Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on forgottenweapons.com. I'm Ian,
I'm here today, thanks to the generosity of the Beretta company allowing me to
come to their reference collection outside of Russia, and take a look at
some of the really cool
prototype rifles that they have. Now this one was actually apparently done by the
Terni Arsenal and this is a very early experiment in turning a
bolt-action rifle into a self loader.
This is an M91 Carcano rifle, six-point-five millimeter (6.5x52mm), it appears to be basically
one straight off the rack that was modified to be semi auto.
Now typically the way--one way--that people do this would be by taking a
bolt-action rifle and adding a gas piston on the side, and then as the gas
piston cycles backwards,
you have a set of mechanical components that caused it to pull the bolt up, push
it back, and then a recoil spring moves it forward and rotates it back down.
For example, the British Charlton did that. The other way you could do it, which
is what Terni was trying with this rifle, is to use a short recoil system where
they took the entire barrel and receiver assembly of this rifle, and allowed it to
move about a centimeter.
Well, less. Maybe six or seven millimeters.
You can see when I push on the barrel, whole thing cycles backwards.
What that does is allow you to take a standard receiver,
you don't have to mess with attaching anything to the front end of the rifle,
and you can use the recoil energy to do the work for you.
Now what we have here is a little lug. That lug is fixed to the frame, to
the the stock and the magazine assembly,
but that all stays in place, it's just the barrel which slides in these barrel
bands. Now when that goes backwards,
this lug interacts with a cutout in the bottom of this bolt and it forces the
bolt to cam upwards, which is a clever way of forcing the action to unlock. Now
that cam can't move it very far,
the original Carcano was a two-lug bolt, where you had to rotate the bolt a full 90
degrees to unlock it.
They've replaced that with what appears to be, I believe, an eight-lug bolt where it now
only requires a very short throw
up to unlock, enough that this cam can do that.
So the bolt there is in the locked position, and it's a little stiff to do
it by hand, but it only comes up that far. Then, the bolt can cycle backwards under
inertia, pick up a cartridge, run it forwards
--there's a recoil spring on this side, which we'll see in a moment--which is then
going to force the bolt all the way forward, cam it back down, the bolt drops
back onto this lug, the whole assembly goes forward, and you're ready to fire
again.
Now this is a clever way to do a self-loading rifle conversion of a bolt
action and, like I said, every military in the world wanted to do this because in
theory it could be a very cost effective way to take the existing rifles that
they had and convert them instead of having to buy all brand new self-loaders.
So, obviously this didn't get accepted because this never showed up anywhere
but it's a really neat experiment to look at, so let's take a closer look.
All right we've got the Terni Arsenal logo there
this is serial number T35. Its marked "35" on several of the other parts, and that
"08" is a date,
so this is a 1908 rifle. This is a pre-World War One experiment into
semi-automatic actions.
Now they've added a big amount of metal back here
this is an added receiver cover. If we look inside here you can see the firing
pin coming back through [and] an extra lug. This semi-circular bit right here
encloses our return spring.
It's not really a--well, I guess you could call them a recoil spring as well. So,
what happens when this functions is that lug is locking into this cutout on the
bottom of the bolt.
It's an angled surface, and so--it's a little stiff to do by hand, but--when the
bolt cycles backward,
you can see how that lug is going to interact with the cutout on the bolt
handle and force it open.
Now once this is cammed open and unlocked, it cycles all the way back.
This does not lock open. Instead, you have a cutout here like a later submachine
gun to manually lock the action open. You can see that they've added a bunch of
locking lugs to the bolt face so that it requires a shorter throw
to lock
--there we go.
So that is how you would lock the gun open. You then have an opening here to use what is,
I presume, a standard six-round Carcano clip.
There are--the front of the clip
would come right--
the front of the clip would come right to these two little square edges, and
then you've got these two feed lips to ensure that the top cartridge goes in
the right direction because this whole thing has been lengthened out to
accommodate the short recoil action.
I wish I knew more about... heh, you can see the end cap on this is vaguely reminiscent
of--reminiscent of the Vetterli system, which the italians used prior to the
Carcano. [In] 1908 they probably still had some of this sort of stuff lying around.
I wish I could tell you guys more about this, but this is an aspect of
developmental history that I have never seen before in a book, and I don't have
any other information to give you, but clearly we can see how it works and it's
a very cool experiment.
Thank you for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video. This is a rifle I
hadn't even heard of before I found it here in the Beretta reference
collection. I'm grateful to them for letting me come in and take a look, and
I'm grateful to you guys who helped support me on patreon, which gives me the
ability to do things like come here to Italy and check out rifles like this to
bring to you. If you enjoy the work,
please like the video and subscribe and consider checking out that patreon
account and signing up yourself.
It really is a big help to me. Thanks for watching