Belt Fed Fun

Variants of the M240 general-purpose light machine gun may have earned a reputation for ruggedness and reliability on the battleﬁelds of Iraq and Afghanistan, but this 7.62x51mm NATO belt-fed beauty has provided U.S. Army and Marine Corps infantryman with hard-hitting ﬁrepower since the 1990s. And, although the weapon is heavier and more complicated than the Vietnam-era M60-series light machine guns it replaced, those drawbacks are far outweighed by the simple fact that it works much better.

The United States military ﬁrst took an interest in the weapon as a coaxial machine gun for tanks in the 1970s. It was very successful and proliferated on various vehicle mounts through the 1980s before it was employed in a ground role.

BOB LANDIES of Ohio Ordnance Works (OOW) in Chardon, Ohio, outside of Cleveland, specialized in making semiautomatic versions of historic American machine guns like the Browning Automatic Riﬂe and M1917 water-cooled heavy machine gun for collectors. So when the M240 was seeing heavy use in ground combat against Iraqi troops and later al-Qaeda insurgents, Landies hatched the idea of making a semiautomatic version to satisfy shooters in the military collector market. Following a year of design and development work, OOW patented the M240 SLR (Self Loading Riﬂe). Read the rest of the story here.

I was told that the Heroes at begahzi had 3 of these on the roof and they killed hundreds of those Sunni bastards while they aited for help. We had thousand of rounds that they hauled up there is fight. For 1453 hours hillary did nothing and the New York Times is covering a 31 year old LEGAL tax deduction??? LMAO.
Great gun— 700 rounds a minute? Im so glad they killed so many sunnis.

For a “clunker” coax machine gun, I nominate the M-73 that was on our M-60A2 tanks in the mid-70s in Germany. It was seldom that it fired more than a half dozen rounds before jamming.

Or maybe it was, the M-219 that we had. It’s been 40 years since I first served on a M-60A2. I recall that there was no problem with the .50 cal M-85 in my commander’s copula.

Used the M60 while at university in the 1980s. My recollection was the national guard weapons we used were pretty well worn. I seem to recall on of the barrel extensions on the spare barrel was dated august of 1960 and this was in 1982/83.

The primary fault I saw with the M60 was the gas system was locked to the barrel as was the bipod. so instead of replacing the barrel alone, you had to replace the gas system, bipod and the barrel. Also I seem to recall there was no way to zero each individual barrel and because of the differing wear on the barrel extension the spare and the original barrel do not always shoot to the same point of aim.

The gas system on the barrel was a real pain to clean, especially with blanks. I seem to recall the ones we had were so old they had wire wrapped around some part of the gun to keep the gas system from coming apart, a field fix I assume.

Also I seem to recall the T&E mechanism was so old that the guns shot getter from the bipod that the tripod. The tripods were recycled only 1919 ones from the WWII period.

The gun shot well from the bipod and was not all that heavy at around 23 pounds, though in truth I did not get to use it much other than with blanks, I seem to recall only shooting it on a 25 M range.

First time I got to take down ad MG42 and shoot one, I suddenly realized how US ordnance had really messed up, to remove something like 3 pounds they made the M60 much more complicated. The MG42 is still modern MG today in 2016, 74 year after introduction, while the M60 is obsolete.

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