Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I have a Type 96 Japanese Nambu light machine gun here.
And I just got my hands on this, and I figured I'm often asked,
"What do you do, like what goes into prepping a gun for Forgotten Weapons filming?"
So today out at the range is actually my very first range trip with this gun.
So I figured I'd give you a little bit of a look into what I'm going to do with it.
So I should point out, before we got out here
I pulled apart both of my magazines, made sure that they run smoothly,
there isn't ... a lot of gunk in them, there aren't any dents in them.
Both the magazines appear to be good.
I pulled apart the gun, stripped the gun.
Checked to make sure that everything internally looked good.
Make sure that the firing pin isn't chipped or broken.
Make sure that the bolt runs smoothly.
Make sure that the locking lugs ... don't have any cracks in them.
Make sure the gun is just generally in good working order.
And then gave it a just a light coat of lubrication,
a little bit of oil on the moving parts.
That's pretty much it.
On a gun like this, double check just to be 100% sure that the barrel isn't plugged,
because sometimes that happens on DEWAT machine guns.
Make sure that there isn't a hole drilled in the barrel anywhere,
that's a very, very unlikely thing.
But if ... you happen to have a gun that's got a hole drilled in the barrel
and you fire it, you will have catastrophic results.
So it's always worth double checking that.
Anyway, now we're actually set up out here on the range
and we can get to real business.
I've got some ammo from Steinel, 140 grain, soft point, 6.5 semi-rimmed.
It's a pain in the butt cartridge to get.
So first is a single round to make sure the gun works,
then we'll go to 3 rounds to make sure that it doesn't run away.
And then we'll do some more shooting.
... The rear sight here is windage adjustable, so I'm going to try to get it actually zeroed.
This should be a very pleasant gun to shoot.
Right. You do have to cock it.
A little bit high.
So that magazine worked at least for one round.
Whoo! My empty case. Primer indent is good.
Not too deep, didn't penetrate, but solid enough to be a good reliable firing.
Alright, that's three rounds, empty there.
Now we can actually load this up.
These are 30 round mags which are almost harder to find than the gun.
I was very lucky that I managed to get a pair of magazines.
So I'm only shooting at a target that is 60 yards away, something like that.
The lowest setting on the gun is 200. I am hitting about a foot high,
which seems about right for a 200 yard zero at 60 yards.
So not really anything I can do about that at this short range.
The gun's not intended to be ... zeroed at something this ridiculously close.
Alright, now the real fun.
Oop. That felt like a malfunction.
(See what's up.) That's a malfunction right there.
So we got a live round.
It got squished going in, possibly because this is soft point.
Nothing in the chamber. Leave that one aside.
It seems to be depositing the empty cases in a pretty nice little linear area.
Ooh! Well OK, so ...
the actual problem last time was a split case.
So when this got jammed in ...
What happened last time is I've got a case out there somewhere
where it tore the back half of the case off.
And then when it tried to load this round
you can see that the ... neck of the broken case got jammed onto the bullet.
Fortunately tight enough that when I went to extract it, it pulled that out.
But let's see.
There it is.
So that ... whew, still a little hot.
That is a case neck separation.
We got some scraping there, but that's not broken.
That is either the result of a bad chamber,
or badly annealed brass.
[ It was a badly maintained chamber, after filming it was thoroughly cleaned and inspected and should be OK now. ]
Go ahead and empty the magazine.
As long as I aim just a little bit low, I'm actually able to hit
that red bucket without any trouble.
Alright.
According to my magazine I am out of ammunition.
Because if you look at this up close,
we have a round counter in the back of the magazine.
And ... those are numbers that are on the follower.
So as the follower goes up it'll tell me I've got 1, 2 or 3 rounds, or 0, remaining.
Alright, now I'm going to put a couple of rounds on a paper target
to check the exact windage. Like I know it's pretty close,
but this thing has this really nice click-adjustable aperture,
so I can get a precise zero on paper. But I have to get some more ammo first.
You know what? Actually I should do this one round at a time,
because I'm not really used to the trigger on this thing yet.
And I don't want to end up with doubles
when I'm trying to fire one round at a time for zeroing.
This is much like the Bren gun for unloading, by the way,
where you take your whole hand
and palm this lever forward as you tip the magazine forward.
Very fast to get the magazine out of it.
So the sights are offset to the left, of course, because
the magazine's right in the middle.
Unlike a lot of guns, the French guns in particular when they offset the sights to the left,
you just can't shoot it left-handed.
The Nambu, both the 96 and the 99, are actually both very forgiving,
very easy to shoot left-handed just rolling your head slightly over the stock.
Alright, this is open bolt. So go take a look at the zero and see how those shots did.
... OK. This tells me almost nothing really useful.
So I was aiming here to ... take care of the elevation issue.
Boy, that one's good, those two not so much.
I think I will adjust it just slightly off over to the left,
and see if that improves it a little bit.
We'll fire a few more rounds next time
to get a better idea of where it's actually hitting.
Alright, it's kind of time consuming to do single shots
by just single loading the magazine and recharging it every time.
So I'm going to put six rounds in here,
and I'm going to see if I can just do singles on the trigger.
Now first. ...
OK, I gave it three clicks of windage adjustment.
I probably should have looked it up, but I didn't before we came out.
I have no idea what the adjustment increments are on this thing.
So it seems to be pretty gross adjustment, we'll try three and see what happens.
We'll also see if I can reliably fire singles.
The length of pull on this thing is remarkably short.
Like if you try and pull this good and tight in,
your face is sitting on this end cap.
So you kind of have to deliberately sit back on it a little bit.
Alright. So much for being able to fire singles, those were all doubles,
and we fired 6 rounds on target.
Let's go take a look and see what happened.
It's probably not that good for zeroing, but who knows? Maybe.
Alright. So sorry, I think we missed the first double there, the first two shots. ...
I tried for singles, I got doubles each time.
One of the interesting things about the gun though is
between being in 6.5 and being a light machine gun - so relatively heavy,
and frankly being a really well-designed gun,
the recoil is really, really light compared to most other light machine guns.
So I'm really curious to see if my doubles are actually forming a reasonably good group,
because the gun does not move around that much when you're shooting.
Ha-ha-ha-ha! Oh, I like that!
So those are two shot bursts. "Bursts."
I'm going to call that windage dead on now.
Once again I was aiming here because this is a 200 yard zero, and that's as low as the gun goes.
But.
People discount Japanese firearms often,
... largely because there was so ... little ... shared culture
between the United States and Japan during World War Two. ...
The Germans and the Italians had a lot in common with a lot of Americans,
Japan was much more of an alien ... culture to the typical American or American soldier.
And so that, combined with a little bit of genuine misunderstanding
about some of the firearms technology they had, caused a lot of Americans to go,
"All that Japanese stuff, it's all crap, it's all worthless."
And that's a big mistake, because the Arisaka is a very well-designed rifle,
and the Nambu light machine guns are outstanding.
So I'm going to do a full 20 round or 30 round magazine now.
And I want to see what kind of group I can get on this paper in real bursts, 3 to 5 round bursts.
So we'll tape these up, load up a magazine and try that out.
Alright, I got a full 30 rounds.
See what this puppy can do.
Ow.
Oop. Out. Something.
Same thing happened a second time.
It is not a safety hazard at this point,
so I'm going to go ahead and finish out the magazine.
Oop. Nope. Something, something.
Alright, I think we just had a plain old failure to feed.
Yeah, once again soft point has bitten us there.
Soft point is what Steinel offers, or what I got from them.
I'm not sure, I'll have to go check on their website,
talk to Andy Steinel and see if he does an FMJ loading.
Alright. And now, I know that I am out
from looking at my round indicator on the magazine.
That. Double check - we got nothing in the chamber.
So that ended up being 28 rounds.
Let's go see how many of them actually landed on target.
OK.
I know some people who can't shoot rifles that well.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,
9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18,
19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28.
All not only on the target, but on the paper, and inside the circle.
That is a very impressive gun, and I look forward
to doing some more formal, more organised, shooting with it.
So, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
I figured what the heck? This is my first time out to the range with this,
we've never really done a video of
what goes into getting a gun prepped for Forgotten Weapons, so.
There you go.
Thanks for watching.