1/8/2024 0 Comments High point gun jamHowever, even a few pumps of the Vickers charging handle meant disconnecting a feed belt, and then hooking it up again, a matter of additional lost time. There was still a chance: working the charging handle might eject a broken case. The bolt couldnt close and, as a saftey measure the gun couldnt fire. Then the next round to enter would wedge the broken bit between cartridge and firing chamber. Difficulties arose when bits where broken off and left behind. The result was inevitable - broken cartridge cases.Īctually, a fractured case didnt matter - so long as every bit of it was ejected. The effect was to further increase the already large yanking force whilst simultaneously reducing the cartridge case's ability to withstand the yanking stress. At high altitudes, the cold temperatures lowered the strenght of the basic metal brass and froze whatever grease might have been availible to serve as a friction reducing lubricant. Offering no match for the extreme loads of expulsion, the thin brass tended to rip apart. ![]() Extreme force was availible to gun designers and they had little difficulty in assembling the necessary lobes, cams, and catches. To eject a brass case pinned to its firing chamber by gas pressure took a most determined yank. ![]() The price was an awesome number of jammed guns. An important either-or design decision was necessary and the winning design consideration was a high rate of fire. Ejecting a case forcibly held in place by gas pressure was not a simple matter. On the one hand, when it came time to eject the fired case, a great deal of pressure still exsited in the barrel, acting to press the case against its seat. Unfortunately, the new, higher internal gas pressure decayed slowly after firing certainly much more slowly than with black powder. With the advent of smokeless powder came less smoke and much more gas pressure, serving to add to muzzle velocity and flatten trajectory. Both Vickers and Spandau guns were descendents of Maxim's original design, all born in black powder days. "Although weather problems were real, many more jams reflected the inability of old gun designs to adapt to the newer smokeless powders. Simultaneous jamming of unrelated guns (e.g., SE5a) suggested lubrication failure owing to the extreme cold of high altitude or perhaps a literal freezing as cloud droplets turned to ice. Truely odd where those occasions when a paired Lewis and vickers machine gun would fail simultaneously, though independant in design, location and means of triggering. Approximatley once a month, in combat, one or both guns would refuse to fire, leaving the shooter defensless. Not surprisingly, after a stoppage or two most shooters prefered to do their own inspection. It was all upto the inspectors intuition and mood. There was no test for split cartridges, corroded brass, defective primers or undersized parts. However this test was to cartridge health as a military board examination was to soldiers health - Stong in an easily checked detail, weak in all that was passed over. ![]() The test was of some use, for those cartridges refusing to drop all the way home were oversized or bent. "Drop the cartrigdes down one by one…if they go home they are satisfactory and can be loaded into the magazines" British Royal Navy Air Service (RNAS)squadrons maintained an official inspection jig constisting of a spare gun pointed straight down along with approved instructions. "The establishment did offer some support to worried shooters. The unexpected part was the realisation of how frequenlty even the best regulated guns refused to work, and of how little there was to be done about it at lubricant-freezing, oxygen poor altitudes." Every course of instruction offered some takedown and reassembly experiance, with the emphasis on stoppages and fast cures. "Shooters new their guns to be complex assemblies of tricky parts. In the spirit of all that is just and holy, lets take a look at what Leon Bennet has to say on the matter (Author of Gunning For the Red Baron.)
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