Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum and today we're gonna take just a minute to look at a question that has come up
quite a bunch. Something that I think really ought to be addressed and isn't being addressed,
and that is: what are these little doodads on the front of old rifles and sometimes
there's like extraneous broken sling swivels on the front of old rifles. What's the deal?
Well these are, the rods in particular, are called stacking rods.
And they are there so that you can hold three rifles up in sort of a little teepee or tripod arrangement
so that they don't lie down in the dirt.
And this is a practice that was generally done when armies were encamped.
Not sort of a thing that happens very much anymore, you don't really see this being done today.
It kind of phased out sort of with the end of the bolt-action rifle, but not entirely.
The US military has drill for doing this with the M14, for example, and the M16,
but today I think it's mostly a parade ground sort of thing.
This used to be a very literal this is how you stored rifles at the end of the day, or when you are working,
or anytime that you weren't actually carrying them what did you do with rifles?
Because, of course, the army doesn't want you to just throw them down on the ground.
So they came up with a couple of different ways of
... basically all accomplishing the same thing, and that is to keep the guns up out of the dirt.
This might take the form of a stacking rod on the side of the action, like on this MAS-36,
or on the bottom below the barrel, as on this Swiss K11 carbine.
It might actually be a job performed by the cleaning rod, as on this Mosin-Nagant carbine
and many other guns. The cleaning rod was a very typical, common and easy way to do this.
It might be done by what appears to be a deformed sling swivel with an opening in it, like on this
early Lee-Enfield, or notably on the American Springfields and Enfields and M1 Garands.
Or it might be something that was done by the bayonet.
That hooked quillion on the bottom that you often hear about being used for all sorts of fancy bayonet fighting,
well, that also served a nice purpose for helping stack rifles,
as you can see with this Lebel bayonet and Type 30 Arisaka bayonet.
And this is the form that this takes in actual practice. Hook all three rifles together by their stacking rods,
or by their stacking swivels, stand them up in a nice tripod. If you have extra guns,
more guys in the unit, they can either form their own little tripod like this,
or they can lean additional rifles up against one of these. And this basic foundational set of three
is strong enough that it will hold up a bunch of extras, as long as you kind of
distribute them around the outside.
Here's what it looks like from the top. You can see all three of these stacking rods are kind of
interconnected in there. This can be a little tricky to set up by yourself if you're trying to juggle three rifles
simultaneously. Definitely easiest to do by having three people, or at least two people, to help get everything set up.
And with a little practice these things go up really quickly and really easily,
and it's a pretty slick thing to do. Not something many people do today,
but I will point out it's really cool to be able to do it with, for example,
M1 Garands at a practical match, if you happen to have two buddies who are also shooting Garands with you.
Speaking of Garands, the system that the US came up with to do this
was substantially simpler to actually use, and that is the stacking swivel.
So you can see that we have swivels with slots cut in them here, and all you do is
take two rifles on the outside and hook them to the one in the middle. In this case
I have two M1 Garands and a 1903 Springfield.
They're the same length and they all have the same style of swivel, so it works just fine.
And the basic idea you want is for the outer two rifles to be pointing one direction,
and the middle rifle to be pointing the other, and then they will stand each other up very nicely.
And then this is really easy to disassemble, just hold two of the rifles,
pull the third one ... out of the slot in the stacking swivel,
and you're good to go.
Thank you for watching another Forgotten Weapons Short.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video and learnt something, even if that something is that you
need to go buy two more of your favourite rifle so that you can build a proper tripod with them.
Thanks for watching.