#MachineGuns

After the Wednesday round of the 2016 SHOT Show, I sat down for an evening of quiet work, to finish up a few articles I had from the day’s show-trekking. Less than an hour later, I was standing in a crowd at Battlefield Vegas, watching a Chieftain tank crush a sedan.

At the Barrett display, the company had one of their experimental M240 Light Weight machine guns on display. The action and operating mechanism is the exact same as the FN Herstal 240 used around the world, however they’ve incorporated a number of features to make it shorter and lighter. The first being the receiver body with a number of cuts in it to reduce the overall weight. This consists of mainly cutting out a number of sections of the sides, while leaving various ribs to maintain strength. Then they have designed a new buttstock for the machine gun, similar to the new M240 buttstocks coming out in the military, this one has a hydraulic buffer, and is telescoping. They have a fluted barrel as well. The bipods are the M60 pattern bipods that fold out individually, while telescoping with teeth on the bottom of them. The handguard uses Keymod mounting at the 3, 6, 9 o’clock, while having a ribbed bit on the sides to help with maintaining a solid grip on the machine gun while carrying it.

The owner of Battlefield Las Vegas has yet again graced us with another high round count report, but this time purely on Optics that the range has on their rental firearms. When they say high round count, they really mean it! The range apparently went through 500,000 rounds of ammunition last month alone. Poor guys had to use their personal optics on rental guns when they initially started out, and needless to say, all their lower quality brands were pretty much done by the first three weeks of operations.

Courtesy of The AK Guy, this image has been making its way around the internet. It is an experimental 5.45x39mm drum contraption that takes a belt of 5.45x39mm rounds and allows them to work in a standard AK74 receiver without any modification to the actual rifle or RPK74. It does this by using the motion of the charging handle going back and forth to cycle the rounds in the metallic belt, pushing the links out, and somehow feeding the rounds into the rifle to be chambered and fired. The first problem I would assume this would have is that there aren’t any 5.45x39mm belt systems that have been used reliably, but then I started looking into it, and the Soviets did experiment with two 5.45x39mm light machine guns that took belts. These were the PU 2, and PU 21 designs. The PU 2 was based on a modified RPK design, that took some elements from the PK machine gun. The PU 21 was a scaled down version of the PK machine gun and designed to fire the 5.45x39mm cartridge. Both of them could take belts in addition to AK74 magazines, similar to how the M249 SAW was originally envisioned. Needless to say, none of the concepts talked about were actually put to use in any large numbers and didn’t go past the experimental stage.

There are odd guns out there, and then there is this. A listing on Gunbroker that just ended consisted of six SKS rifles with 75 round drums arranged in some sort of odd Gatling mechanism. The listing was started at $3,500 and I don’t think anyone bid on it at all (it was viewed 341 times). Either way, this tops some of the oddest combinations of machines and firearms I’ve seen. From the auction description-

I was originally alerted to the idea of this post by the recent posting of pictures from a parade in Pyongyang in which troops were shown goose stepping with bayonet affixed Model 91/30 rifles and thought to myself, just how bizarre looking it appeared in the modern age, with a comparatively modern army. Then I started looking at more pictures of North Korean parades, and they must either be getting tired of looking at AKs, or have some sort of a need to display everything in their museum armory, because everything from M3 Grease Guns to PPSH41s are on display in some sort of fashion. In addition to all their modern stuff! The whole thing reminds me of a time myself and my uncle visited a military museum in Rangoon, where the front guard had an M2 Carbine and was standing post. My uncle inquired about whether or not the poor guy should put it back in the museum.

Something that every Marine Infantryman has pounded into his head at SOI is the Five Point Safety Check while clearing his open bolt weapon systems (SAW, M240). The purpose behind the check is to ensure the feed pawls are in working order and to clear out the various depressions in the weapon system for a shell, link, or live round that might have somehow gotten stuck and thus made operation of the machine gun impossible due to the stoppage. However, one of the most important parts of this process is for the shooter to keep his head down, top of his kevlar helmet facing towards the chamber. This is in case a live round “cooks off” and blows out the chamber and in the gunners direction.

Now, what you think you saw in the title picture was an MG42 and a British Bren light machine gun. However, what you are actually lovingly gazing at, are .22 LR rifles inserted into the parts kit of those guns, and indeed, are fully functional with their .22 LR magazines  and actions (no belts here). The creator of these freakish things of beauty has another thirty or so conversions just like it, and just as similar to their true life counterparts. I stumbled across this gentleman on a Facebook group where he posted some pictures of his work. The guy lives in California, and as a way to buck against the absurd firearms laws, as a hobby, and as a present to his son (he started building them when his son was born), took it upon himself to buy either actual demilled parts kits, or the airsoft shooters modeled after iconic firearms, get either Marlin or 10/22 .22 LR rifles, completely gut out the internals, place the .22 LR receivers/barrels within the actions, and have them in working order. He has done this to an MG34, MG42, Bren, Tavor, H&K UMP, M240, M249, BAR, M14 EBR, and the list just goes on. From his own words-

At this years MSPO (Miedzynarodowy Salon Przemyslu Obronnego), a large defense exposition in Poland, an upgraded PKM was unveiled to the public. The UKM 2000P is a 7.62x51mm upgrade that will be replacing the Soviet era 7.62x54R mm PKMs currently in service with the Polish Armed Forces. The article from Jane’s mostly concentrates on the specs and figures, but this is a little background on the machine gun and history. The company producing the weapon system is  Zaklady Mechaniczne Tarnow (Mechanical Plant, Tarnow), a Polish company that originally started in the railway business in 1917, being briefly interrupted by World War Two and currently producing mostly air defense, containers and industry level services for the Polish Armed Forces. Small arms seem to be a minor facet of the company, however they do have some odd designs, such as the Alex Tactical Sport Training and Training rifle, for the civilian market. Regardless, the UKM series of machine guns came about as Poland’s program into modernizing the PKM for standardization among NATO. There are a number of variants as put forth by the factory page–

Jane’s has a report out about a second batch of Beryl M762 rifles being purchased by the Nigerian Armed Forces. This isn’t the first international export of the rifle, among other countries that Beryl has sold or donated to are Afghanistan and Lithuania. This random transaction most definitely has to do with Nigerian Special Operations forces in their fight against Boko Haram, and not alot to do with their overall military of 80,000 active duty troops. The total would bring it up to 1,500 rifles, and that would make sense numbers wise to equip a battalion of troops. In addition, there really doesn’t seem a need for a short barreled rifle or carbine in the open terrain of Nigeria, another unique requirement of a Special Operations unit. And in fact, such a force already exists and has been photographed with the earlier shipment of rifles. They’re called the 72 Mobile Strike Force, and SOFREP has a pretty good collection of open source information on them.

Trevor Weston sends us more information on obscure Italian prototypes, this time two general purpose machine guns design by Breda. Trevor’s contact Vic Tuff writes:

This is a pretty cool video showing off Philippines Special Forces. I didn’t know they had Special Forces. Looks like they use US weapons. M16s, M4s, and M249s. I like the dramatic style and cinematography of the commercial. Also Tiger camo is cool.

The period from 1945-1970 did not represent the figurative finest hour in US small arms design. From the problematic M60, to too little too late M14, to the disastrous initial fielding of the M16, US small arms design during the time seemed to simultaneously reach to far and grasp too little. One family of firearms that was a product of this period of development was a short-action armored fighting vehicle secondary machine gun design, incarnated in the M73 7.62mm and M85 .50 caliber, and later M219 7.62mm types. (EDIT: I don’t really think the M85 should be thrown in there, as it’s a substantially different design, though it shares some features with the M73 and M219. Mea culpa.)

A TFB reader sent these into us about West Point professor Arthur Alphin making firearms development and history videos for his classes, using his own firearms, and those from the West Point Museum. We’re so used to seeing videos explaining cycles of operation using graphics and various 3D techniques today, it’s easy to forget that there was a time when all people had were a low quality video camera and their own imagination about how to demonstrate various principles. They are available over at Documentary Tube and the West Point Department of History Youtube channels.

These pictures and video were published on War History Online in two separate articles over the course of the past six months. The images and video are absolutely astounding. It seems that a duo of treasure hunters or artifact seekers, using commercial metal detectors have an excellent grasp of the battles on the World War Two Eastern front, and use that knowledge to discover all kinds of stuff still laying around. Some of it is still visible at ground level, while most of it is just barely covered with soil. You see one of them scrapping out an STG44, barely a couple inches below the surface, and in another clip a PPSH41 and an MG34 spare barrel. They certainly have the history knowledge down, but I hope they know a thing or two about high explosives, as they very foolishly/bravely are yanking out mortar ends and other ordnance out of the ground.