Comments by "" (@neutronalchemist3241) on "The Gun Science Says Can't Work: Madsen LMG Mechanics" video.
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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.
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@44R0Ndin Yes and no.
Factories and workshops of the time were not clean places.
WWI HMGs, like the Vickers, the MG08 and so on, were built with the same concept, and had been among the most reliable self loading firearms ever.
Because, like the industrial tooling of their time they were massively overbuilt. It was like they couldn't be bothered by the simple energy of a cartridge firing. And, in their frame, there was a lot of void space, so the dirt had a lot of places to go before locking the mechanism.
The Madsen LMG was kind of a smaller version of that. As that, it was a little more sensible to elements and dirt, but no more (and maybe less) than any LMG of the time (Hotchkiss Portative, Lewis Gun... not to talk about the Chauchat).
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@knurlgnar24 Yes and no.
Yes and no.
Factories and workshops of the time were not that controlled environments, they were not clean places, and they could be hot, cold, and anywere in between.
WWI HMGs, like the Vickers, the MG08 and so on, were built with the same concept, and had been among the most reliable self loading firearms ever.
Because, like the industrial tooling of their time they were massively overbuilt. It was like they couldn't be bothered by the simple energy of a cartridge firing. And, in their frame, there was a lot of void space, so the dirt had a lot of places to go before locking the mechanism.
The Madsen LMG was kind of a smaller version of that. As that, it was a little more sensible to elements and dirt, but no more (and maybe less) than any LMG of the time (Hotchkiss Portative, Lewis Gun... not to talk about the Chauchat).
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