Comments by "" (@neutronalchemist3241) on "Forgotten Weapons" channel.

  1. It's not the recoil that moves the selector, but the release of the trigger. They rotates on a common axis, and probably, in 35 years of overuse, the bit that took the selector in place loosened.
    660
  2. The Madsen LMG is an industrial tool. Like a lightbulb assembly tool, or a barbed wire assembly tool. The kind of complete control it has over the cartridge (“the piece to be worked”), with one element (and sometimes two, see the lever-actuated recoil spring) performing one action (the rammer pushes the cartridge into the chamber, the tilting bolt locks it, the hammer/striker fires it, the tilting bolt unlocks it, the tilting extractor extracts it…), is typical of that kind of tools. In that kind of tools, where there is a single machine in the factory to work a million pieces a week, simplification doesn’t matter. That’s why it works. Because that kind of tools work. The downside is the cost, and the work of who has to service it.
    492
  3. The real purpose of the accelerator is to start extracting the case from the chamber when the barrel is still moving, so that, when the barrel stops, the case doesn't suddenly pass, in respect to it, from "0" to maximum speed, since the too abrupt extraction can damage the case and even cause case head separation. It also reduces felt recoil, since part of the energy of the recoiling barrel is transfered to the frame before the end of it's travel.
    371
  4. Beretta and SIG teamed up to develop an new, intermediate round, assault rifle. Then Beretta guys discovered the Swiss designers were... Swiss.
    280
  5. US didn't adopt the FAL allegedly for the problems it had in cold climates. Luckily is warm in Canada.
    215
  6. Ian forgot one. Due to the rapid decrease in pressure in the barrel, and so decrease in temperature, shotgun shells are ineherently dirtier than smallbore bottleneck ammo. That’s why recoil actions had remained relevant for so long in shotguns (and still are) while they had become little more than a curiosity in rifles, and that’s why gas action shotguns have complex self-cleaning pistons, often with multiple ribs, while rifles have much simpler ones.
    209
  7. When a army adopts a version of something, it's practically bound to use THAT version until it's replaced by something else, for the sake of interchangeability of parts. IE the last M9 Beretta manufactured for the US army were still the 1985 specs, despite the manufacturer having implemented several plug&play improvements in the civilian versions.
    157
  8. The Cosmi is also the first Italian semiauto shotgun. You should now make a video on the second one (and the first made for mass production), the 1947 Bernardelli Semiautomatico, with it's peculiar action. Practically an SVT40 action, with all the gas part removed, that becomes a mix inertial / delayed blowback.
    154
  9.  @collinbrown5751  Early 92FS pistols suffered from a faulty batch of Winchester-made M882 Ball 9mm ammos that developed pressure in excess of proofloads. It was a wonder the pistols could endure several thousands rounds before breaking in those conditions (it's not clear if the same ammos had been used in the XM9 program tests, but it's a fact that only the Beretta 92 and the H&K P7 reached the 7000 rounds threshold with all three pistols tested for "service life" without cracking a frame or a slide). After Beretta technicians found the real cause of the damages (after the Picatinny Arsenal blamed the "Tellurium" in the steel alloy) Beretta sued the US Government for the delay, the bad press and the unnecessary modifications required to the pistols. The lawsuit was settled off-court with the Government paying to Beretta further 10 million $.
    143
  10. We have a first hand account of the functioning of this rifle in Maj. Luigi Gucci book "Armi portatili" year 1915, p.58, and of the reasons it was not adopted. "The tested model, very simple, rugged, as handy as the M91, had shown a reliable, predictable and effective functioning, and it has a relatively low cost for the transformation. However, although the weapon could be assigned to some special troops, it's not convenient to adopt it for the entire army". The reasons were that the cost effectiveness was only apparent. In adopting a semiauto rifle for all the army, the price of the rifle was, in the end, marginal in respect to the price of the same cartridges for it (the price of a brand new semiauto rifle, not a conversion was estimated in 60L, that of a single Carcano cartridge was 0.1L, so a semiauto rifle costed like 600 cartridges), So it made little sense to adopt a solution that, "however ingenious, simple and well designed is, it's anyway a stopgap and, as such, it can't fully comply to all the requirements of an excellent infantry semiautomatic rifle."
    141
  11. There was worse. Tactical and Technical Trends (the magazine of US intelligence), No. 7, Sept. 10, 1942. "use of captured Italian weapons". "The Breda light machine gun is similar to the British Bren gun. It is mechanically superior to the Bren gun under dusty conditions. It requires only one man to service it as compared to several for the Bren gun. It has a slightly higher rate of fire than the British weapon. Its disadvantages are that it has no carrying handle, cannot be fired on fixed lines, and has no tripod mounting." The British Long Range Desert Group notoriously preferred to use the Lewis Gun to the Bren exactly because it was deemed to be more reliable in dusty conditions (and the Lewis Gun in general was not known to be that tolerant of dirt).
    138
  12. Infact. With the same effort, they could have made a pair of perfectly functional shotguns, that, are surely better than a single, barely usable, handgun, both for military than for other purposes.
    125
  13. Like a lever-delayed blowback, it works by accelerating the bolt carrier in respect to the bolt face (with an additional resistance given by the friction of the block over the inclined surface). In this case the bolt carrier is accelerated at about double the rate of the bolt face. To accelerate a mass at double the speed in the same time you need four time the energy, so the system allows to reduce the weight of the bolt carrier to 1/4 of what woud have been needed in a pure blowback design
    109
  14. The Hakim LMG had been assembled by Tuco in a gun shop of the old west.
    85
  15. Type 11.
    82
  16. To me, the definition is fundamentally flawed. It would be better to define three classes of RIFLE ammunitions. Defined by the energy at the muzzle, with a reasonably sized barrel. 1) under 2200 joules (7.92mm Kurz, 5.56 NATO, 7.62X39... practically the almost totality of the intermediate cartridges effectively adopted). They are optimal for individual automatic fire, decent for SAW, unsuited for GPMG. 2) from 2200 to 3000 joules (all the classic 6.5mm service rounds, 30-30, .30 Remington, 6.5 Grendel, 6.8 SPC, 6.5 LICC...). They are decent for individual automatic fire, optimal for SAW, decent for GPMG. 3) over 3000 joules (7.92mm Mauser, .303 British, 30-06, 7.62 NATO, .277 Fury, 6.5mm Creedmoor...). They are unsuited for individual automatic fire, decent for SAW, optimal for GPMG.
    77
  17. The MAB38/A is heavier, has a longer barrel (so the compensator has more leverage) and the foregrip (so the support hand has more leverage). That's why is even more controllable.
    72
  18. It's cause Italians too formed their opinions reading English comments on the net. Historical Italian sources actually praise the rifle.
    69
  19. It's an exceptionally well thought-out gun that ended up being exceptionally poorly built. The problem was that the Santa Barbara Arsenal had not mass produced anything for decades before the AMELI (the problem with state-owned arsenals, that made so they went out of fashion, except for maintenance. You can’t really stop and resume, at years distance, making firearms, and expect acceptable quality standards, or to iron-out all the industrialization problems). Something happened between the industrialization and the production phases, that made so the guns literally self-dismantled in the hands of the operators. It’s a shame a proper weapon manufacturer had not put its hands on the design.
    68
  20. To apply modern mindset to past times is a mistake also. At the time it was A REAL PROBLEM to design a box magazine so cheap to be discarded on the field and so consistently built to not cause feeing issues. It was a problem still in the '50s, when the M14 had been adopted, hence the stripper clip guide.
    61
  21. For the Mamba, the main problem was it's main feature. "all stainless steel". Stainless steel being subject to galling is the reason the Randall 1911 (1983) was marketed as the first reliable all-stainless-steel semiauto (not the first to be made, but the earlier attempts were special series and "Gucci pistols", not really destined to hard use). The designers of the Mamba (1976) passed to production without having solved the problem they should have first.
    61
  22. What shown is not a field strip, but a disassembly of the rifle. A normal field strip (to clean the gas chamber, inspect and maybe replace the recoil spring, clean the bolt and maybe replace the firing pin) can be made in seconds without tools, that was not a given at that time.
    55
  23. +HamsterPants522 The reliability index rating of Warrantydirect, an insurer that puts its own money on it, put FIAT on 15th position among car manufacturer, ahead of Hyundai, Subaru, Citroen, Mitsubishi, Volvo, Volkswagen, Saab, BMW, Mercedes, Audi...
    54
  24. Then the Desert Eagle did the brutal thing, and made the .44 Mag. rimless, not by trimming the rim, but by making the rest of the case larger than the rim (the .50 Action Express).
    50
  25. Yeah. It seems an high quality firearm, with some very clever solution implemented.
    45
  26. Ammunitions needed to be carried before being fired. BREN instructions indicated an ideal ROF during battles of a magazine (of 30 theoric rounds, and 27 practical ones) a minute, and an emergency ROF of 4 magazines a minute (alerting that, at that rate, the barrel had to be changed every 10 magazines, and the entire provision of the squad was of 20 magazines, so 5 minutes of fire). Also belt-fed LMGs were impractical in real life scenarios (and still are today, that's why the Marines are phasing the SAW out). To change a belt requires more time than to change several magazines, and it jams easier, and it requires more time to clear jammings.
    43
  27.  @antoninolatorre8355  The shooter feels the recoil first when the recoiling barrel impacts the frame and stops (so transfering it's energy to the frame, and the hand of the shooter) and then when the recoiling bolt impacts the frame and stops (same as above). The more sudden is the transfer of the energy (a hit instead of a push), the more the felt recoil. The accelerator makes so that part of the energy of the recoiling barrel (that so slows down before impacting the frame) is transfered to the bolt and part to the frame, so it reduces the felt recoil, because the transfer of the energy is less sudden.
    43
  28. Before the Garand thumb and the Glock leg, the Hotchkiss tatoo.
    42
  29. Simply there are markets that are not obsessed with AR15s even if they are regularly available. AR15s are mainly a north american thing.
    41
  30.  @studentaviator3756  It's an exceptionally well thought-out gun that ended up being exceptionally poorly built. The problem was that the Santa Barbara Arsenal had not mass produced anything for decades before the AMELI (the problem with state-owned arsenals, that made so they went out of fashion, except for maintenance. You can’t really stop and resume, at years distance, making firearms, and expect acceptable quality standards, or to iron-out all the industrialization problems). Something happened between the industrialization and the production phases, that made so the production guns were flimsy and out of specs. Yeah. Had a proper gun manufacturer put its hands on the design, it could have ended up differently. In an alternate world, Beretta, instead of acquiring the production licence for the Minimi, could have acquired that for the AMELI.
    41
  31. Unfortunately, it's completely useless without a bipod (it's made to suspend the rifle between the bipod and the shoulder, without tiring the arm).
    40
  32. The welding WAS the heat treatment.
    40
  33. In reality (probably due to the gun being quite old, and a spring loosened) you can see the selector switching only when he releases the trigger.
    40
  34. Several designs made in the '30s were better than the Breda 30 (IE the Scotti LMG, or the Terni 1931). Probelm is that the Breda 30 had been adopted in 1930, and no Army revert a decision made only few years before, for something marginally better.
    40
  35. In reality, in 1896, Hotchkiss patented BOTH the strip feeding and the metallic belt feeding. They offered the metallic belt option for much of their products, but without much success. Strip feeding (or a variant largely used in WWI, three rounds strips hinged together to form a belt of any length) had been the favored method of almost any purchaser until the expiration of the patent. Probably because it was, even if only slightly, more reliable.
    39
  36.  @jarink1  They got carried by their own dreams. For one and half million rifles, ammo availability would have been a problem. For 15.000, 50.000 or even 200.000 rifles, there were plenty of ammos already available. Better issuing a repeater with 400 rounds and call it a day (hardly a Volkssturm militian would have survived enough to fire all of them anyway) than issuing a single shooter even with 10.000 rounds.
    38
  37. You are welcome, and thank you for the video. Knowing Gucci's book without having seen the rifle he was talking of, I was very curious about it. Seeing the rifle, it's easier to understand his reasons. IE, Gucci talks specifically of the barrel. The reason of the conversion is mainly to reuse the existing barrels (that are left untouched) as well as the receivers (that have to be remachined), the stocks (that have to be slightly reworked), and the magazine. At the cost of a new bolt, a recoil spring, and some minor parts. But Carcano barrels have been designed for a bolt-action rate of fire. Gucci, talking of a generic rifle's barrel of his time, says that it's internal reaches 450° after 80 rounds of rapid fire, and says that it has been estimated that the barrels of the converted rifles, due to the more rapid fire allowed by the semiauto operation, would have been worn out after about 2000 rounds. So there is little sense in using a less than optimal rifle to reuse a thing that is however destined to wear out quickly. We can make a similar consideration for the stock too. To save the receiver-barrel assembly, the shooter has the recoiling mass of the receiver directly ahead of his eye, and above his thumb. Although that's not really dangerous, it's surely discomfortable. the situation could be improved with a new stock, with the receiver a little farther from the shooter's eye and a more pronounced pistol grip that moves the thumb away from the receiver. But, that way, you don't save the existing stocks any more. Ecc... ecc...
    37
  38. Wrong time. It entered the market after the other famous metal wondernines (Beretta 92, CZ75 and SIG P220 were of the '70s), so it didn't acquire the same mithical status. It had not been selected by any famous government agency (also because Bernardelli didn't have the financial power of Beretta or SIG) and got everything right, with the model "S", right at the start of the plastic gun frenzy, when an all forged steel gun simply looked "old".
    33
  39. It's never black and wite. The French were dressed in bright uniforms, but were the first that tried to even the playing field, equipping their soldiers en masse with portable automatic fire, in the form of the Chauchat.
    32
  40. Every Hispano-Suiza HS.404, and derivates (included the 20 mm Mark 16 that's still in service) had his cartridges oiled. So did the Japanese Type 96 LMG. An oiler is not the end of the world. Is a charateristic. The resistance of the weapon to dirt is made of MANY charateristics.
    31
  41. Also Beretta 300 series. The first really reliable shotgun gas action.
    31
  42. Just for a clarification, in Italy, and most Europe, this rifle can be purchased with a 12.5" barrel with flash suppressor and a telescopic stock (according to the EU law, a rifle must have at least a 30cm / 11.8" barrel and a total lenght of at least 60cm / 23.6". With the 12.5" barrel and the stock collapsed the rifle is 78.7cm long with the flash suppressor and 73.7cm long without it, so perfectly compliant). Those features are not available in the US only due to US restrictions on imports. So what’s the market this rifle is intended for? Essentially not the US market, but places where the AR15 is not so dominant among the “black rifles”. Not cause the law prohibits it, but simply cause the customers are not so obsessed with it.
    30
  43. +Freeman Matthews The law that ban "military" calibers from civilian use is not made to not allow civilians to use "too powerful" rounds. .40 S&W is legal, .357mag is legal, .44mag is legal, 10mm is legal, and so on. The law is intended to not allow military personnel to privately purchase ammos for their issued weapons. However, sorry, but Michele had not been accurate. 5 rounds restriction is for hunting rifles only. The limit for semiauto pistols is 15 rounds. The limit for sporting rifles (that comprehend "black rifles" like M4, AK47 and so on) is 29 rounds (STANAG magazines modified to accept 29 rounds instead of 30 are legal). BTW, .223 Rem is legal. Knives of every dimensions are legal, if there is a reason to carry them. You can carry a machete in a forest, not at the stadium. You can carry a folding knife almost everywere. To carry firearms outside your house or workplace, you must have one of three kind of permission: 1) hunting licence. You can carry hunting rifles and ammos, the rifles have to be unloaded during transport, until you are in a place where hunting is permitted. 2) sporting licence. You can carry every kind of rifle and pistol and their ammo to and from a range. Weapons have to be unloaded during transport. 3) defence licence. You can carry loaded pistols. This kind of licence is harder to obtain than the former two (that are pretty easy, they only requires a bit of paperwork, a medical examination, a payment and the attendance of a single theoretical and practical lesson at a range). The kind of licence does not restrict the kind of weapons you can purchase. Weapons are not required to be disassembled during transport in any case.
    29
  44. Or, since the grip was made for right hand, he was simply inadvertently hitting the slide-release.
    29
  45. The SR2 bomb was filled with 32gr of TNT, into an iron case, and with an iron spiral around it to ensure fragmentation. The explosive filling was inferior to the later (from 1944) US MKII hand grenades, but superior to the earlier ones, so I wouldn't deem them as "ineffective". The bomb was designed to contain it's effects in a 50m range, and so the shooter was instructed to not shoot at closer distances (see "Istruzione provvisoria sull'uso della bomba S.R.2 con governale"). It was not the bomb, simply they decided to ditch the whole idea. It was replaced by the Brixia mortar, that, being able of direct ant indirect fire, and having a far higher ROF, was deemed to be a better solution.
    28
  46. Pylon: "Its not like its a missle." Pylon: "But I'm sure we can make it explode anyway".
    28
  47. The AA-52 is the French GPMG since 1952.
    28
  48.  @ThorneyedWT  For a gun of that weight and size, the B76 was unusually sturdy too. Benelli was the first company to publicily advertise the gun as being able to shoot safely extremely hot loads. (how many companies still advertise to not use +P ammunitions on their guns?)
    27
  49.  @RonJohn63  Flimsy. It takes a tons of work just to keep them functional.
    26
  50. Then the DS-39 passed in hystory as the only firearm where the case was faster than the bullet.
    26