Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Cody Firearms Museum
taking a look at a really interesting prototype machine gun that they have.
This ... has its origins in a 1940 US Ordnance Department program
to try and find a better universal machine gun to replace the Browning 1917
and Browning 1919. Basically they wanted to lighten the guns.
They were still envisioned as being used off of tripods,
but they were also supposed to have shoulder stocks.
And ultimately this would culminate in the 1919A6.
But through a weird and roundabout different channel.
So if we look at where this thing came from.
In April of 1940 the Ordnance Department put out an RFP for a new machine gun.
And they didn't want just a modified Browning, they already had a lot of Brownings.
They were looking for a new design, and in a nutshell,
the gun they wanted needed to be less than 22 pounds, less than 38 inches long,
be able to be selective fire, so semi-automatic or fully-automatic.
And then kind of fulfill all the general requirements of durability, reliability, etc.
So they published this in public, and they're actively looking for
civilian companies to provide guns to meet this new standard, as well as government arsenals.
And they end up getting five different submissions. Now this one came from Bill Ruger.
Bill Ruger was a very young engineer at the time, and he read this proposal.
He thought about it and put together this conceptual design that he thought would work pretty well.
He was an engineer, he wasn't a manufacturer at that point, so he took his idea to the Auto-Ordnance Company.
(Where he would go on to do quite a bit of work actually.)
And he proposed it to them and they thought this looked like a decent plan for a machine gun,
and they didn't have anything else in line for this trial.
So they wrote up a contract, and in late 1940 they started working on this gun.
And in fact, if I may read an excerpt from a letter from Bill Ruger,
"The object of this project was simple enough. To perfect and prepare samples of a belt fed .30 calibre machine gun
which would take the place of the Browning, and get it ready for tests in about four or five months.
As I was very young and Auto-Ordnance themselves not too experienced, this sounded very reasonable.
And I went to work with a couple of tool makers to be on an 80 hour a week schedule."
So this was written in hindsight and Ruger fully acknowledged the lunacy of the idea
that in 4 or 5 months you could just whip up a new machine gun that would be better, lighter, and more modern than the Browning.
But that didn't stop him from trying.
And it's fortunate that people do attempt impossible projects, because sometimes they do work.
This one did not actually work.
So, testing was done in November of 1941. The 5 submissions that the Ordnance Department got were
the Sedgley Company, whose gun was a complete dumpster fire and didn't ... even complete most of the testing.
This one from Auto-Ordnance, literally this gun.
And then they got entries from the Springfield Armory, the Rock Island Armory, and Colt.
And Springfield, Rock Island and Colt all provided modified Browning 1919 guns,
because of course all of those guys had quite a bit of experience and tooling to build those,
so they took one and kind of tweaked it to meet the requirements.
So ultimately there were some good things about this gun. The Ordnance Department liked the fact that it was within weight.
It was a nice short, kind of handy gun.
The tripod mounting was a little bit odd, and part of the testing requirement involved basically
kind of, not really high speed photography, but high speed analysis of how stable the gun was when it was firing.
So, you know, does it do this sort of thing, or is it rocking up and down when you fire.
And they were unable to actually do that analysis on this gun because of its weird tripod attachment.
Unfortunately, we don't have the tripod for this, I don't have any pictures of it, so I'm not sure
what exactly caused the problem. But the reporting on it does specify that like, yeah, they couldn't figure it out.
Now the gun went through a 10,000 round endurance test, or rather it was supposed to.
You were able to cool the gun down every 500 rounds, you're able to disassemble, clean and oil it every 2,000 rounds.
The converted Browning guns all passed that test.
The Auto-Ordnance Ruger gun did not manage to finish that test. And in the end it was ...
... Oh, I'm sorry, it had to have a quick-change barrel.
You could take the barrel out of this fairly easily, but it was difficult to get the new barrel back in.
Especially when it got hot, and so really what it needed was a better way to loosen this collar.
We'll take a look at that in just a moment.
But then the gun's reliability overall was poor, its reliability in cold was very poor,
its reliability in dusty conditions was poor. They had trouble operating the gun manually when it got dusty.
So the gun was rejected. That's the bad news for Ruger is his gun got rejected.
Kind of the better news for Ruger was actually everybody's guns got rejected, because
the Ordnance Department didn't want Browning 1919s. And so they rejected all three of those for basically that reason.
And they actually looked at this and they thought this is actually kind of simple,
... there's potential here, let's have another test.
None of these were worth adopting, so we'll have a new test, go back and keep working on it.
And so there would be a second test in 1943.
Now that test would involve a revised and substantively different gun than this.
So before we talk about that, let's take a closer look at what this first pattern was.
So fundamentally Ruger's machine gun was a rotating bolt locked breech system. You can see the bolt clearly rotating right there.
It fired from an open bolt, so lock the handle back.
When you fire, bolt goes forward, locks, fires. Does have a reciprocating handle.
There's a gas block on the barrel. This barrel, by the way, is basically an adapted Browning 1919 barrel.
You'll see that when we take a look at the muzzle.
Put a gas port on it, tap gas into a gas piston here, with an adjustable plug.
You can change how much gas is going into the system.
And the gas piston comes back here, interfaces with a belt feed system, and the bolt.
So the Army requirements specified left-hand feed, and of course this is chambered for standard .30-06 ammunition.
So your feed, your belt, would come in this side. This actually used disintegrating metal links, the exact same ones as the Browning.
After firing the spent links get kicked out this little ejection port here,
and the empty cartridge cases come out the ejection port on the top of the gun.
The grip and trigger are actually remarkably comfortable, and it's kind of cool the way that they're mounted high up on the gun.
This is ergonomically a pretty darn nice design element. Now this is your safety lever, right here.
Forward is safe, which locks the trigger. In theory one of these should be full-auto and one should be semi-auto.
On this particular example they both appear to function in full-auto, but the trials requirements,
the RFP requirements, did specify that the guns had to have a semi-automatic mode.
Unfortunately I can't take this one apart for you. But the way you would do that is through these two pins,
which would allow you to remove
(these pins are both a little bit oversized on this side, not entirely sure why),
but pulling those out would allow you to remove the grip frame. Once you do that the recoil spring comes out the back,
and then the bolt and bolt carrier and op rod, all those parts will come right out the back as well.
When I said this was a Browning 1919 barrel, you can clearly see that by the profile here at the muzzle.
And that makes sense, why make your own .30 calibre machine gun barrel when you can
just get a Browning barrel from the government to use for this development.
Now what I can show you is removal of the barrel.
We have a threaded collar here, and there's a set of interrupted threads, or lugs, on the barrel and this collar.
So, in order to remove the barrel we're going to push this button in, which allows this collar to rotate.
(... rotate it to there it should be), and then we can pull the whole barrel assembly forward.
Note that it's retained by the lugs here,
and it slides on a lug right here on the gas tube.
And there we can pull the barrel right off.
You can see the interrupted lugs here on the barrel. Note that they are not perfectly square,
but they're actually slightly canted, so that they act as ... a screw thread.
There is a matching set of lugs here inside that locking collar.
And so of course, we have our locking button here which acts in these grooves.
I push that in, I can rotate this collar 90 degrees.
That will engage the lugs with the barrel, and this also pulls your barrel in, just slightly, as you rotate it.
So I expect (not that there's a manual for this that I found), but
I expect this threaded collar is also how you set your headspace.
Exactly how far this collar is threaded in or out of the gun, because it's threaded into the receiver.
In fact, we can just take it completely out.
You can move this in or out a little bit to set your headspace.
Which is something that the Browning designs also, of course, allow you to do.
So there's that collar.
With the barrel removed you can pretty clearly see the bolt face in there.
And you can see right there the firing pin protrudes through the bolt face
when I have the bolt handle all the way forward.
As I pull the bolt handle back (which you can't see but I am doing), it retracts the firing pin, then rotates the bolt to unlock.
So your ... firing sequence is the bolt rotates to lock, and then the firing pin protrudes right there,
fires the cartridge, and the gas system then causes it to unlock, pull back, and cycle.
Unfortunately for Ruger, his second variation on this gun was actually worse than his first one.
Or at least that's what the report makes it sound like.
... Like everything was wrong with it. The reliability wasn't good, it was ... hard to disassemble.
And once you did disassemble it, it was easy to put it back together wrong and mess it up.
It was difficult to load belts. It was difficult to change the barrel when it got hot.
Like it went from being too fast in the first pattern to being too slow in the second pattern.
It was a wreck.
And what ended up happening was,
(I said this would eventually result in the Browning 1919A6), well
about the same time that the Ordnance Department started looking for this gun and put out this RFP,
the Infantry Department was kind of doing the same thing. It was looking for a lightened version of the Browning 1919 for paratroopers.
And their series of testing and development to that end produced the 1919A6.
That gun kinda did everything that people were really wanting out of this project.
This project didn't produce any good results, and so the 1919A6 got adopted for general US Army use,
not just paratroopers, but everybody. And this went nowhere further.
Of course Bill Ruger would go on to have a substantial, long and very productive career as a firearms designer.
Ended up founding one of the major American gun companies, Ruger.
And really pretty interesting to get a chance to take a look at some of his really early work.
And it's especially interesting to me to be able to see him looking at this in hindsight,
and basically going, "Wow, that was crap, and boy was I naive and foolish to think that I could pull off a project like this."
However, while he doesn't say it in the letter, I bet he learned a tremendous amount from this project,
despite the fact that it ... ultimately didn't produce a gun that got built.
So, a big thanks to the Cody Firearms Museum for giving me access to this.
We pulled this out of the display so that we could film it and show it to you guys.
So if you come back here to the museum, they have recently renovated the entire collection.
It's a fantastic museum, a tremendous number, thousands of guns on display.
Including this one in the little downstairs gallery that you shouldn't miss, because there's a whole cabinet full of prototypes
and developmental design guns. It's pretty cool. So thanks to them, thanks for you for watching.
Tune back in tomorrow for another interesting Forgotten Weapon.