[ LS-26 at the Range ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today, courtesy of a very cool Finnish collector,
we are out at the range with a Lahti-Saloranta LS-26.
This was the Finnish Army's standard light machine gun going into the Winter War.
It is a gun that didn't have a great reputation in the field,
and was generally pretty quickly replaced by captured Russian Degtyarev machine guns.
But it is a fantastically interesting and unique and original design on its own.
So we're going to go ahead and give it a try here today.
I have 20 round magazines, we have semi-auto and full-auto, fires from an open bolt.
Let's just dive right in, I'll start with a few rounds on semi-auto.
There we go. Selector is backward for semi-auto, safety is on fire.
And in two shots I have already destroyed my steel target.
So let's go to full-auto.
I'm out.
Alright, so we went ahead and reset the target.
Overall first impressions: the gun is really quite pleasant to shoot.
I feel like it's climbing a little bit on me towards the end of a longer burst,
like round 4 or 5, if I get to 5 it comes off target a little bit,
but the first three are really pretty easy to keep right in place.
Recoil's not bad. I can't push into the bipod.
You can lean back against the bipod, but that's not quite so helpful.
Killed the target again, it's a little bit of an ad hoc target.
That was my partial magazine, so I'm out again.
A relatively high rate of fire actually.
It does not lock open on an empty magazine, which is a little bit unfortunate.
Man, they do empty really quite quickly.
Alright, so I should point out, one of the downsides with those magazines
emptying themselves so quickly is that they are not exactly the easiest things to reload.
Let me show you what actually goes into that process.
Alright, so one of the issues with the Lahti-Saloranta
is the magazines are a tremendous pain to load because they are a double-stack magazine
that tapers to a single feed, and they have a really hefty spring in them.
So the last time I had a chance to shoot one of these we didn't have a loading tool,
and we couldn't get more than like 4 or 5 rounds in at a time,
which really kind of ruined the whole thing.
Today we have one of the original loading machines, which is really cool.
It has been appropriately screwed to a tree, which is exactly how this would originally be done.
And I lock my magazine into the bottom of it.
I fill the tray on top with cartridges,
and I have a crank handle that runs back and forth to crunch cartridges into the magazine.
So originally you would have like four guys doing this.
One guy loading rounds into each side of this tray,
one guy swapping loaded and empty magazines, and one guy actually running the machine.
Presto, loaded, ready to go.
This also happens to be one of the early versions of the gun
where there is no limit stop on the bipod.
So I can rotate the gun a full 360.
A little later in production they realised that it would be nice to be able to have it stop here,
and so the later ones actually have a limiter on the bipod.
So the reputation for unreliability on the LS-26
really comes from a specific issue more than anything else.
And that is the recoil assembly in the buttstock of the gun
is not supposed to be disassembled in the field.
The parts inside here are close tolerance,
and they just can't handle any dirt or grit getting into them.
And so the instructions were you can field strip the front of the gun to clean it,
but you don't take apart the back.
But soldiers did take apart the back parts of the gun, and when those got dirty all bets were off,
especially in the cold and the ice of the Winter War.
And so that's really what led to the gun's reputation.
It's not a bad gun, as long as you keep it clean and treat it the way it's supposed to be treated.
I would still rather have a Degtyarev myself, having shot one of those.
The larger magazine capacity, and the really more robust durability
of the Degtyarev (the DP-27, DP-28 or DPM) is really nice.
But the LS-26, I think I would say, is a much better gun than it's often given credit for.
... People see how quickly it was replaced,
how anxious soldiers were to replace these with Degtyarevs,
and I think that's given it a bit of a worse reputation than it really necessarily deserves.
It's a comfortable gun to shoot, it's accurate.
... I've given up resetting that target because I keep killing it on the first hit.
It's controllable.
The magazines are really a big let-down because of the small capacity,
and the fact that you really have to have a tool to reload them.
Other than that, it's been a fantastic opportunity to actually try putting an LS-26 through its paces.
I hope you guys enjoyed the video.
And I happen to have one full magazine left, so I guess I'll just have to dump it all in one burst.
Thanks for watching.
Oh, that's ... not impressive at all.
Let's try that again.
Rim lock.
It's probably my fault when going through the loading process.
Now the rims are in the right order.
Nope ... the magazines are definitely a big let-down on this gun.
OK, I'm going to take that one out, so I think we got 18 rounds in it now.
Let's try that again. ... Here we go.