Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian, and I'm here today at the Institute of military technology
Taking a look at a bunch of cool Forgotten weapons
And the one we have today is a Winchester G30 R
Now I did a video series from the Cody Firearms museum
Not too long ago, that covered all of the other guns in the series except for this one
So it was really cool to be able to get my hands on an example of the G30 R
To finish up this story, so just as a brief overview this begins with Ed Browning
Who is John Moses Browning 's half-brother creates a rifle design which Colt manufactures in 1929?
Presents the army they don't like it browning goes back works on it
He then ends up bringing it to the Winchester company in the late 1930s
They bring it on board as the G30 project because they can see that a war is coming and they want to make sure
That they have some sort of self loading rifle that they can bring to market for anyone who might want a self-loading rifle
when a war is breaking out now the G30 didn't work out so well and
It had a tipping bolt and an annular gas piston and what happened was when Ed Browning died in 1939
They brought in a guy named David Marshall
"Carbine" Williams to take over the project and
Williams had this Gas Tappet idea which is a gas piston that moved just a couple millimeters
But provided all of the inertia necessary to fully cycle a rifle bolt
And this was a much more elegant system than the long stroke gas piston on the M1 Garand
so Williams took his
Gas Tappet system and put it into the G30 rifle and at that point it became known as the G30-M it
Was tested by the Marine Corps and didn't do so well in comparison to the Johnson the Garand and as a control the 1903 Springfield
But it seemed to have a lot of potential and so the military encouraged
Williams and Winchester to go back and continue developing the rifle
and that's what they did the next thing they did to it was to replace the
tilting bolt from browning with a rotating bolt very much like that of an M1 Garand and
While they were working on this they had a rough prototype built up
Which is became?
Which they called the Winchester M2 and we have a previous video on that specific rifle as well
The M2 they showed to the Ordnance Department and the Ordnance Department looked at it and said well
That's that's very interesting and all but
What if you could scale that down to this new?
30 carbine cartridge that we have a series of trials going on like right now for and
Winchester did that and that's where the m1 carbine was developed from that that rifle became
Winchester's entry into the m1 carbine trials
Which became the m1 carbine so we have a bit of a delay here in Winchester's development of this rifle in 30.6
Which is where it had started so once the m1 carbine was fully developed and in production
the Winchester came back to the G 30 rifle and
They took that m2 design, and they polished it so to speak
They made it a lot nicer and turned it into what we have here, which is the G30-R?
Revised perhaps. I don't know exactly what the R stands for
This rifle went back and was tested again by the Marine Corps in May and September of 1943
Remember that the Marine Corps took a while to actually adopt the m1 garand
They didn't do it as soon as the army did and they were still interested in this gun by 1943 now
It still had some problems it broke a couple of parts in testing and by 1943 the m1 garand was clearly working well
It was in service people were happy with it and the army wasn't really looking - wasn't that interested in replacing the
M1 Garand at that point so they took a look at this G30-R They still liked it
They still thought I had a lot of potential and by the way, it's a fantastic rifle in my opinion
They took a look at they said well. There are two things that would make us interested in this either
We need to make it way less seven to seven and three-quarter pounds
This is I want to say eight and a half pounds give or take so either
You know cut a non-trivial amount of weight off of this rifle
And then we'd be interested or add weight to it scale it up and turn it into something that can replace the BAR
Because the BAR was really an overweight and obsolete design at this point
but it was still being used by the United States military, and they were interested in replacing it with something better, so
Winchester looked it at these two options and
Concluded that there wasn't really a lot of place. They could remove weight, and if they did
It appears they weren't confident that they could make a product a lightweight version of this that the army would like a lot of
expectation that if the gun is that light it starts to become
Fragile and you'll have more parts breakages because you just don't have as much material available
and
It potentially becomes a lot harder to shoot accurately in control if it's a lighter gun you're gonna have more felt recoil to it instead
They did in fact end up scaling this up to
BAR size, and it became the WAR the
WAR or the Winchester automatic rifle, which we also have a video on so this is
the most polished final evolution of
David Williams .30-06 combat rifle
Let me go ahead and take a closer look at some of the details so
The G30R is not actually marked G30R anywhere the one marking that's on this rifle
Is this one interestingly in a script font?
And it reads WRA Co. that's Winchester Repeating Arms Company and a serial number 67 now. They didn't make 67 of these
This is the only one that I am aware of
67 I believe would have come from a a sequence of other prototype guns that this was just following in line with
So there are a couple elements we can see from the outside here one of course is this pretty obvious m1 carbine looking but
Larger Op-Rod also very similar to the m1 garand. We have a two lug rotating bolt up front
This is an extremely smooth operating gun by the way, it's beautiful
And this is going to cycle back
so
Forward to lock we have a rear sight here. It is an aperture sight
Like the Winchester automatic rifle it actually has these two apertures
And I'm still not entirely sure what the difference is although. I suspect. This is a
close-range battle sight aperture probably
That's that's like your precision aperture
This one right here is your standard battle sight and then this one is for longer range, so you can lift that up
This knob is your windage
Which is going to rotate the entire site. You can see it moving?
back here
We have a safety here on the back
This is a spring-loaded lever that I'm going to lift up to engage the safety
You'll notice when you do put it on safe you have a cover that comes up and closes off this
Channel since when it's on safe. You know the bolt won't be able to go all the way back
so
Not only does this prevent the bolt from coming back thus adding a safety element by not allowing you to charge the rifle
While it's on safe
This also closes off this access to the receiver which prevents dirt from getting in there
When I take the rifle off safe put on fire now this opens up and allows the bolt to travel its full distance
The magazine catch is right down here
Pull that back
and we can pop out the
magazine
The G30R magazine is similar to a BAR magazine the lips look similar in fact
This is probably a converted BAR magazine, and it's got a little bit of a curve to it to better accommodate the stack of cartridges
now unfortunately I can only do a little bit of disassembly because
Just as the Winchester automatic rifle kind of had me puzzled so does this one
But we can take off the upper handguard and take a look at the gas system so the first thing I need to do is
Pop this pin to remove the front handguard
I'll use my Universal tool here for that
That is a captive pin so it comes out that far and then stops
There we go, this is actually captive on the rifle it can't clear the front sight
Right now that we have the front band off or the nose cap off now we can take off the front band
I'm just going to come back like that and now
The upper handguard comes off
So here is the inside of the gas system. We have our gas block right here
That's got the Williams Tappet on it, and that is going to hit this
operating block
Cycle it backward and force the bolt to rotate
So with the bolt open you can see the little gas piston right there doesn't have to move far. Just a few millimeters to
Impart all the necessary energy
into the operating slide
it's interesting to note on this particular rifle that the barrel has been milled away on both sides there and
there this was clearly the
There was some experiment experimentation still going on here
That they were doing not can't say exactly what that was for because this clearly doesn't
Fit any requirement of the upper handguard this was something
Previous in this barrel or this rifles life can also notice that the finish is polished away up here
So they may have been experimenting with different locations to put the gas block in different configurations for the operating rod
So in addition to the interest from the US military
Winchester also had gotten some interest from the Canadian military in trying out this rifle the Canadians were
interested in the idea of a self loader and
Specifically interested in this it was a good commercially available weapon they would have been able to buy it or license it from Winchester
unfortunately when Winchester asked for permission to ship some of these overseas or over the border into Canada
The US government denied them permission, it's not entirely clear
Why but Winchester was never able to provide any of these rifles for Canadian testing so that ended up going nowhere now
It's unlikely the Canadians would have adopted this, but they probably would have been happy to examine them. In U.S.
Testing this was actually given a T designation this was the T10-E1
kind of cool a lot of the other prototypes didn't get so far as the designation like that and
Ultimately it's you know if this had been available in 1936 to compete against the m1
I think there's a pretty good chance it would have won that competition
I think it is a better gun than the m1 of course
it's able to be a better gun because it was able to take elements from the m1 and learn from the m1's development and
Combat use so it shouldn't be any surprise that the Gun that came later
And and took elements from its predecessor turned out to be better
But it's a very sleek svelte gun obviously it had the advantage of box magazines
You'll notice that this magazine is slightly curved. It is an improvement over the the standard BAR Magazines that were used by
most of these prototype rifles the BAR magazine was not really well suited to use in a
Self-loading rifle like this and it was cause of a lot of problems for several different designers
So with this finished we can finally conclude the series on David Marshall Williams
And at Browning's work on this whole developmental line for the Winchester company through out before and throughout World War 2
Really cool to be able to see examples of all of these so of course this particular one is here at the Institute of Military Technology
Down in Florida it is a collection
With basically the same same mission statement as forgotten weapons to preserve this history and to educate people about it
It is a collection
That's not strictly speaking open to the public, but it is available by appointment
and if you are interested in doing research here or examining some of the collection get in touch with them and
Definitely check the place out if you have the option. Thanks for watching guys if you like this sort of content
Please do consider checking out my patreon page
It's support from
Subscribers there that makes it possible for me to come to places like the IMT and bring you guys guns like this one
Thanks for watching