Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the James D. Julia
auction house taking a look at some of the guns
from their April or spring of 2017 auction.
This is a very rare, and very interesting, and very ugly
Howell Model of 1915 automatic rifle.
It is a conversion of a bolt action Enfield, an SMLE,
into a semi-automatic light support rifle.
Now, these were only made in very limited numbers, only a handful.
This one appears to be number 4. It is marked on the handguard, although not anywhere else.
And these didn't ever get adopted in any great number.
Now when you say semi-automatic Enfield conversion
I think a number of people are going to immediately think to the Charlton,
which is the same sort of idea but done in World War Two.
... The Howell here is interesting in that it is actually a World War One conversion project.
One would naturally think that, yeah, self-loading rifle in World War One is
the bee's knees, the cat's meow, it'd be awesome, it'd be fantastic and it'd be a big help.
And why wouldn't the British have done everything they could to refine this, and really make it a reality?
That's an interesting question. And taken in context it's ... a very good question.
A lot of other combat powers were looking at semi-automatic weapons.
The US and the French, of course, were looking at the Pedersen Device at the end of the war.
The French had issued the Model of 1917 self-loader, and the Model of 1918 follow up on it.
The French also used a number of other sporting rifles, Remington Model 8s I believe, in small numbers.
Winchester 1907s were used in the Air Corps.
There was potentially a lot of use of semi-auto rifles in World War One.
But the British didn't really take up on that.
They had the Farquhar-Hill, which was ordered right at the end of the war but never actually used in any quantity.
And then they had this developed in 1915. So why didn't it go into service?
Well, there are two answers. One is it is a total kludge of a gun, mechanically speaking.
... On the bright side, there's not necessarily a ton of cost to this conversion,
because it uses most of the original rifle as is.
We'll take a closer look at the mechanics in just a moment, but it's basically just a gas piston
bolted onto the side of the gun and not much else.
But I think the more significant reason is that the semi-auto rifle didn't really fit into British tactics in World War One.
As the war progressed, the British started finding, as everyone did,
they started finding their own successful ways to ... break the trench warfare stalemate.
And for the British this involved mostly hand grenades and light machine guns.
So by the end of the war the British were loading dudes up with Mills bombs, hand grenades,
and they were adding a kind of ridiculous number of Lewis light machine guns to their basic squad organisation.
And the self-loading rifle didn't quite fit into that paradigm.
The idea was they'd be better off with light machine guns that offered more firepower than anything like this would have,
and hand grenades, which offered indirect fire. So you could actually heave hand grenades into a trench
where you couldn't directly see the enemy and still kill them that way.
And the semi-auto rifle was kind of this middle ground that wasn't really necessary.
It was neither fish nor fowl, to put it that way.
So, very few of these were actually manufactured. This one is serial numbered four.
I don't have any numbers on actual production, but it would not have been many at all.
I do want to point out that the bipod here is an after the war addition by some owner of the rifle,
I don't know who. It's a Parker-Hale bipod, so it's at least no earlier than the 1930s.
And I don't know who put it on there or when, but it is not a military standard.
It does presumably make the gun a lot easier to shoot though. ...
Anyway, let's go ahead and take a closer look at the mechanics of this,
because while it is a total kludge, it's cool-looking,
and it's really neat to see how simple of a way you could actually
make to convert a bolt action into a semi-auto.
So mechanically, this is pretty much a stock rifle with a gas tube added to it.
And you'll see the end of the gas tube right here. This screw actually gives you access to the gas port to look in.
Presumably for drilling the gas port I would assume.
At any rate, gas comes in here, and it's going to come down this tube,
going to continue coming down this tube, past the rear sight.
This is a big mounting bracket that holds this whole thing on.
We've got a mounting bracket there, we've got this bracket down here.
And then we get to this point. So right here the gas tube ends, and we have the actual moving piston component.
I'm going to lay the rifle on its side so we can see what that's doing.
What we have here is the actual knob on the end of the bolt handle has been cut off,
but other than that, it's been left stock.
And there is this carefully shaped curved surface.
So what happens is when this gas piston comes backward,
this cam is going to force the bolt to rotate open while not travelling backwards.
Just like that.
That unlocks the bolt just like you are doing it by hand.
And then this piston is going to continue travelling backwards,
it's going to cycle all the way open. You can see that the magazine is fully open here.
... So inertia is going to open it this far, and then spring pressure (because there's a big spring inside this tube),
that's going to start pulling the bolt forward, and it's going to go forward. (It's a little sticky here.)
Once it gets to the end of travel,
right there.
It's a little sticky here, but if I drop it,
just like that,
this cam surface (the other side of it) now pushes the bolt handle down and back into a locked position.
The striker is cocked and now it's ready to fire.
The trigger has been reshaped substantially, and there's a spring and an extra piece added to the back of it.
And best I can tell, this is an added disconnector safety to prevent it from firing out of battery.
With a standard bolt action Enfield that's taken care of differently, and with the modification here
they had to add something or wanted to add something.
Now, you'll note this is a longer than normal magazine.
It does still change through the standard method.
This is in fact one of the British World War One 20 round Lee-Enfield magazines.
These were manufactured very much like the German 20 round trench mags,
but never seem to have really gotten into service much.
It's an interesting question as to why they weren't, but what ended up happening after the war is
these magazines ended up used in a lot of machine gun trials.
So in the 1920s, they were experimenting with using these in various machine guns.
And so there very few of these magazines left. This is a rare and expensive thing just by itself.
But that is what the Howell was equipped with because it made more sense than a 10 round mag.
You could, of course, fit this with a standard 10 round magazine as well.
Nothing about the lock-up or the magazine release has been changed.
Now a lot of the other strange bits on this rifle are there just as workarounds for the semi-automatic action.
So if you think about the way you would hold an Enfield,
it would hit you in about three different places if the bolt cycled automatically from your firing grip.
So for one thing the cocking piece. If you are holding it up above the top of the wrist like a normal hold on the rifle,
the cocking piece is going to hit your hand when you go to cycle.
So they add a pistol grip down here so that you can
(and I mean, this is a really crude pistol grip, it's just a piece of hollow tube basically that's clamped onto the top),
but that brings your grip down here so your hand's not in the way of this.
This tab right here is there to protect you from the cocking piece, so that you don't bring your face up in the way.
You can see when we cycle this all the way back,
that shield
is right there to protect you from the cocking piece.
On this side of the rifle you have this weird sort of shaped handguard
that your firing hand goes in, like so.
That's not there because of any sort of gas leak issue, it's there because
you don't want your hand to creep up and get in the way of this,
which will probably hurt a lot if it hits you while the gun is cycling.
It's also interesting to note that the rear sight has been moved out to the left side of the gun.
Because of all the mechanics going on, the shooter would presumably
not have their eye lined up straight down the centreline,
but they'd have their cheek off to the side of it. So a rear notch has been added on the side.
And this actually stows, we can lift this up,
and that stows in here so it doesn't get snagged on anything.
And we have the same sort of accommodation with the front sight.
So there's the actual front sight blade,
and then when not in use it folds down into the nose ... cap.
You'll note that the bayonet lug has been removed, this whole nose cap has been modified a bit.
You can see the square cutout in the wood from when this was an SMLE,
but they changed the nose cap for the semi-auto version.
Now I think if we really want to know how this rifle works, we're going to have to go out and shoot it.
So let's go out to the range.
So the malfunction, and we've had this happen like twice so far, overall this thing is shooting really well,
but the one malfunction that does happen is the cocking piece
gets canted over and then jams on the receiver,
like this.
And,
there we go. Now it should run fine again.
I do want to point out that this is very much a self-loading rifle and not a machine gun.
In fact, this has about the worst trigger reset of any gun I've ever shot.
You have to push the trigger all the way forward to reset for your next shot.
And that was done deliberately as a way to avoid having unintended automatic fire, so.
However, with that in place you can very clearly tell that this was not designed to be a light machine gun.
It was a self-loading rifle.
And to further that point, the bipod that is on here right now,
it makes it a lot easier to shoot prone, but it's not an original bipod. That was added.
So in its original form I think this would have been fired from the shoulder.
Now another thing people are going to point out is, is it not
absolutely petrifying having this giant thing come flying back at your face every shot?
And the answer is, if it were going slowly enough that you could see it, it probably would be.
As it is, ... I can notice it, but ... we did the high speed shooting before we did this filming,
so I've shot this enough now that I'm pretty confident that it's not actually going to fly out and kill me.
However, it's also interesting to note (I pointed out these offset sights),
those sights are offset enough that you actually don't even get a cheek weld on the stock, really.
And I'm suspicious that that may have been done to mollify soldiers who picked this thing up
and looked at it went, "No way am I putting my face behind that bolt."
And stuck the sights off far enough to the side that if something were to happen,
that bolt's not going to go straight into your face. It might skim off your cheek, but it wouldn't kill you.
Thoughtful, you know.
Overall I have to say that the Howell performed completely differently than I was expecting.
I figured this thing was really, while cool, was really a kludge.
And there was probably no chance it would run reliably. And I came away very surprised.
... We had a few malfunctions, it's a 100 year old gun, that's to be expected.
And it actually ran far better than I would have anticipated.
The recoil impulse to it is odd a bit. It's not something you would normally find on a modern gun. ...
Because of this huge gas piston, it's got a very long recoil impulse.
You can kind of feel the whole thing going kachung kerchunk, kachung kerchunk, back and forth.
And the trigger reset is really quite remarkably long.
It was definitely a ... semi-auto rifle, and not a light machine gun.
That said, you know, if British doctrine had called for it
this is not the worst gun I've ever seen, ... [not] the worst type of conversion like this. It's really cool.
I hope you guys enjoyed the video.
I have always wanted to do some shooting with, well, any semi-auto bolt-action conversion really.
But this rifle has been on my list of "wanting to try out and shoot" for a very long time, so.
Hopefully you enjoyed the video, enjoyed the high speed.
If you'd like to actually own this yourself, it is coming up for sale here at James Julia.
So if you take a look at the description text below you'll find a link to their catalogue page on it.
You can read their description, see their pictures, and if you'd like to place a bid, it's just a click away.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]