Comments by "" (@neutronalchemist3241) on "The awful Scotti Lee Enfield that isn't a Lee Enfield at all. With firearms expert Christian Wellard" video.

Scotti didnt' have a factory. He was only an inventor. His designs were sold to other people to be manufactured. In Italy, IE, it was Isotta Fraschini that manufactured his automatic weapons while the Scotti Model X, had it been adopted, would have been made by state arsenals. Had this conversion worked, Scotti would have sold the licence to make it in the UK.
4
Thanks for sharing. I'm a fan of the Scotti action, and didn't even know that rifle ever existed. However, Scotti didnt' have a factory. He was only an inventor. His designs were sold to other people to be manufactured. In Italy, IE, it was Isotta Fraschini that manufactured his automatic weapons while the Scotti Model X, had it been adopted, would have been made by state arsenals.
4
Italy entred WWII only in june 1940. Until then, it was even bargaining to sell Reggiane Re. 2000 fighters to UK. Isotta Fraschini sold 20mm Scotti Auto Cannons to Nederlands right before the start of the war, and the last ones had been delivered on May 14 1940, when the Germans had already passed the border.
3
It only requires a spring loaded, L-shaped, striker, and the sear catching the short end of the L of the striker instead of the bolt. Mind that Italy used .303 British for aerial MGs (it was what the Italians called 7.7mm) and Scotti MGs in that caliber had been made for years at that point.
2
He surely did, but he had a single sample. There are limits to how much you can test a single rifle. If you fire 500 rounds, ship the weapon, and it breaks at 501, there is little you can do. Also the tests in Italy had been surely made using Italian 7.7mm cartridges (used in Italy as aviation ammo for the Breda SAFAT 7.7mm MG). Those are nominally identical to the .303 British, but what if there was some minimal difference? The Italian ones were surely not charged with cordite IE. Really, a hold open lever and an extractor (not to say a standard pattern 14 foreguard. That too having been broken in tests and not replaced is quite revealing) are quite minor damages, and any Army arsenal could have replaced them to keep on testing. It seems they were not particularly fond to work on it.
1
Infact, it doesn't seem to be anything inherent to the action that doesn't work. And I find quite strange the remark about the rifle being difficult to field strip. The Scotti action is practically the simplest gas action possible (infact I would gladly see a modern Scotti action GPMG), and in Ian's video on the Model X you can see how easy it is to field strip. Had it been an idea of a British arsenal, they would have probably worked on it, changing the dimensions of the broken parts, until they worked, but it was not. It was a design they would eventually have to purchase from the inventor (Scotti, like Browning, didn't have a factory, he was a designer that sold his designs to others). They didn't have the tooling to work on it, so they didn't even try.
1
You can see, on the channel "forgotten weapons", the disassembly of a Model X, that uses the same system. This model is different in that it fires from a closed bolt. a quite minor modification.
1
This one had a closed bolt action. It's really easy to convert an open bolt action to a closed bolt one. The original Springfield 1903 had the rear sight even further ahead than in this rifle. It depends from the kind of sight. "V notch" sights have to be placed at a certain distance from the of the shooter. Aperture sights have to be placed very close to it.
1
Garand action is VERY expensive to make from scratch and, in 1939, when it stil used the gas trap action, it was not that great also. the Scotti action is way simpler.
1