Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today I have got, at long last,
my Berthier converted to use Chauchat magazines.
This was done by Mark Novak over at Anvil Gunsmithing,
who you may recognise from C&Rsenal.
And ... now this isn't quite 100% historically accurate.
So the French did build a small number of guns converted like this. In fact, they actually seriously considered
building receivers from the factory from scratch that were designed to accept Chauchat magazines.
But that program never went into service. Instead they did a small number of conversions, primarily for the Air Force.
So this wasn't intended to be a rifle you would shoot from the cockpit,
this was intended to be a survival rifle, so instead of having 3 rounds in the rifle, you'd have 18.
Now ... the guns that they actually specifically converted in this way
did not include M16 carbines. So you can see this one has an upper handguard.
That is the M16 update that was done to the Berthier carbines
during, well really towards the end of World War One.
They were actually making these guns quite early in the war, and the base rifles
they used were 1907/15 three round long rifles, and 1890 cavalry carbines.
So the cavalry carbine is going to have a stock that comes all the way out to the front of the barrel,
no bayonet lug on it, and certainly no upper handguard on it.
By the time they got around to doing the upper handguard
they weren't trying to ... put bolt action rifles in aircraft cockpits anymore. The airplanes all had machine guns.
So this is a pseudo-experimental sort of conversion. I think it's a really cool
comparative thing to what the British, ... the Germans, and the Americans all did in terms of
extended capacity trench magazines for their bolt action rifles during the war.
Now, I am curious how well this is going to actually work, this is a bit of a kludge.
So I'm actually going to load this magazine up all the way,
because one of my first questions is, "Will the magazine actually stay in the rifle when it fires?"
Because there's a lot of weight in this thing,
and it's going to be bouncing around under recoil, which is also substantial.
So there we go, one more.
Load this up to a full 18 rounds capacity.
This is 200 grain PPU 8mm Lebel ammo.
There we go.
The way that they did this, the Chauchat actually uses the lip of the ... floor plate
as a magazine catch. So you lock that in, and then lift the thing up to lock it into the gun.
And they did the same thing on these.
So I have a video on an actual original one of these conversions that you can take a look at.
But basically we're going to notch that in there,
you have to do this with the bolt open.
There we go.
Alright Mark, let's see if
this actually works.
Whoo! That certainly kicks.
Magazine appears to still be ... no. Alright.
My magazine has ... oh, I see what happened, the front round didn't quite come up the way it's supposed to.
Alright, let's just pop that out.
So a little bit of a mag issue here. There we go.
Little smoother chambering with not a completely full magazine.
Whoops, that one popped the locking catch on the mag.
Alright, so what actually happened there is ... this thing is a lot of weight that's dangling under the gun,
and the gun's trying to ... recoil back on top of it.
What appears to have happened is that the recoil actually
popped one of the cartridges, right about here, forward.
So the rim is supposed to run in this groove at the base of the magazine.
And it popped that cartridge forward,
so the rim came out of that groove, which jammed the rim of the cartridge along the side of the mag.
And that meant that it wouldn't feed anymore. So I've got that cleared up.
Now there are good reasons why this sort of system never became actual standard issue.
Yeah, so now every time we fire,
the ... magazine catch is popping loose from the recoil.
Which is causing the magazine to drop down, and has to be fitted back into place before it can feed properly again.
So I'm going to give it a couple more shots holding it back here, to see if supporting the magazine can fix that.
Ah, I guess not.
It's not meant to do that. So.
You know the reason that the French abandoned the 8mm Lebel cartridge
is largely because it was not suitable for box magazines.
They had to kludge together the Chauchat magazine in this half-circular, single-stack arrangement
because that's the best they could do with this double-tapered heavily-rimmed cartridge design.
So. Whoo boy, we have the same ...
Alright, this mag is fubar I think at the moment.
So, no shade at Mark Novak, this is a project that didn't work for real,
and so expecting a reproduction of it to work is perhaps not realistic. ...
Anyway, I very much appreciate the time that he spent trying to make it work right.
It's a cool system and it'll look great on the wall instead of in a match, unfortunately.
Had this worked well I would have loved to use this in a two gun match at some point,
compare it to say a Mauser or a Springfield with an extended trench magazine.
But I don't see that being on the cards at this point. Anyway, doesn't always work out.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video anyway.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]