Machines | Japanese Army Pedersen Copy Trials Rifle
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http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Sold at auction for $37,375. The Japanese military was interested in finding a new self-loading rifle to adopt in the 1930s. The development project began with a request to retired General Kijiro Nambu who designed a gas-operate,d rotating bolt rifle but could not bring it up to the standards demanded by the military and opted to abandon the project in favor of a new light machine gun (which would become the Type 96 Nambu). Two major commercial firms entered the fray, Nippon Special Steel with a gas-operated and toggle-locked rifle and Tokyo Gas & Electric with a copy of the Czech ZH29 rifle. In 1933 the Army itself decided to jump in as well, developing a delayed blowback Pedersen copy at the Koishikawa Arsenal. The Army rifle was pretty good, but apparently never overcame extraction problems which would appear when the rifle became hot from sustained fire. When John Pedersen had demonstrated his rifle in Japan, it seems he did not mention the necessity for lubricated ammunition and this trick was not figured out by Koishikawa personnel. The Army liked the mechanical simplicity of the delayed blowback system (which required no gas ports, pistons, tubes, or anything else), and opted to fit the rifles with 10-round rotary magazines. After the final set of trials in 1937, the whole semiautomatic rifle program was dropped, as the escalating war in China shifted priorities to producing a large number of less expensive and readily available Arisaka bolt actions.
Comments
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You're so lucky seeing all of these incredibly rare and working pieces of a pivotal time in the history of the world.
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I think its unacceptable a rifle or a gun that need lubricated ammo to work properly.
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does anyone know if the Japanese knew about the wax coating and then adopted this rifle, could the wax coated arisaka round work with their bolt action type 99 rifles??
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does this rifle shoot pedersen rounds or did the japanese make it so it could shoot arisaka rounds and just copy everything else???
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"How does a Japanese Army Colonel tell a Japanese Army General he's done something wrong?" By committing seppuku after writing a haiku about it.
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Seems like they had some great concepts that weren't quite executed properly. A perfected version of this gun would be very interesting.
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It appears that WE were fortunate that the Japanese were not able to get going on this rifle. One of the biggest contributions to American victory during WW2 was our weapons. M-1 Garand, M-1 Carbine. Thompson, Colt 1911. The Japanese had nothing that was equal to them. In the end it was superior weapons, tactics, quality and quantity that won the day.
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funny thing is the paterson round is kind of making a come back in the US military.
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would a fluted chamber have helped this firearm?
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Do type 100 smg plz.
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What's with the beeping in the background for the first minutes of this video?
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What's amusing to me about these guns is that the HK style fluted chambers could easily have changed the fate of this rifle.
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The japanese army used lubricated ammo in some other weapons , so I guess they would had figured out .
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Trying to understand why you seem wistful the Japanese didn't iron out the kinks and adopt these rifles. Rifles which would've been fired at US Marines and soldiers. Were the Pedersen clones fundamentally flawed in a way that the Arisakas were actually the better weapon? If large scale deployment of fully developed Japanese Pedersens had happened, would US (and Chinese) lives have been saved or lost?
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Whoa...
I've wanted to see a real example of a pederson for a long time. even finding pictures was hard but actual video...
Thanks Ian! -
Great rifles but would they have stood up to the rigors of combat? That toggle assembly requires precision machining to work. I cant see it working for long when its covered in mud or sand. It looks like it wouid need constant cleaning.
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Phew, relying on a perfect combination of inertia and torque created from the bolt's mass and geometry sounds like this system needs a hell of extremely tight tolerances. No wonder those guns were prohibitively expensive.
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Did Pedersen base his toggle lock design on the Luger design and just modify it, or did he come up with his design completely independently?
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really pretty rifle
IJ having a decent semi-auto gun that could challenge the M1 alone would have made life a lot harder for china and usa/allies, provided IJ got their ammo streamlined,figured the wax out after buying some, and logistics down, and not out of hand like in irl.