Hey guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
taking a look at a Marlin Model of 1917 machine gun.
And this is one of those kind of orphaned, oddball machine guns
that nobody pays a whole lot of attention to, because it was
primarily, almost exclusively, an aircraft machine gun.
And a lot of people don't pay attention to aircraft guns because
they're typically very hard to actually set up and shoot,
and they often just don't really look like real guns.
So the basis of this is actually John Browning's Model of 1895 machine gun
that was manufactured by Colt.
This is the gun that Browning came out with basically to compete with Maxim.
It was an air-cooled gun, and it was gas-operated.
And it was given the colloquial name of the "Potato Digger"
because it had a gas port right up here in the barrel
but it had a swinging lever that would come all the way down and back with each cycle.
And this was fine on a mounted tripod, but if you tried to put the gun too low to the ground
that swinging lever would actually dig into the ground, hence Potato Digger.
It's a weird name, but that's what people came up with.
So, this was not a terrible design.
It was of course restricted by having to not do things that Maxim had already patented.
And Maxim's patents were pretty wide ranging,
which kind of left John Browning without a lot of space to work [with] in a ... recoil operated gun.
Well, Browning was off the 1895 very quickly.
By 1901 he was already working on a new design that would be recoil operated,
which would ultimately become the Browning Model of 1917 heavy machine gun.
Which is a subject for a whole other video.
But when World War One broke out the Colt 1895 was one of those guns that was actually available.
Colt ... had all the tooling to manufacture them,
and they were selling them in small numbers, but not zero.
And so countries that desperately needed machine guns, well,
"What do you have available?" "We can build Colt 1895s."
The US military got in on this, they were of course one of the first customers
for the US Navy, with guns in .236 calibre, or 6mm Lee Navy.
Ultimately they would buy some in .30-06.
The US National Guard, various National Guard organisations, had them as well.
One of the few machine guns that was in limited numbers in American service
when World War One began.
At any rate, once the war does break out, Colt starts getting a lot of contracts
for a lot of different things from all over the world.
And in 1915 they pick up a contract for the Vickers gun.
The Vickers gun is a more desirable gun than the Colt 1895 Potato Digger,
and so Colt decides to try and free up some of its factory capacity
by outsourcing, by subcontracting the 1895 guns to Marlin.
The Marlin Firearms Company didn't really have any military products
but they had a lot of manufacturing capacity.
And so they were happy to take on a project like this.
In 1916 they would reorganise into Marlin-Rockwell,
and what they did at this point, they manufactured swinging gas hammer 1895/14 Marlin guns.
But then one of their employees, a guy named Carl Gustav ("Gus" I think) Swebilius,
(who was a Swedish immigrant, came to the US when he was like 17,
ended up with dozens of firearms patents, very talented designer),
he redesigned the gun to have a straight-acting gas piston.
And that became the Marlin Model of 1917, which we see here.
Marlin and Swebilius made a couple of other changes to the gun which
we'll take a close look at in just a moment.
But by getting rid of that swinging link they made the gun much more convenient,
and conducive to general purpose use.
So the first customer was the US Navy, and they bought like 1,600 of them,
and they had some problems. You see, by changing to a straight piston,
Swebilius had ... substantially changed the recoil impulse,
the cycling dynamics let's say, of the gun.
And in Navy service the bolt was opening with too much force,
and it was tearing rims off of cartridges.
Now Marlin blamed this on subpar quality ammunition, but it really was an issue.
And so Marlin had to go back and redesign a few things about the gun,
they gave it a bigger extractor.
Out of a total order of 38,000 guns,
some 22,400 had been delivered to the US military by May of 1918.
And there were some changes that were made.
The barrel was reduced in diameter and lightened,
the ... loop style charging handle was replaced with just a simple L bracket.
And later on in 1918 a new modified version of the synchroniser assembly
was put together that had actually a hydraulic system
instead of this spring mechanical system.
Now, if we take a look at this over its length, we'll start at the back here.
The 1895 guns had pistol grips originally, but they had a slightly different design.
It was shorter because it didn't have a charging handle in here to deal with.
It had a single finger trigger instead of kind of this two finger arrangement.
And it didn't have this big lever on top.
This pistol grip has been designed specifically to work with
the aircraft gun version where the trigger is actually built into this assembly.
This is the synchroniser mount.
You would bolt ... the assembly coming in from the aircraft engine up here,
and this is actually the trigger.
You push back on that and it fires.
We have an auxiliary trigger here,
and the exact reason for this is a bit of a mystery to me.
I don't know if some of these guns were mounted as flexible observer guns,
where they needed a manual trigger instead of a synchroniser connection.
Or if, perhaps, there is some other explanation.
At the end of this video we'll go ahead and talk about the
further evolution of the gun beyond this pattern.
Now Swebilius, as part of his work, actually improved
this latching system to hold the pistol grip in place.
We've got two big latches here on a little flat spring.
So that's part of his work.
Mechanically speaking, this is locked through a tilting bolt style of mechanism,
where the bolt drops down into a locking shoulder there.
When it cycles, the rear of the bolt is going to lift up,
and then it can travel backwards.
Interestingly, and I'm not entirely sure about the reasons behind this,
there's actually a release lever here
that you have to hold in order to cycle the action fully open.
You also have to actually lift up on the charging handle here.
So there's a little tiny pin back there, and you have to lift it up before it will open.
Moving forward a bit, we have our front tripod mount.
These guns, including the aircraft ones, had the same standard mounting.
And these would go on like a Vickers gun tripod.
We have a set of markings up here on top of the receiver and barrel.
Now, we have Marlin-Rockwell Corporation, New Haven, Connecticut.
Inspected ... J.A.D. who is the inspector, and then this would have said "1917".
Except this was originally a deactivated gun and had been drilled right through here.
So the hole has been filled, the gun has been repaired, legally by the way.
But that obliterated part of that date marking on there.
So calibre .30, and the serial number of the gun which is ... 7,900 and change.
The barrel is mismatched, 28,000 on the barrel, but that is the right pattern of barrel.
Interestingly, in order to prevent people in service from getting confused about the
ammunition that went in this gun.
Potentially people thinking that it would use maybe 6mm Lee Navy still,
or perhaps .30-40 Krag, these were marked "US Cal .30"
in really huge letters on the side of that synchroniser block.
We do have a cool port here in the side that gives you access to the operating bits.
Not that you really need it unless something goes wrong, but it's neat to have it there.
We will take a look at the feed mechanism in a moment,
but first the gas piston is out here. We have an adjustable gas ... port right there.
Oh man, this thing is heavy.
And then our straight gas piston right here.
The swinging link originally was pinned right about in this position
on ... Browning's version of the gun.
Now this big cylinder is an extra weight
that was added by Swebilius and Marlin after initial problems that the Navy experienced.
So the Navy was the first customer for these. They bought like 1,600 of them,
designated them the Mark 5, because the US Navy at the time
was doing marks for everything as their nomenclature.
And they complained that they had a lot of torn rims, ... extraction failures.
And the reason was essentially by converting this gun to a straight piston,
Swebilius had substantially changed the cycling dynamics of the action.
And it was trying to pull cases out of the chamber
at much higher pressure than in the original design.
This movement gets to the chamber faster than that swinging link did.
The swinging link added a nice element of delay
that reduced chamber pressure when extraction was supposed to happen.
Now Marlin claimed that the Navy just had crappy ammunition,
and there may be an element of truth to that.
But this really was a bit problematic in its original implementation.
So what they did is they gave it a bigger extractor for one,
and then they added a weight to the piston,
which is going to act to delay the opening of the action
similar to the way that the swinging link originally did.
So that's what this big chunk of metal here is, it's just there to add mass to the piston.
If I open this up a bit you can see the gas piston operating there.
And of course we have the spring right in there that pushes it back forward.
Swebilius also dropped the feed system down a little bit in the gun.
In the original Browning design this feed opening was a bit higher up in the gun,
so this is also fairly distinctive.
There is a cam wheel inside there, or a pair of them.
Your ... belt loaded with ammunition would come up here,
and ... basically the belt comes in,
and cartridges drop into this rotary spool, which cycles them up.
They get pulled off the belt here, and then fed into the chamber up top.
Belts for the 1895 and also for the Marlin 1917,
are just slightly different than Browning 1917 belts or 1919 belts.
The later pattern Brownings had a spacing of 17 cartridges per foot,
where the early ones, the Marlins and the Diggers, had 16 cartridges per foot.
Now you can tell these apart in some belts because the early ones
will have a single line of black stitching on the cloth belt,
where the later pattern Browning belts have two lines of stitching.
And the belts are one-way reversible, sort of.
You can use Digger and Marlin belts in a Browning 1919,
but you can't go the other way around.
The problem is the more modern belts are presenting cartridges too closely together,
and they won't properly cycle into this spindle.
So, original Colt and Digger belts are quite hard to find,
so if you get them, treat them well.
Some people can get reasonably good feeding with later pattern Browning belts,
especially if they're a little older and they've stretched a little bit.
But they're not going to be 100% reliable.
Now, after implementing a number of these changes to the extractor
and increasing the weight of the gas piston,
also in conjunction with the fact that the Air Service always
(in pretty much all of the nations in World War One)
the Air Service always had the best quality ammunition because
once you're in a dog fight you really don't want to be trying to clear a malfunction in a gun.
It literally could be a life or death thing, in a way that an infantry gun
it's a problem, but not quite as serious of a problem.
So air corps always got the cream of the crop, primo ammunition.
Between that and the improvements that Marlin made to the design subsequently,
these ended up being actually very popular aircraft guns for American flyers.
And many, many thousands of them were ordered and installed and used in American aircraft.
A lot of the details of the configuration of these Marlin aircraft guns are a bit hazy.
There's never been a whole lot of particularly
good research done on these that I'm aware of.
There is a little bit of discussion in Dolf Goldsmith's book on "The Browning Machine Guns",
because this is, at its core, a Browning machine gun.
But that leaves some questions unanswered.
So what we typically see are first the Navy pattern guns which had a heavy barrel like this.
Then we see the 1917, the '7 MG' US aircraft guns, which have,
the early ones (apparently, as far as I can tell), still have heavy barrels on them.
... They have the improved ... heavier gas piston, they have the larger extractor.
They're better quality guns. They have the loop charging handle back here.
This would evolve into a straight L style bracket.
The barrels would eventually be turned down to be lighter and thinner
because you didn't need so much mass when ... the gun's on a plane that's flying around.
In 1918 a new version would be adopted, designated the '8 MG'.
And its major difference was an improved synchroniser mechanism that was actually hydraulic
and much ... larger, bulbous, and kind of comes out in front of this area.
And those are pretty easily distinguished in photos.
But it's not entirely clear how many of each different pattern were ordered,
or exactly what the circumstances were regarding the change
from the heavy, finned barrel to the thin, smooth barrel.
Now it's interesting to note that the Dutch Military Museum
has an example of a gun in exactly this configuration:
heavy barrel with the pistol grip and all.
And what they told me is that that gun would have had to come from a US aircraft
that touched down in the Netherlands and was interned over the course of the war.
I don't know the exact history of their gun,
but the fact that they have one in identical configuration to this
tells me that this is almost certainly an authentic configuration of the gun,
despite the fact that it has been reactivated.
So, late in the war these would undergo a further conversion,
2,646 of them were converted into tank machine guns.
Although none would be delivered in time to actually see service in US tanks, or in any tanks.
The tank conversion involved adding basically the inside half of a Lewis gun jacket.
So an aluminium finned barrel jacket, real big in diameter, to help cool the guns,
along with a Lewis style flash hider at the end of the muzzle.
This is clearly not one of those.
But that conversion, they were done, but never actually put into service.
After the war, the Marlin machine guns kind of fell out of favour pretty quickly.
People moved on to more modern, newer guns. There wasn't the immediate demand,
and aircraft development would find other armament, primarily
... new Browning guns, Browning 1917/1919 pattern guns,
which really were a lot less finicky, cheaper, easier to manufacture, lighter.
So the Marlin really didn't go anywhere after World War One,
and that also contributes to it being a
fairly poorly understood and poorly documented design.
So, hopefully I didn't get anything hugely wrong in this video,
hopefully you guys enjoyed taking a look at it.
Thanks to Morphy's of course for giving me the opportunity to take a look at it and bring it to you.
Thanks for watching.