According to wiki, the 8mm Chauchat was OK but we (the US) blew it with the 30-06 redesign. Who would have thunk it? Chauchat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Dave
Dave, I don't think so; look at the dates... The redesign was the M1918....but it had been in service with the French for some years before that; that's when these mentioned problems came to light... In the muddy trenches of northern France several operational problems came to light. Most of these were a side effect of the economical construction and in particular of the open-sided, semi-circular magazines. Those allowed for the ingress of dirt and were the cause of 2/3 of all stoppages. The Chauchat's construction was composite thus not fully consistent in terms of parts quality. The recoiling barrel sleeve as well as all the bolt moving parts were precision milled from solid steel and always fully interchangeable. The barrels were standard Lebel barrels that had been shortened from the muzzle end. The barrel radiators were made of ribbed cast aluminum. On the other hand, the outer breech housing was a simple tube, betraying Gladiator's pre-war activities in motorcycle manufacturing. The rest of the gun was built of stamped metal plates of mediocre quality. Side plate assemblies were held by screws that could become loose after prolonged firing. The sights were often misaligned on the Gladiator-made guns, creating aiming problems that had to be corrected by the gunners. The exact number on record of Chauchat machine gun manufactured between 1916 and the end of 1918 is 262,300. The Gladiator factory manufactured 225,700 CSRGs in 8 mm Lebel plus 18,000 in the US caliber .30-06 between April 1916 and November 1918. In other words, while the Amercian-calibre weapon was ..."abysmal"....the French 8mm version had ALREADY been rubbish! "The rest of the gun was built of stamped metal plates of mediocre quality. Side plate assemblies were held by screws that could become loose after prolonged firing." Apparently there was little in the way of "interference" fit between components or the sideplates, the whole thing was aligned by the screwholes simply being countersunk!!! These would of course take a terrible battering...and thus even when tightened up again when they lossened off, the alignment between sideplates and the components beneath them wouldn't be exact any more....!:p "the survey's essential conclusion was that the open sided magazines were defective and caused about two thirds of all stoppages. Loose earth, grit and other particles easily entered the gun through these open-sided magazines, an ever present risk in the muddy environment of the trenches." The Wiki article doesn't mention either that the construction of the banana magazine was really just plain cheap, thin pressed steel; in the heat of battle, it was very easy to deform the magazine when attaching/detaching it! That didn't help the magazine feed either... Personally, I don't think anything could exonerate the Chauchat, except...perhaps...that this was war, and when they DID work, they killed the enemy.
Here's an interesting little note... As to the U.S. Marines, they had initially received .30-06 chambered Lewis Guns, but had to exchange them for Chauchats after their arrival in France (This was the result of an old feud between Mr. Lewis and the superior officer in charge of the U.S. Ordnance Department Lewis had another problem - his design was far more closely cribbed from Sam Maclean's original than most references say And one of the reasons Lewis was so insistent about the Lewis Gun NOT being used without its cooling jacket was apparently that doing so would reveal just HOW closely!!! But nevertheless it was used in that way in may occasions on the Western Front, and in doing so it was found that the cooling jacket wasn't actually necessary....and of course it just happened to make the weapon far easier and lighter to use from the hip or shoulder by one man!
When it comes to bad conversions, German engineers have also shown some skill This abomination was the result of an attempt to convert the Chauchat to 8mm Mauser
Well that got a solid 'what the actual f-ing f?' from me, but I suppose there's a logic to not having to re-engineer the entire well & just use what's there.
