Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten Weapons.
I'm Ian, I'm here today at the James Julia auction house up in Maine taking a look at some of the guns
they're gonna be putting on sale in March of 2015 at their spring auction.
Couldn't help but take a look at this one.
What we have here is what was colloquially known to the US military as a "Woodpecker".
This is a Type 92 Japanese heavy machine gun. These were the most common Japanese
heavy guns in World War Two, they saw pretty extensive use, pretty extensive manufacture.
And they're often kind of derided as being goofy or ineffective guns, when in fact they're actually extremely good firearms.
And we'll take a look at why as we go through the features of this one.
Now to start with, that name Woodpecker came from this gun's relatively low rate of fire of about 450 rounds a minute.
It fed from a 30 round feed strip that would go in the side, the same ... exact mechanism as was used by the French Hotchkiss guns.
Which makes sense because the Type 92 here is a derivative of the French Hotchkiss design.
So the Type 92 has a number of really good strong points to it.
For one thing you can see that the barrel and barrel jacket are absolutely massive.
These guns effectively did not overheat in combat, you could just feed strip after strip after strip
into them, and they just keep chugging along without any problem.
The barrels are removable, but that's primarily for cleaning and maintenance, you wouldn't quick change these barrels.
That's the point of having these gigantic cooling fins is to allow the gun to have a fairly continuous rate of fire without overheating.
The tripods that these guns are mounted on are very good tripods. When you got this thing sandbagged down
between the tripod and the gun itself they were extremely accurate.
They were ... even used for things like indirect fire, firing over the tops of hills
so the incoming rounds you literally could not see where they were coming from,
because there was no direct line of sight from the gun to the target.
That was something the Japanese did with these. The rear sights on these are graduated out to 2,700 yards,
very heavy fixed barrels, or virtually fixed, they're very, very precisely fitted barrels.
These are just extremely accurate guns.
So the Type 92 is designated that because it ... went into production in the Japanese year 2592,
which equates to our calendar 1932,
and they were in production all the way till the very end of World War Two.
And what's kind of cool is unlike a lot of Japanese rifles, which most people are very familiar with,
the Type 92 heavy machine guns underwent virtually no degradation of quality through the war.
The most you might see is not quite as nice of a bluing job on some of the very late ones,
but the actual parts quality, the machining quality, the accuracy, none of that degraded over the course of the war.
They did an extremely good job manufacturing these right up until the very last one. And they are very high quality guns.
So, let's start looking at a couple of the features here. We'll start with - we have an oiler here on top.
This screw plug allows you to open this up
(In fact we can do that.)
You would fill this with a medium viscosity oil. And that is actually used
in conjunction with a little brush and a little oil pump here inside the feed mechanism.
So that every time a cartridge feeds it gets a little bit of a brush of oil on it, which aids with the extraction of the cartridge.
Now this is a ... derivative of a Hotchkiss design. You can shoot these guns without the oil and they'll run for a while.
The oil is kind of a safety factor, it makes sure that the guns will continue to extract and function well,
even when they start to get hot and dirty and are being used out in combat.
Later Japanese machine gun designs would be able to get away from the oilers,
but this one dates all the way back to the Model 1897 French Hotchkiss.
The Japanese bought a bunch of those, they then manufactured their own copies of them as well.
They updated the guns to the Type 3 in 1914, and that was still in 6.5mm Japanese at that point.
But very similar to these guns, they had a different spade grip and a few mechanical differences.
In 1932 they [adopted] the Type 92.
The primary change, the biggest single change being the conversion from 6.5 over to 7.7 Japanese calibre.
They also had a different style spade grips and then a few other mechanical changes.
One of the other neat things about the 92 is that it's a very well sealed up gun,
which keeps it clean, prevents it from stopping up in combat.
One thing you'll see here...
Right now I have the bolt forward so all of the surfaces on this gun are closed up.
This roller right here ... serves two functions. Right now it's acting as a dust cover in the feed way,
and it also acts as a support for the 30 round feed strips.
Now when I charge the bolt you'll see that this pops down
just like that. Now it sits out here and it can help support the feed strip.
In addition to that the feed strips were all packaged in a fairly sturdy cardboard sleeve,
and they would actually leave the sleeve on as further support for the feed strip while it was going into the gun.
So we also have a dust cover on this side, right here, covering the ejection port.
And that is actually ... spring-loaded and it's open when the gun's firing, but it's locked closed by the charging handle when the bolt's closed.
The trigger is back here on the back of the spade grips. These grips fold up for transport.
There is a scope rail on the top of the Type 92. There were a couple of different styles of scope made for this gun
4x power, 5x power and 6x power. They're all extremely rare today.
What's kind of interesting is one of the very earliest types of scope
was actually designed to be used only to what's called lay the gun. To set it up and make it ready to fire,
and then would actually be removed from the gun when you were shooting.
Later versions of scope, they realised that may not have been the most useful.
And so the later scopes were actually meant to be used while firing.
It's interesting to note that the Japanese did a lot of mounting of optics on machine guns,
which isn't something very many other countries figured out during World War Two.
The Japanese had scopes on virtually every one of their machine guns.
Alright, I think it'd be a good time to start pulling this gun apart and take a look at some of its insides.
So, disassembly is fairly easy.
We want to make sure the bolt is forward, which it is, and we have a disassembly pin right here, going to pull this detent out,
and rotate it.
So this pin pulls out, and then the backplate is going to fly off the back of the gun
because it's under tension from the mainspring, so we'll hold it on.
There we go.
Now, we have our recoil spring, we have our backplate. Take a look at it up close in a minute.
Now we pull out
the bolt and bolt carrier. These are massive components.
And we can pull off our charging handle as well.
And that's it. That's the gun pretty much field-stripped.
Now you could detach the barrel. That's actually a very intricate process that I'm not going to get into on this video.
You can see, right here, we have this threaded plug. If you take that plug off there is a gas regulator nut underneath it.
They did have five different sizes of aperture.
So, not so much to adjust with the gun getting dirty, but rather as the barrel wore
over its lifespan you would adjust different gas regulator bolts in it.
To take the barrel off you would take this out, take the gas regulator out,
take off this collar, and then there's actually a wrench that you use,
kind of like a wheel puller, to pull the barrel out of its socket because it is extremely tightly fitted.
Guns today typically have been sitting around, you know, for 40 years with
hardening oil in them, and they can be extremely difficult to get the barrels out of.
At any rate ... let's bring the camera back here and take a closer look at exactly how this mechanism functions.
Alright, so here is our bolt, our locking piece, operating rod, and our gas piston.
These are very much like a beefed up, large scale Type 11 light machine gun.
And what happens is the bolt...
So the bolt comes out like this. We do have a firing pin inside, very chunky firing pin.
That drops in there.
When the bolt is out of battery these lugs raise up,
they don't engage with locking lugs and the locking recesses in the receiver,
and as you can see the firing pin is not accessible.
When the gun is in battery this locking piece drops down,
... the firing pin is now visible, so it can be struck by the rear of the operating rod.
And in this position the locking lugs are actually engaging in recesses in the receiver.
So to set this up on the gun, this is the position when the gun is locked.
And what happens is this giant face of the operating rod strikes the firing pin
because it's accessible through there. And that's what fires the gun.
When the gun is out of battery, when the bolt's moving, this locking piece is cammed up,
that pushes the bolt forward a little bit, and the locking lugs come out of battery. The firing pin is inaccessible.
So that's what happens, as this cycles, the bolt does this.
Now when we look at the operating rod, one thing we'll notice is this cam trackway.
This operates the slide that feeds ammunition into the gun.
So what this does is cause a lug on the feed system to pull a new cartridge in every time the bolt goes forward,
and then it cycles backwards, picks up a new cartridge on the feed pawls when the bolt goes back.
So that's what this is doing. And then, of course, the front here you can see is kind of carboned up.
That's the actual gas piston. You can actually see this moving underneath the gun. We'll take a little close-up of that in a moment.
Our charging handle here has this very nice big gripping surface.
This is a non-reciprocating charging handle. So you use it to pull the bolt back and then you push it forward,
and this acts as a little catch spring and holds the charging handle to the front end of the receiver.
A couple other pieces here. This is the back plate of the gun.
This gigantic rod is the spring guide, and then this is the trigger.
So.
This doesn't do much when it's out of the gun because it's not under tension. (There we go.)
So this forked rod is the ... extension of the trigger,
this trips the sear in the bottom of the receiver, which allows the bolt to go forward and fire.
This is an open bolt gun, so when it's ready to fire the bolt's locked back and under spring tension.
There is also
a buffer insert here that goes into the back plate.
This has an additional spring just to cushion the bolt when it is at full travel. So this
sits inside the back plate like that. Bolt hits this, that softens, dampens the blow. That trigger still comes through.
You can see we have buttons, here and here, that allow you to fold the grips up.
That's for transportation.
That's our safety. Just flipping the trigger piece up to the side prevents it from being used. Pretty simple but very effective.
Alright, here on the side of the gun this is one of the recesses for one of the locking lugs.
There's an identical one on the other side.
You can see there's a little screw and plate so that you can access the locking surface
if you ever need to adjust, change headspace, repair the gun that sort of thing.
Something else I want to point out, we have this mounting point on the bottom. This is not original,
this was added by a previous owner at some point in the gun's history to allow it to mount to a Browning style tripod.
One last thing to look at while we're down here,
This cylinder at the bottom has the spring-loaded sear in it.
So when you pull the trigger, the forks on the back of the buffer
are actually pushing against the sear and a spring in there to allow the gun to fire.
So you can see it's got a little screw, you can take the screw out, take the bottom plate out and maintain that as well.
Now of course our oiler is inside here. This whole top cover assembly is an oil reservoir.
We have an access button here,
that allows this whole thing to lift up.
Once this is up you can see that we have a brush, right there.
And this little beveled piece is actually the oil pump.
So this is hit by the feed assembly. Every time the gun cycles it pushes in and pumps just a little bit of oil out onto this pad.
This pad then brushes the oil onto each cartridge as it runs through the feed assembly.
Now the oil is not strictly necessary, the gun will run for at least several hundred rounds without it, as long as it's clean.
It's there more as a contingency and to prevent things from going wrong once the guns start getting used heavily.
Let's take a look at a couple of the other features of the tripod.
The elevation adjustment is right here. We have an adjustment dial and we have a locking lever.
So with the lever all the way back the elevation is pretty well locked,
and what you can do is simply depress the gun a click at a time,
you can hear that. So very fine adjustment.
Now if I move the locking lever into its vertical position,
I can now free-crank the gun up and down a little bit faster, and I'm not limited.
This is for fairly significant adjustment. And then if I move the lever all the way forward
it disengages this wheel from the elevation entirely and allows me to move the gun completely freely,
So I can move the gun to whatever position I want, lock it down. If I need to move quickly,
unlock the gun, move it to a new position, and then relock it. A pretty effective system.
You will also see up here we have two slots for an armoured shield,
though there isn't one on this gun, but they were fitted with them.
There is also an adjustment for traverse locking, which is unfortunately missing from this gun.
And then the one other mechanism we have is this front hand wheel
which actually raises and lowers the entire pedestal of the gun.
It's heavy to move it up because I'm lifting 60 pounds of gun with it.
But that allows you, if you're setting this gun up behind some specific piece of hard cover,
you can raise the gun up to whatever allows it to just peek out from behind your cover.
And then adjust the angle of the gun with this.
Well thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
I know I always really get a kick out of taking a look at some of the more unusual and obscure machine guns that are out there.
Especially ones like this one that are really so much better and high quality than most people give them credit for.
This one, of course, is up for auction here at the James Julia auction house.
It'll be in the March 2015 auction, and if you'd like to add it to your collection
and there are a bunch of good reasons you might want to, you'll have every opportunity.
So if you take a look in the link below, that'll take you to the Julia auction catalogue page.
This is lot number 2030, ... you can take a look at Julia's high res pictures, their description,
all that sort of stuff and start making plans for where this is going to go in your living room.
Thanks for watching.