bring it up and actually place the site like a commercial site I've gotten so used to doing you know not should post from the show yeah so overall I agree recoil is let's call it moderate moderate moderate very controllable 10 rounds here's the thing we need to start talking about whether or not you would take this into battle now the expected use of this gun and the known use of this gun is in the air and we're gonna talk about that next episode and more likely theorize about it because we can't put you well there are places where we can put you an airplane we just haven't been able to arrange that we could theoretically stander up in the back of a jeep and drive around on the range and let it shoot at targets which is cool but we don't have like a 30 foot firm and it just it's possible but it's also a huge safety risk and so we're gonna to play with our imaginations a little bit more until we have a much better facility or back of a motorcycle that seems somehow worse what if I'm driving the motorcycle that is also a terrible idea he's really not playing with the imagination here folks so no so one day we would like to get into some sort of more theoretical experiments like that if we can come up with a system that works but for right now we went with what we know safety safety first so we're not doing aviation today anyway we're gonna do ground and you do theorized using this weapon on the ground and how confident you would feel with it so a couple things since we're gonna be doing this on the ground I'm thinking about laying prone with this guy I'm gonna say this 10 round magazine is actually going to be a big issue like I can't see myself really laying down with this in the mud somewhere so 10 is the most I can do I can't possibly seeing doing 15 or 20 that looks one ridiculous and - that's gonna get dinged up pretty easily I'm already worried about this getting dinged up as it is it sticks out so far the sights like I'm afraid this little guy is gonna get lost at some point in here because you just can lift up the sights and it comes right on out folks I mean seriously and if I can get it back in there well that lives on the table now so yeah I feel like it's gonna do I just did just now it's gonna fall out for no reason and then I'm not gonna have adjustable sights but then again I don't really need them to be adjustable for the range that I am looking at so it's I think I'll do fine with just the sights set up as it is like I don't really need to go that far with it the blowback system is a pretty reliable system though the cartridge 351 I do believe that is a good man stopper cartridge so you know I'm actually gonna give this one yes I'm gonna give this one yes I would take it into battle there's just some reserves that I have like in swapping out the magazines pretty quickly I'm gonna have to take some time with that one and also being afraid I'm editing this guy up a little bit too much but other than that yeah she's got too much pastas going for I could see myself being pretty confident battle with this one yeah it's funny some of the big positives that you would think of an a semi-automatic okay so we think semi-automatic with a detachable box magazine and World War one so we immediately imagine rapid reloading right and we imagine you know sort of quick and easy kills right well it's a lower powered cartridge so anything past 200 yards is going to be a little difficult it's not gonna penetrate armor it's not gonna penetrate any sort of emplacement what so you're not gonna get through wood even very easily but up close and personal very effective ten rounds much faster than bolt actions including load time on most of them I mean the higher capacity bolt actions were like the lee-enfield you start to work the bolt for every round this thing just bit I could see clearing a trench with this just fine very very very difficult to disassemble and clean that recoil spring assembly yeah that's gonna be that would be a negative you were there for that you were one of the three people helping me wind the spring back in it does take three it is a nightmare of just trying to keep that thing going on we still have modified to get it to actually go back and I'm not sure the factory correct way I'm sure there was a system and I'm sure it wasn't something you can do in the field I'm certain of that so no servicing in the field unless you're an armor and a patient one at that but blowback so not a lot of service needed blowback tends to be very reliable even in adverse conditions you know we haven't done a mud test to it but it's sealed up very very well there's not a lot of places for things to serve a few holes on the mag that I'm a little bit concerned about yeah but that is an extremely stiff magazine spring I mean very very stiff feet it's actually quite hard I didn't cover this this hard to load the magazine with cartridges once you get past the halfway point is extremely stiff spring it is very stiff but what I feel like I was saying the tangible box magazine we think of it as being rapid loading and then rapid firing the problem with that is if I may may pop that magazine out real quick yeah so this is real quick by the way and you've played with this a little bit yes so let me borrow that gun for a second so I need to rapidly load and ready this gun so I'm just going to take my magazine which has very little indication and I'm going to pop it in and write that I'm ready to go but look at how much hand motion is involved and imagine running and doing that not easy so I'm going to go with her that yes I would use it over some other things is it ideal is it a magic weapon and is it something that they would really pass I don't necessarily think so alright so anything else on this guy nope I think that'll cover us guys I will say I wish 3:51 was still in active production cuz I love shooting this guy that was fun super fun but that's gonna strapped up so well thank you for tuning in and there's updates at the end and there's a whole other episode on the way that covers these guys in the air bye guys [Music] all right gang update now rated some notes by Matthew moss so now is a good time to remind everyone that he's a friend of the show and has his own project the armourers bench check that out Michael Carrick called in some favors for us and has generally been a huge help on anything Winchester he also loaned us those lever guns as you may recall that brand horse article came from Winchester arms collectors Association did you know that if you get a membership to this group you can search and read all their back articles last and definitely not least Danny over at Cody firearms museum has been unbelievably kind enough this cannon sent us some documents last minute all while his museum is being overhauled and it's schedule is surely wrecked if you have any ability do support institutes like cody they helped preserve this history alright thanks for tuning in again and we'll see you next time

Channel: C&Rsenal

Views: 244,902

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

Id: XDgPDsja5jA

Length: 72min 32sec (4352 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 24 2018