Designed by Giuseppe Bommarito, this was one of the many independent rifle designs submitted to the US War Department in the 1910s hoping for military adoption. It is a short recoil operated, toggle-locked system chambered for .30-06 and using detachable 20-round magazines. It was tested (without much success) at Springfield and remained in development until 1918.
See a more complete article including original disassembly photos here:
https://www.forgottenweapons.com/m1-garand-development/us-bommarito-rifle/
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2015/01/16/bommarito-rifle/ suggests that
This rifle is of the recoil-operated type, with a toggle breech bolt, similar to the Luger pistol. The barrel recoil is 1-1/4 inches and this, with the long toggle levers necessitated by the length of the service cartridge, render the rifle a very unwieldy one, with grave danger of injury to the firer’s hands in use. In August, 1918, however, a contract was awarded for the construction of a test rifle.
Is that real danger or rather made up one?
I can see a toggle action being the path of least resistance to convert existing bolt action rifles to semi-auto. Too bad the design did not go anywhere.
So could aspects of the Luger toggle action rifle have been applied to the Bommarito to make it more reliable?
It would be a good fit for converting a pre-Browning levergun, but it concentrates the stress of firing at the very back of the receiver. Most bolt guns lock up front, and while most didn’t take the fully unstressed receiver all the way to its logical conclusion (like the AK or AR), they did mill away a lot of metal both at the bottom (doublestack mag) and top (stripper clips) leaving very little in between.
There were lots of conversion attempts in the interwar period, and most logically followed the path we see in the Garand (use a cam to convert the bolt gun to a straight-pull, than stick a gas piston on the front of the oprod).
*then
The Luger is pistol-reliable (for an early 20th century gun. It’s reliability would be abysmal for today standards).
The low pressure and short brass of pistol cartridges solve a lot of reliability problems
I’d like to be able to do a side-by-side comparison with all the other toggle-locking rifles out there, particularly the Pedersen and this one.
How much of the Pedersen is him seeing this weapon, and saying to himself “I can do that, better…”
Aside from the exact technical tree branching that this fell off of, I’d like to state that I strongly dislike the upward-flexing nature of most of these rifles. I think it’d be horribly distracting to actually try and use in combat, and that the major benefit of the semi-automatic rifle, namely the rapid follow-up shot capability, would evaporate in the face of having to re-acquire your sight picture after that horrendous mechanism kicked up right in front of your face.
I mean, on technical terms, these rifles are probably fine. In terms of actually using them, they just strike me as being very poorly thought out, in terms of the built-in distraction of that action flexing upwards on every shot.
Ideally, on a semi-auto? The mechanism ought to be entirely enclosed, and essentially invisible to the shooter. That way, you’re not losing situational awareness and you’re not being induced into a flinch by that mechanism leaping up in front of you.
I really rather doubt that these rifles that share this sort of design would be all that successful in active use, and if they had been adopted, they’d have been swiftly left behind.
If you absolutely have to have a toggle-lock action on a rifle, it should either “break” downward or to one side or the other. The Swiss Model 25 “Fusil Furrer” LMG is one example. Feeding from a 30-round detachable box magazine inserted from the side like an FG42, it would qualify as a rifle except for its 10.76 kg weight with bipod.
The Model 41 SMG was another toggle-lock design, which was really a scaled-down Model 25 in 9 x 19mm. It, too broke the toggle sideways and fed from a horizontal magazine.
And of course, the Vickers-Maxim machine guns and automatic cannon all had toggle-locking actions, but because everything was inside their large and box-shaped receivers nobody noticed until it was time to disassemble one for maintenance.
The Parabellum pistol’s action looks very elegant when closed and locked. And when you’re firing it at arm’s length the toggle flipping up into your line of sight with every shot isn’t that distracting. Firing the Artillery Model with the shoulder stock is a different story.
One more reason the Colt-Browning type automatic ended up as the default design path.
For rifles, gas operation of one sort or another ended up as the default type. Machine guns seem to work well enough with recoil or gas operation, because the “weight penalty” isn’t seen to be as critical in such platforms.
Recoil operation in a rifle seems to be one of those things that everybody thinks should be simple and reliable, but generally ends up being neither one.
clear ether
eon
I’m glad I re-read your post before I sat down to respond to it, because at first glance on my phone, I took it as you saying that the Luger wasn’t that bad, and so the rifles couldn’t be, either…
Then I re-read it, and got the sense of what you’re actually saying, and I have to agree: 30cm or so away from your face, that toggle-lock isn’t so bad, particularly with a pistol-caliber cartridge. A rifle on the scale of the .30-06, right there at the tip of your nose…? Oh, hell to the no, no, NO…
I have to wonder what the inventors were thinking, once they’d spun up working copies of these rifles. Were they so committed by that point that they just didn’t care about the effect on the average shooter?
I dare say that had any of these gotten to general issue, there’d have been a mass revolt on the part of the trainers and the initial entry guys learning on these rifles. You’d have had to have had something else, in terms of training rifle, for them to get over the initial heebie-jeebies and flinch that would no doubt develop.
One of the things you have to take into account with your weapons designs would be what I’d term “trainability”, namely “Can you easily train someone to shoot this weapon effectively with any real speed, and how much ammo/time does it take?”
I can’t see any of the toggle-locking designs being at all easy to train, especially with people who’ve limited experience with firearms. Maybe I’m wrong; I obviously haven’t fired any of these rifles, and probably never will, but from my perspective as a trainer of other weapons, I’m thinking it’d be an absolute nightmare of a system to try and teach. Just the necessity of having to re-acquire that sight picture alone, for each and every shot after that action flips up in front of your nose… Yeesh.
Mind that this rifle is of the 1910s. On one side, there wasn’t much to compare it. On the other, the designer had to tiptoe around existing and still valid patents. That’s one of the main reason we see so many seemingly disadvantageous solutions employed in early years of self loading firearms.
I like keeping the P.08 at arm’s length, literally. At two feet or so away from my eye, that finger-sized toggle going up and down in a split second is barely noticeable.
With the shoulder stock, about six friggin’ inches from my eye? No. Way. In. Hell.
And the P.08 toggle is a lot smaller than any toggle you’d find on a rifle firing even an intermediate cartridge.
Plus you have to consider ejection geometry. In my experience, Parabellums tend to toss their empties straight up. From what I’ve seen, toggle actions tend to throw empties in the same plane that the toggle rotates in. The only exception seems to be Maxim-type machine guns, with their very carefully-contoured (and generally massive) ejection chutes.
So, whichever way the toggle “bends”, whoever is on that side on the firing range is probably going to need at least a WW1 tanker-style “helmet visor”, to avoid having an empty from next door trying to get too friendly with his face.
Like Col. Cooper said of the double-action automatic, the toggle action in a rifle is an ingenious answer to a question no intelligent person ever asked.
cheers
eon
I recall non-gun guys in BCT complaining the action of an M-16 cycling during firing was “distracting.” A toggle action might’ve made Quakers of them all.
Then you understand where I’m coming from, as a recovering trainer…
There are some things that you look at, tilt you head, and say “I know there’s something wrong with that idea, but I can’t quite articulate it…”
I have no problem at all articulating why I think these toggle-locking monstrosities would have been extremely difficult to train neophyte shooters on.
I’d also like to know how the hell the Pedersen got as far as it did; did they just not get to the “Grab random mob from training pipeline and attempt to train them as marksmen with this specific rifle” part of evaluating it? I can’t see anyone who is shooting for the first time not developing a severe flinch, having that lock do its thing right there in close proximity to their faces… I think most would experience great difficulty with the initial experience, and likely go on to develop many of the usual vices you find with new shooters.
I’m still kind of in awe that anyone thought these things were a good idea, let alone at all viable as a general-issue rifle.
If the almost-completely-enclosed working bits of the Armalite disturbed them, I’d hate to see their reaction to a Garand. Especially after the eighth round.
cheers
eon
“(…) thing right there in close proximity to their faces(…)”
Handbook of the Pedersen Self-Loading Rifle available at https://www.forgottenweapons.com/m1-garand-development/us-pedersen-276-rifle/ suggests that Vickers-Armstrong tried to use it-is-feature-not-bug manœuvrer namely at page 4 claims that
…As the last round from the magazine is fired the empty
clip is automatically ejected, leaving the rifle clear for immediate recharging. The Breech
Closure now remains in open position, blocking the line of sight and thereby drawing
the attention of the soldier to the necessity for recharging…
“(…)should either “break”(…)to one side or the other(…)”
This was implemented by HEINEMANN
recoil-operated sub-machine gun https://guns.fandom.com/wiki/FN_Model_1935
gas-operated self-loading rifle https://www.historicalfirearms.info/post/148067062107/heinemann-rifle-designed-by-karl-heinemann-in-the
“(…)mechanism ought to be entirely enclosed, and essentially invisible to the shooter(…)”
If you wish to use TOGGLE inside self-loading fire-arm AND do NOT have it visible then use MAGAZINE FIREARM described by H. S. MAXIM inside 1885 patent https://patents.google.com/patent/US317162A
Just imagine wearing the upside down saucer plate aka British steel helmet. Sounds the bell with every shot…
13:25 – it doesn’t _run out of inertia._
It runs out of energy.
Bommarito:
1. made a lovely prototype; and
2. didn’t do too badly for his work. $4000 would have bought a decent house in 1920.
That is looking on the bright side. Still no one wants to stop at creating a prototype, even if you throw in a house. One could say JaMarcus Russell and Ryan Leaf had NFL careers that stalled at the prototype stage