Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video episode on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, and today we're going to be taking a look at the Pig, the M60.
This was a standard-issue machine gun for US armed forces for quite some time,
obviously most associated with Vietnam.
This particular one that we have here today is an M60E3.
This was an upgrade that was adopted by the US armed forces
actually surprisingly only in 1986.
So they used the standard M60 for 20 years
before making the modifications that this E3 incorporates.
... The M60 is a kind of an interesting piece when you start researching it
because a lot of the vets who used them in Vietnam absolutely loved them,
obviously they're heavier than an M16 and that was the common complaint,
but the vets who used them had very good experiences with the guns in combat.
The vets who have used them later on, in the late '70s and '80s,
often the guys who had to work with them a lot despised them.
The way I see it, there are two different sets of problems with the M60.
It has a really good lineage, it started off with basically the bolt and gas system from the Lewis Gun
(some people say an FG42, which is basically the same as a Lewis Gun), and the top cover from an MG42.
Excellent top cover, this works really well, the gas system is a pretty good overall system.
They didn't necessarily integrate them all together in the best way.
The first set of problems with the gun are what I would call handling problems, ergonomic problems.
And the biggest one is that on the original M60 the barrel has this whole gas system on it,
and it has the bipod mounted on the barrel, and there's no carry handle.
So when you're out firing (and in order to get a fairly light gun they have a fairly lightweight barrel),
you get the barrel hot enough that it needs to be changed,
there's nothing you can hold onto when this barrel's toasty hot.
You had to hold the gun vertically or hold it vertically facing down, or use the asbestos
glove that was issued with it to grab the barrel, pull it out to replace the barrel.
Having all this stuff up here also meant that when you're carrying a spare barrel,
you're carrying several pounds more gear than you need to.
If you look at general purpose machine guns like this, almost all of them will have a bipod mounted to the receiver.
So that if you have two spare barrels, you only have one bipod, you're not carrying three bipods for no reason.
So a lot of people are able to get over those issues in combat and, OK it's got some quirks, but they liked the gun.
The second set of problems with the M60 are what I would consider long term durability problems.
In order to get a nice lightweight gun,
you can only have so much mass, which means you have to cut some corners in places.
And the corners that were cut here lead to the guns having mechanical problems over time.
So the guys who are using these in the '80s are finding guns that are beat to death. They've been fired a lot,
they may not have had really good routine maintenance, and they're getting
... to the point that parts are simply wearing out.
For example, the receiver Is made of 6 or 7 individual pieces all welded together to form a box.
Well the metal is a bit light, the welds are not of the highest quality, or not the greatest strength,
and so you'd end up with issues of welds cracking, of receivers actually stretching,
and by the end of their service life the receiver was actually listed as an available replacement part.
So most guns, if the receiver is bad, you just toss the whole thing and start over.
On the M60 there were so many recognised long-term issues with the receivers
that they would keep the trunnion and replace the entire rest of the receiver.
Additionally, the bolts tended to peen themselves. You would get peening on the bolt because
forcing the bolt to rotate, instead of having a cam that would start rotating and have a nice smooth transition,
the bolt rotation was started by having a curved surface hit against the bolt locking lug.
And over time that causes damage and peening to the surface of the lugs. So a standard maintenance
procedure is as long as you can stone that down and get it smooth again, the gun's fine.
Most guns peening on the bolt is indicative of a serious problem and would be cause for a complete rebuild.
On the 60 it was recognised as something that just happened, which is indicative of not a really great design.
Another issue that comes up, and this is primarily a training Issue.
When the ... gun's running you have a roller here on top of the bolt that operates the feed train.
This roller pulls this side to side, which feeds ammunition. And this is straight off an MG42,
and like the early MG42s the issue here is that ... once you open it, this pin has to be in the back to line up
with this tray. Because if it's in the front, the pin's over here and the tray's over there.
... The only time this ... pin is in contact when the thing's closed, this lever is held all the way over.
When you open the gun, spring pressure pushes it the other direction.
So if you have the gun with the bolt closed like this, and you try to close the top cover
it doesn't want to close, so typical, you know, if especially if you're in an emergency, you smack it.
What that's going to do is bend the components and cause the gun to stop working.
A lot of other guns with a feed tray like this will incorporate some recesses so that ... or
make one of these two parts - give them some vertical travel so that if you smack it,
they'll move out of alignment and they won't damage each other.
They may not work properly until you fix it, but you won't damage the parts.
The 60 didn't do that. You have to have the bolt back to close the top cover.
The other issue that came up
[with] some regularity,
the pistol grip assembly, the fire control assembly, is held in place by this kind of odd system
where you have a flat spring captive on this pin and hooked around the back pin.
Well if this spring loses its tension or gets bent (and in fact this one is somewhat bent),
if this falls off you only have one nice loose pin
holding your fire control group on.
And it's not unknown to be humping the thing through the jungle and look down
and discover that somewhere in the last five miles you've lost your trigger. That's bad obviously.
If this comes partway loose and you don't notice it, and you start firing, and
the pin rattles out and your trigger falls off, you have no way to stop the gun.
And it's just gonna run until it runs out of ammo. That's also not good.
And the sear catch here, this is a very simple trigger, it's fully automatic only,
this catches the back of the bolt and stops it, well if you only pull the trigger down a little bit of the way
you only have partial engagement of your sear catch here with the underside of the bolt.
and that will start wearing the top of your sear catch.
If you do this enough, eventually you get to the point where the bolt will jump over
this catch even when the trigger is fully released and you're not touching it. And again the gun will run
away on you. And the only way to stop it is to run out of ammo or break the belt.
So, these are all of the problems that people had,
and they're pretty much all legitimate problems with the gun.
However, a lot of the durability issues didn't show up much in Vietnam because the guns were all relatively new.
Special forces units continue to use these guns and generally have pretty good luck with them,
again because they had the resources to do the maintenance on these guns
and make sure that they stayed in good condition.
Special forces guns weren't going to be going on extended multi-month use without any attention.
They're going to be taken care of, and as a result if something started to get worn
it would get fixed and not become a functional problem.
So that's where I think the two schools of thought on the M60, either it's great or it's terrible.
And it occurs to me that I have left out probably the biggest issue that people know about on the 60,
and that's the gas system.
When you see these, you'll almost always see them with a wire on here.
The reason is these pieces will unscrew themselves in use. This one hasn't been wired and
it's obviously been shot and these pieces will just unthread. If this unthreads all the way and falls off
the gun stops working. And hopefully you notice it right when it does, or else
you have to go find wherever that fell off and put it back together.
So the standard fix, and this was recognised very early on, was to have
a castle nut up here, run a wire through it, run it around the barrel assembly and safety wire it in place
so that this couldn't rotate. Rebuild the gun once, wire it and you're done.
And make sure you put the gas piston in the right way around,
because if you put it in backwards, which is possible, it turns into a single shot straight pull, which is no good.
So it sounds like I'm really ragging pretty heavily on this thing, and in some ways I am.
The M60 wasn't a really well thought out design. It had really good lineage
and then they kind of fell down when they actually got done building it.
So we are going to go ahead and take this out on the range, we're going to do some shooting,
and see how it performs on the range.
Alright guys, we're out here on the range with the M60E3,
... go ahead and do a little test firing and see how it works.
Lock the bolt back, snap the charging handle forward, feed tray is down,
drop a round onto the feed tray,
smack the top cover down, we're in fire, it's all set to go.
So the E3 has a vertical front grip so that you can fire it a little more effectively standing up.
We could play Rambo, but... well, why not?
You really, really do not hit anything without using sights like that.
In fact, I really don't hit anything standing up at all.
One of the hazards on the M60 in general is that this barrel is not covered,
and you really don't want to touch it even after a short bit of firing.
I'm all over it and not hitting it, aren't I? - No you're not.
- You're high and left. - Come under it, come up into it.
- There you go.
- Well you scared him down.
Alright, so Scot, this is actually your M60, and I kind of suck shooting it, but
you're going to show us how it's actually done, right? - I'll make you look bad.
Alright, go nuts.
Yeah, that's how it's done, thank you.
Alright, so we had a really good time shooting this, no kidding, it's fun to shoot, no doubt about that.
Has a nice slow rate of fire, pretty controllable. I kind of suck shooting it, but that's my fault, not its fault.
Overall I think a pretty good gun, as long as you have one new
... or in good repair and it's been well maintained.
It certainly did develop a reputation and a real following of people who loved them from Vietnam,
and I think that was...
It's a testament to what did go right in the gun that it was able to be so well liked,
despite having as many flaws as it did, so.
If you think I've gotten this completely backwards, go ahead and let us know in the comments.
We'd love to hear, especially if you had opportunity to use one of these in combat or in the military.
Let us know what you think, and tune back in to Forgotten Weapons for more videos on general purpose machine guns.
Thanks for watching.