Winchester 1964 SPIW: Flechettes and a Blow-Forward Grenade Launcher

hi guys thanks for tuning into another video on Forgotten weapons calm I'm in McCallum and I'm here today at the Rock Island Arsenal Museum on in fact not just in Rock Island Illinois but literally on Rock Island this is a big Arsenal complex still an active US military Arsenal and they have a really cool small arms museum here that they have graciously allowed me to do some videoing in so what we're looking at today is an extremely cool and very weird piece of firearms technology this is Winchester's entry into the 1964 spi W program or I'm sorry the 1962 program rifles were delivered in 64 SPI W stands for special purpose infantry weapon and the genesis of this whole program really goes back to 1952 when the Ordnance Department or one guy in in the US military published a report looking at the actual causes the the lethality of rifle and machine gun wounds like how effective are these weapons and what he found was that 90% of rifle and machine gun fire many percent of the wounds caused by rifle and machine gun fire were caused at 300 yards or less and 80% of those wounds were caused at 200 yards or less and the conclusion that he came to was that the accuracy of a particular rifle or machine gun is basically irrelevant you know there's this very long tradition of marksmanship in the US Army and what what this report was finding was that this is all basically a pointless exercise in winning matches and doesn't really have much relevance to war fighting the issue was it didn't matter if you had a 1 minute of angle rifle or a 5 minute of angle rifle what actually determined whether an enemy was hit or not had nothing to do with the accuracy the weapon it was all about how long was the enemy exposed and how much of them was exposed some guy stands up in broad view and stays still he's gonna get hit give you know in that exact same situation even if the soldier has an absolute laser beam of a rifle if the enemy only exposes a small part of himself and only for a very brief time he's getting hit and so this report the hitman report found that you know we could double the dispersion of any given infantry weapon in u.s. inventory and it wouldn't have any impact on on that weapons ability to cause enemy casualties so this really flew in the face of ordinance department tradition and thinking and doctrine and everything but what the report suggested was that the US military should develop a system that basically builds in more dispersion and this led to what was called the salvo program which ran from 1952 until 1960 and salvo looked at a couple couple different solutions they looked at duplex and xxx cartridges where you have one cartridge case with two or three bullets in it that all fire as one that was the really simple solution and that was actually the solution that was recommended at the end of this program but that wasn't all they also looked at small caliber high velocity cartridges because this was before the five five six cartridge before the m16 they found that in fact they did testing with 80-48 full-auto u.s. made FAL rifle that had been reach aim bird for basically seven sixteen NATO neck down to 22 caliber with like a forty one grain bullet and they found it even it wasn't really all that practical or beneficial in full auto and then they also experimented with flechette cartridges where you have basically a 10 to 15 grain little dart that's fin-stabilized and they tested this in project salvo by stuffing a bunch of these things like 30 of them into a 12-gauge shotgun shell and they were testing with a remington 1187 now the result of salvo was nothing entirely conclusive the the formal conformal recommendation at the end was that the u.s. actually developed a duplex 716 nato cartridge and issue it but that never happened largely I think because how on earth do you win it can't parry with duplex cartridges you can so it's not going to happen however the program continued into a second phase and that was projects pew and in that one well spew didn't start until well there's there's a time gap between the actual testing of the salvo rifles which was like 1956 and the order for spew rifles which was in 62 and most of this time was taken up with advanced armament incorporated aai trying to develop a an effective single-shot flechette cartridge they had kind of liked what they were seeing with these flush eps loaded in the shotgun shell the problem was they were low velocity you know you're talking twelve or thirteen hundred feet per second you know it's shotgun velocities and they wanted to try these at like hyper velocity so they were going they were aiming for 4,000 feet per second which is like 1300 meters per second really really fast and it took a AI a long time to figure out how to do this effectively so there were two ways that they could look at these flechette cartridges one was to have a Sabo at the front that pulls the flush at and one was to have a stable at the back that pushes the flush hat and the the one at the back was the much simpler technical solution the problem was that meant all of your gunpowder had to be behind the pusher behind the Sabo which wasn't turned behind the flechette and this made for a very long cartridge too long the army wasn't willing to accept it so instead they had to come up with a way to develop a puller flechette or a puller Sabo that held the nose of the flechette and pulled it down the barrel the problem with this is they well any advantage here I should say is they were able to basically pack the Gunpowder around the body of the flechette and that gives them a much shorter cartridge in the end they would develop something that was pretty similar in length to the five five six NATO cartridge however it took like five years of development to do this because they had to get the attention of that Poehler Sabo just right if it was too loose if it didn't grip the the flesh out hard enough the Sabo would blow off in the barrel and then you'd have like bits of debris left in the barrel and your accuracy obviously went all to zero if you had it too tight either it wouldn't release properly or it interestingly at when they started approaching 4,000 feet per second which is really really fast in case you don't have concept for this they actually were having problems with snapping the flechette in half in the middle like the puller would be under so much pressure in such an instantaneous g-force that it would actually snap the flechette in half and only pull the front half out the muzzle so they finally managed to find the right equilibrium the right tension the right materials they went for it was like a glass nylon hybrid sort of strange material they finally got it working in 1962 and that is when the army actually put out a request for project spew rifles and that now finally we have gotten to the rifle that we're looking at today four different companies were given contracts to develop these rifles they were Winchester which is what we have here also Harrington & Richardson probably is like well you didn't do so well with the m14 maybe you can do this better Springfield Arsenal the government Arsenal and also aai themselves got a contract and the requirements for this rifle were pretty optimistic so all the usual stuff it had to be lightweight it had to be handy it had to be safe had to eject cases in such a way that it wouldn't interfere with shooting or with a guy shooting next to you had to what else maximum overall length of 40 inches all the normal stuff you'd expect easy to disassemble and then more substantially it had to carry a minimum of 60 rounds of point target ammunition by which they mean flechettes or whatever other futuristic thing the companies decided to come up with and it also had to carry three rounds of area effect ammunition these rifles had to be built with grenade launchers built into them and in fact knowing that this would irreparably destroy the balance of any rifle as it entirely has done here the the requirement was specific that the grenade launchers had to be removable but could not be removed at the discretion of the rifles user so private Snuffy was not allowed to take the grenade launcher off of his rifle but the armorer had to be able to do it in case they wanted to so with that requirement set up Winchester came up with this rifle let's take a closer look at it we'll start by taking a look at the rifle portion of this combined weapon this uses a three lug rotating bolt and it used a gas tap at a short-stroke gas tap at action in order to cycle so that's going to be hidden up here under the stock the hatch for the drum is actually right here and in order to release the drum you push forward on this lever and it actually uses the trigger guard has a flat spring to provide tension for that also you can flip the trigger guard out of the way for shooting with gloves these rifles were required to have three position selectors they had to be capable of semi-automatic fire three round burst will actually burst they didn't specify how many rounds full automatic as well as a safe position so this is your three round selector you heard it click this is kind of a weird finicky selector because this rifle fires from an open bolt in three round and full auto and from a closed bolt on single shot and then it has a manual safety located up here that's safe and pulling the button forward is fire there is also another button up here and this is kind of an interesting solution there's only one trigger for both the rifle and the grenade launcher and the way you distinguish between the two was when you wanted to fire a grenade you had to hold this button down while pulling the trigger as long as you did that it would fire a grenade instead the rifle so kind of an interesting interesting and not necessarily a bad idea or a bad way to do that we have a grenade launcher sight mounted on the side of the rifle and that'll pivot down for various ranges this had to be effective up to 400 meters and the rifle was actually also expected to be combat effective out to 400 unfortunately I'm not entirely sure how to disassemble this one I know it's this lever which comes up and then we can almost take this top assembly out but the trigger gets stuck and I don't know we spent a substantial amount of time a couple of us here behind the camera and also myself trying to how to get this out and we just weren't able to figure it out so we're gonna be leaving that on now the other thing that made this rifle kind of unique and that was commented on in the the trials was it had what they called a soft recoil system which basically apparently is it comprises a second housing inside the action and the the bolt and the recoiling components reciprocate in first in this housing and then with it the point I think is just to soften the recoil to take up a bunch of the recoil energy before the bolt actually hits the back of the receiver and transmits that energy to the shooter the idea is to make it flatter shooting softer shooting apparently it didn't really work very well and even when it did work technically speaking it didn't actually help much so unfortunately that's all I have to go on about that because we aren't able to take it apart so the recoil operating section of the action you can see right here and note that the bolt is staying in place with the barrel and if you look at the muzzle when I do that you can see the barrel reciprocating backwards and then the second phase of the recoil has a really stiff like force you have to overcome if I'm understanding this right if I look inside there it actually looks very much like in fg42 or an m60 sort of system to me I think that's what's going on here and I think there we go I think what we're overcoming there is the firing pin spring so this all comes back like so when it's open and it is a three lug bolt up in here but there are very small lugs and there it is back in battery now in addition to the grenade launcher the rifles had to be able to mount a detachable bipod and so Winchester went ahead and basically put an old var bipod on this and loosen that pivot these legs out tighten that back up you can see this is technically removable with a pair of screw this and they don't stay in place now I know you guys want to see the grenade launcher section here what makes this really interesting is that this is actually a blow forward grenade launcher it's chambered for the 40 millimeter high / low pressure grenades like the m203 and the m79 the m79 was actually adopted right during this time in 1960s so this ammunition was just coming in to the military system when they were doing this development work now the way this works is we actually have a blow forward sleet well blow forward barrel inside the the receiver section here so this is a ring loaded feed ramp that's going to pop open like that you can then load a cartridge in through one of these to feed ways either one I believe then it will feed up into here and you lift this up which allows the barrel slide backward and chamber a grenade you can then go ahead and load two more one into each side that gives you your three rounds of required area target capacity and then when you fire this thing is recoil-operated so I believe the idea is that when you pull the trigger the barrel is gonna tend to stay in place or and/or be pulled forward by friction of the projectile moving down the barrel while the rest of the gun is going to want to go backward from the recoil and that results in this whole thing cycling forward there's a spring inside here that is old and the whole thing is stiff so it shouldn't normally stick like this I don't believe tension from this is also holding it in place but when you fire this thing that the rifle is gonna recoil backward this is going to get pulled forward it will somewhere in there eject the empty 40 millimeter case I suspect it just falls out because the case on one of these grenades is a lot shorter than the overall length so the case fits in here where this will hold a full cartridge in position Winchester was kind of specific that they they designed this to have a low bore axis without having to have a straight line stock they wanted the traditional style of stock so they made sure to mount the barrel as high up in the receiver as they could and there isn't any extra hardware above the barrel so you're able to have a sight that's actually not that tall and the barrel pretty much comes back into your shoulder it's kind of interesting to me that this is very clearly a commercial sort of rifle sight that they were able to find and adapt with a new aperture there then the front sight is this big ol shark fin type design in testing it turned out this is really pretty much a terrible gun there was only one aspect of this that survived past the initial round of testing and that was the blow forward grenade launcher which would go on to be further developed for the next iteration of Springfield Armory's s piw rifle which then consequently went nowhere so ultimately all of this disappeared but it's certainly a really interesting look at what the US military had in mind in the 1960s and it's a fantastically cool rifle that I've said some times that you know you have practical and you have cool and they're kind of inversely proportional to each other this is an entirely cool rifle and turned out to be completely impractical in the field the balance is awful the reliability was bad the grenade launcher idea is neat but this would have been a nightmare in the field but that doesn't make it any less cool anyway hopefully you guys enjoyed the video a big thank you to the Rock Island Arsenal museum for allowing me to get my grubby hands on this thing and bring it to you guys thanks for watching and stay tuned for more Forgotten weapons you

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 906,844

Rating: 4.9582143 out of 5

Keywords: spiw, special purpose infantry weapon, salvo, project salvo, winchester, aai, aberdeen, trial, trials, testing, forgotten weapons., mccollum, history, development, design, flechette, burst fire, burst, automatic, rock island arsenal museum, museum, prototype, 1964, disassembly, short recoil, lewis gun, fg42, m60, drum, blow forward, grenade launcher, bipod, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv

Id: 21qZpSJp5W0

Length: 17min 49sec (1069 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 19 2018