#firearms prototypes

Screw-Breech Percussion Rifle Prototype

In this week's Armourer’s Bench video I examine an unmarked screw-breech percussion rifle, believed to be a prototype dating from the 1860s. Building on earlier screw-breech designs like the Ferguson, this rifle is believed to have been designed by Lewis Wells Broadwell, who patented a similar action in the mid-1860s.

Turning the trigger guard acts on a thin screw which raises and lowers a rectangular breechblock to open and close the action. You can find lots more photos and info on the rifle in our accompanying article here. 

Samopal 81 Krása

The Sa 81 Krása (meaning ‘beauty’) was developed in the late 1970s by Jiří Čermák, a Czechoslovakian Army engineer and designer. The Czechoslovakian Army requested that the Brno Research and Development Institute of the General Mechanical Engineering Works develop the weapon for use by troops who didn’t require a full-length rifle, including officers, artillery, logistics and armoured vehicle troops. 

The resulting personal defence weapon was based around the standard issue 7.62x39mm rifle round. It was just 31.5cm or 12.4in with its side-folding stock folded. This was 17cm or 7.1in shorter than the Soviet AKS-74u. Unloaded the weapon weighed in at 2.1kg or 4.6lbs, which in turn is 1.4lbs lighter than its Soviet counterpart. The Sa 81 fed from a 20-round magazine (the one pictured with the gun above appears to be proprietary) and had a hinged top cover, a side-folding wire stock and a short, fat flash-hider. 

It had a magazine well which protruded from the receiver, esquing the AK-pattern rifle’s rock to lock system. Interestingly the magazine well and release are reminiscent of those seen on the M16. It had a safety selector with positions for single, safe and fully automatic. While not ambidextrous the selector was marked on both sides of the receiver. The charging handle was positioned on the left side of the weapon with a folding, spring-loaded dust cover covering the ejection port. The prototype’s furniture appears to be wooden and of a blocky profile.

The Sa 81′s interesting gas-piston and bolt assembly (source)

Historically, Czechoslovakia was not afraid to forge an independent path from Soviet small arms doctrine having adopted the vz. 58 rather than the AKM. So the development of a local carbine was not surprising. The most interesting element of the SA 81 was its bolt. In order to keep the weapon short Čermák opted for a bolt which moved up and down. Rounds were pulled from the magazine and lifted up to the breech as the bolt moved forwards again. The Sa 81 was driven by a gas-piston with the breech locked by locking wedges.

The weapon was ready for testing by the end of 1980 and was refined over two years with efforts to chamber it in the new Soviet 5.45x39mm round, as the Sa 83. By the mid-1980s, however, the project have been abandoned. 

Zbrojovka BRNO (ZB) donated a prototype, Sa 81-6955, to the Military History Institute in Prague in 1991. The Military History Institute (or Vojensky Historicky Ustav) has a short, but detailed, article which gives us the bulk of what we know about the weapon.

Sources:

Trial submachine gun Sa 81, Vojensky Historicky Ustav, (source)

Moore’s Centrifugal Machine Gun

In June 1918, Major Edward T. Moore and Saul Singer filed a patent for an intriguing new kind of weapon based upon a principle that man had mastered centuries earlier. 

Moore and Singer’s machine gun operated using the principle of centrifugal force - an inertial force which appears to act on objects moving in a circular path, and is directed away from the axis of rotation. As such the machine gun required no propellant powder to propel the projectile, or a case to contain it, nor a conventional rifled barrel to stabilise the projectile. 

Moore, an alumni of the Princeton class of 1903, an attorney who practised in New York and a Major in the New Jersey National Guard, claimed that the idea for his weapon came from the “story of David slaying Goliath with a stone which he whirled around his head in a sling” according to a piece in Volume 21, No.5 of the Princeton Alumni Weekly. The short article goes on to explain that Moore offered his invention to the War Department shortly before the end of World War One. The cessation of hostilities apparently stalled development but the by late 1920, the gun had been tested.   

The weapon itself was powered by a powerful electric motor which spooled up the centrifugal barrel assembly to rotate extremely quickly and impart centrifugal force on projectiles. According to Julian Hatcher the gun could fire steel ball bearing projectiles at approximately 1,200 feet per second. Fire was controlled not by the weapon’s motor but by a stop pin in the ammunition feed tube. Moore claimed the weapon could fire a projectile 1.5 miles with enough force to kill a man. He also suggested the weapon's rate of fire approached 2,000 rounds per minute. The patent describes the machine gun as “simple and inexpensive and well suited to quantity manufacture.”

Moore and Singer also designed a feed system for their machine gun, with the projectiles fed through a hopper. This system was patented in August 1918, with the inventors claiming:

“Our invention will be found particularly useful in connection with centrifugal machine guns where it is necessary to feed large numbers of bullets in rapid succession to the gun... our improved mechanism no jamming is possible and the bullets are positively fed in rapid succession as long as the mechanism is operated and there are bullets remaining in the hopper”

The system was decidedly more simple than the machine gun itself comprising a hand cranked carousel which regulated the flow of projectiles into the feed tube. This tube can be seen, along with the weapon’s battery powered motor, in image #4.

Moore and Singer’s feed system for their centrifugal machine gun (source)

The patents for the weapon and the feed system were assigned to the Aero Tank Machine Gun Co. Inc., registered in October 1918 in New York. This parent company appear to have continued developing the idea of a centrifugal machine gun into the 1920s. At least one more patent was filled with the company as the assignee, not in Moore or Singer’s name but ascribed to Victor Czegka. 

Czegka’s centrifugal machine gun patent (source)

Czegka, a US Marine Corps Technical Sergeant, is perhaps best known as the supply officer of Admiral Richard Byrd’s first two expeditions to the Antarctic. Czegka’s centrifugal machine gun patent claimed to improve the aiming and stability of the projectile as well as attempting to ensure “the safety of the operator.” As such the barrel rotated within a shield with the barrel being aimed with a pinion system. Unlike Moore’s gun which could only be controlled by closing off the ammunition feed tube Czegka’s gun has a more controlled feed with a timing block feeding projectiles into the spinning breech block. It is unclear if Czegka’s gun was officially tested. 

The concept of a centrifugal gun has long interested firearms designers and inventors. It is problems with control, accuracy and feeding, however, which have made the concept difficult to realise. Julian Hatcher, a Major with the US Army Ordnance Department during the war, described the accuracy of Moore’s centrifugal machine gun as ‘extremely poor’ and the weapon’s testing did not proceed. 

Sources:

Images 1-3

Hatcher’s Notebook, J.S. Hatcher (1962) [image #4]

‘Centrifugal Machine Gun’, E.T. Moore & S. Singer, US Patent #1332933, Mar. 1920 (source)

‘Feeding Bullets and The Like from Hoppers’, E.T. Moore & S. Singer, US Patent #1332993, Mar. 1920 (source)

‘Centrifugal Gun’, V.H. Czegka, US Patent #1404378, Jun. 1922 (source)

Princeton Alumni Weekly, Vol. 21, No.5, 3 Nov. 1920 (source) 

MAS Mle 1948

In the late 1940s the French Army began a rearmament program and made efforts to standardise some of their weapons. The post-war French army was equipped with a collection of pre-war, captured and lend-lease small arms. 

Standardising their pistols to 9x19mm meant that a new submachine gun was also needed to replace the MAS Modèle 38. Trials to select a new submachine gun began in 1947 with many of France’s state arsenals, including MAS, MAC and MAT, as well as private companies submitting designs. The French Army requested a compact weapon and many of the submitted designs had a folding stock and magazine well.

Manufacture d'armes de Saint-Étienne (MAS) submitted a design in 1948 which was designated the Pistolet Mitrailleur de 9mm MAS Modèle 1948. Other submachine guns submitted included the Hotchkiss 'Type Universal’, Modèle 47/1 and the MAT Modèle 49.   

A French soldier armed with a MAS 48-C3 in Indochina (source)

The MAS Mle 1948′s receiver was stamped and appears to have an ‘L’ shaped bolt which travelled above the barrel, similar to that seen in the Italian Armaguerra OG-43, Franchi LF-57 and later Walther MP. The weapon fed from a 32-round magazine and had an ejection port cover, a 2-position 100m and 200m rear sight and an enclosed front sight. The weapon had a large grip safety at the rear of the pistol grip. The magazine housing pivoted forward with a push button release just in front of the trigger while the magazine release was located at the base of the extended magazine housing. 

A number of prototypes appear to have been made with some having a wooden side-folding stock while others have a hollow metal under-folding stock. There is also variation between the style of magazine housing and some examples have plain wooden grips while the example seen above has a finger grooved pistol grip and longer grooved magazine housing - similar to the MAT49s.  

It appears that some MAS Mle 1948 were field tested as there are some grainy images of French troops equipped with them in Indochina. Following the trials the French military adopted Pierre Monteil’s MAT-49 in June 1949. 

Sources:

Images: Many thanks to Peter Hokana for kindly allowing the use of his photographs.

MAS model 1948-C3, ArmesFrancaises, (source) 

Submachine Gun, M. Popenker & A. Williams, (2011)

Delaunay-Belleville Anti-Tank Weapon

Today, I stumbled across this amazing piece of footage purporting to show a ‘Fusil Delaunay-Belleville "antichar " 20mm’. Dating from 1918, the short film appears to show a live fire function test of a large calibre, tripod-mounted weapon. A very trusting assistant single feeds in each cartridge while the gunner (who has good trigger discipline) fires the weapon. The footage appears to have been taken from a short film of a demonstration of weapons to members of the Commission of the Directorate of Inventions in 1918.

Delaunay-Belleville refers to the company, rather than a designer, that developed the gun. Delaunay-Belleville were a French automobile manufacturer before the war who became a contractor producing Berthier rifles. Towards the end of the war they began to work on a dedicated anti-tank gun. The company working alongside Atelier de Puteaux (APX) developed a 20x115mmSR anti-tank round which aimed to have a muzzle velocity of 800m/s and penetrate 16mm of steel plate at 300m. This was to be fed into the gun with a specially designed copper belt. 

Still from the film showing the Delaunay-Belleville Anti-tank Weapon

I wasn’t able to find a great deal about the weapon but we can learn quite a bit from the footage. We can see that the weapon fired from an open bolt, fed from above and ejected to the right and appears to be semi-automatic (quite possibly fully automatic). There is a compensator at the muzzle and the recoil of the barrel indicates the weapon works on the long recoil principle. The tripod appears to be the same as that used by the St. Étienne Mle 1907. 

Following the end of World War One development of the project slowed and Delaunay-Belleville sought to return to their pre-war automotive work. By mid-1919 the project had ground to a halt and attention was turned to a new anti-tank project centred around a 13.5mm round. 

Sources:

Video Source

The French 20 mm Delaunay-Belleville Machine Gun and its Cartridg, IAA Journal #441 (January/February, 2005), P. Regenstreif, (source)

Anti-Tank Machine Gun, CNC, (source)

T12 Light Machine Gun

Sadly, there is little information available on the T12 Light Machine Gun. However, there are some Ordnance Corps photographs and several patents which show the weapon and its operating mechanism. 

The Ordnance Corps’ took photographs of the experimental T12 in late August 1934, they show a weapon with a locking action very similar to that seen in patent drawings for a machine gun design by Wiley T. Moore. Moore filed a patent for his design in April 1934, the US Patent office granted the patent in December 1937.

The patent lists Moore’s residence as Wright Field, Ohio, which at the time was the US Army Air Corps’ primary research and development center and armourer training facility. The patent begins with a stipulation that: 

“The invention described herein may be manufactured and used by or for the Government for governmental purposes, without the payment to me of any royalty thereon.”

By 1941, a Colonel Wiley T. Moore, was the chief of the engineering group of the Small Arms Division. It is likely that he was an officer working on various designs at Wright Field, while later patents suggest he was working at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. 

Moore filed a number of other patents including one for a disintegrating cartridge belt which the T12 appears to have used (see image #2, #5, #6). Moore gained a variety of patents for military inventions between 1933 and 1942 for everything from improvements for the BAR (turning it into a belt-fed light machine gun) to a carbine. Moore also filed two patents for a rifle grenade launcher which appears to have influenced the M7 Grenade Launcher adopted in 1943. In the 1940s it appears that he concentrated his efforts on developing fuses, projectiles and HE rounds, filing no less than a dozen patents.

Moore’s Disintegrating Cartridge Belt (source)

An immediately noticeable difference between the patent drawings and the Ordnance Corps photographs is the difference in configuration. The T12 pictured has a pistol grip rather than the pivoting spade grips shown in the patent (see image #7). This system must have proved impractical during the prototype stage.

The T12 light machine gun used a conventional gas-operated system with a gas piston below the barrel. The T12′s action locked with a flapper locking system which Moore’s patent describes as “...a pair of locking levers adapted to swing outwardly into pockets or recesses in the side walls of the receiver when the bolt is in battery” (see images #3, #4 & #8). Moore designed the T12's feed mechanism to be quickly reversible to allow its belt feed to feed from the left or right. In theory making the weapon well suited to a number of roles and applications. The patented design also featured a non reciprocating charging handle and an “automatic head-space adjustment with uniform loading pressure, by a feeding mechanism.” 

While the full history of the T12 prototype is currently unknown, it is a fascinating pre-war design utilising the flapper locking system. 

Sources:

T12 Light Machine Gun Photographs, ForgottenWeapons.com (source)

‘Gun’, W.T. Moore, US Patent #2101086, 1937-12-07, (source)

‘Disintegrating Cartridge Belt’, W.T. Moore, US Patent #2022685, 1935-12-03, (source)

Wiley T. Moore’s Belt-Fed BAR

In December 1933, Wiley T. Moore patented his design to convert the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle into a belt-fed light machine gun. Moore designed the weapon while based at the United States Army Air Corps’ research and development center and armourer training facility at Wright Field, Ohio. 

Moore’s design sought to improve on the BAR’s rate of fire which is inherently hampered by its 20-round box magazine feeding system. Moore hypothesises that: 

“The gunner just about gets on this target when it is time to reload. These frequent interruptions have the effect of disarming the gunner for considerable periods of time during which he is exposed to the deliberate aimed fire of the enemy. Under these conditions the gunner naturally develops a tendency to reopen fire before the gun is properly aimed or directed and as a result his efficiency is impaired and a large amount of ammunition is wasted.“

Moore felt that with thousands of BARs already in the US Army’s inventory it was a logical step to attempt to convert them to feed from belts with “a minimum substitution of parts and without requiring extensive modification of the retained units or interfering with the standard characteristics of the gun.”

Carl Gustaf Prototype Belt-fed Light Machine Gun m/1937 (source)

The operation of the firearm is not altered by Moore’s conversion, however, a ‘feeding box’ is added to reliably feed the belt into the weapon’s action (see image #4). Moore’s patent explains that the weapon’s belt feed was linked to the piston with a slide which has a feed pawl mounted on a pivot pin. As the action cycles the piston acts on the feed slide which cams the pawl left to right to pull the belt into the action. A round was then stripped from the belt and fed into the action as the bolt returned home. Moore’s patent stipulates the use of disintegrating links, a system that he himself had patented in 1933.

Moore’s conversion also added a pistol grip, much as the Colt Monitor and FN’s Model D. FN also experimented with developing a belt-fed variation of Browning’s design with Rene Laloux filing two patents in 1935 and 1936. In 1937 the Swedish firearms manufacturer Carl Gustav developed a cumbersome looking prototype belt-fed version of the Swedish Army’s Kulsprutegevär m/37 light machine gun, it was not adopted. Moore’s BAR conversion was not adopted either, it is unclear if the design was formally tested. In 1934 the US Army Ordnance Corps had evaluated and apparently rejected Moore’s T12 Light Machine Gun. later during World War Two Colonel Wiley T. Moore became the chief of the engineering group of the Small Arms Division. 

Sources:

‘Gun’, US Patent #2032376,W.T. Moore, 03/03/1936 (source)

The Burney/Broadway Trust rifle

This design appeared in the early 40s, and was tested by the British Army in 1944. It was the brainchild of Dennis Burney of Broadway Trust. Chambered for the unusual 7mm Broadway Trust cartridge, the cartridge casings had ventilation holes and the chamber was enlarged so that gases could expand in the chamber and exit through the barrel. It proved to exhibit very little recoil and was easy to shoot. Nothing came of the project, but it was an interesting concept nonetheless.