Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Canadian War Museum
in Ottawa up in Ontario, where we are taking a look at a very cool
conversion of a Ross bolt-action, straight-pull rifle into a light machine gun.
This is called a Huot automatic rifle, named after its inventor,
Joseph Alphonse Huot. He was born in 1868 up in Quebec.
He was a blacksmith and machinist by trade and interested in firearms.
And when World War One broke out, he got more interested in firearms.
The Ross rifle had been in military service up in Canada up to this point.
Ross rifles started started showing up in 1905.
So what Huot was looking at was how can we develop something that will
give some additional much needed firepower to Canadian armed forces.
And he got the idea to convert a straight-pull Ross rifle into
an automatic machine gun, the Huot.
He and a partner worked on this project privately ... from 1914 through about the middle of 1916.
And they pretty much just like did this in a shed in the back yard.
And they got it pretty well sorted out, they got this project basically functional.
And it was in September of 1916 that Huot was finally introduced to a member of the Canadian military in Ottawa.
Brought the gun, showed it to him and he was hired on the spot to work for Canadian small arms experimental development.
And this would have some repercussions on him, but we'll get to that in a minute.
With Canadian military support he was able to go through and really finalise the design,
and it started going through testing in late 1916. So December of 1916 this thing goes through a trial, 650 rounds.
That's not much by serious trials standards, but when you consider an experimental firearm the first time out,
take it out for an hour or two, find some Colonel to show it to.
If you can get 650 rounds through the gun without problems you've got something with real potential. And it did.
So there was a second extended trial in February of 1917, also went well.
And then a really serious trial up here in Canada, an endurance test where they put
11,000 rounds through one of the guns in March of 1917, and again the guns were performing well.
The problems that the Huot had were not really mechanical ones, this gun functioned quite nicely.
It is an open-bolt firing machine gun, fires about 470 rounds per minute, uses a 25 round drum magazine.
And this looked like it had some real potential for the Canadian military.
This would have filled the same role as the Lewis gun.
And in fact the Lewis gun is the primary contender against which it was tested.
And the idea was ... this is all based on a Ross straight-pull rifle. There were plenty of those around.
And at the time the cost was something like $50 ... to build a Ross into a Huot,
as compared to the cost of something like $1,000 for a brand new Lewis gun.
So that was one of the major considerations, one of the major potential benefits of a conversion like this.
For the record this uses 33 just straight unconverted Ross parts,
it uses another 11 Ross parts that were modified, and then 56 new production parts.
So that may sound like it's mostly a new gun, but some of those parts that are either
used straight off the Ross or only slightly modified included important ones like the receiver and the barrel.
And a lot of the parts that were added onto this are relatively simple parts to manufacture.
So there was definitely an economic ... benefit to using this instead of a Lewis.
And there was of course the national pride thing of we're not gonna use Lewis guns designed in America
and manufactured in Britain, we're gonna design and produce our own light machine gun. So real potential there.
Well, in the spring of 1917 Huot and a partner, ... a Major Robert Blair who was the Assistant Small Arms Inspector in Quebec,
they depart for England to do some actual serious testing. Because at this point this gun is gonna have to pass British military
trials if it's going to be adopted. The British aren't going to let it into military standardisation if they haven't looked at it themselves.
So it went in and it would be tested against the Lewis gun and the Farquhar-Hill light machine gun.
And we'll talk about what happened in those tests after we take a look at what this is, and just how it works.
So we're gonna start looking at this with the magazine.
It's a light machine gun, magazines are actually frankly one of the most important elements to it.
So this is a 25 round drum magazine. And actually what's interesting about this, among other things, is there's no spring.
This is entirely a ratchet driven magazine.
... You push this thing straight into the action.
It has this rather unusual frame built around the magazine I think just to protect it.
And the magazine basically goes in until it sits flush with that frame. So,
go ahead and (this one unfortunately the magazine spring is missing),
so once I push that in I can pull the magazine straight out the back.
This is ... a heavy magazine and it's a small capacity magazine for what it is. So let's take a closer look at that.
In order to load this you actually use a stripper clip.
Unfortunately, we don't have one here. However, there is one of these at the Seaforth Highlanders Museum
and they have a stripper clip for theirs. And if you go over to Bloke On The Range's channel,
which I'll link to at the end of this video, he did a video on one where he actually shows the stripper clip in use.
So that's a cool little feature that I can't show you this time.
However, we have a little disconnector in here. When you put the stripper clip in it unlocks
this feed spindle and allows you to push 25 rounds in the top.
The rounds will then feed out this side, this is what locks into the receiver.
To open up the magazine to show you how it works we have a back plate that rotates
just slightly.
There are four little hooks around the perimeter here. So once we rotate it we can then
(there we go), lift this off, being careful not to break that, obviously.
And then inside you've got this cool spindle deal.
So you have 25 sections for cartridges here. And then this is actually your feed system, so you'll see there's no spring.
This is mechanically indexed by the gun, kind of like the Lewis gun.
Different mechanism but same idea, no spring, a mechanical index.
Now looking inside the bottom of the action, this finger pushes on that ratchet in the magazine.
So when the bolt cycles
you can see that finger pushes over.
This is an open bolt gun, so when I pull the trigger the bolt closes and this finger comes back.
So when the bolt opens it indexes one round, when the bolt closes it's gonna snap back, it's spring-loaded.
And in the same process the bolt is feeding a round out of the magazine and firing it.
Now as a converted bolt action rifle, because this is straight-pull it's actually a pretty
straightforward, I won't say easy, but it's a pretty straightforward conversion.
There is a gas piston that is put onto the barrel and it's right here. And then that piston runs back
to the action. We have a big sheet metal dust cover that we can open up so that we can see inside.
So the gas piston continues all the way back here, where it attaches to this whole assembly at the end of the bolt.
It also mounts the recoil spring to pull the bolt forward.
So when you fire, the gas piston gets pushed back, that pushes the bolt back,
opens, extracts the empty case.
It's going to cycle all the way back to here.
There is a little spring-loaded buffer right here on the side, it's got a pretty heavy-duty spring in it.
And when the bolt cycles all the way back the op rod impacts on that, and that's what buffers the deceleration of the bolt.
By the way, while we've got this open, ... the only marks on this from its conversion are a serial number 5 right there,
and the serial number 5 right here on the receiver.
Other than that, the only markings are those that were originally on the Ross.
This is the original Ross safety. So ready and safe.
I already mentioned that there's one of these that Bloke On The Range did a video on,
his has an additional lever on the back of the bolt he wasn't sure the purpose of.
I was curious to take a look at this example and see what that lever did, but this example doesn't have it.
So a little bit of a data point for those of you who are interested in multiple versions of the Huot.
We have an interrupter here that is going to prevent rounds from feeding up out of the magazine when they're not supposed to.
You can see that's timed to depress down when the bolt goes forward to feed.
The handguards on here vary a bit. This one actually has two added handguard sections on the side of
the barrel jacket here, which do definitely help give you a better grip on this.
It's interesting that they never added a bipod to any of them,
I suspect that would have been done had they gone into military service and production.
The rear sight is taken off of a Ross Mark IIIB rifle.
This is basically copied off of the Pattern 1914 rifle and it's a pretty good rear sight.
Now what's interesting is this sight was originally meant to be back on the receiver very close to your eye.
On the Huot it's here in the middle of the gun. So what they did is they actually
changed this out from an aperture to a notch sight. So you can see the original aperture,
but they put a plate on the back of it and cut a notch at the top.
So when you have the sight down, kind of your standard firing mode, you've got a notch sight.
If you lift it up like this, then you're using
this aperture. And that aperture has been drilled out to be substantially larger than on a Pattern 1914 or a Ross IIIB
because it was recognised that it needed to be larger because the sight was farther forward.
So ... when I first looked at this I figured that sight's gonna be basically useless on this gun because it's so far forward.
In reality it actually gives you a pretty nice sight picture.
The front sight is mounted onto the barrel shroud. And it's just a kind of a typical shielded big square post.
Now this huge barrel shroud itself is there as a cooling mechanism.
It's very much like a Lewis gun, although it doesn't have an internal aluminium radiator like a Lewis.
So the idea here is that the barrel is set substantially back in the shroud.
So the end of the barrel is actually, ... you can't see how far down my hand is, but four or five inches down.
And the barrel's right there in the centre. The idea is when you fire you're going to get muzzle blast
pushing forward out of this barrel shroud.
That muzzle blast is going to pull cool air in through these two vents at the back,
thus forcing a continuous flow of cool air across the barrel.
That allows you to use a relatively light barrel and not overheat as quickly as it otherwise would.
So that's the reason for that huge barrel shroud out there.
Now one of the shortcomings of the Huot design that they really could have fixed without too much trouble I think,
is the overall handling. So what you have to do is actually put your thumb through this narrow little section.
The shroud here is added so that when the bolt comes cycling back and forth
you're not in any danger of being hit by it, that's a good idea.
But really this should have had a pistol grip on it so you don't have to try and hold this with...
I can't even do it while on camera, but stuffing your thumb through here.
The second issue is the cheek weld. In order to get a proper line on the sights
you have to put your face really kind of back here, which is awkwardly far back.
It would be much more comfortable to put your face up this far.
But up here the shape of the shroud is such that your face is really too far offset to get a good sight picture.
So the British testing on the Huot lasted from January until August of 1918.
Although it was about halfway through that it was formally rejected by the British military.
In total Huot and .... Blair took four guns, they took three main guns and a spare gun.
They took three extra sets of barrels and they took five magazines.
And it's interesting to me that they took only five magazines, which makes me think they had only made probably five magazines.
They probably had one drum magazine for each gun, and they took all of them along.
And on the one hand that tells me that these magazines are not particularly easy to make,
or else they would have made more of them,
because having to reload these all the time during trials was certainly, you know, a time consuming task.
At the same time the fact that the magazines actually survived through the trials,
these trials, by the way, over a 100,000 rounds were put through these four guns.
... That's as serious of a trial as you'll ever see.
The fact that the magazines survived and were still functional at the end of that trial is really impressive.
A typical sort of quasi-disposable box magazine would probably not have survived that.
So, the drums are well designed, they're well made, they needed to be lighter, which is one of the ancillary testing results.
But overall the result of this trial in the UK was first off, not accepted for service.
Not sufficiently better than a Lewis gun to justify putting in the cost and the time
to start up production on another different non-standard light machine gun.
There's probably also some political repercussion from the Ross rifle,
which had been the subject of much contentious argument both in Canada and in England.
The specific results from the trials were were both pro and con. This didn't totally fail trials, it did a lot of things well.
It was found to be faster on snap shooting, the idea if you're carrying the gun,
you bring it up to the shoulder and ... make a first shot. It beat the Lewis gun at that.
It was easier to disassemble than a Lewis gun, which makes sense, the Lewis gun's not the easiest thing out there to disassemble.
And one of the nice things about a conversion like this is all the mechanical bits are on the outside.
So as long as you can keep it clean, it'll run. And then if you have to disassemble it, stuff's all pretty easy to access.
This was also easier to clear malfunctions on than a Lewis gun, which is really not a surprise.
The Lewis gun is particularly difficult to clear malfunctions.
You get an empty case stuck inside a Lewis gun it's got this little tiny ejection port that clearing is very difficult.
This, again because of its bolt action rifle heritage, has the whole open top of the receiver.
Very easy to pull the bolt handle back, clear out whatever is in there, and get the gun running again.
So those are the things that it did well. On the other hand, it was criticised for having a very uncomfortable cheek weld
which is absolutely the case. You have to put your face way back here, it's not very comfortable.
The grip was also criticised. This should have had a pistol grip from the very beginning.
I suspect it didn't just as a way to reduce the labour and the effort involved in making them.
There's just barely enough space here to put a hand through, but it's not ideal.
You'll notice that there is no bipod on this. When they did the testing they had what they called a field mount.
I haven't seen any pictures or a good description of one, but it was some sort of tripod/bipod mount.
And the test says that that needed to be better. Really this should have had
even just like a Lewis gun style of bipod on the front. Would have been important.
So that was kind of the balance. It did some things well, it did some things not so well. And ultimately
by this time we're in the middle of 1918, ... you've got the money, if you need more light machine guns
do you put it into starting up production of a new gun that you know is going to have some teething issues.
And going from prototypes, hand built prototypes, to an actual production line gun
that's a tricky process and it takes time and effort.
Or do you take that same amount of money and put it into expanding Lewis gun production.
And the British answer was, "If we want more machine guns, we'll put the money into more Lewis gun production."
So they formally rejected the gun, Huot eventually came back home.
And unfortunately for him he was kind of in a pickle, there isn't really a civilian market for this in Canada in 1919.
He was in the hole, in debt, about $36,000 from all the work he'd put in.
He had spent four or five years working on this gun largely on his own.
When he did it funded by the Canadian military, he simply did it on salary.
He had a deal to get royalties on the gun if it had been adopted.
But it wasn't, and when it was rejected the Canadian military basically said,
"Well, thanks for trying. You're fired. We don't, you know, you're done. Bye."
Which ... left a bit of a bitter taste in Huot's life. He ... had actually married in 1915,
he went on to have several kids, ended up being the foreman for the City Works Department in Ottawa.
... He actually died in 1947. 1942 World War Two comes around
he actually does ... a little bit more developmental firearms work, but nothing that went as far as this.
He did file suit with the Canadian government to try and get some recompense
for the money that he had put into the development here.
And he ultimately did, he was actually paid out $25,000. So not quite everything that he said he had spent on it, but a good portion of it.
But they didn't get around to actually paying him until 1936, which is
kind of a bummer and maybe bureaucratically inevitable.
But such is what often happens to private inventors whose guns don't get adopted.
So, I would like to give a big thanks to the Canadian War Museum for giving me an opportunity to take a look at this Huot.
There were I believe five of these originally manufactured, they actually have two of them here.
This is the nicer of the two. If you're in Ottawa definitely stop in and take a look at the museum.
They have some pretty cool small-arms exhibits, as well as military vehicles and a bunch of other stuff related to Canadian military history.
Thanks for watching.