Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "Forgotten Weapons" channel.

  1. Holy Crap. This gun sold for $132,250! That's a nice boat for the soldier who picked this up off the battlefield.
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  2. Most of those guns were carried in parachute packs as a survival weapon. They weren't carried as a sidearm. It was the weight limits of early ejection seats that made the overall weight of every item in the pack important.
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  3. My brother served in the Delta from 1968-69 and tells me some of the M37E1 guns in 7.62 were mounted on convoy escort jeeps and supply trucks to keep the heads of the VC down when traversing dicey spots. He was an artillery gunner at a firebase, and he took one off a damaged truck and mounted it on an ARVN M1919A2 tripod for firebase defense. The guys liked it better than the M60 because it could fire all night long while never needing a barrel change, and all they had to do was dump a bucket of water on the barrel when it started glowing red.
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  4. Well, Mauser is much easier to spell and pronounce, so there's that.
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  5. Andre the Giant's pocket gun.
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  6. The good old days. Just step out the factory door and start shooting up a historic structure.
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  7. Forget my lousy AK for home defense. I need a 37mm cannon!
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  8. It's not just rich white guys having fun with these. I have a Coastie friend that was involved in drug interdiction while working with the Colombian Coast Guard. There were sections of the coast they made sure they stayed at least 3,000 yards offshore because some of the drug cartel soldiers were using Barrett rifles to discourage naval vessels from investigating too closely. That was when there were actual drug running subs in use. He was on an 87 foot patrol boat armed with two M2 50's and engaged in a two hour running gun battle with a position onshore armed with at least one and possibly two Barrett rifles. The problem was solved when a Colombian Navy frigate arrived and ended any opposition with its 76 mm gun.
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  9. If Remington made a reproduction in .22LR with four or five rounds, I'd buy one. Neat little gun.
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  10. My uncle fought with the Seventh Army from D-Day to the Rhine. He was one of the assigned guys in his company to carry a Thompson. After about two weeks of humping that around, the firing pin broke and he was able to get an M2 carbine. He never took his eyes off that gun until the VE-Day. He never told me how the firing pin broke but i suspect it wasn't an accident.
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  11. Rats! I should have tried harder to convince my dad to spend the $49 for a Solothurn from Hunter's Lodge when I asked for it for Christmas back in 1962,
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  12. The kind of gun you prowl around pawn shops looking for in hopes someone's grandfather left one behind.
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  13. Only in the world of guns do have things that are "rare" and "exotic" because using one can give you a black eye and maybe some broken bones!
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  14.  @kenibnanak5554  Yes, that why I wrote "the Delta". It was the common shorthand for the Mekong Delta in 1969. I really hate that we have so many people on here that are 16 years old and only know what they get from video games. I just got off the phone with him and my description of "glowing red" was me not remembering correctly. He said it was the barrel shroud that glowed, and it was more white than red. That's when they dumped water on it, waited for the steam to clear, and resumed firing. There were nights when there were firing every weapon they had on base, including beehive from the 105's to keep from being overrun. The M37 was the one machine gun they trusted to work all night. Meow Mix, he is indeed still alive after suffering a pretty serious heart attack two years ago. He's pretty tough, and the best brother a guy could have. I'll relay your thanks.
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  15.  @ForeLab  The problem wasn't extinguishers,it was fire detection. The soda acid extinguisher was in common use by 1895, and an interior picture of the armory would undoubtedly show many of them hanging on the support posts around the plant. The reason for so many fires back then was the lack of anything but the eyes and nose of a night watchman to detect and report a fire. The concept of firewalls didn't exist, and many of these old plants were timber framed with brick infill. Once a fire got into the attic area, it was nearly impossible to extinguish before the structure burned to the ground. The motto of many fire departments back then was "We've never lost a foundation".
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  16. I apparently should have invested in guns instead of stocks.
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  17. The Cook brothers are considered two of the heroes of the Confederacy. Even though they were both from England, they adopted the Confederate cause after they moved to New Orleans in the 1850's. Ferdinand married a New Orleans woman, Mary Jane Wilcox, described as "one of the fairest belles of the City", in 1852. He moved to New Orleans after the marriage and was later followed by his brother Francis some time in 1855. Athey were representatives of Novelty Iron works of New York City, where they worked from about 1850 until the outbreak of the war. The company manufactured mostly cotton and sugar machinery, so locating in New Orleans was a logical move. Both brothers learned engineering and metalworking at Novelty, then regarded as one of the finest machinery companies in the nation. There was also another brother, Frederick, who ended up in New Orleans, and Francis and Frederic established the Belleville Iron Works in Algiers, outside New Orleans. They made mostly agricultural equipment, but also spent some time making prototype rifles in hopes of selling them to the US Army. They even wrote to then US Secretary of War Jefferson Davis in 1856 about establishing an arms factory in the South since none then existed. Of course, that suited the Union fine, so nothing ever came of it. When the Civil War began, Ferdinand resigned his position with novelty and it appears Frederick made his way back to New York since he was a Union sympathizer. The remaining two brothers, Ferdinand and Francis, set to work immediately converting the Belleville company to producing rifles. The company was renamed Cook and Brother and a new factory, initially the Nashua Iron Works, was established in New Orleans. Although I don't know for sure, I assume the Belleville factory was sold to help finance the new rifle company/ The removal of the rifle company to Athens had some of the same heroics as the Russians removing their factories in the face of the advancing Nazis. I could write a book on that alone, and this is already getting close enoough to a book. The brothers had no intention of going through that turmoil again. They reserved at least 250 of their rifles for a local defense company to defend the plant and the Athens area when it was clear that the Union forces would make their way through Georgia. They even made a few small artillery pieces. The plant defense force did fight the Union forces as part of a larger local militia at Griswoldville, GA and Hardeeville SC, and several factory workers were killed in the battles. As Ian said, Ferdinand gave his life for the Confederacy on December 11, 1864, stuck down by a Union sniper during the Hardeeville battles. After the War ended, Francis managed to get a Federal pardon after spending some time in Union custody because he was a Confederate officer. Because he was a British subject, he managed to escape imprisonment as a traitor. Even though he managed to stave off several years of attempts by US Marshals to seize the factory, the local sheriff auctioned it off in 1868 to pay of the company's substantial debts that were never made good due to the collapse of the Confederacy. The buildings and grounds were purchased by the Athens Manufacturing Company and used as a cotton mill. To the best of my knowledge, the factory burned to the ground sometime in the 1890's. Ferdinand gave his life and Francis gave his fortune, both for the Lost Cause. The only reason I know some of these details is the brothers are distant relatives. As far as I can tell from my genealogy program, they would be cousins six times removed. I found out some of the information while researching that line of the family. As you might imagine, I'd love to have one of the Cook and Brother rifles. Unfortunately, I don't have a spare $30,0000 readily at hand.
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  18. You could still buy the 1795 musket that was "sporterized" and mostly converted to shotguns from the Sears catalog in the 1920's. They were a cheap hunting gun and were apparently pretty popular at $5.00 to $8.00 each. If nothing else, using a 130 year old converted musket as a shotgun in 1928 shows the durability of the musket.
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  19. I have a Forehand & Wadsworth British Bulldog (actually Forehand Arms by then) in .38 S&W from 1901, just before the company was sold to Hopkins & Allen. It is a quite well made little revolver with much of the bluing still intact. It doesn't have much of a collector market since F&W sold these by the thousands, but the gun still shoots well today. It's surprisingly accurate at 25 yards for a gut buster carry gun.
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  20. Ah, back in the days when Youtube allowed we peasants to go directly to a gun auction website. Thank goodness the Trust and Safety Team prevents such shenanigans today.
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  21. This was also the last use of gliders by the Germans. Only 12 of the 22 gliders dispatched against Vassieux-en-Vercors actually landed in the right place, with the rest either landing too far to the north or crashing upon landing. Thus, the actual numbers of German troops (who were mostly Russian or Ukrainian) were combat effective upon landing numbered only about 150 of the 400 dispatched. It showed once again why glider operations were just not effective, especially in terms of the numbers of troops lost as part of the operation, and the difficult of piloting gliders to a specific spot. The biggest problem for the Marqui was their almost complete lack of heavy weapons. Air dropping artillery and the attendant ammunition was impossible in 1944, but the air drop operation did include at least 14 British 3" mortars and somewhere between 2 and 5 4.2" mortars, along with at least 150 bombs for each mortar. These should have provided enough mortars to stop or significantly delay the German advance up the Massif. Unfortunately, all those containers, dropped from one B-17, landed among the Germans, who retrieved them and turned the mortars against the Marquis and the civilians in the villages on the plateau. On such events does the turn of many a battle come.
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  22.  @shaku2182  Maybe, but it kept working for eight hours.
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  23. Don't know but, according to him, a crate of the first M-2's were delivered to his unit sometime in early August, 1944. He was able to get one, and used to all the way up to VE Day. I know they were used during WWII, mostly in the Pacific, but his story was that some got to delivered to Europe in hopes of getting some testing in winter conditions. He passed on in 2007 so all I have left is the memories of what he told me.
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  24. Quite a modern looking rifle for 1899.
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  25. Tank you for the subtitles. Max speaks better English than I speak Russian, but his Russian accent still makes it difficult for me to keep up at times without help.
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  26. Yesterday has become today!
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  27.  @puppetguy8726  Not at all. Look up Sanborn Fire Maps. Even back in 1895, they detailed all the fire protection available, both in and around industrial buildings. You couldn't get and keep insurance unless you complied with the local and national fire prevention laws, plus the requirements of the insurance companies. A lot of insurance companies had their own fire overhaul departments that sent trucks to the scene of any major insured fire to preserve, to the extent possible, the interior and contents from water damage. Many plants installed their own cisterns and fire hydrant systems. Most insurance only paid for the actual structural loss, not for the inventory or business interruption. Fires were a major cause of businesses failing back then. Any place that handled gunpowder or other explosives had a lot of rules they had to comply with. I think we have this idea that turn of the century America was kind of a Wild West when it came to fire prevention rules. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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  28.  @Agentcoolguy1  It sounded to me like he thought some of these might have been carried as normal sidearms.
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  29. "Unintentional" two and three round burst. Right.
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  30. Problem: Watermelons cost $1.5 and we're selling them for $1.00 Solution: Get a bigger truck to deliver more watermelons This has never been the road to business success.
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  31. Considering the original spec was for a weapon with a service life of one year, the old M3's have done pretty well for themselves. I was in Belize in 1998 hiking in the jungle near the Guatemala border when we ran across a Belizean army patrol. They took a break for a while and, after swapping smokes, they let me take a look at what they were carrying, It was a six man patrol, and three of them were carrying original M16A1 rifles, one was carrying an M3A1, one was carrying a Sten, and the last had an M14. Talk about ammo logistics problems.
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  32.  @GlamStacheessnostalgialounge  Assuming Ian has misspelled the name and it's really Schlegelmilch, buttermilk is a good name for a rifle, just like Buttermilk was a good name for Dale Evan's horse.
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  33. Cleavage and machine guns. The thirsty will be emerging from the woodwork.
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  34. Most of the sniper rifles used in the Falklands War were the L42A1's, but these were conversions of the L1A1 with a new, heavier barrel and firing the 7.62 NATO cartridge. All the wood forward of the barrel band was removed to lighten the rifle and a few more detail changes, like a new magazine suitable for 7.62 were added. These weren't quite the rifles of the Mark 1 (T) in the video, but they still used a lot of the original parts. Some were still being used by the SAS during the first Gulf War. Quite a life span for one basic rifle.
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  35. I've never found Steve to be creepy. He and Ian are doing two different but somewhat related things. Ian, who I believe is a mechanical engineer, is taking apart old guns and showing us how they are made and how they work. That's a very mechanical thing, as it should be. Steve is taking apart old food and trying to give his audience an idea of how it was made, how it looks and feels, and how it tastes. That's a much more subjective thing than showing us a firing pin. Steve gets much more excited when he finds a rare ration or is able to eat a 65 year old ration that's still good. Ian is a cool, methodical engineer. I enjoy both of them, and I'd bet they'd get along great in person.
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  36.  @Taistelukalkkuna  I know. I should have kept chewing on the old man's leg until he coughed up the forty-nine bucks! RIP Dad.
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  37. First a new book and now mag dumps from 5.56 and 7.62 machine guns. You won't have very many more better days in the rest of your life, Ian. Enjoy it.
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  38. The EM-2 weighs 7.7 pounds. The M-16 weighs 7.17 pounds. Not enough weight difference to prompt such an ignorant vulgarity. If the EM-2 adopted plastic furniture the weight would have been nearly identical, or maybe a little less.
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  39. According to Rock Island, this rifle uses a standard M-14 magazine. Is this incorrect? It would be kind of downer to spend $25,000 to $40,000 plus fees to end up with a machine gun you can't fire because it uses a magazine that's unavailable.
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  40. I have a Ruger 10-22 with a serial number of 40000. Mine must be worth...uhh...I don't now, maybe $300?
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  41. I remember seeing an ad for this in (I think) American Rifleman when I was about 13, so that would make it 1959. The entire outfit, including all the spare parts, accessories, cleaning tools, about eight wood cases full of stuff was, as Ian said, something like $189. Ammo was around a buck a round, although I remember you could get it down to about fifty cents is you bought fifty rounds. I pestered the Old Man about the Solothurn for months but he wouldn't spring for it. Looking back, I can't blame him. He was an industrial engineer and was making something like $800 a month so the idea of spending $189 on something as wildly impracticable as a 20 mm cannon was out of the question. The good thing was he did buy me an M-1 Garand from the OCM program for $20 just to shut me up.
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  42. The Dutch East Indies had a separate government and purchasing arm from the mother country. They were ordering non-standard equipment compared to the Dutch Armed Forces all the way back to 1938, including aircraft, guns, and even tanks. While they were naturally concerned with the Netherlands falling to the Germans, it had no effect in the Dutch East Indies, who were preparing to fight it out on their own against all comers.
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  43.  @johnanon6938  Actually, you're right. My dad was pro guns and my mom hated them, so getting any kind of gun before I moved out at 19 was always a battle. Once I moved out, that changed real fast!
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  44. Well, Rats! I'm just finally getting ready to lay down and a Forgotten Weapons video shows up. That will be another six minutes and thirty-five seconds lost sleep today.
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  45.  @nirfz  There were certainly individuals who stole, mostly for their own use. That hasn't changed since then. What I'm saying is there was no organized black market for stolen firearms. The first reason was almost no one wanted to buy a current production gun marked for the USN. That was a big time crime in 1895 and, unlike today, people actually did go to prison for it. Secondly, as Ian said, you could buy almost the exact same rifle by going into any place that sold guns and saying "Give me that". No ID or background checks, just the cash and maybe your signature. Hell, you could send your order off to Francis Bannerman for field artillery and Gatling guns and get them by return freight. Black markets only exist when there's an artificial scarcity of a good. There was no scarcity of firearms in 1895.
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  46. While two battleships were ordered by the Ottoman Empire, only one of the seized vessels, Reşadiye, was from that order. Fatih Sultan Mehmed, the second ship, wasn't even ordered until April, 1914, and laid down in June, just before the outbreak of war, so there was no chance it would even have been delivered. The second ship was the Brazilian Rio de Janeiro, sold to Ottomans in 1913 and renamed Sultan Osman I. She was just finishing sea trials and was ready to be turned over to a Turkish crew when Churchill decided to seize both Turkish vessels. This almost led to open warfare on the docks of Newcastle, as the Turkish captain and 500 crewman threatened to take the ship by force. Churchill ordered the ship held by force if necessary, and it was only the Turkish lack of arms that allowed a negotiated settlement. The Sultan Osman I was renamed Agincourt and added to the Royal Navy. She was an impressive looking ship, which is what the Brazilians wanted. Her seven 12" twin turrets had the most main battery turrets of any dreadnought, and the twenty 6" guns of her secondary battery were the heaviest of any dreadnought ever built. The seizure of these ships, especially since they were both paid in full, caused an uproar in Turkey, and was one of the events that saw the Ottoman Empire declaring war on the side of the Germans.
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  47. Maybe to arm Vopo's with a semiautomatic rifle that was easier to carry and less menacing looking than an AK?
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  48. I'd love to go but since i'd be traveling by myself, $3375 plus a $580 supplement for a single room on a seven day tour is completely out of my price range. Dinner is only included on the first night. Breakfast I'm sure are the typical continental breakfasts included with the hotel charge. There's no mention of the star rating of hotels, just "first class accommodations". That can mean a wide range of things in Europe. Most tours will say something like two or three star hotels so you have a better idea of what to expect. Mycost would be $565 a day not including lunch or dinner. That will easily be another $25 euros per day in any kind of decent neighborhood restaurants, and a lot more in tourist places. I'd have to add air fare from the US to Brussels and then back from Paris. There's an 11 day tour at the end of June covering many of the same points but with two days in Paris and more time at some of the battlefields. It's all inclusive at four star hotels, unlimited non-alcoholic drinks on busses and at meals with a glass of beer or wine at lunch and dinner. The cost is $5,250, or $480 day. The minimum cost for your tour with meals is $507. Even the single room supplement is $52 a day on the 11 day compared to $82 for your tour, and September is the low season in Europe. I'm retired on a mostly fixed income. I'd really like to go, get to meet you, and hear your narration, but the cost is just too high for what's essentially a budget tour.
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  49. It's difficult to imagine that any military would want a rifle that was loaded with single cartridges when stripper clips were so well establish in major militaries. Certainly a nice sporterized appearing gun.
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  50. All the banging, whistling, talking, and crashing in the background made it hard to understand the Swedish guy at times. From what I could understand, I'm sure glad I don't live in Sweden, and the gun bureaucracy is just one reason.
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