Just for reference, here’s the Belgian M1927 Chauchat:
© 2026 Forgotten Weapons.
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Just for reference, here’s the Belgian M1927 Chauchat:
© 2026 Forgotten Weapons.
Site developed by Cardinal Acres Web Development.
It needs. 100 round Beta mag
Recently RUGER got patent for double-stack magazines for rimmed cartridges https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/ruger-awarded-double-stack-22lr-magazine-patent-44824750 (drawings shows one used with .22 rim-fire cartridge, but patents also covers other rimmed cartridge. like .30-30). Question: could it be made to work with French 8 mm rifle cartridge?
From the patent drawing, it looks like loading is done by putting the rim of successive rounds in front of the rim the previous rounds. Am I seeing this correctly? Does this limit the number of rounds in the magazine due to tilting of he rounds? I was expecting a one=in=front—one=in=back etc. arrangement.
Nice link Daweo,
I wonder if this patent will yield actually a viable magazine, looking at goofy positioned rounds that almost dance on their way to feedlips, or was it enforced to stop the development/production of some competitors .22lr hi-cap mag product…
Double column magazine for rimmed rounds…
there’s a long history of reliable double column mags for rimmed rounds, going back to at least as far as the early twentieth century, with the double column mag for the SMLE
Mauser produced double column mags for the 98 sporting rifles in .303, for Rigby, and also in Magnum length for the original, rimmed .350 Rigby (both the rimmed mag and magnum length developments were originated for Rigby).
Mauser later used the Rimmed magazine and breech developed for Rigby, for the 8mm Siamese rifles.
The conversion that became the P14, probably never had a reliable magazine feed with .303.
moving to the mid 20th century, the BREN had a reliable double column 30 round magazine in .303.
in Jon Speed’s “collector’s grade” books on Mauser factory sporters (good look finding a second hand copy of that for under $300 :p )
there’s a photo of a document listing the factory magazine dimensions. from memory it may have included .30-30 win and both .303 savage and .22 savage high power, as well as the already mentioned .303 British.
Double column magazine had been made for 7.62X54r. SVT40, Dragunov, PSL, Zastava M76…
M76 is 7.9x57mm. M91 uses 7.62x54R
Here is a list of my proposed revisionist improvements:
1) Give it a buttstock that encloses the buffer, like a Johnson LMG.
2) Move the sights onto the bore centerline and make them taller, like a Johnson LMG
3) Make it closed-bolt like its inspiration the Remington Model 8
4) Make it semi-only or maybe some sort of 2-shot burst or binary trigger
5) Chamber it in (don’t laugh) 6.5 Carcano with a 20 shot magazine
6) Improve the quality control of its stamped/folded metal/seamless tubing parts
I know the Chauchat is belittled but I always liked the fact that it was ahead of its time in being cheaply made and mass-produced…foretelling the future.
As W.H.B. Smith said (Small Arms of the World, 9th ed.), the Chauchat was made pretty much exactly like the Sten Gun.
The problem was that
(1) In 1916, the technologies that were able to make the Sten a safe, relatively reliable, and relatively cheap piece of machinery didn’t actually exist yet,
and
(2) They never existed in France to begin with. Maybe they still don’t.
Keep in mind that the Chauchat was made by a company that manufactured bicycles, using similar tubular-frame technology. To Americans, that means “mass production”. In France, it meant “hand-fitting”, equaling “parts not necessarily interchangeable”.
Even later, it meant “hand fitting”. I speak from personal experience as the one time owner of a 27 x 1.25″ Peugeot ten-speed. The problem wasn’t just getting parts for it from the factory, it was getting them fitted by hand.
Let’s not even get into the welding on that frame. Very “Sho-Sho” like, even in the early 1970s.
I’m not sure that French industry has ever fully understood that method of manufacture.
By comparison, if you’d handed the blueprints to Birmingham Small Arms (which made both guns and bicycles), or Iver Johnson (also noted for making both), and told them you needed 10,000 ASAP, they’d likely have looked at you and said, “OK, is next Tuesday good for you?”
clear ether
eon
@eon,
FWIW, there was a bunch of the industrial revolution that just never “hit” most of Europe. Mentality-wise, they were mostly still stuck in the old models of mass craftsmanship, rather than real mass production.
This shows in places like you highlight here, and in things like the way that the Germans never really did true mass production of tanks, either. It was all artisanal batch-production, the same way they built railroad engines.
You could probably have done a lot of things differently with the Chauchat’s production, but the really big problems came in with the entire culture: The unions fought anything that would have reduced the “craftsmanship” inputs, and the surrounding matrix of “this is how we do it here” was embedded and ossified.
Frankly, the industrial part of the equation was entirely in keeping with the problems we’ve identified and discussed with regards to the individual weapons: People were inflexible, did not observe what was going on around them, and refused to adapt. Well, in any large-scale and timely manner, at least. That adaptation took until well after WWII, and in France, I think it still took the discrediting of the ancien regime by the 1940 defeat before a lot of common-sense changes could be made. The dead hand of tradition, and all that…
One of my books on the Spitfire mentions that the elevators on each one were precision-balanced for that exact airframe and weren’t even interchangeable left-to-right. Which of course would have been completely unacceptable in any American design from the P-36 on, up to and including the B-17, B-24, and B-29.
Reportedly, the first time the vital necessity of such precision balancing was explained by a Supermarine engineer to a visiting exec from North American who was responsible for the P-51 program, said exec gave him a look like “What are you, some kind of nut”?
cheers
eon
“(…)Supermarine engineer(…)”
If not end of war RAF would likely operate WINDSOR bombers
https://www.militaryfactory.com/aircraft/detail.php?aircraft_id=1630
where …internal geodetic construction was also carried to the wings resulting in no spars being needed for supporting the wide-spanning structures – though the process was a complex one and required fine tuning (a special composite fabric also had to be designed to contend with speeds at play)…
True, but if not for Barnes Wallis they would never have had the geodetic structure in the Wellington and etc.
Because every other engineer at Vickers, Farnborough, and etc. swore blind that it could not possibly ever work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnes_Wallis
clear ether
eon
And the less said about the Nimrod, the better, as discovered during the MRA.4 upgrade program.
Eon, I think the technology existed in 1918, but there was needed for a Copernican revolution in devoluting guns to Sten quality of design and build to pull it off.
Devolution is the firearms evolution – remember Blish lock? When discarded from Thompson, it worked good or even better without it. Why not initially make a blishlock free thompson, its not a technology cause.
Just like you could make a Glock in 1959 (when remington nylon 66 was introduced), but the state of mind to design such simplistic featured pistol just wasnt there.
Its not like plastic for frame was invented only recently in 1979.
As already said, France made over 250.000 Chauchat in a partially invaded country in the same time required for the British empire to make 50.000 Lewis Gun.
1 vs. 1 the Lewis gun was a better weapon.
5 vs. 1, no match.
Just to highlight it, since it’s gone off the header, but the_snork asked me a question over in the experimental Garand thread that is kinda/sorta pertinent here, and which some might enjoy reading.
Might also deserve some attention and thought, if anyone can think of things to add. I would say that the questions asked were things that could probably use a small book written about them…
https://www.forgottenweapons.com/2025/12/
In any event, there it is.
Erk. Wrong link…
https://www.forgottenweapons.com/m1e5-experimental-paratrooper-garand/
So I have this theory, relevant to this article only because the Chauchat is so heavily featured:
In Rage Against The Machine’s “Bulls on Parade” he sings at one point(49 seconds in): “With the sure shot, sure to make the bodies drop”
I always felt it would make more sense if he had said “With the Chauchat”, kinda fits in with the rest of the line. However, the “t” is just a little too pronounced, and the cd booklet definitely says “sure shot”. Also, if you want the bodies to drop for sure, maybe choose a more reliable gun, like the mg42/mg3 or the m60 or something.
Opinions?
When you say “Go for it”, has anyone made a reproduction Chauchat, that is, on an individual basis? It seems to me that someone with basic machining skills, access to a lathe, and a healthy attention to detail would be able to fashion a working facsimile and address some of the shortcomings without slipping into the surreal.
Somewhat off topic so ignore if you wish: the above discussion of stem manufacturing leads me to ask another (admitedly bizarre) question: given a box of 9mm and a time machine, just how far back in human history would you have to go to reach a point at which the local village blacksmith could not construct an open bolt SMG to use said ammunition (assuming you provided him with an explanation of the concept)?
Given enough 9mm ammo to make it worthwhile, you could likely go back quite far, maybe into the late Iron Age of Roman antiquity.
The problem is, and the real question would be, how many STENs could be manufactured? Early 20th, millions once you got the idea across. Mid-19th? Certainly a few thousand. Further back, you’re getting less and less weapons out of it because you’re looking at one-off bespoke manufacture by specialists. You could easily replicate one or two a long way back, but in terms of “make enough to arm a significant number of men”, the numbers rapidly drop off.
“(…)reach a point at which the local village blacksmith could not construct an open bolt SMG to use said ammunition(…)”
Considering that you COIL SPRING is required to craft STEN, I would say no earlier than 1763 as according to https://www.smalley.com/blog/invention-history-and-timeline-wave-spring …first coiled spring was invented in 1763 by R. Tradewell…
The idea of a STEN’s simplicity depends on so many modern technologies we take for granted. Consistent rolled sheet metal and precision seamless aircraft tubing makes a receiver easy in 2025. A determined craftsman could probably have worked those parts out hundreds of years ago.
Straightwall cartridges are, themselves, much simpler than bottlenecked cartridges, but they make a gun’s function completely dependent on the ability to headspace on a case mouth – i.e. to ream a precise, square-edged chamber in tempered steel that is a few hundredths larger in diameter than the bore. That is quite recent. I recently saw a video about the shocking imprecision of the first locomotive steam cylinders. I’d say the capability probably dates from the time when high pressure and tight-tolerance valve gear became important (mid-late 19th).
“Straightwall cartridges are, themselves, much simpler than bottlenecked cartridges, but they make a gun’s function completely dependent on the ability to headspace on a case mouth(…)”
Some of them do, but not all. For example 7,65 mm Browning and .38 Super and .357 Maximum were designed to head-space at rim AND have straight walls.
Sorry, meant “rimless” under the umbrella of “straightwall” because OP specified 9×19. Some of those are straighter-walled than 9×19, but all are rimmed or semi-rimmed – a separate requirement that would limit the answer to the same time frame as discussed in other comments.
Correction: reads “stem manufacturing”, should read ” sten manufacturing “
Most people think the “Shoo Shoo” was stamped and welded, almost the entire gun was machined. As the “Stens back it time” recoil and mag springs will be the biggest problem. To the Blish lock. Though it wasn’t needed to function, it did reduce the cycle rate a good bit. Let go off on the M3/M3A1 “Grease Guns”: 1. What Sten type construction was used? So few were made by war’s end because welding the “halves” warped them. 2. Lose the “9 mm conversion” and use the far superior Thompson mags, (They only made 40 MILLION of them). Not only would that improve reliability, it gives it what few other open bolt SMGs have. Last round hold open, a Thompson advantage. Back to the “Shoo Shoo”, how about 6.5×50 Arisaka? Or the best modification of all: Wrap it around a tree a get a 1918A1 BAR! (Insert laughing emoji here).
Apart that a gun labeled “1918” would not have been available for much of the war, it would be “wrap 3.5 to 5 Chauchat around a tree for every single 1918A1 BAR”.
Because a Chauchat in 30-06, in 1917, costed $91.25 per rifle (the 8mm Lebel version likely less), while a 1918A1 BAR costed $319 per rifle in 1918.
Your life depends on it, which one do you grab? The German machine gun school taught the Lewis also; they converted captured one to 7.92×57. Chauchats? Nope. Have you ever shot one? I don’t know if you know Charley Erb, I’ve shot his. It’s probably the finest turned one ever, it ran fairly good, on a summer day on a farm in PA. Unusable sights, flimsy mags, and an unnecessary recoil that will shake your filling out. It’s twice as heavy, but I’d hump my MG 08/15 over the Chauchat. Runs like a top, never stops, (I humped a M240B on my first tour, if you take the 10 lb assault drum off the 08/15, it’s not that bad).
If your life depend on it, you grab what is there. You can’t grab a weapon that doesn’t exist because it has yet to be invented or it had not been manufactured in large enough quantities because it was too much complicate/expensive, for how much you can long for it.
Germans used the captured Chauchat not only in WWI, BUT STILL IN WWII! Both in the original caliber and converted in 8mm Mauser.
Vladimir Grigoryevich Fyodorov invented the Fedorov Avtomat after having been impressed by the mass use of the Chauchat by the French on the western front.
Good point. In this thread I see people jumping with both feet on the Chauchat who have elsewhere allowed it was not so bad. The fact remains that the cretinous and fussy French manufactured the gun in great numbers while avoiding being on the war’s losing side. “Chauchat Perfection”? Scarcely. But it was not the unmitigated disaster it was often charged with being.
https://www.americanrifleman.org/media/0oeohmvs/20129179058-8-us-80th-div-prizes-2_f.jpg?anchor=center&mode=crop&width=987&height=551&rnd=132616870453930000&quality=60
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F2s4a98h5ii351.jpg
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Foo6ki1f70gwa1.png
Dunlap in Ordnance Went Up Front had some interesting things to say about the M3.
The M3 was not available in the Pacific Theater until just prior to Okinawa. Almost the entire first run from Guide Lamp Division of GM went to England in time for Overlord. Also, starting in Feb. ’44 OSS was airdropping them to the Resistance, notably in central France.
9mm conversion units were supposedly made, but AFAIK none were ever deployed.
The original M3 had problems, most obviously its spring-loaded crank to rack the bolt back; it tended to break at the pivot. The M3A1 eliminated this in favor of a hole in the bolt for a forefinger to haul the bolt back. But that version only arrived after Oct. ’45.
As it turned out, that version remained in service with U.S. Army armor units until 1991. It was finally declared obsolete and retired after Operation Desert Storm.
I guess 45 years in service isn’t bad for what was supposed to be a “disposable” piece of equipment.
cheers
eon