Been a while since we did some gun geeking, so here’s Ian McCollum doing a Forgotten Weapons video on all the ways you can screw up while trying to make a new pistol.
“If you design an answer to a question that nobody is asking, well, not a lot of people are going to pay you for it.” His first example: The Zip 22. “It’s a piece of junk.”
Another way to screw up: Have a good design, but manufacture it poorly. “An excellent example would be the South African Mamba.” Designed by competitive shooters, they had problems with the heat treating. “Even if people like the concept, the gun has to work effectively.”
Or you can have a good design with quality control issues. “The Caracal C slides had a tendency to break in the middle and launch back at their shooters faces.”
Or you can produce a really good pistol, and then announce that you’ve got a better version coming out soon. “Hudson H9, another darling of Shot Show, highly anticipated. [It’s] a really nice pistol, it did everything it was supposed to, [but] was a little more expensive than a lot of people would have liked when it came out.” Then they announced they were just about ready to come out with a lighter aluminum-framed model. “And all of a sudden everybody who had been considering spending $1,200 on a Hudson H9 decided “‘Ah, I’m just going to wait for the aluminum framed version.’ Their cash flow dried up and the company went bankrupt.”
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Re the Mamba: Ian posted a follow-up video, “The End of the Mamba: A Tale of Manufacturing Incompetence” which includes minutes of a Mamba production meeting. I haven’t had a chance to read the minutes or watch the video yet, but Ian claims that they shed a light on how far wrong these people were.
Re the Hudson H9: there is a fine old business term for this that people seem to have forgotten: the Osborne effect.
Another way to avoid poorly made pistols is to not buy anything made by Taurus. I swear I’ve never had more problems with guns then I’ve had with those.
Firearms manufacture is one of our oldest precision industries, and people tend to discount just how hard it is.
It may not be rocket science, but it’s also not something that’s so childishly simple that anyone can do it.
Interestingly, there is only one place in the world that has had actual academic study programs for small arms and light artillery design: The Soviet Union. There are reasons that so many of their autocannon designs have been iconic and much more successful than ours, and it boils down to them having taken the time to build an actual specialist cadre for designing and building them. Here in the West, most of our guys doing small arms are generalists that just sort of “fell into” the firearms industry. So far as I’m aware, as of 2024, there are no specialist degree-producing programs in small arms or any other weapons design here in the West. You can’t get a degree in “Firearms Engineering”…
“Here in the West, most of our guys doing small arms are generalists that just sort of ‘fell into’ the firearms industry.”
Yet this method produced John Moses Browning, John C Garand and Eugene Stoner. The US Army got along reasonably well with the firearms they designed.
There are undoubtedly competent “Firearms Engineers” at Ruger who could manufacture an auto cannon of superior design but the development of such weapons is hindered by the National Firearms Act. Thus we get excellent “sporters” from US manufacturers but nothing much in the way of battlefield implements.
Until the Hughes Amendment is repealed, no financial incentive is readily available that would boost the careers of hobbyist gun designers. As such, the Pentagon will preclude inventors from this area of military development and monopolize the process.
As anyone who has ever studied the process of Pentagon procurement knows, this leads to massive, multiple inefficiencies. So yeah, the Russians get a competitive advantage but not because of innate superiority; we crippled ourselves.
Do note that I’m not really plumping down for one thing or the other, merely noting that we here in the West do not consider firearms engineering to be worthy of creating a fully-academized scholarly discipline around it all. Good, bad, indifferent…? You tell me.
First, however, do have a look at the history of Soviet light autocannon production vs. the US history of same. Soviet/Russian stuff just works. Compare that against the excretions which were the US Cold War efforts, namely the M60, the M73/219, and the M85. Even the GE Gatling guns weren’t produced by the “system”, being as that development line failed utterly, and it was the secondary development that was “cowboy” and built outside the system, although in parallel.
We here in the West seem content to rely on the “gifted amateur” approach, and deem these things not worthy of formalization or actual academic study. When was the last time anyone produced something like Julian Hatcher’s works on the machine gun in the English language…?
I can point to a dozen such academic works produced in Russian…
Point being made here isn’t that one school is better than another, but that we’re not even bothering to build the school in the first damn place.
Of course, given the track record of American academia, we’d probably start having firearms design textbooks being written with more content devoted to affirming the minorities than actual content, so maybe it’s all to the good.
“When was the last time anyone produced something like Julian Hatcher’s works on the machine gun in the English language…?”
Think you are referring to the four volume technical history of the machine gun produced by George Morgan Chinn after WW II. Hatcher’s rather thin 1917 work on the machine gun was primarily focused on tactical employment.
Engineering is many different disciplines and most firearms designers of note are conceptualists. They have little appreciation of (and disposition for) all the other engineering disciplines necessary to deliver satisfactory firearms in large volumes. American firearm designs mostly fail due to a lack of dynamics, dimensioning & tolerancing, metallurgical, and production engineering.
The closure of Springfield Arsenal and the decline of Winchester and Remington doomed the engineering team approach to firearms development. Ruger has never been very successful at creating full fledged engineering teams. SIG-Sauer probably fields the most complete engineering teams in the firearms industry today, but they still have significant problems.
Heckler & Koch has been hinting at a “White Sheet” project. It is unlikely that a crew-served weapon is under development, though.
It is notable that they had to detour their iconic MP-5 into a cut-down semiautomatic model because there is no robust civilian market for the Class III version.
Compliance with these onerous restrictions stifles innovation. We ought to have a ray gun at our disposal by now but it’s development remains a distant dream.
“Compare that against the excretions which were the US Cold War efforts, namely the M60, the M73/219, and the M85.”
Never had a lick of trouble with any of these weapons.
The M60’s poor reputation came from a lack of maintenance and troops’ failure to change hot barrels at the recommended interval. Excessive barrel temperatures weakened the gas cylinder attachment loops. Maintain them and change barrels before they glow red and M60s run well.
The M73A1, M219, and M85 ran flawlessly for me, but I cradle mounted them, rather than pilot mounted them. Their dynamics were marginal and something was happening between the barrel jacket and receiver. My cradle design stiffened the joint between the barrel supports and their receivers. This fixed the dynamics problem, which was some kind of harmonic vibration. Ammunition and links were a continuing problem as well. A lot of crap was accepted during the Vietnam war.
The M60s problems stemmed from shitty design, period. The weapon could be assembled in multiple different ways that would result in a non-functional weapon, it was prone to falling apart after heavy use, and the f*cking thing took up 90% of my maintenance time in every Arms Room that I was ever involved in. “Maintenance” wasn’t the issue; the basic issue was piss-poor design by committee, whose members understood nothing at all about the weapons they stole features off of.
The only really decent part on that gun was the Stellite barrel, which was a triumph of American manufacture. Nobody else managed that feat, let alone got such things into mass production. Unfortunately, those barrels were married with an excretion of a weapon that should have never, ever been procured. I mean, when you have to use aircraft safety wire on key assemblies in order to prevent them flying off? That’s a clear sign your designers don’t know what they’re doing.
The fact that they still bought the damn thing after identifying that requirement? Makes me glad that MacNamara shut down Springfield Arsenal.
Anyone that even tries defending the M60 is a moron that was never saddled with them as a primary MG. I spent the first 18-odd years of my military career trying to keep those things running in every unit I served in, and it was a f*cking nightmare. The fact that Department of the Army quit reporting readiness on them when they weren’t assigned to an aviation unit is another sign of how bad they were… The years after they made that change, we went from “Oh, the weapon’s down? Take it to Third Shop, they’ll have it back in a couple days or weeks…” to “Oh, the M60 is tits up again…? Yeah; we won’t be seeing it back or a replacement show up for six months, or so…”
The M60 was fine, so long as you treated it like a disposable one-shot, the way they damn near did in the Vietnam era. Once they quit spending money on it? It is to laugh, hard. I had a brand-new M60 that they took out of POMCUS stock, issued to me still in the vapor barrier paper. It survived one field exercise before being coded out, due to having the rest of the idiots in our battalion fail to gauge their weapons properly. Our armorer knew what he was doing, so all our guns worked; this led to an entire battalion-plus qualifying four sets of gunners on our guns. Over the course of four days, mine went through roughly 15,000 rounds, all fired within the strictures of the qualification tables. End of the exercise, it had basically shaken itself apart, and when it went back up to Third Shop, they coded it out.
Happiest day of my life was when we turned in our M60s for the M240. I went from constant worry about our guns being up in case of deployment to “Guns are not a problem”, and that was right down to the M60 going the f*ck away.
By way of contrast…? We had those brand-new M240B guns with us for abour four-five years of peacetime service, including being the guns used for familiarization training for ROTC Advanced Camp. Likely put around a hundred thousand rounds through each gun, minimum, in those years. Took those guns through deployment prep, they all gauged as factory new. They went to Iraq; they did a year’s tour over there, and when we came back stateside? The only way you’d know they’d been deployed with us was by way of the exterior finish wear; the interiors were still pristine and in as-new condition. You couldn’t find wear on any of the key parts; when they went back in for depot repair, the only thing that came back on them was “Exterior Finish-Reapplied”. There wasn’t anything else that was wrong with them.
M60s? LOL… The ones they issued us out of theater stocks as “extra”? Most of them lasted six months, and were coded out.
M60 is a piece of sh*t, period. The only reason Vietnam-era guys loved it was because a.) they knew no better, only having the M1919A6 to compare it to, and b.) because there were Herculean efforts going on behind the scenes to keep the guns up and running. There’s a first-person oral history entitled “Bloods” out there, and the main guy’s name was Stan Goff. He experienced exactly what I did on a range, once, which was the spontaneous self-disassembly of an M60 due to rivet failure at the rear receiver bridge, something they were all too prone to.
Once the Army quit spending money on them? The entire M60 fleet went to sh*t. By the early 1990s, if you were a line unit like mine, and turned some in for repair, odds were excellent that an aviation unit would turn theirs in, and yours would get cannibalized to repair them. Had that happen multiple times; the parts were simply not out there to keep the fleet at 100% operational.
The fact that the Marines and Rangers had to do an end-run around the procurement process to get the “excess” M240C coax machineguns out of war stocks is a crime; when the Rangers asked DA about their plans for replacing the M60, they found out that there weren’t any… Which was when they and the Marines joined forces to go after the “excess” M240C stocks that they never replenished, which led to a few “issues” when we needed fresh guns to replace what was lost in Iraq. The cupboard was basically bare, and nobody had spent the money to buy more.
10X25mm reports no problems with the M73/219, and M85. If that’s the truth, and he’s reporting personal experience, then he’s about the only person in the armor community I’ve ever heard say anything at all positive about those guns. The reason we have the M240C is because the M73/219 failed so hard that the assholes in Ordnance couldn’t palm that bastard off on either Armor or Infantry ever again; they tried, but the Armor guys said, very emphatically, “NO” on both weapons for Abrams, and the Infantry guys took one look at the M73/219 performance and service stats and said the exact same for Bradley.
As an aside…? In the competition for coax MG that M240C won, the actual winner was one of the controls: A battlefield-pickup (via Israel…) PKT, which was tested without the copious factory support, and using battlefield-pickup ammunition. Also, the guys doing the testing? Untrained on those guns… They worked everything out by trial-and-error.
If the PKT had been an actual competitor, it would have won. Higher MRBF, and higher MRBJ than even the “winner”, which was the FN M240C offering.
US machinegun design was horrible, bad enough that the proponent branches wanted to go back to the M1919-series for coax guns for the Abrams and Bradley… Which was why there was a competition to replace anything, in the first place. M85 was supposed to replace M2HB, but it was so bad that M2HB wound up outlasting it; they’re still buying new examples, today.
“Compliance with these onerous restrictions stifles innovation. We ought to have a ray gun at our disposal by now but it’s development remains a distant dream.”
I would say that it’s far more than “onerous restrictions” that are the majority of the problem… Unless you’re including the laws of physics and our current materials/propellant technology as part of those restrictions. Laws of man are one thing; physical law? Quite another.
People keep looking for a “free lunch”, in terms of exponential improvement. They keep expecting that there’s another “smokeless powder” out there, that’s going to change all the rules, and destroy all the assumptions. Sadly, that sort of revolutionary technological improvement only comes along at lengthy and unpredictable intervals, and there are no improvements in materials or chemistry on the foreseeable horizon that would actually enable something like the caseless idea. HK likes to claim it was ready to go when the Bundeswehr cut it out of their procurement program at the end of the Cold War, but the raw fact is, it wasn’t ready for issue then, and it still wasn’t when it was part of the ACR program. The Octol propellant was too unstable, and horribly prone to degradation under normal storage conditions, which led to some nasty issues in the ACR competition. When HK managed to con the next set of suckers into buying the technology, they couldn’t make it work any better, and that entire line of effort was abandoned in favor of the next thing, cased telescopic. Which also, predictably, failed. You will note that the NGSW program eventually settled on what is effectively a conventional cartridge case.
The key problem with the US small arms program is that the idjits running the place keep on treating everything as though it were the last thing of that kind we’ll ever buy… They don’t comprehend that small arms are perishable, and that there are constant incremental improvements in everything related to them… Small ones, granted, but… Still, improvements.
Case in point: M16 and M4 were both based off of Technical Data Packages wherein the barrels were all button-broached. When FN got the M16A2 contract, they suggested going to the CHF barrels that Colt Canada was selling the Europeans (ever wonder why the Danes, the Dutch, and the Brits all bought Canadian, not US Colts? It’s because Diemaco was selling CHF barrels for their guns…), but the numpties at Ordnance said “No, the TDP says “button-broached conventional”, and we won’t countenance any revisions…”
Which was at least part of the reason why the initial lots of FN M16A2s had issues with accuracy. At the time, people were buying their CHF M240 barrels and cutting them down to serve as sniper rifle barrels… That’s how accurate those CHF barrels were. The same tech was in the M249 barrel manufacture, and they were, again, exponentially better than the conventionally-manufactured barrels in that class. Those barrels are one reason that the M249 won the SAW competition; the other competitors had barrels that weren’t as good, weren’t as long-lasting.
M4A1 isn’t a product of Ordnance; it came out of the SOCOM weapons pipeline, and it had CHF barrels specified from Day One. Which is why SOCOM routinely did things to theirs that caused the conventional Big Army M4 carbines to fail at Wanat. It’s also why M4A1 is now the standard for Big Army, as well… Yet another M27-like end run around the system.
I don’t think there’s anything out there right now that’s as big a game changer as smokeless powder was, but they’re still looking for something. The reality is that it’s all about incremental improvements that need to be rolled into existing designs: What they should be doing is keeping an eye on industry for things like improved coatings, better production techniques, and so forth. We should have one type-standardized weapon being issued, and another one waiting in the wings that has all the little improvements incorporated, ready to go the next time we need to refresh the fleet. Weapons are perishable goods; they wear out, on predictable timelines. You know you’re going to have to replace them at the end of their life-cycle, so to behave as though you bought the last-ever weapon in that class that you’d ever need to buy when you bought them, you need to be planning and preparing for timely replacement when you’re going to have to do it.
And, you need to keep idjits away from it all… Ain’t nobody came out of Vietnam saying that the M16 was great, we just needed to make it longer, heavier, and slap on some overly-complicated sights suited for National Match competition. Yet, that’s precisely what we did…
Only to have the Infantry bubbas take one look at the afterthought-procurement M4 carbines that were only ever meant for the support troops to get, and then glom on to them because they were a better answer for combat than what the committee-designed M16A2 presented.
What they should have done with the A2 program was to design and build something with a mid-length barrel and gas system, a collapsible stock, and improvements on coatings and so forth for maintenance. Built-in night sight capability would have been something else they should have included, but since the Marines who designed the A2 were really only interested in building “game guns” for their known-distance qualification…? We got what we got, and it was a POS for most purposes. The Marines acknowledge that, now… They’re buying the M27 for everyone, at boutique HK prices.
“The fact that they still bought the damn thing after identifying that requirement? Makes me glad that MacNamara shut down Springfield Arsenal.”
Even MacNamara was not always wrong.
“[T]here are no improvements in materials or chemistry on the foreseeable horizon that would actually enable something like the caseless idea.”
Brass cases have a valuable (if unintended) function as heat sinks. So yeah, caseless cartridges tend to overheat the weapon and cause it to lock up. This drawback could be overcome with the addition of a water-cooled jacket but water is heavy and the weight penalty could be better assigned to a crew-served weapon.
” I spent the first 18-odd years of my military career trying to keep those things running in every unit I served in, and it was a f*cking nightmare.”
Why does this not surprise me?
” At the time, people were buying their CHF M240 barrels and cutting them down to serve as sniper rifle barrels… That’s how accurate those CHF barrels were.”
Why then does the bench rest community use button rifled barrels exclusively? Do the words “residual stress” mean anything to you?
P.S. – There is no such process as “button-broached”. Barrels can be button rifled, broached, single point cut, or hammer forged. But these processes are mutually exclusive.
You might have solved how to make the M73/219 work… On a cradle on a bench at the range.
But they didn’t work well in the turret.
The Dinotankers constantly told us about how happy they were that the M240 was adapted to the 60 when the Abrams was adopted. Armorers repeated the horror stories about the things.
It’s always enjoyable to observe a blowhard show his ass, and here we have the estimable 10X25mm trying to sell himself as some sort of authority on a subject he almost certainly knows nothing about.
Tell ya what, sport… I’m going to pose some questions about the M60, and if you can answer them satisfactorily, I’ll buy off on you as an authority figure. If not, well… Guess what?
Firstly, there are at least seven different points on the M60 where parts can be misassembled and still have what looks like an operable gun… Until you try to fire it. What are they?
What three weapons were the primary contributors to the M60 design, and what two features did the design team fail to understand when they copied them? Both of those features contribute heavily to the various and sundry failure modes of the weapon, so why don’t you tell us what they are?
What are the design implications of the M60 sight system, and why does it create problems for gun crews?
What other features of the M60 make life unnecessarily difficult for gun crews?
What were the usual wear points for the guns, and what problems accrued from those parts wearing out?
Before writing this, I took about a half-hour to crank out some 1200 words answering these questions. From memory, and off the top of my head–I spent enough time with this system that even today, I can pull that crap out of memory with ease.
If our brilliant 10X25mm knows the gun the way he claims, he should be able to answer those questions off the top of his head, as I just did. I’ll post the answers tomorrow, after we’ve given our “expert” his opportunity to shine. It’s open book, of course, but there’s a good deal there that only an actual intimate with the gun could answer without doing hours of research.
“Firstly, there are at least seven different points on the M60 where parts can be misassembled and still have what looks like an operable gun… Until you try to fire it. What are they?”
The only two of significance are the gas piston and the metal spring clip retaining the pistol grip pin. And the gas piston wasn’t an issue after safety wiring became the norm because only qualified armorers were then stripping and cleaning the gas cylinders.
“What three weapons were the primary contributors to the M60 design, and what two features did the design team fail to understand when they copied them? Both of those features contribute heavily to the various and sundry failure modes of the weapon, so why don’t you tell us what they are?”
The expansion (or cut-off) gas system came from the experimental White 1930 semiautomatic rifle in .276 Pederson. Earl A. Harvey and Colonel Rene Studler of Springfield Armory were much enamored of this system. The expansion gas system required thorough, periodic cleaning, which it did not get after safety wiring became the norm. It was also used in the M14 rifle quite successfully. It was the most important element of the M60 design for controllability of fire.
The bolt and operating rod came from the American Lewis gun, via the German F.G.42. The sear notch in the operating rod would round out after several tens of thousands of rounds and the gun would run away. The main drive spring would get cooked under prolonged sustained fire and the gun would slow down and eventually stop running.
The barrel catch is an adaptation of the Czech ZB 53 (vz.37) catch, but loosens over time due to inadequate design strength (along with the trunnion). Mounting the bipod on the barrel greatly aggravated this problem.
The feed cover and fire control group are adapted from Dr.-Ing. Gruener’s outstanding M.G. 42. Someone decided to spring load the track arms in the M60 version and this caused frequent breakage/damage to the feed cover.
“What are the design implications of the M60 sight system, and why does it create problems for gun crews?”
The M60 rear sight, adapted from the M1903 Springfield rifle, was mounted on the receiver while the fixed front sight was mounted on the replaceable barrel. This caused a change of zero every time a barrel changed. Most M60 gunners just used tracers to guide their fire and many removed the sights altogether.
“What were the usual wear points for the guns, and what problems accrued from those parts wearing out?”
Bolts, firing pins, and trunnions suffered the most wear in high mileage M60s. Heat treatment and alloy selection was poor, but the parts were cheap to replace. Lubricants issued were inadequate at running temperatures, so I always used Park AAA quench oil. Eventually receiver sidewalls would stretch due to their manufacture from DQSK steel. Only firing pins could be salvaged by recutting.
If you don’t mind, I now have a lot of Christmas activities beconing.
“The bolt and operating rod came from the American Lewis gun, via the German F.G.42. The sear notch in the operating rod would round out after several tens of thousands of rounds and the gun would run away.”
Cf w/ “The sear engagement surface cut on the operating rod underside is neither overly large, nor particularly aggressive, in its engagement with the sear.”
Premature wear to the sear engagement surface can also be caused by improper trigger manipulation. Having a machine gun in your arsenal that is prone to runaway fire should automatically be a deal breaker, no?
” Having a machine gun in your arsenal that is prone to runaway fire should automatically be a deal breaker, no?”
Every open bolt, belt fed machine gun and most closed bolt, belt fed machine guns can run away when parts break or wear. Sadly, nothing made by man lasts forever. Why you disassemble, clean, inspect, and lubricate firearms every chance you get.
My father had a virtually new Saginaw Steering Gear made Model 1919A4 run away on him during World War II. He would always regale me with this tale when I would tell him about my every latest project. His immediate action drill wasn’t going to work in my vehicle mounts because you can’t twist off flexible feed chutes. But the story made for great father-son bonding.
None of my M60s, nor any of my other machine guns/cannons, ran away on me. I actually inspected every one of them thoroughly before loading.
Re the Mamba: Ian posted a follow-up video, “The End of the Mamba: A Tale of Manufacturing Incompetence” which includes minutes of a Mamba production meeting. I haven’t had a chance to read the minutes or watch the video yet, but Ian claims that they shed a light on how far wrong these people were.
Re the Hudson H9: there is a fine old business term for this that people seem to have forgotten: the Osborne effect.
Another way to avoid poorly made pistols is to not buy anything made by Taurus. I swear I’ve never had more problems with guns then I’ve had with those.
Firearms manufacture is one of our oldest precision industries, and people tend to discount just how hard it is.
It may not be rocket science, but it’s also not something that’s so childishly simple that anyone can do it.
Interestingly, there is only one place in the world that has had actual academic study programs for small arms and light artillery design: The Soviet Union. There are reasons that so many of their autocannon designs have been iconic and much more successful than ours, and it boils down to them having taken the time to build an actual specialist cadre for designing and building them. Here in the West, most of our guys doing small arms are generalists that just sort of “fell into” the firearms industry. So far as I’m aware, as of 2024, there are no specialist degree-producing programs in small arms or any other weapons design here in the West. You can’t get a degree in “Firearms Engineering”…
“Here in the West, most of our guys doing small arms are generalists that just sort of ‘fell into’ the firearms industry.”
Yet this method produced John Moses Browning, John C Garand and Eugene Stoner. The US Army got along reasonably well with the firearms they designed.
There are undoubtedly competent “Firearms Engineers” at Ruger who could manufacture an auto cannon of superior design but the development of such weapons is hindered by the National Firearms Act. Thus we get excellent “sporters” from US manufacturers but nothing much in the way of battlefield implements.
Until the Hughes Amendment is repealed, no financial incentive is readily available that would boost the careers of hobbyist gun designers. As such, the Pentagon will preclude inventors from this area of military development and monopolize the process.
As anyone who has ever studied the process of Pentagon procurement knows, this leads to massive, multiple inefficiencies. So yeah, the Russians get a competitive advantage but not because of innate superiority; we crippled ourselves.
@Malthus,
Do note that I’m not really plumping down for one thing or the other, merely noting that we here in the West do not consider firearms engineering to be worthy of creating a fully-academized scholarly discipline around it all. Good, bad, indifferent…? You tell me.
First, however, do have a look at the history of Soviet light autocannon production vs. the US history of same. Soviet/Russian stuff just works. Compare that against the excretions which were the US Cold War efforts, namely the M60, the M73/219, and the M85. Even the GE Gatling guns weren’t produced by the “system”, being as that development line failed utterly, and it was the secondary development that was “cowboy” and built outside the system, although in parallel.
We here in the West seem content to rely on the “gifted amateur” approach, and deem these things not worthy of formalization or actual academic study. When was the last time anyone produced something like Julian Hatcher’s works on the machine gun in the English language…?
I can point to a dozen such academic works produced in Russian…
Point being made here isn’t that one school is better than another, but that we’re not even bothering to build the school in the first damn place.
Of course, given the track record of American academia, we’d probably start having firearms design textbooks being written with more content devoted to affirming the minorities than actual content, so maybe it’s all to the good.
“When was the last time anyone produced something like Julian Hatcher’s works on the machine gun in the English language…?”
Think you are referring to the four volume technical history of the machine gun produced by George Morgan Chinn after WW II. Hatcher’s rather thin 1917 work on the machine gun was primarily focused on tactical employment.
Engineering is many different disciplines and most firearms designers of note are conceptualists. They have little appreciation of (and disposition for) all the other engineering disciplines necessary to deliver satisfactory firearms in large volumes. American firearm designs mostly fail due to a lack of dynamics, dimensioning & tolerancing, metallurgical, and production engineering.
The closure of Springfield Arsenal and the decline of Winchester and Remington doomed the engineering team approach to firearms development. Ruger has never been very successful at creating full fledged engineering teams. SIG-Sauer probably fields the most complete engineering teams in the firearms industry today, but they still have significant problems.
Heckler & Koch has been hinting at a “White Sheet” project. It is unlikely that a crew-served weapon is under development, though.
It is notable that they had to detour their iconic MP-5 into a cut-down semiautomatic model because there is no robust civilian market for the Class III version.
Compliance with these onerous restrictions stifles innovation. We ought to have a ray gun at our disposal by now but it’s development remains a distant dream.
https://www.americanrifleman.org/content/heckler-koch-the-gray-room-part-i/
“Compare that against the excretions which were the US Cold War efforts, namely the M60, the M73/219, and the M85.”
Never had a lick of trouble with any of these weapons.
The M60’s poor reputation came from a lack of maintenance and troops’ failure to change hot barrels at the recommended interval. Excessive barrel temperatures weakened the gas cylinder attachment loops. Maintain them and change barrels before they glow red and M60s run well.
The M73A1, M219, and M85 ran flawlessly for me, but I cradle mounted them, rather than pilot mounted them. Their dynamics were marginal and something was happening between the barrel jacket and receiver. My cradle design stiffened the joint between the barrel supports and their receivers. This fixed the dynamics problem, which was some kind of harmonic vibration. Ammunition and links were a continuing problem as well. A lot of crap was accepted during the Vietnam war.
[…] OSBORNE EFFECT: How Not To Make A Pistol. “Or you can produce a really good pistol, and then announce that you’ve got a better […]
The M60s problems stemmed from shitty design, period. The weapon could be assembled in multiple different ways that would result in a non-functional weapon, it was prone to falling apart after heavy use, and the f*cking thing took up 90% of my maintenance time in every Arms Room that I was ever involved in. “Maintenance” wasn’t the issue; the basic issue was piss-poor design by committee, whose members understood nothing at all about the weapons they stole features off of.
The only really decent part on that gun was the Stellite barrel, which was a triumph of American manufacture. Nobody else managed that feat, let alone got such things into mass production. Unfortunately, those barrels were married with an excretion of a weapon that should have never, ever been procured. I mean, when you have to use aircraft safety wire on key assemblies in order to prevent them flying off? That’s a clear sign your designers don’t know what they’re doing.
The fact that they still bought the damn thing after identifying that requirement? Makes me glad that MacNamara shut down Springfield Arsenal.
Anyone that even tries defending the M60 is a moron that was never saddled with them as a primary MG. I spent the first 18-odd years of my military career trying to keep those things running in every unit I served in, and it was a f*cking nightmare. The fact that Department of the Army quit reporting readiness on them when they weren’t assigned to an aviation unit is another sign of how bad they were… The years after they made that change, we went from “Oh, the weapon’s down? Take it to Third Shop, they’ll have it back in a couple days or weeks…” to “Oh, the M60 is tits up again…? Yeah; we won’t be seeing it back or a replacement show up for six months, or so…”
The M60 was fine, so long as you treated it like a disposable one-shot, the way they damn near did in the Vietnam era. Once they quit spending money on it? It is to laugh, hard. I had a brand-new M60 that they took out of POMCUS stock, issued to me still in the vapor barrier paper. It survived one field exercise before being coded out, due to having the rest of the idiots in our battalion fail to gauge their weapons properly. Our armorer knew what he was doing, so all our guns worked; this led to an entire battalion-plus qualifying four sets of gunners on our guns. Over the course of four days, mine went through roughly 15,000 rounds, all fired within the strictures of the qualification tables. End of the exercise, it had basically shaken itself apart, and when it went back up to Third Shop, they coded it out.
Happiest day of my life was when we turned in our M60s for the M240. I went from constant worry about our guns being up in case of deployment to “Guns are not a problem”, and that was right down to the M60 going the f*ck away.
By way of contrast…? We had those brand-new M240B guns with us for abour four-five years of peacetime service, including being the guns used for familiarization training for ROTC Advanced Camp. Likely put around a hundred thousand rounds through each gun, minimum, in those years. Took those guns through deployment prep, they all gauged as factory new. They went to Iraq; they did a year’s tour over there, and when we came back stateside? The only way you’d know they’d been deployed with us was by way of the exterior finish wear; the interiors were still pristine and in as-new condition. You couldn’t find wear on any of the key parts; when they went back in for depot repair, the only thing that came back on them was “Exterior Finish-Reapplied”. There wasn’t anything else that was wrong with them.
M60s? LOL… The ones they issued us out of theater stocks as “extra”? Most of them lasted six months, and were coded out.
M60 is a piece of sh*t, period. The only reason Vietnam-era guys loved it was because a.) they knew no better, only having the M1919A6 to compare it to, and b.) because there were Herculean efforts going on behind the scenes to keep the guns up and running. There’s a first-person oral history entitled “Bloods” out there, and the main guy’s name was Stan Goff. He experienced exactly what I did on a range, once, which was the spontaneous self-disassembly of an M60 due to rivet failure at the rear receiver bridge, something they were all too prone to.
Once the Army quit spending money on them? The entire M60 fleet went to sh*t. By the early 1990s, if you were a line unit like mine, and turned some in for repair, odds were excellent that an aviation unit would turn theirs in, and yours would get cannibalized to repair them. Had that happen multiple times; the parts were simply not out there to keep the fleet at 100% operational.
The fact that the Marines and Rangers had to do an end-run around the procurement process to get the “excess” M240C coax machineguns out of war stocks is a crime; when the Rangers asked DA about their plans for replacing the M60, they found out that there weren’t any… Which was when they and the Marines joined forces to go after the “excess” M240C stocks that they never replenished, which led to a few “issues” when we needed fresh guns to replace what was lost in Iraq. The cupboard was basically bare, and nobody had spent the money to buy more.
10X25mm reports no problems with the M73/219, and M85. If that’s the truth, and he’s reporting personal experience, then he’s about the only person in the armor community I’ve ever heard say anything at all positive about those guns. The reason we have the M240C is because the M73/219 failed so hard that the assholes in Ordnance couldn’t palm that bastard off on either Armor or Infantry ever again; they tried, but the Armor guys said, very emphatically, “NO” on both weapons for Abrams, and the Infantry guys took one look at the M73/219 performance and service stats and said the exact same for Bradley.
As an aside…? In the competition for coax MG that M240C won, the actual winner was one of the controls: A battlefield-pickup (via Israel…) PKT, which was tested without the copious factory support, and using battlefield-pickup ammunition. Also, the guys doing the testing? Untrained on those guns… They worked everything out by trial-and-error.
If the PKT had been an actual competitor, it would have won. Higher MRBF, and higher MRBJ than even the “winner”, which was the FN M240C offering.
US machinegun design was horrible, bad enough that the proponent branches wanted to go back to the M1919-series for coax guns for the Abrams and Bradley… Which was why there was a competition to replace anything, in the first place. M85 was supposed to replace M2HB, but it was so bad that M2HB wound up outlasting it; they’re still buying new examples, today.
Malthus said:
“Compliance with these onerous restrictions stifles innovation. We ought to have a ray gun at our disposal by now but it’s development remains a distant dream.”
I would say that it’s far more than “onerous restrictions” that are the majority of the problem… Unless you’re including the laws of physics and our current materials/propellant technology as part of those restrictions. Laws of man are one thing; physical law? Quite another.
People keep looking for a “free lunch”, in terms of exponential improvement. They keep expecting that there’s another “smokeless powder” out there, that’s going to change all the rules, and destroy all the assumptions. Sadly, that sort of revolutionary technological improvement only comes along at lengthy and unpredictable intervals, and there are no improvements in materials or chemistry on the foreseeable horizon that would actually enable something like the caseless idea. HK likes to claim it was ready to go when the Bundeswehr cut it out of their procurement program at the end of the Cold War, but the raw fact is, it wasn’t ready for issue then, and it still wasn’t when it was part of the ACR program. The Octol propellant was too unstable, and horribly prone to degradation under normal storage conditions, which led to some nasty issues in the ACR competition. When HK managed to con the next set of suckers into buying the technology, they couldn’t make it work any better, and that entire line of effort was abandoned in favor of the next thing, cased telescopic. Which also, predictably, failed. You will note that the NGSW program eventually settled on what is effectively a conventional cartridge case.
The key problem with the US small arms program is that the idjits running the place keep on treating everything as though it were the last thing of that kind we’ll ever buy… They don’t comprehend that small arms are perishable, and that there are constant incremental improvements in everything related to them… Small ones, granted, but… Still, improvements.
Case in point: M16 and M4 were both based off of Technical Data Packages wherein the barrels were all button-broached. When FN got the M16A2 contract, they suggested going to the CHF barrels that Colt Canada was selling the Europeans (ever wonder why the Danes, the Dutch, and the Brits all bought Canadian, not US Colts? It’s because Diemaco was selling CHF barrels for their guns…), but the numpties at Ordnance said “No, the TDP says “button-broached conventional”, and we won’t countenance any revisions…”
Which was at least part of the reason why the initial lots of FN M16A2s had issues with accuracy. At the time, people were buying their CHF M240 barrels and cutting them down to serve as sniper rifle barrels… That’s how accurate those CHF barrels were. The same tech was in the M249 barrel manufacture, and they were, again, exponentially better than the conventionally-manufactured barrels in that class. Those barrels are one reason that the M249 won the SAW competition; the other competitors had barrels that weren’t as good, weren’t as long-lasting.
M4A1 isn’t a product of Ordnance; it came out of the SOCOM weapons pipeline, and it had CHF barrels specified from Day One. Which is why SOCOM routinely did things to theirs that caused the conventional Big Army M4 carbines to fail at Wanat. It’s also why M4A1 is now the standard for Big Army, as well… Yet another M27-like end run around the system.
I don’t think there’s anything out there right now that’s as big a game changer as smokeless powder was, but they’re still looking for something. The reality is that it’s all about incremental improvements that need to be rolled into existing designs: What they should be doing is keeping an eye on industry for things like improved coatings, better production techniques, and so forth. We should have one type-standardized weapon being issued, and another one waiting in the wings that has all the little improvements incorporated, ready to go the next time we need to refresh the fleet. Weapons are perishable goods; they wear out, on predictable timelines. You know you’re going to have to replace them at the end of their life-cycle, so to behave as though you bought the last-ever weapon in that class that you’d ever need to buy when you bought them, you need to be planning and preparing for timely replacement when you’re going to have to do it.
And, you need to keep idjits away from it all… Ain’t nobody came out of Vietnam saying that the M16 was great, we just needed to make it longer, heavier, and slap on some overly-complicated sights suited for National Match competition. Yet, that’s precisely what we did…
Only to have the Infantry bubbas take one look at the afterthought-procurement M4 carbines that were only ever meant for the support troops to get, and then glom on to them because they were a better answer for combat than what the committee-designed M16A2 presented.
What they should have done with the A2 program was to design and build something with a mid-length barrel and gas system, a collapsible stock, and improvements on coatings and so forth for maintenance. Built-in night sight capability would have been something else they should have included, but since the Marines who designed the A2 were really only interested in building “game guns” for their known-distance qualification…? We got what we got, and it was a POS for most purposes. The Marines acknowledge that, now… They’re buying the M27 for everyone, at boutique HK prices.
“The fact that they still bought the damn thing after identifying that requirement? Makes me glad that MacNamara shut down Springfield Arsenal.”
Even MacNamara was not always wrong.
“[T]here are no improvements in materials or chemistry on the foreseeable horizon that would actually enable something like the caseless idea.”
Brass cases have a valuable (if unintended) function as heat sinks. So yeah, caseless cartridges tend to overheat the weapon and cause it to lock up. This drawback could be overcome with the addition of a water-cooled jacket but water is heavy and the weight penalty could be better assigned to a crew-served weapon.
” I spent the first 18-odd years of my military career trying to keep those things running in every unit I served in, and it was a f*cking nightmare.”
Why does this not surprise me?
” At the time, people were buying their CHF M240 barrels and cutting them down to serve as sniper rifle barrels… That’s how accurate those CHF barrels were.”
Why then does the bench rest community use button rifled barrels exclusively? Do the words “residual stress” mean anything to you?
P.S. – There is no such process as “button-broached”. Barrels can be button rifled, broached, single point cut, or hammer forged. But these processes are mutually exclusive.
You might have solved how to make the M73/219 work… On a cradle on a bench at the range.
But they didn’t work well in the turret.
The Dinotankers constantly told us about how happy they were that the M240 was adapted to the 60 when the Abrams was adopted. Armorers repeated the horror stories about the things.
It’s always enjoyable to observe a blowhard show his ass, and here we have the estimable 10X25mm trying to sell himself as some sort of authority on a subject he almost certainly knows nothing about.
Tell ya what, sport… I’m going to pose some questions about the M60, and if you can answer them satisfactorily, I’ll buy off on you as an authority figure. If not, well… Guess what?
Firstly, there are at least seven different points on the M60 where parts can be misassembled and still have what looks like an operable gun… Until you try to fire it. What are they?
What three weapons were the primary contributors to the M60 design, and what two features did the design team fail to understand when they copied them? Both of those features contribute heavily to the various and sundry failure modes of the weapon, so why don’t you tell us what they are?
What are the design implications of the M60 sight system, and why does it create problems for gun crews?
What other features of the M60 make life unnecessarily difficult for gun crews?
What were the usual wear points for the guns, and what problems accrued from those parts wearing out?
Before writing this, I took about a half-hour to crank out some 1200 words answering these questions. From memory, and off the top of my head–I spent enough time with this system that even today, I can pull that crap out of memory with ease.
If our brilliant 10X25mm knows the gun the way he claims, he should be able to answer those questions off the top of his head, as I just did. I’ll post the answers tomorrow, after we’ve given our “expert” his opportunity to shine. It’s open book, of course, but there’s a good deal there that only an actual intimate with the gun could answer without doing hours of research.
Anyone who can successfully defend the execrable M-60 deserves an honorary Master of Sophistry academic degree.
“Firstly, there are at least seven different points on the M60 where parts can be misassembled and still have what looks like an operable gun… Until you try to fire it. What are they?”
The only two of significance are the gas piston and the metal spring clip retaining the pistol grip pin. And the gas piston wasn’t an issue after safety wiring became the norm because only qualified armorers were then stripping and cleaning the gas cylinders.
“What three weapons were the primary contributors to the M60 design, and what two features did the design team fail to understand when they copied them? Both of those features contribute heavily to the various and sundry failure modes of the weapon, so why don’t you tell us what they are?”
The expansion (or cut-off) gas system came from the experimental White 1930 semiautomatic rifle in .276 Pederson. Earl A. Harvey and Colonel Rene Studler of Springfield Armory were much enamored of this system. The expansion gas system required thorough, periodic cleaning, which it did not get after safety wiring became the norm. It was also used in the M14 rifle quite successfully. It was the most important element of the M60 design for controllability of fire.
The bolt and operating rod came from the American Lewis gun, via the German F.G.42. The sear notch in the operating rod would round out after several tens of thousands of rounds and the gun would run away. The main drive spring would get cooked under prolonged sustained fire and the gun would slow down and eventually stop running.
The barrel catch is an adaptation of the Czech ZB 53 (vz.37) catch, but loosens over time due to inadequate design strength (along with the trunnion). Mounting the bipod on the barrel greatly aggravated this problem.
The feed cover and fire control group are adapted from Dr.-Ing. Gruener’s outstanding M.G. 42. Someone decided to spring load the track arms in the M60 version and this caused frequent breakage/damage to the feed cover.
“What are the design implications of the M60 sight system, and why does it create problems for gun crews?”
The M60 rear sight, adapted from the M1903 Springfield rifle, was mounted on the receiver while the fixed front sight was mounted on the replaceable barrel. This caused a change of zero every time a barrel changed. Most M60 gunners just used tracers to guide their fire and many removed the sights altogether.
“What were the usual wear points for the guns, and what problems accrued from those parts wearing out?”
Bolts, firing pins, and trunnions suffered the most wear in high mileage M60s. Heat treatment and alloy selection was poor, but the parts were cheap to replace. Lubricants issued were inadequate at running temperatures, so I always used Park AAA quench oil. Eventually receiver sidewalls would stretch due to their manufacture from DQSK steel. Only firing pins could be salvaged by recutting.
If you don’t mind, I now have a lot of Christmas activities beconing.
“The bolt and operating rod came from the American Lewis gun, via the German F.G.42. The sear notch in the operating rod would round out after several tens of thousands of rounds and the gun would run away.”
Cf w/ “The sear engagement surface cut on the operating rod underside is neither overly large, nor particularly aggressive, in its engagement with the sear.”
Premature wear to the sear engagement surface can also be caused by improper trigger manipulation. Having a machine gun in your arsenal that is prone to runaway fire should automatically be a deal breaker, no?
” Having a machine gun in your arsenal that is prone to runaway fire should automatically be a deal breaker, no?”
Every open bolt, belt fed machine gun and most closed bolt, belt fed machine guns can run away when parts break or wear. Sadly, nothing made by man lasts forever. Why you disassemble, clean, inspect, and lubricate firearms every chance you get.
My father had a virtually new Saginaw Steering Gear made Model 1919A4 run away on him during World War II. He would always regale me with this tale when I would tell him about my every latest project. His immediate action drill wasn’t going to work in my vehicle mounts because you can’t twist off flexible feed chutes. But the story made for great father-son bonding.
None of my M60s, nor any of my other machine guns/cannons, ran away on me. I actually inspected every one of them thoroughly before loading.