The Rare Surefire MGX: A No-Recoil Light Machine Gun (LMG)

just like many everyday americans i love coming down to the beach hearing the waves feeling the breeze on my skin and thinking about machine guns and boy am i thinking about a hot one today that is the surefire mgx an extremely rare machine gun only two of them were ever made the mgx was patented by jim sullivan in 2002 purchased by surefire in 2008 and this masterpiece is an open bolt ar-15 meets ultimax meets stoner 63 light machine gun and its claim to fame is that it is so modular you can shoot 100 rounds of 556 through it change barrels change calibers change bolts shoot 100 rounds of 6.8 millimeter through it and that entire process will take you under a minute pretty cool stuff so i was elated when barry duke brought me into his personal vault at surefire showed me the mgx said we're gonna shoot this thing later today but before we hit the range he was more than glad to give us a walk through and a little bit of the history of this magnificent light machine gun guys check it out hey i'm barry duke i'm the vice president of suppressors and weapons here at surefire we're standing in one of our weapons vaults which doubles as my default office and got a really special gun to show the tfb tv crew the surefire mgx this is jim sullivan's latest creation now jim sullivan he designed the m16 for eugene stoner he designed the ultimax 100 in singapore the ruger mini 14 ruger 77 pre-production sample it's nine pounds and change weight wise you know at around nine pounds when you look at the thickness of the barrel one place that a lot of people skimp on machine guns or anything when they're trying to reduce weight take the m60 echo three for an example is a gun purchased during peacetime so everybody uh yeah you have to carry it you're not shooting it it's heavy so it went from a 23 pound m60 to an 18 and a half pound m60 echo three and then all sudden the gulf war starts and you got marines trading stuff with the army to get the army's heavy barrels from the old m60 to put on their m60 echo threes because oh gee now we're going to war and we actually need this gun to work the stock folds left folds right comes off so if you need to if you want to change different configurations of stock this is a machine gun that will actually fit into a briefcase so if we go back to an 11 and a half inch barrel you put a few 60 160 or 100 round mags with it surefire 60 and 100 round magazines those were actually designed to work with this machine gun it actually closes up into a nice briefcase and you know you could walk in with your business suit anywhere you wanted to take it the barrels drop out the bottom so depending on what i'm doing with the with the gun how much muzzle velocity i want uh can change change that the other thing that you can do is change caliber so those were five five six barrels so i dropped the bolt take the five five six operating mechanism out putting a six eight we just changed calibers from five five six to six point eight spc probably the most unique feature of it is it stays on target when firing if you start firing you can pull this thing off you can hold it out here with one hand it actually holds itself up the only thing you got to remember see if james remembers this when he's firing it you got to put it back in your shoulder or you look like a doofus when the magazine runs out because you're holding this thing out here all cool and all sudden it goes and you don't look so cool anymore at the end of the video jesus dude that's unreal it's like a laser gun it's like a bullet hose like turn like flip it on your garden hose that is [ __ ] awesome nothing else like it oh my god can i do one more please unbelievable weapon jim sullivan is you know the most accomplished living gun designer he's just brilliant hundreds of thousands of rounds fired uh in initial prototype and build you know right now it's in a pre-production uh format around 2008 jim sullivan came to surefire uh spoke with dr matthews owned surefire and said hey i got this great design for a machine gun i can't get anybody to fund it john didn't want this intellectual property you know dying jim's you know late 80s a super brilliant guy so funded jim to start up arm west and jim designed the mgx or mg10 depending on how you want to look at it uh 556 6.8 caliber convertible but most importantly it's a gun that literally just hovers on target wherever you aim it what are you guys doing right now it's just sitting here in the ball what's going on i'd say it's uh it's a little bit in limbo uh we have a lot of projects going on we have some weapon stuff that you may be seeing here in the near future the way i see it going to production is you know being being tailored around specific customer maybe it gets in locks instead of picatinnies some minor tweaks on that maybe it uh gets turned into a six arc or something along those lines so a lot a lot of different options it's really going to be customer driven as it goes into the future that is not what i was expecting it to do that was weird in a very good way overall it's a jim sullivan creation the just plain and simple works and i can't emphasize enough the fact that this just doesn't recoil when you shoot it we could end up selling it we could end up putting into production we're kind of looking at the pros and cons of both right now real realistically i think it's likely that we're going to sell it to one of the companies that's already in the machine gun business to give this give this machine gun life and get it into the hands of the operators that need it that's the only one that exists huh uh sullivan has an earlier generation prototype that he has but this was the you know final the final rev how many of them do you think exist two [Laughter] god i hope i was recording [Music] foreign

Channel: TFB TV

Views: 695,206

Rating: 4.950242 out of 5

Keywords: tfb, tfb tv, tfbtv, James Reeves, Surefire MGX, ultimax 100, ultimax, lmg, machine gun, light machine gun, jim sullivan, forgotten weapons, squad automatic weapon, full auto, slow motion, call of duty black ops cold war all guns, m249, saw machinegun, COD, call of duty, light, m249 saw, saw, m240, pubg mobile, pubg, belt fed, military, usmc, mag, fn, best, full-auto, full, auto, automatic, smg

Id: FXzn27vFb5Q

Length: 7min 42sec (462 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/JUMPYCHIEF]

but then the recoil happens when you put it in the case and drive home you just see the case jumping around the car

[u/ShapelessHail]

This is the coolest thing i have ever seen. A 9lb machine gun that can change calibers on the fly?? I want to fire one so badly.

[u/GT540MGamer]

Quick-change caliber conversion is one of those things that I'm surprised people keep pursuing when designing these weapons geared towards military users. It makes no sense in the military use-profile and is in fact a huge liability because there just isn't any plausible scenario where you can/must change calibers on the fly like they're demonstrating, and yet it introduces the opportunity for catastrophic failure when you to step off on patrol with a mismatch of rifle and ammo. You aren't taking the spare parts with you on mission because why would you take two different kinds of ammo? How much extra ammo of one caliber can you take in place of the spare barrel and bolt carrier assembly?

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And then there's the briefcase scenario which is also a bit absurd because the whole thing is that it's a real-deal, open-bolt, heavy-barreled MG, but deployment from a briefcase means that you aren't trying to draw attention and so wearing enough ammo to support this thing in its role as an MG is pretty much not going to happen. Any 10.5" AR can be just as compact when disassembled and can go through a few hundred rounds no problem in a pinch so again it really doesn't offer anything practical even in these absurdly niche scenarios.

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Not to dog on the suggestion or video, just putting some background out there for people wondering why this stuff isn't making bigger waves IRL.

[u/Space_man_Dan]

Dang it, I was going to recommend this gun.