Unusual pistols with a gas release mechanism
BSW pistol and magazine for it. At first glance, there is nothing special about him. Is that the notch on the shutter casing is made in its front part, and not in the back. And who would have thought that this pistol would compete with the Walter P38 pistol
How wonderful it is -
a man who desires strange things!
A. and B. Strugatsky “Attempt to escape”
a man who desires strange things!
A. and B. Strugatsky “Attempt to escape”
stories about weapons. Is it good or bad to “want the strange”? Well, it depends from which side you look at it. But if an engineer designing a new weapon wants something strange, how does that work? You can do something more familiar, improve what was previously done... But no! He does what no one has done before. And sometimes luck follows.
But it happens that the too strange developments of such designers simply frighten ordinary people, and therefore they remain only in the memory of historians. Today our story will be about several such designs of pistols of the last century.
Well, we’ll start with the pistol, which became the first “pistol” development of such a famous designer as John Moses Browning. It was developed in 1894–1895, and at the same time received a patent for it, and it turned out to be Browning's first patent, among all the other patents received for his pistols.
Surprisingly, having decided to work on pistols, John Browning for some reason did not start with the simplest thing - a blowback system, but for some reason he turned to a much more complex design with a gas venting mechanism that works by removing part of the powder gases from the barrel.
However, this is not entirely true, since Browning simultaneously began working on four models of pistols. One was with a blowback bolt, in two the automatics were operated by the recoil force of the barrel, but one of these four pistols had an original gas release mechanism. It’s just that for some reason he was the very first in this “line”, and so, of course, we don’t know what thoughts and which of these systems came to Browning’s head first.
Be that as it may, on April 20, 1897, Browning received four patents at once, and just one for the pistol we were interested in, and very soon he embodied all four in metal.
And his “gas gun” really turned out to be very original and strange.
To begin with, its gas chamber was located above the barrel, although in the already existing Colt-Browning machine gun (the famous “potato digger”) it was located below.
Coming out through this hole after the shot, the gases pressed on the lever connected by an axis to the bolt and, tilting upward, this lever pushed the bolt back. At the same time, the spent cartridge case was removed from the chamber, and a new cartridge was supplied to the dispensing line from the magazine. The spring pressure returned the bolt, the cartridge was chambered, and the lever returned to its previous horizontal position, locking the entire system.
The pistol fired relatively powerful .38ACP cartridges (9x23 mm), so having the barrel locked during firing could be considered a justified decision. The length of the pistol was 216 mm, weight 964 g.
Diagram of a Browning pistol with a gas release mechanism from an 1897 patent.
Already on July 3, 1895, this pistol (like three other samples) was shown to Colt employees, and they were so impressed that they immediately declared that they would buy all Browning’s patents, and... a year later they actually bought all four. But only three samples went into production.
The gas pistol remained out of use. For all its convenience and originality, no one really liked it. It is possible that the lever, rising above the barrel and covering the target, seemed to the company inconvenient for users, so it did not produce such pistols. So today there is only one Browning pistol of this system in the world, and it is located in the John M. Browning Firearms Museum in Ogden, Utah.
Time passed, and the German engineers of the Berlin-Suhler Waffen- und Fahrzeugwerke company began thinking about using a gas outlet in a pistol, and they were puzzled by this before participating in an army competition, which would ultimately be won not by their pistol, but by the famous “Walter” P38.
It is interesting that pistols were not at all the specialty of this company, although it produced weapons - hunting rifles, rifles and even rifles. But, as they say, apparently they decided to take a risk and came up with a pistol with gas removal from the barrel. Moreover, unlike the Browning pistol, where the gas outlet was used to remove the bolt from the barrel, in this pistol it is used only to unlock it. That's all!
But, in general, the pistol turned out to be original even without this. It had a frame milled from duralumin, a shutter made partly by stamping and a “bottle” shaped (if you look at it from above) magazine with 13 cartridges rearranged from two rows into one, although there was also a simpler 8-round version.
The barrel of this pistol was fixedly fixed in the frame, and the return spring wrapped around it and worked in tension, not compression. But since the pistol used a 9x19 cartridge, to ensure reliable locking of the bolt at the moment of firing, it was necessary to somehow block the bolt.
And the BSW designers took an unusual path: in its forward position, the bolt was blocked by the hook of a long lever that ran under the barrel along its entire length. As soon as the bullet reached the muzzle, there, almost at the very end of the barrel, a rectangular gas outlet opened, and the push of the powder gases threw this lever down, which allowed the bolt to roll back freely and eject the spent cartridge case from the chamber. That is, here everything happened exactly the same as in blowback pistols.
BSW pistol
The front part of the lever had a bevel, which played the role of a gas piston, and it also served, according to the patent formula, as a bolt recoil accelerator. That is, again, the design was similar to John Browning’s “potato digger” - the M1895 machine gun - although the difference was significant: in Browning the lever throws the bolt back, but in this pistol it only locks it, nothing more. The trigger mechanism of the pistol had a hidden trigger and allowed self-cocking firing.
The bolt had a safety lock that locked the firing pin, but the designers installed it only because of competition requirements. In fact, he wasn't needed. The trigger stroke was long and hard, shooting was carried out only by self-cocking, so an accidental shot from such a pistol simply could not happen.
The disadvantage of this design is obvious: the locking system is such that it blocks the movement of the bolt when manually chambering the cartridge. That is, in any case, the shutter must be unlocked manually. And this can be done by grasping the two protrusions in the front part of the lever, by which it should be pulled down a little, and only then, holding the corrugated part of the bolt casing, pull it back. That is why the corrugation on it was in the front and not in the back. And it was precisely here that it was necessary to take hold of it, and in such a way as to simultaneously press the locking lever with two fingers, and only after that move the bolt casing back.
Anyone unfamiliar with this pistol design simply couldn’t shoot it! But even ordinary soldiers and officers were unfamiliar with such manipulations. The shutter stop was a second lever in front of the trigger guard. By pressing it, the bolt could be pulled back completely, and then moved forward by lowering the locking lever.
BSW pistol with the bolt pulled back. The lever of the gas release mechanism is clearly visible, closing the outlet hole in the barrel for gases
The pistol did not win the competition.
Its disadvantages were such as the complexity of the design, high cost and another important circumstance for those years.
The requirements for the competition specified the possibility of firing through the embrasures of combat vehicles. But this pistol could not physically shoot like that: the lower part of the barrel always rests against the edge of the embrasure, which in this case would lead to blocking the locking lever. And it was also impossible to shoot through the embrasure while holding the pistol suspended due to its overall dimensions.
So, although the pistol was made in several versions and was even tested by shooting, it ultimately turned out to be unviable.
As a result, the BSW pistol certainly has its place in storiesdefinitely deserved it. But only in the category of weapons curiosities, but not military weapons.
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