Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're going to take a look
at a prototype version of what could have been
the new and improved US Marine Corps
standard-issue China Lake 40mm launcher.
So if you're not familiar with the China Lake,
first off you should go back and watch the video
that we did not that long ago
on the standard, if there is such a thing,
China Lake pump-action 40mm grenade launcher.
This was developed in 1967, manufactured in 1968, a total of two dozen originals were made.
And it was probably the coolest weapon used by the SEALs in Vietnam.
However, after Vietnam this gun kind of goes away, it's replaced by the M203.
Now, an effort came up in the early 2000s (actually kind of started in the '90s),
of a couple of individuals who got their hands on some of the information
about the China Lake and wanted to reproduce it, because it was awesome.
And they ended up going through and doing this.
And ... so they start with one of them, one hand built prototype.
And it's pretty cool, and it's like, "OK, well, we'll build a couple."
And then this kind of escalates,
and a lot of people are obviously interested in this, because who wouldn't want one.
And it goes from 1 to 2, to 3, to 10, to 50.
And by the time it gets to 50 like now they've got a little bit of an issue.
The original, the first one, was made by basically a master machinist - all hand built.
Well, you're not going to do 50 like that, they wanted to get
... a set up for a proper production run.
And so they start looking into how are we going to get the different parts,
things like the [rear] sight.
"Well, OK, we can find old M203 ... rear sight assemblies, take care of that."
Buttstocks, "Who do we contract with to make 50 custom buttstocks, eh?"
Well, the biggest hurdle ends up being barrels, having to make 40mm barrels.
Because they ... didn't have a source to buy them off-the-shelf.
And barrel manufacturers would say, "Oh yeah, we can do that."
And then they'd look at it and be like, "Mmm, yeah, not so much. Like we're not set up for 40mm."
Because there are not very many companies that do, there's not much demand for 40mm barrels.
Well, in the end they end up getting in contact with a company called Airtronic,
which was at the time the prime contractor for the US Army to make M203 grenade launchers.
And this is like a perfect setup, these guys are already making
tens of thousands of 40mm launchers, they've got the barrels in production.
And Airtronic looks at this and goes, "That's pretty cool, we can make the whole thing."
And so what started off as basically a hobby of,
"Hey, we got access to one of these at a museum, the museum curator is really cool,
we're legit historians, we want to make one as a reproduction."
Like making one, this turns now into a full-on manufacturing endeavour.
So the three original guys, the ... machinist was Brian Fauci,
the guy with access to the gun was Dutch Hillenberg,
and the finance behind it was Captain Monty Mendenhall,
these three guys form a company called Trident Enterprises.
And they enter into an agreement with Airtronic.
Basically they're going to get a royalty, Airtronic's going to make China Lake grenade launchers.
And what's really interesting is this is right getting into this time
when the US Marine Corps is starting to look for grenade launchers.
Right after the Battle of Fallujah the Marine Corps basically says,
"Hey, we want ... a rapid-fire grenade launching system,
we can engage multiple targets quickly. What's out there and available?
Well, Hillenberg had taken one of these guys to Shot Show not that long before.
Basically to show it off because it's awesome.
They set it up on I think it was DSA's table.
And the guy who would end up being the Marine Corps procurement officer
in charge of finding a multi-shot grenade launcher saw it at Shot Show.
He thought it was cool, wasn't something he was working on at the time, but he remembered it.
And a couple years later he ends up in charge of this procurement program,
and does some back tracing like, "I remember a thing."
And ends up learning that Airtronic is set up to be making these things.
And what he says basically is, "Alright, you know what? That China Lake?
This: this is what we want, I want this, give me these.
Probably slightly modified, there were a couple of little problems with the originals.
Fix those up, boom, done.
But we have to have a competition to make it all formal and proper,
so maybe there is some magic bullet out there.
But the China Lake is what I want, just give me those."
Well, unfortunately, this is where the project kind of falls apart.
So, Airtronic, ... what started as,
"We are just going to re-manufacture the originals as ... functional replicas."
Turns into, "Well, we can tweak it a little bit to improve it, like fixing the takedown issues."
And then it continues ... to like,
"Oh well, you know the ... Marine Corps, they kind of want to also be able to launch flares.
So we have to figure out a way to modify the design so that we can fit an over-length
projectile single-loading, rather than in the magazine. So how do we do that? OK."
And then it goes even farther to:
"Ah, we want to design this to be able to fire the high pressure ... grenades
that are used in the grenade machine guns."
And that's where things really kind of take a turn.
So, at this point let's take a closer look at this.
This is in fact the first prototype that Airtronic did of their modernised China Lake 40mm.
So this is a prototype, this is what Airtronic was working on,
and this is about as far as the project got.
Now, the gun is all made out of aluminium, which is true of the original China Lakes as well.
Of course this one's still in the white because it's just a prototype.
Had it actually gone into production, it would have probably been finished something like this.
Now there are a couple of modifications that they made.
One of them of course is this big, clunky, Vietnam era ... rear sight.
(It's mounted out at the front, so I keep calling it a front sight.)
Instead the Airtronics updated version has Picatinny rail on it,
both back here on the receiver, and out here on the barrel.
And that makes a ton of sense.
Today you would use this with a modern red dot style of sight,
which is exactly what the ... Milkor M32 and M32A1 use.
... That's the obvious solution, so that's a really good improvement.
The back end of the gun was redesigned so that instead of using a wooden stock,
like the Remington 870 derived stock of the original guns,
instead this uses a standard AR-15 buffer tube, lock nut, and pistol grip.
Which I think is also a pretty good idea, a pistol grip would make this,
in my opinion, a better handling, more controllable, gun.
Now the original safety was mounted on the top tang, right here.
You can see that Airtronic has this machined in place,
but I suspect what happened is someone realised
if you've got a traditional stock and you're holding the gun like this,
that safety is in a nice convenient position.
But if you've got a pistol grip down here, now it's not.
And so what Airtronic did is they refitted this particular gun with an M203 style safety.
And I think that also makes a lot of sense.
Just for the record there are two markings on this.
This is one batch of them where Airtronic registered it, of course.
And then in lieu of any better idea, they went ahead and named it
the "4x40" with a little lightning bolt coming off the X,
and they have engraved that into the magazine cap there.
One other modification that Airtronic decided to make, which is
fairly substantial and I think a terrible idea,
is to actually lengthen the receiver and the feed system
because they wanted to make the modernised version
compatible with standard high-pressure grenades.
Instead of the high-low, the 40x46 that's used in the M203, all the underbarrel launchers,
they wanted it to use the same ammunition that's used in the grenade machine guns.
It is a far higher pressure system.
If you haven't seen the video I did on the M79
where we talked about how that 40x46 cartridge works,
it basically has a chamber pressure of 3,000 psi.
Which is low enough that you can use aluminium barrels, (barrel's down there),
but the high pressure cannot.
And I think this would have been a horrifically dangerous gun the first time someone fired it.
But you can see here on the original China Lakes
they have ... lengthened the receiver.
The safety mechanism for those high pressure grenades is that they are longer,
and they will not fit in a short-chambered launcher.
... I don't know exactly which chamber has been cut into the barrel of this gun,
but the feed system is set up to actually feed high-pressure grenades.
The one other modification that they made was to ... probably the most significant
flaw in the original China Lake, which is this disassembly mechanism.
Which is based on the trigger guard itself.
This is an aluminium piece, it was prone to damage, and if it was bent
the gun could disassemble itself when you went to try and cycle it.
As you can see here,
the trigger guard is now a single solid piece, not subject to that problem.
To be honest (this is obviously a prototype and it's missing some parts),
I don't see exactly what the disassembly mechanism was.
They may well have just screwed this one together as a temporary solution.
But had the project gone forward, one of the major things to do
would have been to improve the disassembly mechanism
to ... remediate the problems on the original design.
Where this ended up, unfortunately, was in court
when it should have been going to the US Marine Corps for trials.
There was apparently some misunderstanding on the part of Airtronics
as to ... whether they had purchased the rights to this, or licensed it from Trident.
The two groups ended up in a rather unpleasant split,
a significant court battle ensued.
And the worst outcome of this, of course, is that both parties got screwed by it
because Airtronic never ended up actually submitting anything to the Marine Corps.
And while the two parties were busy fighting it out in court,
the Marine Corps ended up adopting what became the M32A1 from Milkor.
So, to go back a little bit, when initially shortly after Fallujah, about 2006,
the Marine Corps was looking for an off-the-shelf solution for a multiple grenade launcher.
And the only company that responded with an option was Milkor,
and that was the MGL-140. Which, by the way, we have a previous video on.
So if you're interested in what they ended up using, you can check that out.
That was really sort of an initial small purchase of about 200 guns, and trials, field trials in Iraq.
And then they come back and say, "OK, we want to make these changes."
And that was the time when there was an opportunity to present a gun like this
as a competitive different option, and have this adopted
instead of widespread adoption of the Milkor gun.
Instead this was never submitted.
A number of ... small modifications were made to the Milkor.
It became the Navy Mark 14 Mod 0, which was then basically adopted as the M32A1.
So, sadly, like I think this certainly had a tremendous amount of potential.
The Milkor is a good functioning gun,
but it is a rather awkward thing to carry around, to load.
And I think there was really a lot of potential for a modernised China Lake.
It was really unfortunate that all that came of the project was basically this one prototype.
So, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
If you haven't seen the videos we have on some of the other 40mm launchers,
definitely take some time to check those out.
And thanks for watching.