[ M43 Salakari Maxim Mount ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look
at a really cool Finnish light Maxim mount.
Of course the Finnish military used
... originally captured Russian Maxim guns, and then
started production of their own Maxim guns
in 1932 or 1933 at the Tikkakoski Company.
They really liked the Maxim.
There's an argument to be made that in fact the Finnish 32/33 Maxim gun
is really the furthest evolution of the Maxim in combat service anywhere.
They introduced some things like the snow cap
that allowed you to fill the water jacket with snow when it was freezing out.
This is something that the Russians would copy after finding it from the Finns.
At any rate, one of the real problems with the Maxim gun everywhere in service
was the fact that the mount weighed as much as the gun itself, if not more,
and both elements were really quite heavy.
The Finns in 1932/33 adopted their own new tripod mount based
kind of closely on one of the DWM commercial mounts. And it's a heavy mount.
... It's very nice for emplacements and strong points.
It's not so good for lightweight assault troops who are trying to move around,
and want to have some automatic firepower with them.
And they don't want to deal with LS-26 light machine guns.
And so through the late 1930s and the 1940s,
a number of lightweight Maxim mounts were developed in Finland.
There was a rucksack style mount with a quadrupod foot setup.
So you could carry the mount on your back, and then drop it down,
stab it into position in the dirt,
and have a mount fairly similar to some of the World War One Maxim trench mounts.
The VKT rifle factory developed its own lightweight mount,
a ... ski bipod basically for the gun.
But the most common of them was this, the M43 Salakari mount.
It was developed in 1943 by a lieutenant in the 7th Army Corps named Lauri Salakari.
And basically he fabricated one of these in the field at a field armoury
to fulfil a need of the troops that he was around.
It's a 4.1 kilo mount, which is about 10 pounds,
which is about 50 pounds less than the official tripod.
Of course you have a pair of skis on the front, but they are connected to bipod legs.
So in the summer you can actually take the skis off and stab it into the ground on a fixed bipod.
If I unlock the traverse back there, what you can do is lift this up by the fixed shoulder stock,
it will pivot side to side.
And makes a really nice lightweight sort of assault mount for a Maxim gun.
There we go.
So let's take a look at a couple of these elements up a little closer.
So I don't have a rear mounting pin in this one at the moment,
but this is designed to connect to standard mounting points on a Maxim gun.
So the front peg is fixed to the mount, and the rear is just a removable pin.
If we go ahead and take the gun off, you can see the mounting point here, a fixed pin.
And then we've got our locking plunger on the bottom,
which allows this piece to rotate freely 360 degrees.
There is the underside of the assembly.
The ski feet are both attached by pins to a nice wide bipod foot.
So in the summer, as I said, you can pull the skis off and just have a bipod.
And the shoulder support is actually fairly wide,
slightly pushed over to the left to accommodate a right-handed gunner.
The concept was quite well received.
In the winter and spring of 1943 these were tested and put into production.
A grand total of 312 of them were manufactured.
... Like, the idea was to put them into mass production,
but that wasn't able to happen before the Russian offensives in 1944
and the end of the Continuation War.
So a total of 312 is all that were ever actually made.
But they were apparently quite popular with the assault troops who used them.
You could take this whole thing and put it in a snow sledge for longer distance transportation.
But the skis allow the gun to sit nicely on the snow, unlike a tripod,
and it's far more mobile than a tripod.
The one complaint that some of the users had with it was with the shoulder stock itself,
which ... doesn't have any adjustment whatsoever.
And the argument was, "Well, the shoulder stock could be better".
But for an economical, quickly produced, not quite improvised but close to improvised,
lightweight mount this really was a very good solution.
In fact, it was a good enough solution that 100 of them would remain in Finnish Defence Forces
inventories until the 1980s, when they were finally all scrapped.
With the exception, of course, of a handful that made it out
onto the collectors market here in Finland.
So, I think it's a really cool adaptation of the Maxim to combat in winter.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.