[ McClean Automatic Rifle ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the
Morphy Auction Company taking a look at the very last
gun manufactured by Dr Samuel McClean.
The man whose ideas would ultimately become the Lewis gun.
Now this is unusual in that this gun actually dates
from after World War One, this is from about 1919.
If we go back to the beginning of the story,
Dr ... Samuel McClean was born in Iowa City, Iowa, in 1857.
Paid his own way through University, and got himself educated as a medical doctor.
He was quite successful in that role, he was popular, he was well-liked.
But he also had kind of an inventive mind, and he started coming up with a bunch of ideas.
In fact by the time he passed away in 1930 he would have some 36 US patents to his name.
Many of them revolving around firearms design.
And he was interested in a lot of different aspects of firearms design.
The most notable areas that he got into were recoil reducing things,
basically muzzle brakes, complex and interesting muzzle brakes,
automatic cannons and machine guns.
Now he really put this into practice in 1896 when he formed the McClean Arms Company.
And this got serious pretty quickly, in 1897 he turned over his whole medical practice
to his assistant to run so that he could focus full-time on firearms development.
And he had a good thing going,
his ideas ... looked like they had a lot of promise.
The McClean Arms Company interested a number of high-profile sorts of investors.
He had General Joseph Wheeler of the CSA, later of the US military, was an investor.
Marcellus Hartley, who was one of the principals at Remington
was an investor in the McClean Arms Company.
Like, he had legitimate ideas here, and he was attracting interest
from legitimate people who knew all about the small arms industry.
Now the problem was McClean was never quite able to
get the gun working well enough to be militarily successful.
And he would go through a number of trials of both his semi-automatic cannons,
mostly a 37mm, a 1 pounder.
But also did some work on a 3 pounder, which would probably have been a 57mm gun.
Bunch of trials, never really paid off.
He had a water-cooled machine gun.
In fact he actually started with a bolt-action clip-feed rifle. That didn't go anywhere.
He ultimately ... redeveloped a machine gun,
because that was the thing that interested militaries at the time.
It was a big, very, very cool, unusual-looking steampunky sort of water-cooled machine gun.
Which is notable, I will point out, for the fact that unlike virtually all other water-cooled guns,
this one was actually designed to recirculate steam and water.
Where most guns like the Maxims, and related water-cooled guns, will have a condensing can.
And so as the gun fires, water heats up, turns into steam.
And it's then pulled off by hose and dropped into a condensing can
into some existing liquid water to re-condense it.
And eventually the water jacket runs empty, the condensing can is full.
And then you pour the can back into the water jacket.
McClean's gun actually did this whole recirculating system by itself.
And that was probably part of the reason that it wasn't successful.
It had a pressurised system, so you'll notice it looks kind of like it's got a scuba tank on it.
It has valves, it has condensing coils, it has all sorts of extra stuff.
... He probably shouldn't have tried incorporating all that stuff.
Now, I'm getting a little sidetracked here.
Ultimately the McClean machine guns would fail in a series of military tests.
And in 1910 the McClean Arms Company,
by then actually in its second iteration, failed and went bankrupt.
If you want a little more backstory on this, and how it actually evolved into the Lewis gun,
I would recommend checking out the C&Rsenal video on the Lewis gun.
He covers this development, and how this turned into the Lewis.
Ultimately the investors, when the company went broke,
brought in Isaac Newton Lewis to give them some comment
on the viability of the patents and the models that they had left.
Lewis figured air cooling is the way of the future, and he'd got some ideas about air cooling.
The investors then brought him in, and the Lewis gun was the result.
But that isn't quite where this thing comes from.
This was McClean's last attempt a military firearm.
So in 1910, after his company went bankrupt, McClean ended up moving.
He moved up to Detroit and went to work in the automobile industry.
And he was reasonably successful in there, he never stopped inventing however.
And by the time World War One ended he had one last idea for an air-cooled machine gun.
Shoulder fired, ... sort of analogous to the BAR.
This was select fire, so you have a semi-auto trigger and a full-auto trigger in it.
And he presented this to the Navy for testing in 1919.
So let's take a look at what this thing actually does,
and then we'll talk about what happened to it in 1919.
Looking at this up close we have a shoulder stock.
And it's clearly designed to be fireable from the shoulder,
although in Navy testing it was actually fired from a tripod mount.
Two triggers: the front one is the full-auto trigger, and the rear one is the semi-auto trigger.
This hook here is the magazine release.
You can see it retracts a little plunger there at the bottom.
And this brings up an interesting element which is: what is the magazine to this thing?
Well, I have a couple of original pictures, these were printed in the book
"The Belgian Rattlesnake" about the Lewis gun by William Easterly.
They show the original magazine, although it is not
present on this gun unfortunately, it is missing somewhere.
But somewhere out there is a McClean 1919 Automatic Musket magazine.
What we do know for sure is that there is a mechanical ratcheting system here
to rotate the drum, it is a drum-style magazine.
And it's sort of a doughnut shaped magazine.
Probably the closest thing I can come up with would be an Accles drum from a Gatling gun.
Now whether it mounts off on the side, or over the whole main body of the gun is not entirely clear.
Easterly's book says it mounts on the side. This is very much centred on the gun.
The front grip here is the exact same height as the magazine catch,
which makes me wonder if the magazine is supposed to slide over the whole gun.
Like I said, it's really not entirely clear.
What I can tell you is that it feeds here through the top,
and it ejects down here out the bottom of the receiver.
Looking at this up close, unfortunately the ... rear of the receiver here has been cut away.
That is because this was in fact a machine gun, but it was not registered as such.
And at some point, someone cut this away so that it was considered legally destroyed,
and not illegal to possess. Unfortunate, legally necessary.
Now this side of the gun would originally have had
a couple of wooden cover plates, like you have over here. They are missing.
And there would have been hole in them down here to ... let out empty casings.
So, you've probably noticed we have this handle over here.
This is non-reciprocating, it's currently locked down in the stowage position.
You can pop it up and out to actually use.
That's why there is this cutaway in the back of the stock
because the handle comes back and out like that.
Then we open this up, first off that's your ejection port right there.
We have an interesting style of locking system here.
You've probably seen interrupted-thread style of locking lugs
where you try to get the most surface area possible of locking surface.
McClean definitely went for that (pull this all the way back, there you go),
at least a dozen locking lugs in there.
And you can see just barely up into the receiver here
you can see the mating surfaces where those all lock into place.
So you've got lugs on this side, and you've got lugs on the opposite side of the bolt.
And it is rotating bolt. Very much a Lewis-style rotating bolt,
which of course is ultimately in fact a McClean style of rotating bolt.
So what we have here is an operating rod down here
that has the firing pin on it, you can see the firing pin right up in there.
And it's running through a cam track in the bolt.
So when the operating rod goes all the way forward, like that,
it has now forced the bolt to rotate into the locked position.
And the op rod, which holds the firing pin, is slightly rearward.
That's about an inch further back than it would be when fired.
So when I drop the firing pin, what will happen is
there is a sear that's holding this op rod back.
It will drop, the op rod goes forward, the firing pin goes forward and that fires the gun.
This is precisely the same system that was used in the Lewis gun.
Just Isaac Lewis massively simplified it compared to this,
with just two big locking lugs at the front instead of this system.
McClean's earlier designs also had multiple lugs.
His water-cooled machine gun I believe had 5 sets of dual lugs on each side, so like 20 lugs total.
The idea is not bad, but you don't really need that.
You're just as well having a couple that are a lot ... larger.
Now if we look at the bolt face a little more closely, we'll see a couple of interesting things.
This acts as the ejector, and it also picks up a cartridge from the magazine to feed.
So you'll notice when this comes all the way back,
that ejector gets pushed down under that rear lip of the receiver.
When it does that it is pushing the cartridge (this is a little hard to see),
but if you look at the bolt face there, you can see that that ejector
gets pushed down - boom - right there.
And it's going to push the cartridge straight out of this ejection port right here.
There are two extractors, one on each side.
So the cartridge is held firmly this way,
and pushed laterally - bloop - out the bottom of the gun.
By the way, the bolt handle also has this nice stowage position.
So ... there's a little tiny spring in the front.
And you can push the bolt handle forward and rotate it down
so it stows up nicely against the body of the gun.
Possibly keeping it from interfering with the magazine, that's not entirely clear to me as I said.
But then you lift up to actually make use of it.
Now looking at this thing you'll notice ... obviously we have a barrel up top.
And the barrel is knurled to give it, in theory, maybe a little more cooling capacity.
Then we have this big thing at the bottom which seems a little out of place.
Like, why is that so large? It's obviously too large to be a gas piston, right?
Well no, actually this is kind of modelled on the McClean semi-auto cannons,
which have this very large gas piston in them.
I can actually take the front cap here and unthread it, take that off.
And then, lo and behold that is the gas piston face.
When I pull the bolt back, you can see that whole thing reciprocating.
Right up here at the top is the gas port into the barrel.
This thing is just a really ginormous gas piston.
Unfortunately, I can't take the piston assembly apart.
But there is a recoil spring wrapped around it inside here,
just like all of the earlier McClean guns.
The one bit of disassembly that I can do for you is to take the lower off.
We have a bolt here that just connects the upper and lower assemblies.
There in stowage. Take that bolt out.
And then we can take off the lower.
That makes it very easy to see the sear here.
And that sear holds onto the back of the op rod,
which is this hook right here, so.
So that's your operating rod,
and that is going to rotate the bolt to lock and unlock.
You can see the cam track here at the end, so that's unlocked, that's locked.
So I believe this one was the full-auto, that pulls down both levers.
The rear trigger here is semi-auto, although to be fair
I'm not entirely sure where the disconnector is.
It might just be not working anymore in this gun.
You can see the little lug on the front of the charging handle,
that's what actually pulls back on this lug of the operating rod.
Actually it's on this side, it's right there, that little hook.
And you can see the large diameter mainspring (just barely) down inside there.
Obviously McClean never did become wealthy off of his patents,
despite the success of the Lewis gun.
He did actually file a lawsuit after World War One in an attempt to get some
... financial compensation from the company that had
used what were originally his ideas and patents.
That went all the way up to the Supreme Court before it was ultimately ruled against him.
... Samuel McClean was apparently a very friendly, outgoing, nice guy.
And despite all of these setbacks, he never did actually blame Isaac Lewis for the turn of events.
And as far as I can tell, remained friends with Lewis for the rest of his life.
This gun was presented to the US Navy for trials in early 1919.
They did a bunch of shooting, it wasn't a complete failure, it was moderately successful.
But the final report written up in May of 1919
did not express any interest in adopting it. And not surprisingly.
By the end of World War One first off, there was a lot less need for machine guns.
And there were a lot of other interesting designs out there to be followed up on
that had more promise to them than the McClean gun.
So, I believe this is probably the only one of these ever made.
McClean never made all that many of any of his guns,
you're probably talking less than a dozen ... rifle calibre guns made by McClean altogether.
So the fact that this one has survived is really cool.
It's unfortunate that it had to be legally destroyed, have the receiver cut,
because it was a machine gun and it was not registered as such.
But ... it is really cool to still see the last example.
There are a couple of other surviving McClean guns out there in various museum collections.
There's at least one water-cooled one in a private collection.
But if you want some of the guns
that were directly associated with the origin of the Lewis gun,
arguably ... the best light machine gun of the First World War,
this is a literally unique, one-of-a-kind example.
So hopefully at some point, someone will find the magazine.
As I said, if you have the magazine for this, that big doughnut-looking thing.
If you've got a weird doughnut-looking magazine and you don't know what it goes to,
this one's floating around out there somewhere.
So if you think you have it contact the Morphy Auction Company,
and they will be happy to put you in contact with whoever ends up purchasing this gun.
It would be great to reunite that magazine with the gun that it originally went to.
Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thank you very much for watching.