I really wonder, how much of the heavy/clunkiness of this was the very early design, how much of it was required by the much less advanced metallurgy of the turn of the 20th Century, and how much was just over-engineering to ensure extra durability, safety for the users and long service-lifetimes? I mean, obviously the complexity of the design and it's parts can be mostly put down to it being an pretty/very early machine-gun design, and the massive uses of machine-guns throughout the century would enable designers to learn where and how they could get away with simpler, smarter and vastly less complex designs, but some things are always going to have to be working in that early, far less mature technological space. This very complete strip-down of the gun was fascinating to see and hear explained by Ian, which is no small part of why I'm here for pretty much every video here on KZfaq. Firearms and firearm designs are fascinating because of the very complex and tight design constraints required when you are creating something to throw small bits of metal a long way, very fast and ideally, many, many times, and that's before you even consider how to make production of them simultaneously as cheap but also as reliable as you possibly can. Even the wild ideas that ended up not going very far for whatever reason are still hugely interesting to see and hear about.

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

@@agate_jcg So true!

It's fascinatingly simple and complex at the same time - so few parts, so many interactions! It's everything I lover about early machine guns lol

@@agate_jcg "Simplify, then add lightness"

And the shear amount of heavy metal. A very overbuilt gun, even for 8mm Lebel. It would have been a very good mounted gun, but I'm sure the cost of manufacture was very substantial, rivaling that of bigger guns like the Vickers.

@@douro20 They didn't have steels like we have today, so "overbuild" was necessity. Also things were built to last.

Seriously, I have no idea how you'd do the workholding on some of those parts.

@@douro20 This is what happens when you're designing guns for purposes that no one has figured out yet lol. Are these static? Are these portable? Are these vehicle mounted? Are we gonna puttem' on damn blimps & airplanes?!?! Who knows! Just make sure that we can move it if we throw enough guys at it and that it can lob bullets forever(with a crew of preferably less than double digit men, thanks)... MGs may be the only firearm category where the first generation is arguably more reliable than succeeding generations - I mean, what's more reliable than a Maxim? lol

@@XtreeM_FaiL Eh, I wouldn't say it was a necessity for 1st gen machine guns. They just didn't have any stringent weight or portability requirements for much of their development, so they just didn't try to make them that light weight or portable(aside from the outliers like the Madsen, Chauchat, etc.). The Maxim for example DEFINITELY didn't need to be as overbuilt as it was(those things belonged in a factory lol), and you saw that with how much that design was shrunken and paired down over time in Vickers & MG08 variants. After 1st gen, MGs shrank quite a bit and shed some serious weight - many designs moving from these obnoxious billet receivers to plate receivers or stamped/bent receivers with machined reinforcements and internal parts(guide rails and such). The MGs that stayed with machined receivers moving to significantly leaner designs.

Reminds me of neuraling.

Also great for use as a file...

Or as a saw...

...or as a club.

Waffle iron

@@nagoogle8542 look at the various knurling, ridges, and fins on the barrel. Then think about just how damned hot a machine gun barrel can get during high-rate fire (German MG gunners were issued asbestos(!) gloves for barrel changes in WWII). A carelessly-placed hand could get you quite the interesting burn scar.

"Three on the tree" 😁

@@lairdcummings9092”… I put my foot on the clutch, and man alive I shoved it on down into overdrive…”

@@DABrock-author "... you're gonna drive me to drinkin if you don't stop driv'n that hot rod Lincoln!"

Me too! The only things stopping me are: 1) Time 2) Money 3) The complete lack of necessary machine tools or the skill required to operate them. In all seriousness, this gun is a work of art and building one would be an extremely noble and challenging labor of love.

Agreed, a dealer friend had one of the US Benét-Mercié models on stock so we took it to the range. While it was really cool to shoot in a steampunk sort of way I think we spent just as much time discussing how inconvenient almost every aspect of it was! Neat gun in its own weird way.

To borrow a term from the computer market, it's a "luggable" machine gun lol. Portable because you can move it around by yourself, not because you'll want to.

@@SnakebitSTI It's about as heavy as an FN Mag, which appears to take the same approach to durability over the spines of the soldiers assigned to carry them.

@@andrewweitzman4006 The FN MAG wasn't all that much heavier (11.8 kg/26.01 lb) than the M-60 (10.5 kg/23.15 lb), and I can tell you that pig (and it's accessories) were a right pain in the arse to lug around. Though the MAG was appreciably longer than the 60, which would have made one hell of a difference to the poor bastards having to manhandle the damn things about, I expect.

​@@SnakebitSTI- The "bag phone" of light machine guns, haha. "So, this is a MOBILE phone?!?" "Well, it's umm... yeah. Sort of..."

The entire weapon is, except that silly bipod.

Would be cool if we did, but Sweden hasn't had bicycle troops since the 90s

Oh crap, now that you mentioned it, yt will probably take it down.

oh hey, my favorite gun autist watches my other favorite gun autist

I wondered when I'd see a comment from you on one of ian's videos.

Ah! Suprise Zack Hazard!

The strips were also likely cheaper to purchase than individual metallic belts

hinged strips sounds great actually

I think that the three round clips were for the 37mm (1 pounder) autocannon version of the Hotchkiss heavy MG.

Hotchkiss magic. Take about 45 pounds of individual parts, put them together and have an MG weighing 26 pounds.

"You went to war with *that..?!* You're braver than you look."

Maybe not even then. 😛

The combo of Forgotten Weapons and C&Rsenal will definitely get you up to speed lol

I'm a little disappointed they didn't go all in and use a Welin interrupted screw for the breech haha.

Chauchat seems to be a lot easier and ergonomic. As long as you don't have a .30-06 version and try to hose everything downrange in as short a time as possible.

I now have the image of ian, Mea and Othias with Guinea pigs in place of reindeer delivering guns on Christmas to all the good law abiding people.

'Supreme excellence in engineering is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.'

That is mostly because machines back then are only able to do simple cuts.

@@XtreeM_FaiL not actually true. Complex cuts required more expensive machinery, more expensive skilled machinists, and often more steps, but those cuts could be made. The main problem was the cost, and more primitive design process - when you're building up the design in your head or on paper, the ability to test fit, iterate, optimize, and refine is tremendously more limited. That can ALSO be overcome, but it pushes development timelines and costs quite a long way as you have to physically build and test each variant.

Prime example the Thompson submachine gun with Blishlock, cooling fins, and 2 type of magazine to lock in place. "Stick magazine and drums"

@@lairdcummings9092 Modern multi-axis CNC machines gives you much more freedom to design parts. You can do cuts that were impossible then. If you can't do a needed cut in one way, then you need to redesign your part. Instead of one relatively simple part, you have to make many different parts. Anyone can design a complex machine with lots of parts, but to make the same task simple and fewer parts require much more.

When your contemporaries weigh in at over 50 kilos... 😁

Look like i'm not the only one who wonder why the hell does Hotchkiss machine gun can be carry and fired in the shoulder in the game. Now i know what kind of exactly Hotchkiss machine gun can do that

Definitely very cool. I worked with a couple of the DICE LA weapon guys (an animator and a design/balance guy) through BF4/1/V, basically helping with some volunteer QA stuff to touch up some goofs and oversights; there were some seriously passionate people on that dev team, so it's no wonder those games do their weapons so well. BF4 was definitely the one we got the most stuff fixed in (had the most to fix), from open/closed bolt changes to mag capacities, firing or reload animation issues, changing cartridges (that era of Battlefield games in fact used cartridge-based damage models), and even a couple names fixed (BF4's RPK and L115). Correcting the Madsen to be open bolt in BF1 comes to mind, off the top of my head. :)

He's not wrong though, they're closer to modern belts than the cloth belts of the era

@@NM-wd7kxmetallic links but stiff. Only drawback I can think of is they need to be kinda short so they’re not drooping and popping cartridges out, so the assistant gunner has to stick a new one on more often.

I believe the strips could be chained togeher, so an organised team should be able to just keep it running

It probably is called the cam collar.

"Nut operated" technically applies only to the very small, long-lost production run in .22LR that was ordered by a particularly militant community of squirrels.

​@@robertgaudet7407the manual refers to it as a nut

He was not - Benjamin Hotchkiss died in 1885.

Pretty much made to measure, I guess. I worked on pre-CNC machinery for valves/taps, and some pegs and pins can be lathered in a relatively "universal" machine like a Traub - there are an obscure science on how to put camms on a cylinder and make arms go in and out in sequence. But to machine the flat parts, all I've seen is a single slide going back and forth to make a single cut copying a single design - then the piece goes to the next machine and has to be precisely blocked to cut the next surface and again and again.

In those days, gun factories had rows upon rows of lathes, mills, and drills. At each one a worker would put the piece into a jig and run it through the machine in a preset path, then pass it on to the next. There were highly-trained well-paid workers called machine setters who went around setting up and adjusting the jigs, cams, and machine stops. The common worker would only do the one operation and was strictly forbidden from touching anything. When Ian or C&Rsenal talks about the time and expense to set up production, it largely comes down to making all the jigs and other tooling - not to mention purchasing literal hundreds of machines.

Very similar to modern machines but power supplied by a belt, not electricity. Animal fat to lubricate parts, apparently in hot weather the shops stank. To automate processes they used jigs to define toolpaths instead of CNC.