Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and what we are looking at today is cool
for several different reasons. This is a Russian Maxim gun.
However, first off it is mounted on the original World War One version
of the Sokolov mount which has wheels and has tripod legs on it.
Now the Russians would use this mount all the way through World War One,
but after World War One they simplified it for production.
They got rid of the tripod legs, and they modified the surviving tripods by getting rid of their legs as well.
So when these mounts ... were used in World War Two, they're the much simplified version,
and very few of these original full capacity mounts still exist today. So it's really cool to actually
have a chance to see what a Russian World War One Maxim would have looked like on its original mount.
Now to make this even more interesting,
this is a gun that was captured by the Germans and retrofitted to shoot 8mm Mauser ammunition.
This is something that both sides did as, you know, as much as opportunity allowed during World War One.
The Germans would take British Vickers guns and Russian Maxim guns and convert them to 8 Mauser.
The British would take captured German Maxim guns and convert them to .303.
I'm sure the Russians any opportunity they had would take a captured German Maxim and convert it to 7.62x54.
The thing that made this all really possible is the fact that these Maxim guns are all basically very
close cousins of each other. They were all derived from the same basic commercial Maxim guns,
and those commercial guns were specifically designed to be very easy to swap between calibres,
so that the Maxim company could sell a gun in any calibre that any customer might want.
So we are gonna go through the specific changes that the Germans made in order to do this conversion,
... well, in fact, I can just tell you from right there you can see that this has a brass jacket, but it has wooden handles.
This is a 1910 Maxim gun, but it has been retrofitted with a 1905 brass jacket.
That was done, we don't know exactly who did it, it could have been the Russians repairing a gun in their own inventory.
It could have been repaired by the Germans at the same time that they did the calibre conversion.
Because if this was captured as a damaged gun, taken back to a German depot and refitted there,
swapping a brass jacket onto a steel trunnion from a 1910 is the sort of thing that they might have been able to do.
If they had a pretty thoroughly destroyed 1905 brass gun, say, you know, a big piece of shrapnel
went through the receiver or something, but it still had a salvageable water jacket on it. And then they
bring in this gun that has, say, a perfectly intact receiver but a chunk of shrapnel went through the water jacket,
well, they can salvage what parts are available and build them into new complete guns.
So, let's take a look at the conversion to 8mm.
It, of course, would be important to distinguish between what guns are in what calibre.
And so what the Germans did is they put this big 'S' on the top of guns that they converted.
It's held on there by two little rivets, and you'll find that on German converted Maxims and Vickers guns.
The other big giveaway that this is a German converted Russian gun is the fact that it has this scope mounting bracket on it.
That was something that the German standard pattern Maxim had, the Russians did not have it.
In fact you can see that if you mounted a scope here, there's no opening in the Russian armour shield to see through it.
So the Russians never use scopes on their Maxims, that was added by the German armourer who did the calibre conversion.
Now the Russian and German muzzle boosters were substantially different designs,
and there were two different ways that this conversion could be done.
What we see here is a version where they just put on a German booster.
The other option was ... they made a conversion tube, which was basically this size.
That tube would thread into the front of the water jacket, and then the Russian
booster would thread into the front of that tube. What that allowed ... the Germans to do was use a
standard German Maxim 08 barrel in a Russian 1905 or 1910 gun without needing to have a German booster on it.
You don't want to try and take a Russian barrel and re-rifle it or anything like that.
That's a tremendous amount of work when they already have MG 08 barrels in 8mm in the logistical system.
I also want to point out here this is an unusual gun with this brass conversion,
because you can see that there's a steel front cap on the brass jacket.
That was something that had to be done, or was done, to make use of more standardised parts out here.
Alright, if we open up the feed cover here, we can then take out the feed block. And this has to be adapted
to convert from the large rim diameter of the 7.62x54R to the smaller, rimless 8mm cartridge.
With 54R the space back here in the feed block,
this is where cartridges are going in and this is the back end of the case,
this is open to allow for that wide rim.
You want to narrow it in order to properly control an 8x57 cartridge so that it feeds reliably.
There are two ways the Germans did this. This one, probably because it is a steel feed block,
what they've done is milled out this area and then pinned in a pair of little inserts.
You can see three pins right there, and also on the bottom.
And those inserts are the proper width to give the proper width opening for 8 Mauser.
The other thing that they would do, particularly on 1905 brass feed blocks that they captured,
was actually crush them in a hydraulic press. Obviously that's easier to do with brass than steel.
And while it seems like a kind of a questionable way to do the process,
the German Ordnance Department appears to have made a pretty reliable
process for doing it, because that was the other thing that they did.
The barrel in here doesn't really look any different, but it is a German 08 Maxim barrel.
It has this Nazi proof on it, however this is not necessarily a late production barrel.
During the Weimar rebuilding period, or the post-Weimar rebuilding period in the 1930s,
what the German military did is they went through all their inventory of parts and reassessed
basically everything they had. And this 'S' mark at the top here indicates that this was a top-quality barrel.
It may have been renumbered, or it may have just been left with the gun that it was originally issued with.
That dot 2 indicates that this is the number two spare barrel for the gun,
and then that is just an inspection acceptance proof mark.
So this may be a World War One barrel. This is not the barrel that would have been put in
during World War One, because this gun came out of Germany ... after World War One, before World War Two.
Lastly the lock had to be replaced or rebuilt,
and in this case, the effective solution is simply to modify the gun to use a German MG 08 lock.
The major significant element here is the extractor, which has to fit the narrow rimless 8x57
instead of the rimmed 7.62x54 of the Russian cartridge.
So rather than try to adapt these out of the Russian guns, what they did instead was just take the
cross head down here and adapt it to fit a German lock. Again, because these guns were all based on the same commercial
dimensions and patterns, a German lock will fit inside the receiver dimensions of a Russian gun.
Now this particular one, the keen-eyed will spot that this is an S.237 which
should make that a Weimar production, or a pre-World War Two production lock.
Once again I suspect that that has been replaced. It may have been missing,
that may have been removed as part of its souvenir status coming back into the United States,
but it is a German lock that has been fitted into the Russian internals.
Alright, a couple other things that I want to point out on the tripod here because they are unusual,
and because they were gotten rid of when the Russians simplified this.
You have a slide here that can run on rails up and down this curved mount.
That's important because you want it all the way back if the gun's being shot off the wheels, where once you lift it up
having the slide back here means your gun's pointing way up in the air. And so then you push the whole thing forward.
We have a locking lever here, I'll show you that in just a minute. In addition
there was also some adjustment built into the mounting here. So if I take this, and I pivot it,
it is spring loaded, so you hold it back, like that,
and then you can rotate the gun through these five different settings right there.
That's something they would simplify and get rid of. You then also have a more fine adjustment in here,
but this has a fairly limited travel to it, hence you need these in as well.
Then, go ahead and show you this, we pull this back,
this then can drop it back like that.
You can get a little bit better view of the front end of the tripod
once we have that slide all the way back. Got the rails that it runs on,
your centre beam that the wheels rotate on, and then the flanges for these legs.
And these both pivot all the way backwards around this screw
to fold up alongside the rear of the tripod when you've got it on the wheels.
Perhaps one of the neatest little additions to this guy is this, the rear wheel here, which can pivot around.
So right now I have this just lifted up and then there's a spiked foot on the back of the carriage
to dig in when you've got this set up as a tripod. If you want to use this as a wheeled mount,
you lift this up and the wheel comes back like so,
and then the tripod can actually roll on it.
It should also be noted that there is a loop here so that you can attach a rope,
or other hook, to lift up the back end of the tripod and tow this by the hook.
I suspect this is the remnants of a little locking ... strap, to ensure that your hook here didn't come loose.
It's just a solid steel wheel, as are the ones at the front.
Well, I hope you guys enjoyed the video. As I said, these tripods, early Sokolov mounts, are really quite scarce.
And this is a fantastic opportunity to get a look at this one in all of its original glory.
Thanks for watching.