[ Argentine Maxim ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
with an Argentine brass-jacketed Maxim gun.
This thing is seriously cool.
This is one of the fantastic examples of a very early
Maxim gun that's actually, relatively speaking,
available in the United States to collectors.
So let's do a little bit of background on Maxim first.
Of course Hiram Maxim invents the modern machine gun.
He's the first guy to make a feasible, functional and commercially successful
self-loading self-firing automatic gun. And it's essentially this.
Now he spends the mid-1880s getting his design right.
... What he calls his first "perfected" guns, he sends two of them
to Enfield in England for testing by the British military in 1887.
And this is just on the cusp of the invention of smokeless powder.
Maxim's early guns were in fact black-powder guns,
they were all chambered for the ... early 11mm rifle cartridges.
He can essentially build these things in any cartridge that you want.
His early ones for the British were in .577/450 Martini-Henry, believe it or not. Massive things.
And ... black powder was a real concern for Maxim.
He did manage to get the guns to work reliably with black powder cartridges,
which was quite a feat, that's the thing that had really defeated
all prior self-loading firearms designs was dealing with all the powder fouling.
And he did that largely by having a recoil-based action, so he wasn't trying to trap gases anywhere.
And thus didn't have to deal with the powder fouling
from black powder as much as other mechanisms might have to.
He did have a big issue with black powder smoke obscuring the battlefield
and making it difficult to see where you are going to fire with this thing.
These ... are 5-600 round per minute guns,
you can imagine how much black-powder smoke that puts out.
Anyway, right about the time Maxim starts successfully testing this gun,
smokeless powder is starting to reach all of the major military countries
in Europe, and by extension in the world.
And Maxim is able to quickly tweak his gun for modern smokeless-powder small-bore cartridges.
So now we are talking the 7 to 8mm cartridges that countries are starting to adopt and use.
And that's essentially the stage of development that we have here.
This is an 1889 pattern of lock in this pattern of gun.
It's interesting, Maxim had to do a number of things to adapt his design from black powder to smokeless.
He actually had to make the water jackets bigger because, despite being a smaller bore diameter,
smokeless powder actually has substantially more energy contained in it,
and it generates more heat. And he actually needed more water
to keep the guns cool effectively than he'd had with previous black powder designs.
He also had to redesign some of the recoiling mechanism
so that it would better handle the different burn rates
and basically pressure impulse of smokeless powder compared to the earlier black powder.
So you put all of those changes together and you get essentially this gun.
It's basically where the Maxim gun really hits its stride in worldwide military trials.
It's not the black-powder gun competing against modern smokeless cartridges,
it's now a smokeless cartridge Maxim, 1889 pattern lock.
... You'll see it in a moment when we flip the gun around,
the early crank handle and recoil mechanism design.
All of these magnificent cast brass parts which are just so cool to see.
This is the epitome of a steampunk machine gun, because it actually comes
from the era of steam power, largely. It's so cool.
Anyway, Argentina is an early adopter of the Maxim gun.
A lot of countries in South America actually bought the Hotchkiss.
There were only a couple that bought Maxims, Argentina was
one of them, they would ultimately buy 200 guns.
The first batch from Maxim Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition Company Limited,
and the second and third batches from DWM, Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken.
And what's really cool about these is they give us
... an example of this very first early pattern of Maxim gun.
Now Maxims were constantly evolving in their small details,
and generally speaking every country's guns are just a little bit different
because he's always tweaking and improving the design.
So it's not like there's a standard 1889 pattern, there isn't.
But this is a perfect exemplar of the very first generation
of Maxim guns that were actually commercially successful.
So a little bit of history on the Argentine guns in particular.
Of course when they purchased them they were using the Model 1891 cartridge.
It was a round nosed bullet, a big heavy bullet, round nosed.
And in 1909 Argentina adopted a spitzer bullet, so lighter bullet, shorter, pointed, higher velocity.
So they sent all of their guns back to DWM,
even the ones they bought from Maxim Nordenfelt, to have them reworked.
They had them re-chambered for the new cartridge,
they had the sights rebuilt for the new cartridge, and they had a couple of other things done.
First off, problems with the gun were repaired, you'll sometimes find
original Maxim Nordenfelt Argentine guns
that have DWM replacement parts in them, that's from this overhaul.
They added scope mount brackets to them for a 2x power, I think it was a Zeiss optic.
At any rate, DWM overhauled the guns and then sent them back all new.
We'll take a look at some of the markings in just a moment.
... They would stay in Argentine military service until 1929.
They were then handed over to the police and replaced with more modern military arms.
The police kept them until the late 1950s and then got rid of them.
And what's really cool is in 1960 Sam Cummings,
our favourite international arms dealer, responsible for getting
all sorts of cool stuff onto the American collector market,
he managed to buy 91 of these guns from Argentina, brought them into the US.
Of those 8 were re-exported, 28 I believe of them went to various government
agencies, organisations, museums, displays, that sort of thing.
And the remaining 55 went onto the collector's market.
So there are actually a remarkable number of
these Argentine brass-jacket Maxims in the US on the collector market.
Which is awesome because they are such a cool historical example
of the very dawn of successful functioning machine guns.
So let's take a closer look at some of the details of this thing.
This is gun number 64 of Argentina's 120.
So this is one of the first ones purchased in the 1898 contract.
This is not a model designation, this is a contract year.
Still marked "Maxim's patent", and then the manufacturer is marked around the outside,
Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken, Berlin.
The Maxim Nordenfelt ones have "Maxim Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition Co. Ltd." around the outside.
The cartridge plate here on the top of the gun,
Originally this said 1891 to identify the cartridge,
that has been milled out and re-stamped 1909 because it was rebuilt.
And all of the ones in the country are marked like this, there are no unmodified ones
because Argentina sent literally all of its guns to DWM to be rebuilt.
Now this thing's kind of cool.
That's originally the spot where the rear sight sat, so that was the top end of the rear sight.
Now if we zoom out here, this is the new rear sight and it's graduated up to 2,000 metres.
The original sights were 2,000 metres, and they came all the way out to here.
And that should give you some idea of the difference in trajectory that you get between
a heavy, round-nosed, low-velocity bullet and a shorter, lighter, spitzer, high-velocity bullet.
So again, you can see the little DWM mark.
The sights were rebuilt by DWM to fit the new cartridge.
Alright, let's take a quick look inside the Maxim gun. If you're not familiar with how these work,
well it's actually a toggle action - think a Luger, but huge, water cooled, and made half out of brass.
The toggle joint itself is right here.
So ... this crank handle is connected to this element of the toggle link.
... By the way, this is the bolt, this is your feed tray, the chamber is right up here.
When you fire the whole internal mechanism cycles backward under recoil, like so.
As it does, this part of the crank handle is going to impact this block,
which is solidly mounted on the outside of the receiver.
And notice the difference in curvature down here.
So I'm going to go push on the barrel, simulating recoil of the gun. You can see what happens there.
The two curvatures on these two parts interact
to push this crank handle up, which breaks the toggle joint inside.
And it does this with enough energy that the bolt cycles all the way back like this.
You can see the extractor drop right here. It's then going to go forward.
The next cartridge will be accessible right here from the belt.
As it goes forward it's going to grab the next cartridge.
The extractor rises up, the lock re-cocks itself and it's ready to fire.
The firing trigger is located back here, it's this guy under my thumbs.
It does have a safety on it, notice it says
When I flip this up it now says
And now when I push the trigger forward you can hear it click, and it has just fired.
Cycle the action, and dry fire it again.
When I do press the trigger, what I'm doing
is pulling that bar in the bottom of the receiver backwards.
Now we are at the front end of the receiver, I'm holding the bolt open
so you can see that trigger bar again, and right there is a little lip that's going to pull the sear back.
It's pretty easy to take the lock out of a Maxim gun, all you have to do
is open the crank handle up, pull it all the way back.
And then we can just lift this up.
And then there is an interrupted thread right here on the back
and I can pull this whole mechanism out of the gun.
So this is the extractor, that's obviously where it's going to fire.
It's going to pull a cartridge off of the belt here, push it down to here where it fires.
And then push it down once again (after it's fired, when it's empty)
down here where it gets ejected out of the bottom of the gun.
Now when the lock is cocked, this is the trigger.
So when I pull this back, you're going to see this snap up.
(If I can hold this all in place without snapping my finger in it.)
There we go, that has fired.
And you can see how this tab sticks down in the bottom of the receiver
to be actuated by the thumb trigger.
So that's the basic action going on inside a Maxim gun.
Now distinctive elements of these early pattern guns,
obviously the first bit is all of the brass.
Brass early on was something that was easier to cast than steel, and that's why it was used.
(By the way, we have oilers in the grip handles which is kind of cool.)
Anyway, it wouldn't be that long before steel replaced brass for all the castings
just for the sake of strength, and material cost, and construction efficiency.
The design of this system right here would be simplified quite a bit as well.
So notice we even have this extra tab up here, ... it's a buffer for the crank candle here
to ensure that it doesn't over travel and break anything.
This system gets simplified quite a lot in future versions of the gun.
We also have this guy, like how cool is that?
There's actually like a walnut wooden roller as part of the feed system.
So ... the whole feed tray would get much simplified over time.
But what we have right now is a brass casting.
It's got a steel reinforcement here. In fact this was something that was added
by DWM during the retrofit because the cartridge overall length
gets shorter with the spitzer 1909 cartridge.
But they kept this wooden roller that's in there just to
essentially reduce friction of the belt coming into the gun.
... In fact the only piece of wood on this entire gun is that feedway roller.
You want to talk about old school? There is actually a leather seat
on the tripod where the gunner sits.
And this looks kind of rough, but this is actually in amazingly good shape.
That's the original leather from when this thing was made in 1898,
so that's fantastically well preserved.
People often ask how the steam recirculates back into water
on a Maxim gun, and the answer is - it doesn't.
So this jacket is full of water and the barrel is located in the bottom.
You can see it's down at the bottom there.
So, as long as there's water in the jacket,
(and by the way, ... this is the fill plug, so you open it up
there was originally an ... expensive little brass funnel that came with these
so that you could fill the water jacket up),
and then as long as there's water in the jacket, no matter how much you shoot
the water will not get to be more than 212 Fahrenheit or 100 degrees Celsius.
Because once the water is at its boiling point, any additional energy that comes into it
instead of raising the temperature it ... changes some of the water into steam.
There is a steam vent on the other side ... and that's it, right there.
So you would attach a steam hose here.
And the newly vapourised steam comes out of this port, down your hose, and into a ... condensing can.
You put a little bit of water in the bottom of the can, and you put this hose under the level of the water.
And then when steam comes in, the liquid water cools it enough
to re-condense it back into more liquid water.
Now you can leave the hose off of here, if you don't have one on
and you get the water in the jacket boiling, you will just get a cloud of steam
coming out of this vent and going up and telling everybody where you are.
Which if you're training, no big deal. If you are actually in combat, could be a pretty big deal.
Anyway, eventually if you shoot enough, you will in fact boil all the water out of the jacket.
And once the barrel is no longer in contact with water,
additional energy dumped into the barrel will just raise its temperature.
So once you are out of water, you can see this barrel is actually pretty thin,
and this gun will overheat pretty quickly once there's no water in it.
So what's the solution? Well, you go back to your fill port,
yep, that fill plug right there. You unscrew that and pour all the water back into it.
That's your recirculating system, essentially
it's one of the crew members manually recirculating the water.
There were experiments done on mechanical
recirculating systems, especially with vehicular mounted guns.
But they were just never really worthwhile, they were too complex, too likely to break down,
and you know it's not that big a deal to just refill the thing manually.
One other element that's kind of unique to the Maxim gun, and we see this because
it's an early developmental thing that eventually would be simplified
and basically automated for the user, is the fusee spring cover.
So if I push this forward and lift it off, that is the main spring of the gun.
And it's sitting here on the outside and I can actually adjust how tight it is.
This gauge right here tells me how much tension I've put on the fusee spring.
It's called a fusee spring instead of a main spring just because of anacronicity basically.
Interestingly the Argentines actually put a little data plate on each gun
designating what the tension needed to be.
So this one needs to be between 25 and 40mm of tension (gun number 64).
Well, this one is currently sitting at like 13mm, which means there's not nearly enough spring tension.
And it means the gun probably won't go back into battery successfully
if I try to start shooting it, ... essentially it's going to short stroke.
So what I do is use this little crank at the front of the fusee spring cover
to tighten the system up, and essentially I'm just pre-stretching the spring a bit more.
So we'll do this a little bit.
There we go, now we are at 20. I would want to keep going a little higher,
I'd want to be in that range designated for the gun.
This will also affect the rate of fire.
So once we have it in a range where it will effectively reliably operate,
the higher the tension is, the faster the bolt will come back into battery, and the higher the rate of fire.
And some people think that this is just a rate of fire adjustment, because that's the practical impact.
If you don't know what's going on, what you see is the ... tighter I crank it up, the faster the gun runs.
Well, the problem is if you run it too high the gun will actually start battering itself.
If you have too much tension (or too little on the main spring frankly, either way),
you'll start damaging components either when the gun goes into battery
or when it slams into the back of the receiver on the unlocking stroke.
So ... yes, this does change the rate of fire, but that's not its purpose.
That's a secondary effect of what you are really trying to do,
which is set the main spring so that the gun will run reliably and safely.
And if you do this right, Maxim guns will run for
tens and tens and tens of thousands of rounds without a problem.
Alright, I don't think there's a whole lot else we need to go over here.
I will point out the adjustments on the tripod here,
this is the original tripod that came with the Argentine Maxims.
The screw here adjusts the gun elevation up and down.
We've got a little track right here, also up here,
that will allow me to move the gun left to right.
This little pad is (ah, it doesn't want to come loose)
the idea of these two little pads is that you can move them on the windage track to set limits to the gun.
So if you have a specific field of fire, you can set that field of fire up when you put the tripod in place.
And then guys can just swing the gun left to right and not have to worry
about exceeding their given zone of fire.
Anyway, that's how the tripod works. And I think that's about it.
It really doesn't get any more steampunk than this, a big thanks to Morphy's
for giving me access to this to film for you guys.
Hopefully you enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.