Nice.
[ Reproduction China Lake 40mm at the Range ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are going to actually try out
one of the China Lake 40mm pump-action grenade launchers.
I had a video on ... a reproduction of one of these a little while back,
and I had a viewer who saw that video and said,
"Do you know what? I've got one of those reproductions transferring.
Do you want to go do some shooting with it when it comes in?"
And I said, "Yes, yes I do."
And so that's what we're out here today to do.
It's a little bit windy, but we'll push through that and have ourselves a good time.
So let's start by loading this thing up,
because there are a few quirks to actually running and operating one of these.
So this is essentially a very large Remington 870 action.
And it loads like an 870, we've got an elevator right here, push that up and load in.
The trick however is that the shape, the ogive, of the nose of these chalk projectiles
is not quite the same as that of true high explosive.
And one of the problems that these guys ran into when they were actually producing these
is they had a hard time running anything except high explosive.
Which doesn't really seem like a problem, except that
well you do want to be able to, say, practice with chalk from time to time.
Or perhaps shoot something heavier like illumination flares,
something longer than this length of cartridge.
And the China Lake design just didn't allow any of that.
So what we're going to do is load this very gently.
We also want to be careful not to crack
(there we go)
we don't want to crack this plastic cone on the front.
If we crack this and then the chalk canister breaks open while we're cycling the action,
well then you have chalk all over the inside of your magazine tube.
And you get to take a break and carefully clean out the whole gun.
There we go. There's two rounds. Let's do one more.
Without crushing my thumb in the loading gate.
So OK, we've got 3 in the tube, let's see how she shoots.
Alright, so we have actual sights on this.
I'm going to leave the ladder down because we're shooting at about 50 metres.
I've got a full-size silhouette out there, and I'm really curious
to see if I can hit that at 50 metres with this thing.
So slide release is there, here we go.
Just help that first one in there a little bit.
Second round has gone onto the lifter, safety is on fire.
Significantly short.
Oop. Alright, this is not particularly happy feeding these chalk rounds. So.
Whoo! OK, the range was good, windage is slightly off.
Ah, close again, but not quite there.
Alright, let's get some more shells.
Alright, so it is really kind of a ...
there we go. Alright, three in the tube.
I believe we now have blue chalk. So let's see how these run.
Alright, we've got two in the tube, one on the lifter ready to go.
I think part of the problem here is that I wasn't actually running the slide violently enough.
I think you have to actually open it all the way on one motion,
you can't be gentle with it, in order to lock the elevator in the upward position.
So, let's see how this goes.
Sight back up.
Nope, still low. Alright, here we go.
That didn't quite do it.
There we go, that did.
Overshot it a little bit.
We're going to try this guy again.
Closer.
Alright, now that we've got maybe some of the
operational kinks figured out, let's try one more magazine.
Alright, round is on the lifter.
Ah, alright, I didn't quite lock it open all the way.
But if I roll the gun over a little bit.
Definitely blue chalk, definitely too high.
Now ... oh, so close!
Ha-ha-hah! There we go. Alright.
Still high. These are not very consistent chalk rounds.
Alright! It only took 9 attempts, but I hit our target.
This is quite a lot of fun, malfunctions or not. Just takes a little getting used to.
Alright guys, well 40mm ammo goes pretty darn quick.
This has been really interesting to get a chance to shoot, it's a very cool gun.
But it does also show you some of the traps of making reproductions,
because, well, it's got a few hiccups.
And you have to really understand how to use it and get past some of its quirks
to be able to actually run this.
So the sort of thing that ... can be worked out in large scale production.
But for small batch, reproduction prototype sort of guns like this,
this is pretty much par for the course.
So I've got 3 rounds loaded in it.
Let's see if I can make a couple more hits.
Oh, just over the top.
But got one more chance.
Nope. The primer is set a little deep on this one.
So if you're wondering could you in fact fire 40mm grenades faster out of a pump action China Lake
than out of a single-shot M203, not so much.
It takes a little bit too much fiddling around with the loading and the firing process.
But a huge thanks to the viewer who brought this out to the range for me to give a whirl with.
It's always a tremendous amount of fun to play with these things, even if they don't run perfectly.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching. ...
[ ... ]
Alright, we are back. We are actually going to do a quick little epilogue here
because we also have a single-shot M203 that we can run 3 rounds through,
and you can see this is going to go a lot faster and smoother than the China Lake.
Just off to the left.
I'll tell you what though, this thing's got a heck of a lot more recoil than that pump gun.
This actually kind of jars the shoulder a bit,
that China Lake feels like basically nothing for recoil.