Buongiorno.
Fortunately there aren't too many Italian phrases in today's video, because
I speak third-best Italian.
Thanks for tuning into another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look at a very cool,
very rare, World War One heavy machine gun.
This is a FIAT-Revelli Modelo of 1914.
And this was the Italian standard heavy machine gun throughout the Great War.
Now, it's interesting that Italy was actually the very first country to formally adopt the Maxim gun.
They started buying Maxims in 1887, right at the very earliest beginnings of the Maxim.
And ultimately they would end up buying a couple of hundred of the 1901 pattern Maxim guns.
And that may not sound like a lot, but that's a lot of Maxim guns
by the standards of pre-World War One Europe.
However, despite having a lot of Maxims, they decided
that they still wanted to encourage domestic machine gun development.
They really wanted to have an Italian machine gun to work with.
And they probably thought they could do better than Maxim.
They didn't, but...
The gun that the Italian military was pushing along, was helping, was supporting, was the Perino.
And unfortunately for the Italians they kept the Perino machine gun top secret.
It was water cooled, it used a feed strip.
Kind of like one of the later Breda guns, it would actually
after it fired it would put the empty case back in the feed strip,
and then spit the whole thing out when it was done.
At any rate, the Perino was kept so top secret that
they were never able to really do any good comparative trials with it.
They were never able to, think of it as open source,
they didn't have the ability to open source development on the Perino.
And so it just never got very good.
When World War One broke out they had this problem of
the Perino wasn't really a suitable machine gun.
But now they were unable to buy anything off the commercial market
because everyone who was making machine guns was busy supplying them to themselves.
Or to some other foreign power that was actively in the war
and wanted a ton of machine guns.
Remember, Italy wasn't in the war at the very beginning.
So they turned to Captain Bethel Revelli.
Now, ... Revelli had previously designed the Glisenti Model 1910 pistol.
He actually designed that back in 1906, it would take a few years to be adopted.
He was a known quantity to the Italian military.
And in 1908 he had patented the mechanism in this machine gun.
This is a delayed blowback system.
Revelli did the development himself, he worked with the FIAT company,
which is "Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino".
Torino!
Sorry, that the best I can do for Italian.
He worked with FIAT to build his prototypes,
he did the design, they did the manufacture.
And when the war broke out in 1914 the Italian government went,
"We need a machine gun. Where are we ... well, there's that one."
And so ... they adopted this relatively quickly, and FIAT put it into mass production.
So before we take a closer look at this,
I want to talk about a couple of its kind of quirky features first.
And one of them is the water jacket. So there's a common misperception
that all of these water-cooled heavy machine guns circulate water.
That is, you've got water in here, and when you shoot it gets hot, and it boils,
and it goes through a tube into a condensing tank.
And then it comes out of the tank once it's re-condensed,
comes back into the water jacket.
Like, people expect that's what happens. That's not what happens.
In fact, the only machine gun that's set up to do that is the FIAT-Revelli.
So there are two hose connections here at the back of the water jacket.
You of course fill it up with water here on the top.
The rear hose connection is in fact a steam valve.
So when ... the barrel gets hot enough to boil water in the jacket, it turns into steam.
That transition into steam, into a gaseous nature, uses thermal energy,
which prevents the temperature of the barrel from rising, that's how the water cooling works.
And the steam is able to vent out this connection, it goes down a hose into a condensing can.
Now, the condensing can actually has a little hand-cranked pump on it,
and the front hose here is a one-way valve that allows water to be pumped
from the condensing can back up into the water jacket.
That's a cool feature that none of the other heavy machine guns of World War One,
and by extension, none of the other water-cooled heavy machine guns ever,
none of them did that. That's cool.
The other really funky thing about this is its magazine.
This thing, this is a 50 round like mouse-trap magazine.
And instead of using a belt, or a strip, or a box, Revelli designed this thing himself,
possibly under the influence of something.
... There's 10 single-stacked magazines that each hold 5 rounds.
And what happens is this will fire one stack of cartridges,
and then it will index over one position, fire the next, index over.
And eventually once it's all empty, it spits this cube, bop, out the other side of the gun.
So, now that you know those two things, let's take a closer look at this guy.
We'll start with the crate here, because this is how those feed blocks were actually carried.
You've got a chest here that carries eight 50 round feed blocks.
They did also make a 100 round feed block. I believe this was for anti-aircraft use.
And I've been told, although I've never actually tried it myself, that there are some
reliability issues with the gun maybe not having enough power
to actually cycle this whole thing through at the start
when it's all full and all sticking out one side of the gun.
We'll take a look at the feed mechanism in a minute.
So the way this things loads, we've got a dummy cartridge here,
you just stick cartridges in each of these stacks,
and each of those followers is going to go down.
You put 5 rounds in each one (get your fingers stuck in them).
There is a loading tool, which is basically a wooden block with 5 fingers on it
that will push ... 5 of these followers down at a time.
So you push them all down and stick 5 rounds in,
and push them down again and stick 5 more, etc. etc.
Note that each one of these columns has a tab on the back.
And that tab is very important, because when that tab reaches the top
it mechanically tells the gun to index this magazine over one position.
This doesn't actually say FIAT-Revelli or Model 1914 on it anywhere.
It just has a serial number and a few production stamps there on the top of the receiver.
Looking at this guy from the top,
we have our rear sight here, which is calibrated out to 2,000 metres.
To use it, you ...
(there we go), you flip that up. And then you can adjust this slider
like so.
We'll leave that down for the moment.
We have an ejection port cover here, because this is going to eject out the top of the gun.
And it feeds from the bottom of the gun.
Feeding is done right down there.
And this goes in, bullets pointing forwards, just like that.
Now you might ask, "But what if I want to take this out?
Because it's locked in there in this ratchet system, and I can't get it out."
There is a little lever on the bottom, and if I push the button and release it
and bring it over to this side, that unlocks the little clasp
that is hooking in these serrations, and allows me to pull the magazine out.
While we are on the underside here, I'll point out these guys.
This is the main dovetail where the gun mounts onto the tripod,
and then this ... locks it in at the back.
The guns set up is really pretty unusual in that this whole space is empty inside.
This is just a hollow box, and it's there solely so that there is space
for the bolt to reciprocate back in this open area.
There's a leather pad here to buffer any potential impact of the bolt.
Because when you fire, that comes all the way back, like so.
The barrel reciprocates backward when you fire, then it unlocks,
there's a locking wedge on the inside that we'll take a look at.
Once it unlocks the bolt here, which is by the way this long,
the bolt is then free to reciprocate, and it's going to come all the way back to here,
pick up the new cartridge, and then snap forward.
We have a striker - that's right there. This fires from a closed bolt.
So ... when the gun is ready to fire you have a thumb trigger.
Push the trigger and you can actually see the sear, right there,
dropping when I push the trigger. And that's going to fire it.
We have a selector lever here on the back of the spade grips.
So this pad in the centre is your actual trigger.
Left is semi-auto, or "Lento", or slow.
Up is "Sicura", which is safe.
And over here is "Rapido", or full-auto.
You can see the sear there. When I am on full-auto
I just hold the trigger down and the sear stays down.
If I switch this to semi-auto, there's actually a semi-auto disconnector
that pops that sear back up, and will catch the striker after a single shot.
Alright, you are going to see a bit of the carpeting here, because there is
no good way to position this for disassembly otherwise.
Disassembly begins with this cross pin.
If I pull that out, it is a captive pin,
and that allows me to rotate the spade grips down.
Which now gets the end of the spade grips out of the way.
Notice that the ... trigger is just this plunger, right here.
So that goes in.
There is a transfer bar, right through here, that connects over to ... the actual sear.
With the grips out, now we can proceed.
This is a spring-loaded plunger, lift it up, pull back,
and we have an inspection plate that comes off,
and gives us this wonderful view of all of the components.
So now I can show you exactly how this whole thing works.
Basically what we have is a locking wedge, right up in here,
that has to pivot down to unlock the bolt when the barrel comes back.
And you can actually adjust how much force it takes to unlock the wedge
by adjusting this, we have plus and minus there.
This is set in the neutral middle position, so standard really.
You can see our firing sear, right here.
And the other sear next to it
is an out of battery safety.
And I know that's tricky to see, but behind this guy
(if I hold that down), you can see there is another sear.
And as soon as I start to pull the bolt back, that second sear comes up.
And its purpose is to catch the striker, and hold it back
until the bolt is all the way in battery, to prevent an out of battery detonation.
Now I said I'd talk about how the feed system works. And what we have here
is a little feed pawl, right there.
That is going to hook onto these one-way teeth on the magazine.
When the bolt cycles, that feed pawl is pulled to the right.
However, it's blocked unless you have just chambered the last round in a given stack.
Right up here, at the top of the magazine, is a little release lever.
And when this goes up, pushed up by one of the follower tabs on the magazine,
(so I'll hold that up with my finger), and then that arm is freed to pull all the way across.
That is what indexes the magazine.
So: 1, 2, 3, 4, chambers the 5th round, pulls the magazine all the way across.
If we look in the whole system here, what's doing that is this lever
which is pulled back by the bolt up in here every time the gun fires.
Now I'm just going to move on to the next step of disassembly.
It will be easier to show you how the gun works once we have it all the way disassembled.
So, I'm going to push this lever down, that little button,
and then push this piece out from the other side.
(There we go.) This is a locking wedge, kind of like what you see in a C96 Mauser.
So the mainspring is inside the bolt, this is what puts tension on the mainspring
by holding in the receiver while the bolt's moving backwards.
And now I can pull the whole bolt assembly back out of the gun.
So this is the actual bolt, that is the locking shoulder.
So there is a rotating wedge which is right here.
Which is going to go ... (let's see) ... that way.
There's a lot of spring tension on it, because that's what keeps the gun locked.
... Let's see, let's take a few bits out of this.
Just take this lever out, that lever will come out in another minute.
That's it, I can lift this spring out.
It's not really designed to do this when the gun's sitting at an angle,
but that's the spring that is tensioning the locking wedge.
So now that that's out, this is our locking wedge, right here.
And there's the locking piece itself.
Normally this goes from this position, all the way forward, down to this position.
And you can see that there is a tail on the locking wedge right here, that pushes on this.
This is the out of battery safety. So as long as the wedge is all the way up,
it pushes the out of battery safety up, and disengages it.
There is a separate spring that is always trying to engage that safety.
So if the locking wedge isn't in position,
the out of battery safety comes up and prevents the gun from firing.
Pull this bit out as well.
And we can pull out ...
the whole barrel and basically action bar assembly.
And these are just held together like that.
So this is your FIAT-Revelli bolt carrier I suppose you would call it.
Breech assembly?
And the bolt is going to sit in here, and cycle back and forth like that.
There is its locking ... [shoulder].
So in order for the bolt to come back, that locking wedge has to rotate down out of position.
That disengages, and allows the bolt to travel.
And ... that is the firing pin assembly.
Here is the actual locking wedge out of the gun.
And then the cam pin that holds it in, it sits like this.
The way that this adjustable delay works is that
the cam pin is held in place here and here.
And the centre bit is not actually perfectly aligned, it's not co-linear with these two.
So, on this side you can see that the edge of the bearing surface is exactly in line with this,
and then over here you've got a little bit of a depression.
And so basically what this is doing, ... this pin, depending on which orientation it's in,
it is actually camming the locking block forward or back,
which is affecting how much ... force it takes to unlock the gun.
And it's really kind of an interesting concept.
I don't know that it's a good concept, but it's a very interesting one.
There is a sight you will not see very often. There is a
... I would say that is halfway between field stripped and detail stripped,
FIAT-Revelli Modelo 1914.
Over the course of the war the FIAT-Revelli would serve as the
standard Italian Army heavy machine gun in this form,
on a tripod that is ... unfortunately I can't get the tripod out in front of the camera here.
It's a pretty kind of standard typical tripod, not a lot of fancy stuff going on there.
They would also adapt this to an air-cooled version for aircraft use.
Of course you don't need the cooling if you are flying around up at altitude
and there's lots of airflow over the gun. So they did that.
That had a big brass catcher bag on it
so that empty casings didn't fly all over the place and cause problems with the aircraft.
The gun would stay in service after World War One.
In 1935 they went through a modification program,
and they rebuilt these as Model 1935 FIAT-Revellis, which were air cooled.
Had a big fluted, air-cooled thing on the barrel.
And if I remember correctly, also belt-fed at that time instead of these mouse traps.
The 1935 version initially had a cartridge oiler built into it to ease extraction pressures.
That was actually pretty quickly dispensed with, and instead it was given a fluted chamber.
So, there was never any sort of oiling mechanism on the original 1914 FIAT-Revellis.
In that 1935 pattern the guns would serve the Italian Army through all of World War Two.
After World War Two they would be ditched in favour of more modern, better, guns.
So, that is, I think, most of the history of the FIAT-Revelli.
It is super-cool to get a chance to tear one of these apart,
and show you guys how the whole thing works.
There are not many delayed blowback machine guns.
There's this, and there's the Schwarzlose, not much beyond that.
I guess there's actually the AA-52, but that's post war.
Anyway, I am now rambling ... because I am very happy to have had the chance,
there are very few of these guys still around.
So hopefully you guys enjoyed it.
Thanks for watching.