Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Cody
Firearms Museum, where we are taking a look at
one of the weirder French machine guns.
Or at least, one of the least well-known
French machine guns, this is a Darne.
It is a Darne aircraft machine gun, which is why
it doesn't appear to have a stock or a trigger
or any of the sort of accoutrements you would normally expect.
And that's because, frankly, most of the Darne guns
that were actually sold and used were in fact aircraft guns.
Now, the Darne Company started in 1881 as a
... gunsmith turned into a gunsmithing company, and they're best known for shotguns.
They have a number of interesting and very popular shotguns, especially in France.
However, as with so many companies, they got into the
... military armaments business during World War One.
Specifically in 1915 they started making Lewis guns, and started slow.
By the end of the war they'd made like 3,266 French production .303 calibre Lewis guns.
Now while they were building that,
they came up with their own machine gun design in 1916 which would turn into this.
It was tested by the French military in 1917 and 1918.
The French Air Force decided that they liked it,
and they placed an order for a bunch of them to be delivered in the spring of 1919.
But of course the armistice at the end of World War One caused that contract,
along with so many others, to be cancelled.
So that kind of cut them off short, but the company didn't let that stop them.
And they kept developing their gun, trying to increment it,
make it better, make it more manufacturable, make it cheaper.
And in 1922 the French Air Force did formally adopt it
and started buying a bunch of them, a couple of thousand of them total.
In .303 calibre, largely because of the legacy of the Lewis gun,
and the fact that .303 was an easier round to work with than 8mm Lebel.
So the initial production of these guns was all in .303, or as this is actually marked, 7.7mm.
Now Darne, once they had that contract, what they tried to do was kind of
come up with a universal machine gun that they could apply to anything.
So in their catalogue they offered this as an infantry gun with a bipod,
and a shoulder stock, and actually a box magazine feed.
All the rest of these would be belt fed, either with cloth belts or disintegrating links,
depending on the time frame and the customer preference.
But then they offered it as an aerial gun, like this, with various rates of fire.
... On the infantry guns you could go as low as 100 rounds a minute,
as fast as like 850 on the infantry.
... The aircraft guns were designed to be more like 1,000 to 1,350 rounds per minute.
Higher rate of fire being applicable for aircraft use.
They had a fortification version, they had an armoured vehicle version.
They had like the standard company level support machine gun version
that was meant to be fired from a tripod, belt feed.
They had the heavy version of that with a bigger barrel,
and like instead of just a portable tripod,
they had a really good precision sort of long-range heavy machine gun style of tripod.
They did all this sort of stuff.
So before I tell you how many of them actually got sold and who bought them,
let's take a look at how this thing actually works.
Because this is a gun that you occasionally see, but you rarely see the insides of.
And part of that is because they were aircraft guns, so not many people are interested in them,
... If you're a shooter and collector and you have something like this,
you can't really go out and shoot it easily because like where do you - there's no trigger.
And of course belts and links for this are quite rare.
So, no further ado, let's go ahead and take a closer look at it.
Alright, we'll start with some of the markings here.
We have the Darne name or logo.
This is a 1931 gun, that's manufacture date, not model. And then a serial number.
And then we have a calibre marking here on the left side of the receiver.
It's 7.7, that's a metric designation, and that is the metric equivalent to .303 British.
Because if you're the French you are not going to write "British" on the side of your gun,
you're going to write some metric equivalent.
Now that's it for markings, except for the occasional serial number here and there.
What we have is basically a gas operated, open bolt, tilting bolt, machine gun.
So there's a gas block here on the barrel, gas comes down, gas piston down here.
These were all fed by belts, either cloth belts or disintegrating links.
They didn't use feed strips on these.
It's interesting to note you've got a fairly big ... vertical gap between the belt and the barrel,
and we'll touch on that in a moment.
Now this assembly up here
is the trigger mechanism.
This is abnormal because this is an aircraft gun.
So these could be set up to be synchronised to be fired through propellers,
they could be set up to be fired mechanically in wing mounts,
they could be set up in turrets, a bunch of different options.
And to be blunt, I don't know which one this is set up for.
Now I believe it's this gets pushed backwards to fire.
This is an open bolt gun though, so it's not going to fire when the bolt's closed of course.
One of the kind of neat things about the design
(and this is made possible because it's an aircraft gun and it's not going to get mud in it),
is this giant open window on the side.
So it's really easy to see how a lot of this actually works.
In particular you can see that this is a tilting bolt.
So right now it is lifted, the back of the bolt is lifted up
into a recess in the receiver and locked.
When I pull the bolt handle back, which moves the gas piston back
just as it would when you fire,
you can see that the back of the bolt drops.
So right (see if I can get it smooth here), right there
the back of the bolt here is dropping, unlocking, and cycling backwards.
Now the feed system for this gun is really whacky by comparison to most others.
It's got to pull a cartridge from here, all the way back, and then lift it up into the chamber.
And it does that by pulling the cartridge back out of the belt using the rim.
And then it's actually got a forward lifter that holds onto the front of the cartridge,
pushes it up, and then the bolt can come pick it up.
So I have a picture here that ... shows it fairly well.
And then I can show you what it looks like actually in the gun.
So there is our front little cartridge holder.
There's the back, the cartridge sits in there,
the front of the cartridge sits up there.
And when the bolt starts to come forward
the tip of the cartridge is going to get caught in the chamber up there.
And then the bolt is going to pick it up, and push it all the way into battery.
Looking at this from the top, and by the way,
the barrel is on the top, the gas piston is on the bottom,
because with this thing in an aircraft mode, or an aircraft design,
it can even be difficult to tell which way's up on it.
Anyway, looking down on this,
this is our feedway, belts are going to come in from the left.
And we have kind of a typical feed pawl setup
where when the bolt handle comes back it's going to pull this inward like that.
And when the bolt goes forward it's going to push it back.
Now this element, this pawl right here, is spring-loaded.
So what's happening is this will pull a cartridge in,
and then when this slider moves to the left,
this pushes down, slides under a cartridge, lifts up, and locks the cartridge in place.
That basically is going to feed a belt in one ... segment,
but then not allow it to slide back out.
One of the other cool things about the Darne is we can actually open this up,
and see that right in here.
So ... basically this lug is controlled by the gas piston,
and it's going to connect to this arm, which cycles that slide in and out ...
like so.
So disassembly of the Darne is actually remarkably easy.
We have a nice tab here on the back of the gun,
that's connected to the spring guide rod.
All I have to do is push that in, and slide this rear plug off the gun.
Now it's got a pretty hefty recoil spring in it.
See if I can do this on camera.
There we go. We can pull out our recoil spring and its guide rod.
And then the next step is simply pull everything out the back of the gun.
So pull our bolt handle back,
and the whole kit and caboodle comes right out.
So this thing really looks like a complete mess.
And in fact one of the complaints with the Darne is that while it was fairly rugged,
and in particular it was a very cheap gun by light machine gun standards,
the complaint was ... like when they had a functional problem,
they'd kind of like used mechanical tricks to get around it.
And that leads to a lot of stuff in the design, which you can clearly see here.
Now here's our bolt, we can drop the firing pin out.
What happens here is when the bolt is fully locked, the firing pin is controlled by this lug.
Firing pin goes forward when it's fully locked, and fires.
And it does that automatically, it is an open-bolt gun.
So ... that's our locking surface at the top.
And you can see this guy is going to sit right here.
That's the locked position, lifted up on this little inclined slope. That's the unlocked position.
So when this comes up and locks (put the firing pin in),
as this comes back, that firing pin is pushed forward, as you see there.
And ... there's no return spring, but it is an inertial firing pin.
So ... if it's not given some momentum forward it doesn't protrude through the bolt face.
And then you can also see our two lifter-feeder sort of finger arms there.
These are all spring loaded, so they collapse down underneath the system to
pick up a new cartridge when this whole assembly goes forward.
Looking at the front end, ... the front end here is pinned on so that the gas piston itself
can be made of an appropriately different steel than the ... op rod and bolt carrier.
So you've got a little bit of wiggle in this,
kind of like the AK, that's a nice thing. Make sure that it doesn't jam up.
There's your view from the other side.
Despite all of the weird mechanical-looking bits,
the function on this is actually pretty straightforward.
Also I will just point out that the charging handle is very similar to the style of the Chauchat.
Now your easy disassembly ends with the bolt coming out.
The feed mechanism here, all these parts are held in place by little pins and springs.
I suspect it's actually not that hard to take apart.
If you start punching pins out I think you could probably then like
shake the thing upside down, and all the bits would come right out.
However, I am not going to do that
because I don't want to then have to figure out how to get them all back together.
And of course the museum here would not be happy if I didn't.
One other element I want to point out, there's another spring-loaded feed guide in here.
That's there to take the tip of the bullet,
and make sure that it gets forced down right into the barrel.
And then this also gets pushed up out of the way when the bolt closes.
This complaint about mechanical tricks to solve functional problems
really is exemplified by this feed system. ...
Like every time there's a problem with the cartridge escaping and jamming in some direction,
the solution is, "Well, we'll add another little arm or finger to control it there."
Not the most elegant way to solve these sorts of problems.
And you can just barely see, right above my finger there,
is the recess in the top of the receiver that the bolt locks into.
Sorry, it's pretty dark in there. There you go, you can see it ...
right there. That's your locking recess.
Unfortunately for Darne, they weren't quite in the right place
at the right time to get any really big contracts.
They were a little too late to get anything significant in World War One.
And by the time countries were starting to rearm in the 1930s
there were getting to be better options out there.
There were some more refined, more elegant, and better machine guns available.
And so the Darne was ultimately not particularly successful.
They sold a grand total of about 11,000 guns.
A little more than half of that to the French Air Force.
And then they sold, usually about 1,000 at a time,
they sold them to Italy, they sold them to Brazil, they sold them to Turkey.
A couple other countries tested them, Spain, Yugoslavia, Brazil,
all actually bought at least a couple hundred if not about 1,000 of the guns.
So, they got a little bit of distribution, just enough
that you see them showing up in weird places every once in a while these days.
But they really are that gun that you're like,
"I kind of heard of that, but nobody really knows anything about it."
So hopefully you know a little bit more about it now.
A big thanks to the Cody Firearms Museum for allowing me to
pull this out, take it apart, and show you how it works.
They have a tremendous new facility here in Cody, Wyoming.
Thousands of guns on display, really well done.
Highly recommend stopping in at the museum if you have the opportunity.
Thanks for watching.