Hi, I'm Ian. Thanks for tuning in to another episode on Forgotten Weapons.com.
Today we're out here with World War Two Bren gun.
It was the standard British light machine gun from World War two. These were designed through the 1930's and went into production during World War two.
This particular one is a 1942 dated Mark 1 star. So it's kind of an intermediate model of the Bren.
So for those of you who aren't familiar with the Bren, it is an open bolt, air-cooled, light machine gun.
Calibre is .303 British and these were
derived from the the Czech ZB-26 and ZB 30 series of guns.
There was some progressive development and an early stage of the Bren was submitted to the
British Army for testing in 1933.
They made a few more changes to it and eventually adopted it as the Bren.
What it's worth the Bren ,
B R is for Brno the arsenal in Czechoslovakia. The E N is for Enfield in England where these were actually manufactured.
Start obviously you remove the magazine.
Check the chamber. Make sure it's clear. Close the magazine cover
Now the Bren has a quick-detachable barrel, so we'll pull the handle up
and then this is the barrel catch, we open that and the barrel slides out.
So if we were in the middle of shooting and had just overheated the barrel you can take a new barrel
slide it in, snap that down, turn down the handle, and carry on shooting. In this case
I'm going to go ahead and further disassemble the gun. There's one push pin here at the back of the receiver.
It's a captive pin, we'll pull it out.
That allows the entire lower assembly to come out.
We have a bolt, bolt carrier, gas piston.
And then the lower assembly, the recoil spring, shoulder stock, pistol grip, firing mechanism.
The last step,
remove the bipod. This whole thing is actually the Bren gun receiver. It's a fairly large chunk of metal.
One interesting thing about the Bren,
you can see in here,
a separate little piece. This is actually the locking shoulder. This is what the gun head spaces against and
the way they built these was to have
interchangeable locking shoulders so that you can adjust the headspace on the gun.
If the gun gets heavily worn you can switch out the locking shoulder to bring it back in spec and
this also made manufacturer if the gun easier because they didn't have to precisely machine the receiver.
Just fit it for the locking shoulder
And then you can check the head space with a couple different shoulders until you get one that fits and head spaces correctly.
On the bolt,
like I said that's fired from an open bolt so as this travels forward the bolt pulls up backwards and
then this surface here is what head spaces against the locking shoulder and locks the gun.
So reassembly is fairly simple,
Go ahead and put the bolt assembly in.
Put the lower on and close that pushpin.
Put the bi-pod on right side up.
That's that.
And there we go.
One thing you will notice about the Bren here is the magazine is mounted centrally on top of the gun.
Which means you can't exactly sight down the center of the barrel, so as you can see
the front and rear side are both offset to the left of the gun.
Which allows you to get a nice sight picture.
Despite having a big magazine in the way.
So as you can see
there's a magazine centrally located on the top of the gun which means you can't exactly sight down the center of the gun.
So instead what they did is offset the front
front and rear sights on the left side of the gun.
This allows you to get a clearer sight picture past the side of the magazine.
The other neat thing about the the early Brens the mark ones and the mark one star is
they have this dial rear sight. If you can see the little number here
that's set in hundreds of yards and
so you can adjust your elevation
simply by rotating this dial. It has a cam surface inside
that raises the sight the appropriate amount for whatever range you're using.
By the later guns, the mark two guns had a more typical flip up ladder sight on the back instead.
So you may have noticed on this or on another Bren Gun that you've seen there are these little levers, latches
on the front and back of the gun and
don't really seem to do anything.
Well what these are for are actually mounting the gun to a tripod.
In addition to being a standard light machine gun the Bren was also able to be used in a fixed position
basically like a medium machine gun roll on a tripod. So we have one of the tripods here.
See there are two mounting points
Let me drop this on there
Lock the front.
Lock the back and now we have a mounted gun.
So elevation
Is controlled by this screw.
To elevate and depress the gun.
Each partial revolution here is a three minute change in angle and then you also have traverse
along this back curve.
If you can see these two little devices.
There are stops on the tripod so that you can set a specific limited field of fire.
Lock it down and the gun will only traverse that far. This would be for a static point defense
where you want you have several guns, and you want a fixed field of fire for each one.
For an ambush where again you want a fixed field of fire for the gun you can set these stops
and that way no matter how excited the gunner gets
they keep their their assigned field of fire.
So in addition to a regular tripod mount the Bren tripod could be set up as an anti-aircraft tripod.
There's an extra leg that sits out in the back here
and then the gun is free to swivel around.
There's also
functionality of this handle
When you fold it down, it's actually spring loaded and you can snap it out like that
which is designed to give you a point of control when firing in an anti-aircraft mode.
Alright, it's time to shoot this thing
I like this thing.
Those are
8 8-Inch steel plates we have it about a hundred yards, and it's real easy to nail those things from this any aircraft tripod.
We don't have any vintage aircraft that are going to fly by that we can shoot at.
That doesn't usually get a good reception, but this thing's cool against ground targets.
And we're back in business.
So with the tripod the Bren gun could take the place of a standard fixed mount medium machine gun.
So we're going to put in an entire magazine on a silhouette from 100 yards from the ground mount and see just how stable of
a shooting platform this really is.
All right, well that's pretty effective.
This whole group
And really no outliers, this was from a previous round.
Whole group was a single pull the trigger and dump the magazine the ground mount tripod really makes this into a stable platform for shooting.
Maybe not quite so much as something like a Vickers or a water-cooled Browning
But if what you got is a Bren gun and sticking on a tripod like that, and it's an extremely effective
emplaced weapon, So thanks for watching we sure had a good time shooting this.
You know the by World War 2 the Brits that really figured out how to do a light machine gun, right.
Even to this day the Bren is often considered one of the best light machine guns ever developed
It's really it's extremely reliable, it's light,
it's portable. It can be mounted in a variety of different ways for a variety of different uses. It has a nice quick change barrel and
very popular with its users, and I can certainly see why.
So check back in again on Forgotten Weapons. We'll have some more videos.
We'll be shooting some more cool guns and taking apart some neat things you may never have seen before. Thanks.