The author of the article got everything bassackwards.The MG 34 was made of machined steel parts so it was heavier and more expensive to purchase.
The MG 42 was made from stamped metal parts so it was made much more easily as a result it was also cheaper.
It was belt fed with metalic linked cartridges.Something all of our belt fed weapons adopted with the M60 machine gun of the Vietnam war era.
“The author of the article got everything bassackwards. The MG 34 was made of machined steel parts so it was heavier and more expensive to purchase.
The MG 42 was made from stamped metal parts so it was made much more easily as a result it was also cheaper.
It was belt fed with metalic linked cartridges. Something all of our belt fed weapons adopted with the M60 machine gun of the Vietnam war era.” [puppypusher, post 17]
Someone needs to rescue the folks at American Shooting Journal. Everything they publish seems to arrive peppered with errors.
In this article, they managed to mis-state basic German infantry tactics of World War Two. The “Universal Machine Gun” (as adopted in the MG34 and MG42) was the offensive element of the German squad; the riflemen were there to protect the machine gun and fired to suppress enemy return fire while the gun team advanced.
American infantry tactics of the day were the opposite: the M1918 BAR was the base-of-fire weapon, suppressing enemy fire to permit the riflemen to advance.
MG34 and MG42 are in actuality rather close in weight: 26.7 pounds versus 25.6 pounds. The major advantages of the MG42 lay in fewer work-hours required to make it (about half that needed to make an MG34), and less consumption of costlier high-grade materials. In the event, German forces never had all the machine guns they wanted, so the MG34 was not replaced by the MG42 but continued to serve right to the end of the war.
The metallic-link belt for machine guns was developed in World War One by the Germans. Originals were of the disintegrating-link type, where the cartridges hold the links together. When the cartridge is removed from the belt for chambering, the links fall apart and are ejected from the gun as individual pieces (just like empty cartridge cases). Early use was in aircraft guns, where storage is at a premium: a canvas belt emptied of cartridges flapping about in the slipstream of the small airplanes of the day becomes a tangle and injury hazard.
By WW2, disintegrating-link belts were common. John M Browning’s belt-fed gun in water-cooled and air-cooled configurations proved easily adaptable to canvas and metallic-link belts and was made in large numbers. It equipped British and American aircraft and ground forces of US and Allied nations. Canvas belts can be seen in still photos and archival film footage from those days, feeding ground guns.
German and Soviet forces of WW2 used non-disintegrating metallic-link belts in various machine guns. The spring-steel links were more durable than canvas belts, less susceptible to degradation from rain or snow or dirt, and more easily cleaned of dirt & fouling.
The US M60 machine gun came to the field late, but this delay allowed designers to incorporate various innovations that had been invented during WW2 and after.