[ Burton 1917 Light Machine Rifle ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today again at the Cody Firearms
Museum, part of the Buffalo Bill Centre of the West.
And we are taking a look today at an extremely cool gun.
This is a Model of 1917 Burton Light Machine Rifle.
And, interestingly, it fits all the characteristics of
an assault rifle, despite being made in 1917.
Now the impetus for this was the need to shoot down hydrogen-filled balloons, apparently.
Poking little bullet holes in them didn't do a whole lot.
What was really necessary to effectively take down
a Zeppelin or an observation balloon was incendiary ammo.
And in order to have an effective incendiary cartridge,
you had to have a big projectile so that you could fit some incendiary in it.
For this reason, ultimately what got used for this purpose were
Vickers and Maxim guns re-chambered for 11mm cartridges,
that was primarily what the Allies used anyway.
Before that became standard however, a guy named Frank Burton,
who was working for the Winchester company, came up with his own solution - which is this.
Now, interestingly, he was the son of a Colonel James Burton,
who was actually Superintendent of Armouries for the Confederate States of America.
Interesting bit of arms ... industry lineage [there].
Frank Burton had been working for Winchester for some time,
and he was actually the designer behind the series of Winchester self-loading rifles,
the 1905, 1907, and 1910.
Which are all semi-auto simple blowback guns
in the .35, .351 and .401 Winchester Self-Loading proprietary cartridges.
What he did when faced with this requirement from the military,
was he took the .351 Winchester cartridge and redesigned it a bit,
and renamed it the .345 which apparently was the bore diameter.
That gave them a nice big projectile,
and instead of being a round nosed projectile like in the self-loading sporting guns,
he made it a pointed projectile, and incendiary.
And he then devised a blowback select-fire machine gun to use it
and that's this gun. Now a couple of distinctive things about this gun.
Well, OK, there's one really distinctive thing about this gun, and that is
it's got two magazines here, one coming out each side.
These are 20 round magazines, there's some misconception about that out there.
Somewhere along the line it got misinterpreted as 40 round magazines,
it is in fact two 20s that give you a total of 40 rounds of capacity.
So we'll look at exactly how these magazines fit and lock
in a minute when we get a close-up on the gun.
But for the moment, let me point out that only one of them feeds at a time,
and it's not super-fast to change from one to the other.
In order to understand why this setup would be done like this,
we have to think about the fact that this was originally developed as an aircraft armament.
And if you're up in a cramped little wooden biplane doing weird manoeuvres
... you don't want to have a lot of accessories kind of bouncing around in your observer's seat.
So by having a second magazine already locked into the gun,
you had no risk of losing your magazine, or having to find it when you needed to reload.
What you would do is basically pull one magazine partway out,
push the new loaded magazine the rest of the way in, and then you could continue shooting.
Now Burton ... made this a dual-purpose gun.
So it wasn't just an observer's gun, although it does have a nice machined ring here
to fit on a flexible mount, a Scarff type mount, in an ... aircraft observer's seat.
However, they also made sure that this would also be done so that you could use it on the ground.
If you were forced down in enemy territory for example.
And that is the reason why we see a bayonet lug on the end of the barrel,
which is not something you would typically need for an aircraft gun. So.
I think we should probably just bring the camera back in,
and take a closer look at some of these elements because
nobody really seems to know how this thing worked.
Because there's only one of these in existence, and
I don't think anyone's taken a real close look at it in a little while.
Alright, this funky magazine thing is what everyone wants to know about, what's the deal with that?
So the rationale here, as I said, is you want to have a reload already situated on the gun.
This is like a World War One ready mag.
And the way they do that (these magazines by the way are really stiff),
the way they do that is by having two locking catches on each of the magazines.
So you have a storage position and you have a firing position for each magazine.
Now it's a little bit unusual that the locking catch is on the front, but.
On the back of the magazine there is one catch, that is an over-travel stop.
So that prevents you from jamming one magazine in too far.
That's a double-stack mag, like I said, it hold 20 rounds.
And we have magazine catches on the front of the magazine wells.
Now, let me pull this one out.
This one's the really stiff one.
Alright, I'll demonstrate with this one.
So the magazine goes in, we'll hear one click, there it is, that's the storage position.
And if we take a close look inside the other magazine well, you can see pretty much nothing.
When I bring the bolt back you can see that the bolt is not going to be
picking up a cartridge from that magazine,
until I push it the rest of the way in.
Let's get the click there for you, so there's the second click.
Now you can see that the magazine is protruding way down into the magazine well there.
And now the bolt is in a position to actually strip rounds out of that magazine.
So once this mag is in this position, you can go ahead and fire 20 rounds.
Once this mag is empty, what you have to do is hit the latch,
and bring it up at, least a little bit, so that it clears the magazine well.
And then you can take your other magazine, which you would already have in the gun.
(Excuse, me a moment here.)
And then you can snap the other magazine the rest of the way in,
lock the bolt back open, and continue firing.
Now the gun is ready to go.
So if we look at this from the back when it's in an actual usable position,
you can see that one mag is further in than the other.
This is my stored mag, either empty or loaded but in reserve,
this is my currently active magazine.
So mechanically this is an open-bolt firearm.
We have our bolt handle here. We can take a look at the bottom of the bolt.
This is our sear engagement surface, right there.
And the bolt's just going to cycle back and forth,
it's a pretty heavy bolt with a pretty heavy spring.
And that fits for Burton's other developments with the Winchester Self-Loaders,
which were all blowback guns
based on the premise of having a fairly heavy bolt and operating spring.
In fact, interestingly, even having the charging handle here on the bottom of the gun
is somewhat reminiscent of the Winchester Self-Loaders,
where the charging handle was a button located out in the front of the stock.
Anyway, these two big lugs here on the underside of the receiver
lock the grip frame and fire control group in place.
It sits there, it just goes in the back and slides forward.
Now looking closer at the fire-control mechanism,
we have ... very much an unusual and unique system here.
The trigger here is our semi-auto trigger.
Now being an open bolt, when you fire the gun just with this trigger,
the bolt will drop home, chamber a cartridge, fire it,
blow back, and lock in the open position again.
If however you hold the bottom trigger at the same time, and then pull the top trigger,
the gun will fire fully automatic until you release the bottom trigger.
Now the way this works, like I said, is a bit unusual.
This is our actual sear right here, that angled surface locks into the bolt and holds it back.
And in the typical ready to fire position
(this doesn't sit in its normal position because it's out of the gun,
normally the bolt's going to be pressing down on this sear the whole time),
and you can see the little shelf, right here, that this sear sits on.
So normally when you pull the trigger this goes forward and the sear drops
(sorry, it's under my thumb), but the sear drops down.
And you can see this square piece, that's the semi-auto disconnector.
It comes up through that centre slot, allowing the sear to drop all the way.
At this point the bolt is cycling forward, and as soon as it clears,
as soon as the bolt's all the way forward, now there's nothing holding this sear down,
and it pops up like that.
When the bolt comes back the bolt rides over the sear, pushes it down,
and now that rectangular block is no longer in alignment with this slot.
So the sear goes down, hits that block - the disconnector, and holds the bolt back.
It can't drop far enough to allow the bolt to cycle forward again.
When you release the trigger, now instead of sitting on the disconnector
now it's sitting on the shelf.
Now, when I hold both triggers down,
that rear trigger is holding a lever back here
which actually grabs that sear the first time it pushes down, and holds it down.
So the gun will fire full-auto because this sear is locked in the downward position,
and it doesn't engage with the bolt.
And it will continue firing until it's either out of ammunition
(at which point, interestingly, it will not lock open,
it will drop on an empty chamber and go click),
until I release this bottom trigger.
You can hear that click, now the sear is able to come back up
and we're back in our normal semi-auto firing mode.
One other thing I should point out,
once you've got the trigger assembly ... attached to the rails on the receiver,
you then have this spring-loaded catch, right here.
You can see it's got that big wedge.
That locks into this cutout on the ... rear lug.
So in order to take the pistol grip off what you have to do
is to pull this down, like that,
far enough that you can then tap this assembly backwards out of engagement.
That's kind of tricky actually.
Now the literature describes this gun as having a quick-change barrel,
which is sort of correct, it does have a changeable barrel.
What you have is actually this screw, right here on the front of the receiver.
It un-threads, and when it does it comes out of this slot in the barrel.
Once this screw is free of this slot, then you can unthread the barrel.
So you can't really just push a button and pop the barrel out,
it takes a bit of a procedure, but it is an easily changeable barrel.
Because of this locking ... screw, you don't actually have to have
the ... threads tightened way down, this prevents it from un-threading.
So we have a rear sight on here, there is no notch or aperture on the bottom.
But when you flip it up you have a range adjustable rear aperture sight.
Now this would be intended ... for long-range use.
When you are shooting closer ...
you would use this V notch, which is fixed in place.
Now to go along with this, this is the infantry barrel.
And we know that because it's got a bayonet lug on it.
If you read the literature, it will say that this fits a Model of 1917 Enfield bayonet.
The British P14 Enfield, aka the M1917 in US service, which Winchester was making.
So Winchester made this, Winchester was making those,
it would make sense that it would fit that bayonet.
However, I tried one and it doesn't fit.
This bayonet lug is not dropped low enough to fit that bayonet.
So exactly what it does fit, I don't know, possibly its own proprietary thing.
Maybe just some other model I haven't thought of.
But we know this is the ground barrel because it's got that bayonet lug,
you'd never have that in the air.
The ground model also has this standard front ... post sight.
Now if we look here, right at the front of the receiver,
we can see that there's this machined flat surface.
This is a mounting ... position for something like a Scarff ring,
which was the standard type of flexible ... aircraft gun mount during World War One.
That's so that you could pivot this thing around, and
an observer could fire it in any number of different directions.
If you pull the front trigger, I'm going to hold it down here, bolt closes, fires,
and then it locks back open.
If you pull ... both triggers simultaneously.
Now holding the rear trigger down ...
that bolt will continue to cycle until I release the rear trigger, then it will lock back open.
So disassembly for the fire control group is done with
a spring-loaded tab right back here, which you'll see in a moment,
and then this whole thing slides back about an inch and comes off.
Then you would unscrew the recoil spring ...
from the buttstock. This allows the buttstock to come off.
And then the bolt and the recoil spring come out the back of the receiver.
This is a very stiff screw, and it doesn't want to get any tighter than that.
That's how we found it here in the display, so we're going to leave that alone.
We can take a pretty good look at the bolt, the underside anyway,
when we take the rest of the gun apart.
So I've got the barrel off and we're looking down at the bolt face,
and when I pull the charging handle back
it actually pulls the firing pin backward into the bolt.
So there is some sort of inertial mechanism inside the bolt that prevents the firing pin
from going all the way forward until the bolt is in battery and the trigger is depressed.
Now, I'm not sure exactly what that system is.
Unfortunately ... the rear end of this disassembly just doesn't want to run smoothly.
So I can't take the bolt out of the action, we have to try and figure this out
from looking at it from the outside.
Alright, the safety on this is this lever right here. This is the fire position.
If we rotate this forward, what it does is actually lock the bolt in place.
So at this point I can pull the trigger, nothing happens, I can't cycle the bolt.
If I put it on fire, now I can drop the bolt.
And then if I put it back on safe, it has locked the bolt in the forward position.
So that prevents anything untoward from happening.
Now the other interesting element here,
and unfortunately since I can't take the bolt out I don't have this entirely figured out,
but we can deduce some things.
So when the gun cycles this does not have a fixed firing pin,
it actually has a floating firing pin, which is connected to this charging handle.
And when it closes, you hear a second kind of ker-clack.
And that is the firing pin actually projecting forward.
There is some sort of little trip inside the bolt that does that,
that releases and allows the firing pin to go forward, right there.
So in fact it's most noticeable if we fire in full-auto.
So - there it is - there it is - there it is.
But if I just pull the bolt back a little bit, it doesn't make that noise.
So I suspect what's happening is we have something like an out of battery safety
that at the end of travel trips and releases the firing pin to go forward.
And then it resets when the bolt comes all the way back.
So if you don't pull the bolt all the way back, that thing doesn't reset.
In theory, maybe, that would also act as a safety mechanism
to prevent, say, bolt bounce from opening the bolt just far enough to pick up a cartridge
without locking open, then closing.
That was a typical safety issue on open-bolt submachine guns.
It would be much harder for that to happen on this gun
because the bolt is much heavier and the spring is heavier.
I'm really kind of going out on a limb here, but
whatever the release mechanism inside the bolt is might involve that as well.
So ultimately by the time this thing had gone through testing, and was developed,
and ready, and suitable for actual potential military issue,
the problem had already been solved in other ways.
Namely Vickers guns in 11mm Gras, and this wasn't necessary.
... The Vickers guns were belt-fed, they were very high capacity, they were very reliable guns.
And they could be mounted in a synchronised manner on aircraft,
and be much more effective than a limited capacity thing like this in an observer's seat.
So production of this never began.
I don't know how many prototypes were actually made,
this is definitely the only one still in existence.
And it has no marking of any kind on it, not even a serial number 1.
Which to me kind of suggests it's probably the only one that they did.
It's extremely cool, it's interesting that it meets these criteria for an assault rifle.
It's a select-fire, intermediate cartridge, shoulder-fired weapon.
Now it ... didn't see any service, all it saw was a bit of testing.
But it kind of shows that this technology was out there, as of now, 99 years ago.
I hope you guys enjoyed this video.
I would like to very much thank the Cody Firearms Museum
for letting me take a close look at this and pull it apart.
If you are ever in Wyoming you should absolutely take the time to visit the museum.
They have a fantastic collection and very well displayed.
And of course, if you like this sort of content,
if you like seeing one-of-a-kind prototype assault rifles,
please consider checking out my Patreon account.
It is funds from the wonderful folks there that allow me
to do travelling to come to places like Cody and show you guns like this.
Thanks for watching.