Posted on 04/07/2015 5:48:41 AM PDT by C19fan
Once again, archy posts and milehi learns.
Good stuff. Hope you are too.
The Hulk or Audie, same thing.
Doing okay. Doing a bit of cleanup work from my old newspaper days that should prove disconcerting for some of the political figures nosing about the November election; indeed, one's already dropped out.
I'll be very happy when I can get back west, back to Wyoming/Montana/South Dakota, and start working on some of the politicos out there. And, of course, to get back to the beautiful Silvertons, and back to Ridgway. Got some shop projects coming up, too.
{:0)
Take care
Could the T-24 have been a viable design, even taking the differences between the US .30 and the German 7.92mm rounds into account?
I knew a guy who had asbestos mittens and would change the M60 barrels in firefights in Vietnam. He said the barrel would start to glow at night and eventually slump down if they didn’t get a break in the action to change it.
In the 90s I worked in a shop that made lots of small parts for M60s that got sent to East Asia Trading Company, whatever that was.
The essential problem with the T24 was a Savage draftsman's error failing to account for the overall loaded cartridge length between the German 7,92x57mm round and the American 7,62x61/.30 M2 ball ammunition, which interfered with reliable ejection. But after WWII had concluded, the French removed the metal pressing dies and toolwork from a former MG42 production facility in the French occupation zone [don't recall which one it was, maybe one of the Mauser-Werke plants] and used it to produce test samples of an MG42 chambered for the French 7,5x55 cartridge, which also used a .308 bore diameter projectile. They were quite happy with the result, but concluded that the manufacture of barrels via the *Appel-process* of hammer forging wasn't suited to their existing production machinery, and they wanted an interchangeable light barrel and heavy barrel, the heavy version replacing American M1917A1 and British Vickers watercooled guns and for sustained fire as tank co-axial and armoured vehicle equipment...which was a feature of the French AAT52 weapon eventually developed from those early attempts, and which has served French forces from the 1950s to today.
The Finns also looked at a further-developed MG42 variant, but in the Finish standard 7,62x53R chambering, their adaptation of the Russian 7,62x54 Rimmed Mosin-Nagant cartridge. They had quite a hodgepodge of automatic weapons, including pan and drum-fed DP and DT machineguns used on Finnish tanks and STUGs [including German supplied STUG IIIs, a Finnish mainstay even up until the 1980s] Finnish LS26 automatic rifles, French CSRG Chauchats, Swedish 6,5x55 BARs and water-cooled Maxim guns. How the Finns intended to obtain reliable feeding with the rimmed Russian cartridge is beyond me, and the two sources I'd best trust for accurate info are no longer with us, but my initial thought is that the MG42 *double half-step* shuttling of the belt would be easier to work with for such an adaptation than the M60 MGs jumpy single long stroke camming of the belt for feeding. Too the Finns were interested in a gun which could be mounted and fed from either side of a tank turret, or paired in a twin mount in which one gun feeds from the left side, the other from the right, and empty brass and links fall or are ejected downward. The differences between some early Finnish 7,62x53r ammunition with .308 diameter projectiles and Soviet *D-ball* ammo could have been accommodated with no more effort or trouble than a routine barrel change, which on an MG42 takes about 3 seconds if you're not even trying.
And, of course, any chambering shorter or equal to the German 7,92x57 round works just fine, as the Swiss SIG and 710-series guns proved, a few testing samples of which were built for foreign sales in a variety of calibers, including some tested at the German weapons test centre at Meppen at a time when the German Bundeswehr was equipped with U.S. M1 Garand rifles and BARs...until the first purchases of 7,62 NATO G1 FAL rifles from FN of Belgium went through, at which time the Germans simply rebarreled leftover WWII MG42s with new barrels in the NATO cartridge, thence designated MG42/59 and then MG1. When production of new-built guns commenced with a few improvements, the designation became MG3. Austria used a similar MG42 rework, and Yugoslavia simply produced a M53-designated gun known as the SARAC in the original German chambering.
Could there have been a successful .30 derivative of the MG42 at all?
Probably. Had that Savage receiver been built with the additional .75 of an inch or so to allow the overtravel of the bolt to allow reliable feeding, there's no real reason it wouldn't have worked with the .30 M@/ 7,65x61mm cartridge. How well the U.S. barrel making and boring facilities would have kept up with the really massive quantities of spare barrels needed for the guns would have been a challenge, since the primary application of the Appel-process hammer forging technique at the time was seamless tubing for hypodermic needles; we happily swiped the engineering, as well as the engineers and production machinery after the war, but it's still the Europeans who remain the masters of that manufacturing application.
It'd also be interesting to speculate as to whether the design could have been adapted to work with the M1 link of the .30 Browning aircooled M1919A4 MG and the Watercooled Browning M1917A1, both wartime standards. With the M60 design, a new push-through link designated M13 for use with the 7,62mm M60 and M73 tank guns. But .30M2/.30-06 rounds link up just fine in an MG34/MG42 belt- designated Gurt33 by the Germans, and BTW, for which the Germans' leftover WWI Maxim watercooled guns were adapted to use.
I wish P. T. Kekkonen, my source for much of what I know of the postwar Finnish work on building a Finnish MG42 in their standard 7,62x53 Rimmed cartridge was still around to better inform us about that episode. But he's passed on, and much of what he hadn't yet shared with others with him.
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