Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island
Auction Company taking a look at some of the guns
that they're going to be selling in their upcoming
September of 2017 Premier auction.
What we have here today doesn't really look like a whole lot,
but this is actually a very relevant and very important
machine gun from World War Two. This is a Rheinmetall MG 17,
and it was one of the principal armaments on
a lot of the German aircraft early in World War Two.
These were used as the fixed guns on
Ju 88s, Fw 190s, Bf 109s, Bf 110s, Ju 87s.
Most of the German Luftwaffe aircraft that used
8mm Mauser calibre machine guns used these,
and if they didn't use this, they used the MG 15,
which was basically the same mechanism.
So these were manufactured by the Rheinmetall company by way of Solothurn Company, sort of.
Solothurn wasn't really a company, it was actually an extension of the Rheinmetall company.
Now Rheinmetall had been a manufacturing concern in Germany for, I don't know, a very long time.
... They'd been doing artillery and big industrial stuff,
and they got into the small arms business right around the turn of the century, 1900,
by buying the Dreyse company and its manufacturing facilities.
And with all of that they manufactured a bunch of machine guns during World War One.
They made Maxims for the German government,
and they had an R&D program that was developing other guns at the end of the war.
Now the Versailles Treaty severely limited the ability of German companies to do small arms research and development.
And so, like many others, Rheinmetall started looking to expand outside Germany,
to set up constituent companies in other places where they could do R&D.
Interestingly a bunch of these companies actually did a lot of cooperative work with Russia early in the 1930s.
And then the big one here that would make a difference, was the Rheinmetall company set up a subsidiary
in the Swiss town of Solothurn. And this Solothurn company had all of its own gun designations,
but they were basically all Rheinmetall designs used under license.
And this was basically a way for Rheinmetall to continue doing small arms research and development
and production around the limitations of the Versailles Treaty.
So the gun that this started out as was a Rheinmetall design, the Rh.29, which in Solothurn
became known as the S2-200. It was a light machine gun, magazine-fed,
and it was actually sold to a number of different countries.
Primarily Austria and Hungary, who [adopted] it as the M30 and the 31M in 8x56mm.
And then Hungary also then adopted an 8mm Mauser version during World War Two as the 43M,
and this would eventually be adopted by the German military as well under the designation of MG 15.
And this gun, it was a box fed light machine gun, and it was adapted primarily to be used as a flexible mount in aircraft.
So flexible mount meaning: a gun where ... you actually have a gunner behind the gun aiming it and it's mounted to,
like, the nose of an aircraft in a glass enclosure, or it's mounted in a window on the side of a large bomber
where it can be manoeuvred and swung around for a wide field of fire.
And in this guise the gun was adapted to use a 75 round double drum magazine. You've probably seen those,
the same ... style of magazine was also used on the MG 34 from time to time.
That gun worked quite well, it had a nice high cyclic rate of about 1,000 rounds a minute,
which is important for anti-aircraft work, because you have very limited opportunities
to actually take shots at fast-moving enemy aircraft. So the more bullets you can get out at once the better.
And aircraft mounted machine guns generally don't have to worry about overheating, because
they're not used for sustained fire, you don't have an opportunity to just dump endless magazines at a target.
And they're generally up in a slipstream at very high altitude where the air is very cold.
And air cooling, when you're in a couple hundred mile an hour aircraft at high altitude,
air cooling totally takes care of any heat issues you might have.
So, that was the MG 15. And then Rheinmetall, or Solothurn - same company really,
... built a slightly modified version, the MG 17, which was belt fed.
The belt fed version had a slightly higher rate of fire,
and it was actually set up not so much to have a guy behind it shooting,
but actually to be set up for electronic or pneumatic control.
So you could charge the gun by hand, but it was intended really to be charged with a pneumatic system.
The belt is there because these were typically mounted in fixed positions.
They could be synchronised, or they could be not synchronised,
i.e. not hooked up to a propeller, or not mounted behind a propeller.
And in these sorts of mounts, they're generally hidden inside the wings or under the cowling of the aircraft,
and there's no way to reload them during flight.
So you need a belt feed, because you need a large amount of ammunition loaded in the gun ready to go.
A 75 round drum magazine won't last long enough to be useful if you can't reload it in flight.
So ... there were a couple of limitations, or a couple of special adaptations that an aircraft gun needed.
One is it typically had to have a very flexible belt.
With the high rate of fire and the tight confines of aircraft mounting,
they needed a belt that could be wrapped around some pretty tight corners.
So these guns used a specialty belt, the Gurt 17/81, which coincidentally was used in the MG 17 and the MG 81.
That belt was ... basically interchangeable with the standard MG 34 and 42 ground gun belts,
but only one direction. So you could use the aircraft belts in the ground guns,
but if you tried to reverse it and use a ground belt in an aircraft gun,
the gun would work, but because of the flexibility requirements for the mounting positions,
the belt itself might not actually physically fit into the whole arrangement.
Alright, I'm going kinda long here. So why don't we stop rambling so much
and take a closer look at a couple of elements of this gun.
Now there's a bunch of stuff bolted to the outside of this gun that's not original.
And that is a mounting that some previous owner has added so that they can actually shoot this
from a tripod on the ground instead of having to bolt it into a Focke-Wulf 190 or some other German aircraft.
So this charging handle is new and added by the owner. There was originally a
much smaller manual charging handle, so these could be charged by hand if they needed to be.
But there was also a pneumatic system for charging the gun.
There was also an electronic or pneumatic control for firing the gun, which is not on the gun at this time.
This long bracket has been bolted to the gun and it's got a mounting point back here
and a mounting point up here. And then this
is a new trigger system that has been added. Originally you would have had a
... remote trigger attached to this, and someone has added this.
The reason that they set it up this way is, I'm pretty sure,
to interact with the remote trigger on a German MG 3 machine gun tripod.
So I'm pretty sure that's what this is set up for using on, is that MG 3 tripod.
Our markings are up here on the top. MG 17, a wildly high serial number.
I think actually the first digit of that is just a placeholder, a serial number block.
And then to be honest, I'm not entirely sure what this bottom number is.
The aircraft machine guns are a subject that I need to study in more depth.
However, I can show you how this one works.
The most interesting part of it is this block on top, this is the feed block.
And these can be set up for either right or left-hand feed, which is important in an aircraft.
If you have a pair of them side by side in the nose of a plane, of course you're going to want
... them to feed from the outside or from the inside, both.
So you could replace this with either left-hand or right-hand feed blocks.
To take this off all I have to do is rotate this ... spring-loaded pin. This lifts up and then the whole unit comes off.
Now I want to point out this roller, this is on the barrel extension of the gun.
So this is going to move back and forth as the gun fires.
That roller is going to interact with the feed mechanism and travel in this track.
So, as that roller comes backward it forces this to rotate over like so,
And then when it goes back, it forces it to go the other direction.
There is a ratcheting cam right here, and what this does is when it goes back it lines up,
and then it pulls this feed drum one position over with each cycling.
If we look in there, you can see instead of the typical pawls that would pull in the cartridges
and then lock behind them, the MG 17 belt feed is based on a rotating ratchet type system.
(... there's a better view for you.) So
snaps over and then feeds in. And you can see how it would be very easy to make this,
because the whole assembly is pretty much symmetrical, you could just replace this part
and have this thing operate in the opposite direction.
You'll notice that the ports on the side are both big enough to feed.
And there is this open slot right here and that's where the belt goes through.
The belt that these used was a push through belt, so there was no need to delink
these cartridges separately like there is on, say, an M134 Minigun.
The belt goes in one side loaded, and just comes out the other side empty. And as each cartridge
gets in this centre position, the bolt's going to come through, push the cartridge through out of the belt,
feed it into the gun, fire it, and then this adapter will cycle the next round into place.
Now as for the gun, it is recoil operated so there's a muzzle booster up at the front, very much like an MG 34.
Then we come back here and we get to the action itself.
The way this works is based on a design by Louis Stange, who is a
pretty impressive designer that a lot of people haven't heard of. He was also, by the way, the guy who designed the FG 42.
Now what we have going on here is we have a bolt in the middle right here,
and we have a barrel extension here, and there is a rotating collar right back inside this section.
So the bolt just travels forward and back, it doesn't rotate.
However, it has a set of interrupted threads on it back here.
And when it's in battery like this, the collar back here has rotated and locks the bolt into the barrel extension,
meaning that they can't travel independently.
When you fire, this whole thing is going to cycle backwards about about 0.75 of an inch, about 18mm.
Like that. At the end of that travel this rotating collar, back in here,
rotates the opposite direction, unlocks the bolt, and allows the bolt to travel backwards separately from the barrel.
So that's the firing cycle right there. It's got a pretty hefty recoil spring
which is ... partly what allows it have that really high 1,200 round rate of fire.
Now this does fire from an open bolt, and it could be synchronised.
So the way that works is the firing pin is not fixed.
The firing pin actually drops when the bolt is fully in battery.
And if this were set up in a synchronised mount, there was an additional piece that could be mounted
(I believe it would mount here),
which would interrupt the firing pin and prevent it from dropping if the propeller were in the way of the muzzle.
So that's a mechanical setup that could be used if you're mounting these in the cowl of a single-engine fighter,
for example, you would need them to be synchronised like that.
Now if you look closely back here, you can actually see the interrupted threads of the locking collar when I open this.
so right there, there they are. And the actual rotating and locking takes place inside here.
I am not going to further disassemble this, because I just don't have enough experience with these aircraft guns
mechanically to want to mess with that. So I will leave that to the next owner.
While the MG 17 was a very important gun in the late 1930s for a lot of German aircraft armament,
by the end of World War Two this kind of thing would be pretty much considered obsolete.
There was a lot of development of aircraft armament during the war, and the Germans pretty quickly went from 8mm guns like this,
to 13mm, and then 15mm and then 20mm, and ultimately all the way up to low-velocity 30mm automatic cannons.
They had a low muzzle velocity, but they had a very large payload capacity.
So you could pack a lot of explosive into a 30mm shell.
And the tactic by the end of the war was trying to get one good hit on an aircraft
that would be destructive enough to destroy the aircraft or knock it down.
As opposed to the tactic early in the war where you need to get a lot of
little tiny machine gun hits on an aircraft in order to damage it enough to destroy it.
So, by the end of the war not so much of a relevant gun any more.
In fact, it would be spare stockpiles of barrels for these, among others,
that would be looked at for use in Volkssturm rifles at the end of the war. Adapting these spare machine gun barrels
to be used in last-ditch rifles. A kind of a cool added element to these.
As I mentioned, this thing has been set up with this kind of slick, hand built clearly, mounting system
to allow it to be, I believe, mounted on a German MG 3 tripod, which are fairly readily accessible and available.
Cocked by hand, fired with the tripod mount, so that instead of actually needing an airplane to put the thing in,
you could take this out and shoot it and enjoy it, on a standard ground gun tripod. So that's pretty cool.
If you'd like it to be yours and you want to go out and try that, well, take a look at the description text below.
You'll find a link there to Rock Island's catalogue page for this gun.
It is a fully registered, transferable machine gun under the US NFA.
And that link below will take you to ... Rock Island's pictures, description, estimated pricing, and all that good stuff.
So you can place a bid on it, if you'd like it, on the website, or over the phone, or live at the auction here in person.
Thanks for watching.