Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others' throats with greater facility.
and so he did
this is the maxim machine gun
it was the first truly automatic firearm
it was adopted by everybody
fought against itself and won every time
when you hear descriptions of the horrors of wwi and the unprecedented devastating destruction caused by the new machine gun
this is the one theyre talking about
so how did this horrific instrument of awesomeness come about
well it all starts with a mouse
so in the second half of the 1800s a kid named hiram maxim was boppin around learning all sorts of trades
he was very smart and tinkered incessantly
as an apprentice in a mill he made a self resetting mousetrap
he used the energy from a thrashing mouse to reset the trap for the next guy
they call this foreshadowing
his family was real smart too
his father tinkered with gun designs and early aircraft
hirams son would go on to invent the silencer
and through his early adult life hiram himself invented a bunch of stuff
in fact he even invented the incandescent lightbulb
wait clammy but didnt
shh
it was a confusing time ok
and he got really tangled up with edison
you may have heard what a ruthless man edison was
well one big lesson hiram maxim learned from dealing with all that was
get your damn patents straight six ways from sunday
so maxim had become a pretty successful businessman from all of his inventions but he was getting burnt out on this eoectricity thing
he needed to move on to something else
and some of his business associates who may or may not have been edison lackeys were like hiram
bro
you know what you should really do
take this literal zillion dollars and go to europe to study their patents
uh for like research and stuff
just dont come back for like ten years ok
and dont invent anything
well getting paid a literal zillion dollars to kck back sounds pretty sweet
but maxim got bored
one day he was drinking with this jew friend of his who was like bro bro just invent a murdergun
and maxim thought back to his childhood
his dads prototype designs
his mousetrap
and eventually he realized that you can take the recoil energy of a gun going off and use that to cock the gun again
and this time hed patent the hell out of it
first he made a system that would cock a lever action rofle automatically
and patented it
and any possible way to use that
then he secretly started making prototypes in england
in around 1890 he really started to get somewhere
he had a system of cranks that brought rounds into the gun on a belt
and an elbow that would lock the bolt forward long enough for pressure to drop as the barrel jerked back and threw the bolt rearward
straight is strong then bent it moves back
and it did this with a friggin black powder round
the smoke and fouling was hardcore lol
luckily smokeless powder came out soon after which made the gun even more effective
one prototype had no trigger
just a throttle for how many boolits you want to throw per minute lol
dial it anywhere from 1 a min to like 6000
the first real one just had a push button on the back
at first everybody was interested by not sure what to do with it
literally everybody bought one
and i mean one
no big sales everybody just wanted to try one out but nobody adopted any
they got sent to colonies like in africa
and the men there greatly appreciated the crazy firepower
especially when outnumbered 200 to 1 by natives
but back home nobody cared about their experiences
which was pretty much a bummer because everybody had a few machineguns when wwi started
and it turns out oh shit these are fucking dangerous lol
so everybody got one
germany had the mg08
russia used the maxim gun
britain used the vickers
but these are all basically identical except for caliber
and can be readily swapped to your caliber if you capture some from the enemy
fuck yeah
they were really really successful
lets talk about why
ok so whats that giant barrel thing
well its a water jacket
maxim calculated and found 1lb of water can hold as much heat as 5lb of metal
so he literally just surrounded the barrel in water
the barrel cannot get above 212 degrees fahrenheit
and the steam cycles back into a tank so you can reuse it
you can shoot literally millions of rounds through it
now all this makes the thing kinda heavy
40lbs just for the gun and more than double with a tripod
but man it worked well once emplaced
the only problem is maneuver warfare as used in wwii ended up making it obsolete
so we dont use it anymore
we just do air cooled and multiple barrels
another weird thing is the literal clock spring it uses
this can be dialed up or down so it works with whatever shitty ammunition came out of the factory last week
this is important because ammunition quality was horrible
but i hear the russians used theirs until shockingly recently on the chinese border
because if a million chinese come across in a human wave
you need something proven to go five million rounds without a problem lol
pew pew
#click here for previous articles
robot7247 ago
Adjustable ROF, should have been a thing for the MG-34/42 as well.
clamhurt_legbeard ago
dude heres a picture of the throttle
adjustable down to once a minute
they wanted to set it up at a specific spot and have a round go off automatically every minute for harassing area denial
it used an oil filled buffer that slowly squished oil out a hole
by making the hole smaller you increase the time it takes to squish out all the oil and fire again
robot7247 ago
I know, the arc vernier is ridiculously cool. I don't recall any other MG utilizing adjustable ROF. What is so ingenious about it is that it operates at all at such low rates.
clamhurt_legbeard ago
the thing is modern guns operate on a completely different mechanism so it would be much harder to implement on something built today
robot7247 ago
I should have specified I don't know of any man-movable MGs with variable ROF as an integral feature. Chain & gatling guns can have variable ROF (neither rely on recoil but motors). But nothing like Maxim did was ever repeated as far as I know. Likely size, weight, and complexity or discovery that it didn't add much at the mission level. Still ridiculously cool though.
Great post!
Deshy ago
Nice you rock and the 5th cheeky sneaky Toosday sneaked on me like a robber in the night... sorry...
thedirtypuma ago
I blew it. I forgot about the fifth Tuesday.
Awesome read though. The maxim is awesome. I also believe that Maxim thought that the machine gun would end all wars since casualties would be so high. That went well lol
How have you not done the gatling gun yet?
clamhurt_legbeard ago
honestly if you look almost everything ive done is 20th century or about there
i think the oldest are the winchester guns from the post civil war era
thedirtypuma ago
Checks out.
Have you ever considered doing a guns clammy doesn't like?
clamhurt_legbeard ago
no
this is about positive things
i dont want a whole series to encourage complaining lol
thedirtypuma ago
I remembered about the stippling now.
I'm still undecided is I do it to the glock
clamhurt_legbeard ago
ya
i remembered i did it to my shotgun too
still need to take pictures for you
thedirtypuma ago
I bought a wood burning kit for stippling. I may try it out on some AR mags first to get the feel of it then maybe move on to a firearm.
clamhurt_legbeard ago
very cool dude
if you have any things like caps or different sizes inserts for grips you can try on those first
WhoFlungPoo1132 ago
Awwww....sheeeeit. Shit just got serious.