Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, and I am here today at the James Julia Auction House
taking a look at some of the guns, and enormous naval cannons,
that are going to be for sale in their upcoming October of 2016 Firearms Auction.
And of course what we have here is a tremendously large naval cannon.
This is a Vickers "pom-pom" gun, or a Maxim actually, this one's a Maxim pom-pom gun.
So named by actually South Africans
for the ... rather distinctive sound that this makes firing in fully automatic with
37mm, one pound, explosive shells.
This was a serious piece of artillery when these were manufactured.
Which would have been between 1889 and 1900, or thereabouts.
This particular gun, it's really cool, it has some really good documented history to it.
This is gun number 2024, and they started at number 2001.
So this was in the very first batch of 30 of these guns that were made
by what was at the time, the Maxim Nordenfelt Gun and Ammunition Company.
And they made 30 of these guns kind of as an experiment.
They were hoping to make big sales of this
as an upscale version of the standard Maxim water-cooled machine gun.
And the idea was these would be primarily used by naval units.
They would mount these on ships, and they would act as your close in
basically like anti-torpedo boat armaments.
So when people tried to get in close to do nasty things to a large naval vessel,
you needed something small that you could use to fend off small boats.
... Another option would be think of them like the Somali pirates of 1900.
They are going to come up in little speedboats and you need something to keep them away,
and 14 inch naval guns aren't going to do the job on a speedboat that's 200 yards away.
Instead you get something like this, that can rapid fire a projectile.
... You could have them explosive, you could also have armour-piercing ones.
This would go through an inch of cast iron plate at 100 yards,
which is pretty significant, especially at the time.
That really lets you defeat any light armour on a small naval vessel.
These will also go on to be used on a ground based role, primarily as anti-aircraft guns.
You'll see pictures of these used by both sides, by the British and the Germans,
in World War One as anti-aircraft guns with timed exploding projectiles.
... I mean this is going to do a serious number to a World War One wood and canvas biplane.
And they are just incredibly cool, massive, guns.
Mechanically ... they're extremely similar to a standard Maxim gun.
Same basic principles, but there are a few changes made
to accommodate the enormous size of these things.
And in total they only made about 450 of them.
They did a really good job financially
for the Maxim Nordenfelt Company for a couple of years, 1895, 1896.
Really sales of these helped the company survive.
But beyond that, they kind of quickly became a bit obsolete.
So these were ultimately in service for a couple of decades.
The US declared them obsolete in 1911 and 1912,
but they were still on US ships during World War One.
This particular gun ... (again, I mentioned there is some cool provenance on this one),
well, this particular gun was originally manufactured in 1889
as ... one of the first batch of 30.
And it took a couple of years for it to sell.
But by the mid-1890s it was sold, along with five other guns, to Russia.
These were sent off basically as sales samples.
And the Russians tinkered with it for a short time, and decided it wasn't what they wanted.
I think they actually claimed it had some defects to it,
and they shipped them back rather than pay for them.
So ... Maxim Nordenfelt (at that point) got the guns back and rebuilt them.
And then they actually sold them to someone else,
and in this case we don't know who this second buyer was.
But by 1897 they had come back a second time,
because parts of this are stamped "Vickers, Sons and Maxim",
which was the new name of what would become the Vickers Company as of 1897.
So that we know that after 1897 this gun came back and got reworked again.
And then in 1898 it was sold a third time, that third sale was to the US Navy
who put it on a Coast Guard cutter, the USS Manning.
That Coast Guard cutter was promptly brought into naval service for the Spanish-American War.
They sailed down to Cuba. And the Manning, with this gun and a second one,
they also had gun number 2026 on the Manning,
and those two participated in some of the very first bombardments of Cuba.
After that it stayed on the Manning for a time.
It was eventually declared obsolete, removed from the ship,
and kind of tossed on a pile somewhere probably, until someone found it.
It's been largely restored, it looks fantastic.
It is missing some of the internal parts, and we'll take a look at the inside in a minute.
But boy, it's just a really cool piece of equipment here.
Swing it around and you can see the other side.
This would have originally fired belted ammunition, so these guys all in a belt.
And in fact the platform over here is for a crate of ammunition.
Instead of a fusee spring, like you would have on a regular Maxim gun,
a coil spring on the side, these actually used a wound up like a clock spring.
And that would be contained in here.
On this one the spring's present but it's actually broken, so it's not installed.
But really cool markings here on this guy.
And all the way down to the little teeny pistol grip on the back,
which is what you would actually use to fire it.
Fill up the water jacket with water for cooling.
This fires between 250 and 300 rounds a minute of
explosive one-pound projectiles, like I said a lot of firepower in this guy.
And a lot of the components on here are big cast brass pieces.
It was a lot easier, for example, to cast a part like a feed block like this,
... very complex, a lot of curves involved.
It's a lot easier to make a mould and cast this than try and machine it out of steel.
So they did that for a lot of the complex parts.
You'll see that ... the square parts, like the side plates, are steel.
These guys, parts of the ... operating mechanism, have to be steel because they need to be stronger.
Brass isn't strong enough to withstand the impact that you have with this when it's firing.
But for things that are just geometric, like the feed block, the water jacket here,
the pistol grip, the sight.
This thing is actually a hydraulic buffer.
It has this nice instruction on the back,
"Fill buffer glycerine & water equal parts, one pint at extreme depression."
So you would tilt the gun all the way this way,
and then you can fill the buffer up from the back via this screw plug.
And that's what the internals slam into every time you fire, that decelerates them.
And this is actually on an original naval cone mount.
So this mount would have been bolted onto a ship's deck.
And you've got this thing that ... one man can operate this,
although you have ... an assistant, at least one assistant, to help bring ammunition.
But one man can aim and fire this.
You've got a rear sight, you got a front sight.
This is set up so that it's pinned in place for elevation,
but originally you would have had a wheel to allow you to elevate and depress the gun.
And of course it just pivots 360 degrees on the mount.
And you can deliver a lot of bad news to anyone
who's trying to get close to a naval vessel with one of these.
Same thing if you're shooting down aircraft in World War One.
Let's bring the camera in and take a close look at some of the markings on this thing.
And we'll take a look inside the top cover.
Alright, so here is our spring collar. In fact we can actually pull this off.
You can see the stud it goes on.
And then inside here you normally have a very large clock-type coil spring.
Wind-up spring.
And then Maxim Nordenfelt was the name of the company at the time.
... There's an interesting story just in that.
The Maxim gun company was bought up by the Nordenfelt gun company,
who was actually one of his competitors making multi-barrel,
what you'd call a manual machine gun.
And the two worked together for a short time before
eventually it ... all became the Vickers Company.
And that's more story than we need to get into today.
But 37mm, which is in British parlance a 1 pounder,
because a 37mm shell was a nominal 1 pound shell.
Maxim Nordenfelt Gun and Ammunition Company Limited.
Now if we look down on the yoke that holds this whole massive thing up.
We have a US Navy stamp, it's a one ... pounder Maxim gun.
And this was in the Naval Registry as gun number 6,
separate from its Maxim named serial number
Weighs 97 pounds. Let's be clear, that's 97 pounds for just the gun.
Without water, without ammunition, without this actual trunnion, and without the stand.
That weighs quite a lot more than 97 pounds otherwise.
And the date on there is 1898, which is when the US Navy purchased this piece.
Here's the back of our hydraulic buffer, with of course the instructions for filling said buffer.
We'll see when we take a look inside what exactly that's doing.
And then here is our rear sight. We've got windage adjustment right here.
Like so.
And then in order to adjust elevation,
what you do is loosen this thumb screw,
and slide the whole sight bracket up and down.
This can go out to a maximum of 80, which would be 800 either metres or yards.
I must say I'm not sure if it's metres or yards.
But 800 is a pretty extreme elevation for this gun.
It's a fairly low-pressure cartridge, and the maximum range wasn't all that huge.
Now that's not particularly important, because this is primarily meant for close-range usage.
And lastly, up here on top of the top cover we have the original data plate.
So it's a 1 pounder automatic, and then patents from 1889, 1890 and 1895.
This is kind of interesting, because ... we know this gun was made in 1889, maybe 1890,
but it came back to be refurbished and updated by the Maxim Company.
And clearly ... they added some feature to it.
I believe it was an improvement to the operating handle,
that was a feature that was patented in 1895.
Alright, now to open this thing up we are going to pull the top cover pin.
That comes out, and then the top cover lifts up,
comes all the way over onto the muzzle.
And now we can take a look inside.
Alright, now I mentioned some of the internals are missing.
Those would be the lock itself, and the slide components to the feed block.
However, what we do have here is the original lock head.
So you can see that this has an interrupted thread to it.
And the lock would drop in here, and rotate and lock in place on this.
And that is how it would remain attached to the internals of the gun
when it's actually being used.
Now ... it has two internal rails, here and here, just like a Maxim or Vickers gun.
And when fired this whole assembly, including the barrel,
all of this is going to reciprocate backwards about two inches.
When these go back they're going to impinge on that hydraulic buffer
at the very back of the receiver.
And so that's what's going to dampen the impact.
They will be slowed down by the coil spring here.
And there is a charging handle on this other side.
So what would normally happen is this handle would reciprocate backwards when fired,
it would impact this, and it would end up [swinging] all the way forward,
and then all the way back.
So as you're firing this, this charging handle
is moving through this arc of rotation fully with every shot.
You don't want to stick your hand or your face in the way of that.
And that again is just like what you would have on a Maxim or Vickers gun.
This design ... of the outside bits here
is exactly what they had on the very early Maxim guns of this same period.
Now one other difference between this and the standard Maxim gun
is again kind of due to its size, and also to a special naval interesting requirement.
... First off, it does have a manual safety.
But then the trigger on a regular Maxim runs along the bottom plate of the gun.
However, on this thing there is no bottom plate.
So we can see right down through there.
And the idea was the Navy didn't want stuff to accumulate in the gun.
Just anything that gets in there, let it fall out the bottom.
No big deal, there are plenty of sailors to scrub the deck clean afterwards.
So the trigger bar can't go on this bottom plate which isn't there.
Instead the trigger bar is running along the right side of the receiver.
Looking down in here you can actually see the trigger bar,
right there, at the tip of my finger.
It's locked in place, it's not moving. But it runs from there
up, you can see it right here,
and it's going to continue all the way up towards the front of the gun
to right there.
So right here is a projection on the trigger bar
that's going to interface with the lock.
And when this gets pulled backwards, it's going to trip the lock and fire the gun.
And that's what happens when you pull the trigger, this whole bar
all the way to the back of the receiver slides backwards.
Thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
It's really cool to get to take a look at one of these.
As far as I know ... there are only two of these in the country,
there are a couple more around the world.
And there are some others that are in total relic condition sitting outside VFW posts and such.
But this one's actually been restored, the brass is nice-looking,
it's got most of the internals in it.
And it's a really cool rare specimen of the most ginormous Maxim that they ever made.
So if you are interested in having this yourself you might need a bigger living room,
you might want to talk to your wife, but pretty damn cool.
Check out the link in the description text below,
you'll find a link there to Julia's catalogue page on the piece.
You can see all of their pictures, their information, their provenance,
which includes some of the naval records describing
the naval inventory of this gun and the ship that it was mounted on.
And place a bid online if you want, or come right down to the auction house,
participate live, and get to take a look at it yourself.
Thanks for watching.