Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the National Firearms
Centre, part of the British Royal Armouries at Leeds,
and we are taking a look at a New Zealand Charlton automatic rifle.
One of the coolest looking, most steampunky guns
of all of World War Two I suspect.
Now, this was never actually intended to be a front line
combat weapon. From the very beginning this was intended
to be used by the New Zealand Home Guard.
And it's the brainchild of two guys in New Zealand,
Philip Charlton, whose name has become attached to the gun,
and his buddy Maurice Field. And as is typical
in endeavors like this, partnerships like this,
you had one guy who was the engineer, gun guy,
nerd sort of person and that was Charlton in this case.
And you have the other guy who is the wealthy financier guy who can provide the resources,
basically invest in the project to make it all happen. And in this case that was Maurice Field.
Now, originally what they wanted to do was something to help the New Zealand military
equip itself for World War Two, which it had just gotten involved in as part of the British Commonwealth.
Initially apparently, they figured maybe ... they could take Philip's Winchester 1910 in .401 Winchester
and convert it to full-auto, and maybe that would be a cool military thing,
but ultimately decided against it on the grounds that .401 Winchester ammo was not exactly
in ready supply and the Army probably wouldn't be interested in it. So instead they got a better idea,
arguably, and that was to convert an old Lee-Enfield or Lee-Metford type rifle into a semi-automatic,
or perhaps even a full automatic machine gun.
This seemed like something they could do, Charlton seemed confident that he could make it happen and he did.
In the spring of 1941 the two got to work and they actually created a working prototype.
And in June of '41 they ... took it to ... their local Member of Parliament and arranged
to make a demonstration for the New Zealand military which went really well, surprisingly.
Given how this thing looks, the idea that the initial prototype gun could demonstrate to the Army
reliably and effectively is really quite a remarkable thing. And it was so effective that the Army looked at it went,
"That's actually pretty cool." And gave them 10,000 rounds of .303 ammunition with which to keep
experimenting and kind of perfect the design. So they went back,
they spent another five months tinkering, tweaking, improving the gun.
They came back in November of '41 to do another trial for the military and that one also went really well.
By the way, with apparently the same basic gun, you know the same...
... They'd been taking the same gun and modifying it, they didn't build a second one.
So by the time they did this second trial for the army, the rifle they were using
had more than 10,000 rounds through it, which is again really quite impressive.
The second trial also went really well, and they came away from that one with an actual contract
to convert 1,500 rifles into Charlton pattern semi-automatics.
Now these weren't brand new rifles.
New Zealand had some good SMLEs, you know, Number 1 Mark 3 rifles,
state of the art (sort of, at the time) and they weren't willing to give those to a couple of yahoos
to hack up in a shed and turn into machine guns. Instead they gave them left over, basically
obsolete home guard rifles. Long Lees and Lee-Metfords from like 1889, through about 1903.
So they had a bunch of those sitting in inventory and that's what they gave to Charlton and Field.
So according to the contract they had six months to make these 1,500 conversions, and that was clearly not going to happen.
There is a long and interesting story about exactly what went on through the process of actually turning
a one-off prototype into a production line, you know, 1,500 conversions.
I think it's an interesting story. There's too much there to go into in-depth here on a video,
I actually have that all written up as an article over on ForgottenWeapons.com. So if you're interested in
the rest of that story and the trials and tribulations of turning this into a production line enterprise,
take a look at the description text below, there's a link there to the full story on Forgotten Weapons.
If you're not so interested in that ... well, if you are, just pause the video and go read it.
What we're going to do now is take a close-up look at exactly how this thing works,
and we're gonna do a little bit of disassembly on it.
One of the funny things to me is some of the guns like this, these conversions that look
absolutely bonkers are actually some of the simplest guns to understand because
as converted bolt actions, all of the elements of their semi-automatic mechanism have to be bolted
onto the outside of the gun. And so they're really visible, and obvious, and easy to understand.
So if we go to the front here, we have a gas port in the barrel right here,
that comes down and drops into a gas piston tube right here.
Notice that there are fins on the barrel, sort of. If we look at those up close you'll notice that
there's segments in-between. These are all individual fins that were manufactured and then
dropped on to the barrel to act as basically cooling fins. But rather than machine one big cooling sleeve,
it was much more economical and efficient to make them as individual pieces.
That's kind of a cool little detail there.
Now back to the gun. We have our gas piston in this tube. We have its return spring in this bottom tube.
So again, both right out in the open. There's a charging handle here,
and then the gas piston continues back ... on this guide rod.
So this ... keeps everything running nice and straight and smooth and in line.
We have a bolt in here, and if we look closely you can see the ... receiver socket for the original
Lee, this is either a Long Lee or a Lee-Metford rifle, and they have gone and welded on an extra bit here.
So when this thing cycles, the bolt's going to travel all the way back here, just as it would
with a standard bolt action Lee-Enfield. However, when you're shooting a bolt action Lee
you don't have to worry about the bolt coming screaming back at your face at
extremely high velocity, because it only moves when you physically move it yourself.
Because this is cycling back under its own power there is a big guard built around it here
to make sure that you don't accidentally get your face up a little too close and eat the end of the bolt.
So, when this cycles it's going to come all the way back like this,
the recoil spring down in here then basically takes over and pulls the whole thing back.
The bolt handle has been removed, it would have been back here.
and they have welded on this lug, which is what actuates this scroll cam and
causes the bolt to rotate up as this moves backwards. So this angled
scroll cam is going to convert back to forth motion into rotary motion of the bolt.
And it does the reverse when the thing closes.
A few additional features here, ancillary features. They have taken the sight
from these old Lee rifles and attached them back on. Not on the original sight base,
but you've got those sights. Rather than manufacture a brand new sight, just reuse that one.
Since that rear sight is lifted up a bit on the barrel cooling vents, the front sight needs to be lifted up a bit as well.
And so why not add a bit of a muzzle brake there at the same time, kind of kill two birds with one stone.
There is, of course, a bipod on here to make this a little bit easier to use, especially in full-auto mode.
Bipod pivots a little bit, but is otherwise fixed in position.
Vertical front grip for controllability. This was intended to be fired either from the shoulder,
from the hip, or prone from the bipod.
And certainly from the hip you need some way to hold onto the front of the gun.
Looking at the other side, we can see of course the big protective shield here.
We have a selector switch which has three positions. Safe at the top which locks the trigger,
"R" for repetition which is semi-automatic there, and "A" for automatic at the bottom.
So this was a select-fire rifle. The standard protocol with it was to shoot in semi-auto,
with full-auto reserved basically for emergencies when you needed a lot of extra firepower.
But these guns were delivered with only one magazine each, so you really didn't want to waste the ammunition.
Because once the mag was empty you basically had to take it out of the gun
and reload it by hand before you could continue shooting.
Lastly, of course, there is a standard vertical pistol grip, albeit a very simple one, added.
Really made quite necessary, you're not sticking your hand under here.
And even if this assembly weren't here and you ... wanted to, that's making it really
quite likely that the bolt is going to come back and just tear up the knuckle of your thumb.
So, vertical pistol grip is really an essential element there.
Now the magazines are an interesting aspect of this.
This particular one has been set up with a 20 round Lee-Enfield magazine.
These were manufactured during World War One, ... just like the trench magazines
that the American and German forces had as well.
However, after World War One, in the '20s and maybe into the '30s, the British tended to use these
in experiments with new light machine gun designs, and so there are very few of these surviving today.
Even though, as far as I can tell, they were kind of made in the same quantity as other countries' trench magazines.
But the German and American trench mags ... you know, were non-detachable,
and there really wasn't anything you could do with them outside of a Springfield or a Mauser rifle.
Because the Lee-Enfield magazines are detachable, these made a perfect magazine for experimenting with new automatic weapons.
Now when Charlton made these conversions he didn't have access to these magazines.
When he made his prototype he actually converted a Bren gun magazine to fit,
which takes a fair amount of work because with its hold open tab the Bren gun
magazine is substantially longer front to back than a Lee-Enfield magazine,
and will not easily fit a Lee-Enfield receiver, so he converted one.
Ultimately, when they did the mass conversion, the mass production, the 1,500 guns for the military,
they contracted with a company that was making Bren gun magazines to make a run of
basically 1,500 converted 30 round Bren magazines for use in the Charltons, and that's what this gun should have.
However, because they just converted the magazines and didn't alter the magazine well in the gun,
standard Lee-Enfield mags will fit. So you could run this with a regular 10 round Lee-Enfield mag,
or to make it look cooler, if you can find a 20 round Lee-Enfield magazine that will fit as well.
There we go, locked in place.
Serial number on this is 2,327. The contract was for 1,500 of them.
I am going to assume, but I can't prove, that they started the serialising at like 1,001 or 1,000,
So this would put this right at the end of production but within that 1,500 total.
Now I can actually take the bolt out to show you a little bit of the conversion work that was required.
So the disassembly process (by the way I have a complete scan of an original Charlton automatic
rifle manual on Forgotten Weapons, that's at the same link as the story of the manufacture.
So if your interested in that, which has all of the teardown instructions in it, check out the website there), anyway,
if we loosen this screw we can then rotate this protective plate up. It's a bit stiff.
But that pivots up.
We do that so that we can actually slide the bolt out the back of the receiver.
It's nice reassurance to have this in place when you're shooting to know that this will stop
the bolt from flying into your face should something fail catastrophically.
Now the next step is to take this plate which pivots away from the gun.
And this basically is the control rail for the scroll cam here. So what we're going to do is
(pull this the rest of the way forward), we're going to
pull this back just a little bit, hold this down, and lift the scroll cam up and off.
So it's in about that position, open this up. This is kind of a three handed affair,
there we go.
So that lifts this piece up and out of the way.
Now we can take the bolt, rotate it into the unlocked position,
bring it back here. Now we're gonna pop the bolt head up.
This is just like an original, standard Lee-Enfield or Lee- Metford, because that's what this gun is down inside.
Again, you can see the receiver end socket here, and you can see the weld marks right there
where they added on this extra track at the back of the receiver. So this is all original
Lee receiver, and you can even see some of the markings on the front of the receiver,
although they're generally hidden under this protective side plate.
The Royal Armouries have helpfully provided me with a Lee-Metford rifle bolt for drill.
And this is what would have been originally used for the Charlton conversion. So if we take a look at these two side-by-side,
I believe they just manufactured the cocking piece brand-new, because there's a substantial
alteration that would have been required and I think it was simpler just to make new ones.
This is also a very simple part, nothing complicated about it.
The bolt handle here has been lopped off because that's no longer necessary.
And this is one place where the Charlton has an advantage over, for example, the Howell
conversion, which is the same sort of idea, it's a Lee-Enfield converted to semi-auto.
On the Howell what they did was just cut the bolt handle off and have a scroll cam operating down here.
And in theory that's going to put a lot of stress on this bolt handle, getting slammed back and forth when the gun cycles.
What they did on the Charlton was just ignore the bolt handle and they actually welded on the camming lug
here, as well as welding on this control lug a little farther back.
So if we look at the standard bolt, you can see that this long rib is the same rib that we have here.
The Charlton has just had two extra pieces welded on on top of it in addition.
So all in all, not that complicated. The bolt head stays completely intact
and original, and unchanged, which is nice - that certainly helps.
The locking ... lugs, this and this, those remain effectively unchanged.
They'd have to do a good heat-treat job on this to make sure it went back to its original hardness
after they welded on that lug, but that's not a technically difficult thing to do.
So there you go, one disassembled Charlton bolt.
So looking at this now, hopefully you can see that it looks really weird, kind of like a rifle that's designed inside out,
because that's basically what it is. And yet, despite the strange look, the strange appearance,
it's actually really easy to explain how this thing works because, well, all the working bits are on the outside.
I need to have this in semi-auto to allow the bolt to go forward.
Reattaching this is a little bit tricky because I need to have that like a little bit up there,
hold this back, and we want this
and there we go, back in place.
And Holy Cow, it actually works. So let's go ahead and push that back down,
lock it in place. Now that we're in semi-auto mode pull the trigger, striker drops, gun fires just like it's supposed to.
The whole story of the Charlton is really one of remarkable success given that this sort of project usually ends very poorly.
They usually go nowhere, the idea of converting bolt actions to semi-autos,
it always sounds like a good idea, it always seems like a great way to save a bunch of money.
And we can take these obsolete things that have no use and turn them into state of the art,
you know, repeating rifles, semi- automatic rifles and it never works.
Well, this one remarkably kind of did work. All 1,500 were produced,
I guess after a lot of trials and tribulations along the way,
magazines in particular. But they were all delivered to the New Zealand Army.
And in fact the Australian government expressed some interest in this as well.
And the Electrolux company would go ahead and start to get close to putting this into production themselves.
That's the subject for another separate video.
... These were, as I said, not intended to be front line combat weapons. These were
going to be, and in fact were, distributed to the New Zealand Home Guard. They went to a number,
I think it was like four, different army depots around the country,
basically in case of invasion, like, should we need it.
This means we can take all of our Bren guns and send them out to troops in the field
and not worry that the home islands are completely undefended.
Because in the event that we have some sort of weird surprise attack, well, we've got these.
So at the end of the war they were all consolidated back into one basically warehouse,
because they were no longer necessary after the war was over.
And unfortunately after the war that warehouse burned down in an accidental fire,
and that destroyed almost all of the Charltons in existence. So these are very rare guns to find today.
There are a few of them spotted around here and there, mostly I think in Australia and New Zealand,
but it's really cool that the Royal Armouries have one here.
Presumably, I would suspect, the [Kiwis] sent them one for evaluation
or just to brag like, "Hey, look what we did. It's really cool."
So they have this one here and they were generous enough to let me pull it out of the racks,
and take it apart even and show it to you guys.
So a big thanks to the Royal Armouries for that. If you're interested in getting into the facility yourself,
it is unfortunately not open to the general public, but it is available by appointment to serious researchers.
So if there's something that you are looking into either for print or for other media,
definitely get in touch with them. Their website is also in the description text below.
And some great folks, they'll hook you up with an arranged time to come in and study whatever it is you're looking for.
Thanks for watching.