The REAL Heroes of the M1 Carbine - not "Carbine" Williams
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- Опубликовано: 8 сен 2024
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The Hollywood-spawned mythos of the M1 Carbine is that it was created by David Marshall "Carbine" Williams. The reality is far different. In real life, Williams was talented, but short-tempered, stubborn, and unable to work effectively as part of a team - and a cohesive, cooperative team is what the M1 Carbine required.
While Williams was off sulking about how the work was being done wrong, a team of Winchester machinists and engineers including William Roemer and Fred Humiston were actually making it happen.
The most impressive anecdote of the whole story, to me, is from when the solitary Winchester prototype broke its bolt in the middle of the final testing. Fred Humiston was representing Winchester at the trials, and he was told that if he could provide a new bolt within 24 hours the gun could continue the trials - but he could not take the gun off the testing ground. So Humiston went back to the Winchester shop and made a new bolt from memory (no drawings yet existed for the gun) and without being able to test-fit it in the gun. When he returned the next day, his new bolt dropped in perfectly, and the gun went on to win the trials. That is an epic feat of skill, and it is really a shame that he does not get more recognition for it.
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Cutting a bolt from memory. Free handing a gas port.... I would show this to a CAD buddy of mine... but he might not survive the video
Some sacrifices must be made....
You mean "Cad Monkey", right?
@@BadWolf762 People who have never touched a actual file.
Lol if only you knew how good an experienced machinist is. I worked with plenty of guys that can eyeball plus minus .002. Must cnc programmers start out on manual machines. By the way machinist is different than operator.
Great story and very educational.
Ian: Can't remember the name of the General in charge of the project.
Also Ian: Spends 15 minutes singing the praises of a forgotten machinist.
This is why I like this channel.
Ian knows his priorities, and the machinist is it.
This is why he has a show and you.. well. Look I don't have a show ether man.
And nobody else remembers that General either
"don't put my name on it, I want nothing to do with this, I absolutely do not want to be known forever as Carbine Williams"
- Carbine Williams
@chris younts The CEO did. As did the team working on it
@peter jones I am so triggered right now. You have triggered me. I'm not even a gun.
@peter jones In fact, the "car-bean" pronunciation is closer to the correct pronunciation of the original French root word "carabinier", meaning a soldier armed with a musket/a musketeer. (I think perhaps it was popular to arm such troops with shorter muskets for extra manouevrability, hence the use of the word?)
This is the same root for the Italian word "carabinieri", which I believe are the dedicated police force for Rome and the Vatican.
Even as an Englishman, in respect of this fact, I tend to use the "-bean" pronunciation, though I do like how "car-bine" sounds. "Custodians of an international and historically-steeped language" bumph aside, if we're going to defend particular pronunciations, they should probably be the more correct/original ones we choose to argue for.
There is, of course, the very valid argument of choosing to say it the anglicized way just to stick it to the French, however, which I will concede is valid. One must always take any given opportunity, as a true-blood Englishman, to stick it to the French.
@peter jones am I looking too far in to this or did you say the last word to jab at how people pronounce things? Idk. Just Wikipedia lol
@peter jones for the record though, my grandfather served in ww2 and was issued a carbine. Never called it anything but a "car-bean." So there is provenance in that.
To build from memory then property heat treat in literally hours is a feat that needs to be brought to light. Thanks ordering the book today.
That was one HELL of a feat. Probably couldn't be duplicated today. Flying by the seat of his ass, forget the pants, ain't got no time for pants.
Yeah and Hollywood will never make a movie about him.
Not as sexy for Hollywood, even if Jimmy Stewart could play anyone, even a humble machinist, in a real true story..
@@Hawk1966 Im in the machining industry..there are thousands of guys who are brilliant AND rough and ready enough to accomplish this. Thousands in an in industry of millions. Unfortunately..they are going to be retiring..and that "thousands" is steadily dropping to "hundreds"...
@@GunnerAsch1 how very true. I'm in Sheffield and I've grown up with the last of the "little mesters", true engineering and machining genius that they were. There's few left now, and in an age that champions degree level education over hands on practical learning, there will be very few people that capable in the coming generations. I once watched two University professors trying to smelt steel in a crucible forge, they were scratching their heads as to why it wasn't working. One of the old boys wandered up, leaned on his walking stick and looked at the fire "That's not hot enough" they disagreed. He then took a bite of the coke they were burning, spat it out and said "nope, you'll never get beyond 1350 degrees with that" , they laughed him off as their IR thermometer read 1500, he wandered off chuckling to himself. Shortly after he left they tried a second thermometer, which read 1338 degrees and try as they might never got the heat any higher. It reminds me of one of my Grandad's sayings, "listen to the guy with dirty hands before you listen to the guy in a clean shirt".
"Williams, you're off the project."
"Fine! I'll go build my own carbine! With blackjack! And hookers!"
Thank you Bender. I believe in you!
"Fine! You can bite my shiny metal ass too!"
I appreciate this reference so much.
In fact, forget the carbine
Ahh screw the whole thing.
I've been a machinist for 40 years now and I can totally dig this story. Most guys who've been in the trade for a while can tell stories about a "save the world job".
Got ya beat, 53 years(but I started when I was nine). I've done prototype parts where the engineer comes in with a sketch and prints and says, "Make it look like this, and make it fit in this print. We'll blueprint it later." A DARPA engineer once told me "Machinist are the guys we go to,to find out if we can do, what we think we can do".
I've been there. I'm not a machinist, but an all-around shop guy. An order came in from the Navy once for a doohicky, to be installed by the crew on a vessel that was sailing in 72 hours. It required design, shearing, forming, welding, punching, tapping, and parts sourcing. I built the whole contraption in two 12 hour shifts and my foreman delivered it about an hour before they sailed. I just wish I'd taken pictures.
(It was a paymaster's window, to be installed in an existing door in the paymaster's office. It had to be all 316 stainless, have an attached folding shelf on one side, bars over the opening, and a slide-up solid security window on the inside with a mechanism to hold it up and secure it down. It couldn't be removed from the outside either, so I used carriage bolts. Luckily we had the door dimensions because we had supplied the original door. I sketched out the basic idea on some graph paper and just hand fitted everything together as I went along. It was _beautiful._ )
@Q Continuum Man, I always wanted to learn EDM. I knew a guy who had one in his garage/shop. Had his own business that was 100% burning broken taps out of high-dollar machinings for companies like Boeing. He retired at something like 52 years old and sold all his equipment. Bastard.
Yeah, I had this blueprint for a radio/com fixture which was meant to go in a Sea King helicopter but the engineer had not thought about how it was supposed to be assembled. As he had drawn it, it was impossible to make. I fixed his design/drawing and sent it back to him,......not even a "thank you".
The drop in bolt should be held in as high a regard as Browning resizing the lever action in a few weeks. Feats like that are extraordinary.
We used to be able to do that sort of thing....still could if certain elements would get out of the way and let us do it.
Perhaps not. Are you familiar with programming? The average programmer has mastery over an enormous number of lines of code that studies have shown they have modeled in their head a very detailed accounting of that code and its properties. The only limiting factor is size and recency. Wait too long since last refreshing knowledge, or exceed a certain size of program and the details get fuzzy.
This feat involves a similar scenario and implies recency and long hard hours of intellectual and manual labour. It is actually less surprising than most of the other elements in the story that the machinist was able to recall his process.
@@Jakugen0 I'd be willing to bet like any good machinist he had brought tools to measure with as well.
@@Jakugen0 Commenting code isn't really possible with rifle bolts though.
@@markfergerson2145 not commenting, I speak of fluency with its mechanisms and names of moving parts, as well as knowing its every property.
Ian's tirade against Hollywood continues
He needs to let his hair loose and go full Messiah.
@@dickimusmaximus9086 the World isn't ready yet.
Shows his British ancestry, Hollywood has been screwing with British history since the invention of film.😉
I am happy about that.
I remember watching that movie about Williams as a kid. The twists of the real story are so much better.
This reminds me a bit of that "local boy saves nation" with the owen smg. Where everyone remembers it for having this mythological creation. When the real heros were the ones who spent all their time figuring out how to make the design work by a deadline.
I like the tension in this story alot more though.
That is a fantastic analogy.
The real heros were the guys that carried it into battle in the field.
@@tarmaque Not really an analogy...more like a second happening of the same type of event.
Rob...sorry. Mr. Williams was a hindrance to the program and did NOT invent the M1 carbine.
What a top story. That machinist was a walking, talking micrometre. I hope he got a pay rise.
I'm not a machinist, but I've worked in the metal fabrication industry for more than 20 years running CNC presses and shears and ironworkers and such. It's quite amazing the feel you get for metal after a while. An example: I was once walking through the shop and saw a plate of steel on the floor by the burning table marked "3/8" and did a double-take. It didn't look like 3/8 to me. I asked the plasma operator if it got mis-marked, and he said he didn't think so, but he agreed with me it didn't look right. I went and got a micrometer and checked it. It should have be .375, but measured .315. That's bigger than 5/16, but smaller than 3/8. It turned out to be a piece of 8mm metric plate. Something we didn't stock, and had probably been mistakenly shipped from the mill. In other words, I had seen approximately a .03 inch discrepancy in the thickness of a piece of plate from about 10 feet away and recognized that fact.
At another job where I used to work with sheet aluminum I used to be able to tell the difference _by feel_ between .125 aluminum and .112 aluminum. Without looking at it. (.112 is just .125 that has been polished. Both had a vinyl protective film on them. That's only a .012 difference.) It's all about familiarity and repetition.
tarmaque I can attest to these “magic” tricks. Unfortunately not personally but through watching other preform them. Trades are no joke. While you were in University learning how to lawyer, doctor or more likely learn Western Native American wedding dance and festival posture, many people were making so many mistakes in the real work that they ran out of them and now only do everything correctly. (University is great, it’s just not for everyone).
@@tarmaque The human touch is an exceptionally sensitive well....sense. You can distinguish between features on a surface on the scale of nanometers with your fingers.
@@tarmaque The human eye can do amazing things when conscious thought isn't getting in the way. Back when I was behind the counter at a shop/range just for fun, I walked in one day and out of the corner of my eye spotted a new consignment gun, some inexpensive single shot rifle. That wasn't the issue, the issue was the weird spidey sense tingle in the back of my head that "something's not right". I picked it up, looks ok... caught a reflection of the fluorescent lights off the barrel and saw a bulge in it about 4" back from the muzzle and about an eighth of a degree of bend. I guess the same light caught on it when I was walking past and gave the same odd reflection, but brain wasn't on-task so sub-brain went "Ooo OOOOOO *points*" which translates to "problem spotted!"
@@slartbarg Indeed, but you still have to learn that. I've seen stage magicians sort playing cards into piles of face cards v/s number cards. It's a skill, but not an easy one to learn.
This would have made a much better movie than the mostly fiction one Hollywood gave us.
Was there ever a Hollywood movie made about the M1 carbine development/ life of David Marshall "Carbine" Williams?
Actually sounds more like an episode of Monster Garage.
@@Drrolfski
From IMDB www.imdb.com/title/tt0044480/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0
Carbine Williams (1952)
This is the story of David Marshall 'Marsh' Williams, the real life inventor of the world famous M-1 Carbine automatic rifle used in WWII. It all started when Marsh, who was one to do things his way, was caught distilling moonshine, and was accused and convicted of shooting a federal officer in the process. This at first placed him in the chain gang which labeled him as a hard case. Later, to make room for those more deserving, he was moved to a prison farm, where he came under the direction of Captain H.T. Peoples. The Captain was a mild mannered warden, who did not shy from discipline when necessary, but also believed that given the opportunity, most men will respond to good. Believing that Marsh was just such a person, the Captain gave him every opportunity to reform, so much so, that he eventually allowed Marsh to work in the tool shop on his spare time to develop and build by hand, a working rifle, inside the prison farm itself.
@@Drrolfski Yes..and it was largely bogus
www.imdb.com/title/tt0044480/
Remember watching the film on the BBC stirred my initial interest in how firearms work.
Carbine Williams. Not to be confused with Full Power Williams.
aleidius or his father Battle Rifle Williams
@@beardoggin8963 Or his grandfather Trapdoor Williams
did you mean "Full Force?"
Lastly Blunderbuss Williams
Or Magnum Williams or his Chinese brother Browning Williams Browning.
"...David Marshal Williams was off sulking in the corner, trying to figure out how to do a better gun, in twice as much time." I'm glad I wasn't drinking something when Ian said this.
I can just imagine him looking like a pouted child with his arms crossed.
"I don't want it perfect. I want it Tuesday."
It reminds me of a quote someone made about Montgomery regarding D-Day. "The plan he'd give us would be utterly perfect, but we'd also still be waiting for it"
Neat fact, Frank Humeston, after leaving Winchester went to High Standard Arms and designed the JC Higgins Model 20 for Sears which evolved into the High Standard Flite-King shotgun.
That has got to be one the best Hail Mary moments I've heard. To do that from memory, on an part that can't even be test fitted before being put back into action is incredible.
I remeber a similar story about the design of the A4 ground attack airplane for the US Navy. History has it that the design team locked itself in an hotel suite and within few days came out with the blue prints for the delopment of the prototype, beating the snout of all other competitors for simplicity of production, structural robustness, minimal dry weight and unbeaten payload.
Sounds lie a great story of Lockheed's "Skunk Works" going into overdrive.
The P39 is the other end.. a good if not great plane from factory.. turned into a fair to good plane by USAAC.
That's the story of the B-52.
_Boeing: Historical Snapshot: B-52 Stratofortress_
www.boeing.com/history/products/b-52-stratofortress.page
@@jayfelsberg1931 I always thought that the real squares are the so-called creatives. Most of them chance their way through life without an ounce of true imagination and brilliance. Engineers work miracles every day of the week.
@@jayfelsberg1931The A4 was a Douglas design
Even back in the day , machinists and engineers had pencils , notebooks , micrometers , calipers etc. Perform prototype machining and engineering for a short period of time and nothing is left to memory .
I'm betting the broken bolt was measured for dimensions and tolerances before heading back to the shop . Great video and much appreciated .
As a side note -> I wish all firearms enthusiasts had a chance to fire an M-2 which I still love after 45 years . Everybody stay safe , healthy & happy .
M2 Carbine is awesome fun.
When you have worked on a machinist project you can in fact remember the dimensions.
@@Willy_Tepes Yes its funny but that's a fact, how you can make a part from memory, but cannot remember somebodies name.
@@andrewmicas4327 I still remember parts numbers from jobs I had 20 years ago. I am a walking encyclopedia of facts no one wants to know. :D
Damn straight. Those guys has slide rules & pencils, no C.A.D. software; their brothers in other project were equally skilled, my favorite example is the fire control "mechanism", for the 16" guns on the Iowa class battleships > It had to factor in and allow for the curvature of the Earth so the round would land on target 25 miles away😲
that's a damn good machinist. i wish i was half that good i can't remember where i laid my scale half the time.
Probably didnt have one to lose
Or does it have to do with what is being weighed?
WHO STOLE MY 5-6" MIC IT WAS RIGHT ....oh it's under the print
If it's not in your hand it should be in your pocket.
Me being a journeyman machinist, I can really appreciate this story and the time crunch that these men had to deal with!
It truly is an amazing story.
When Ian was doing the leadup to the broken-off drill bit, I saw it coming and I'm just a garage "machinist".
As a retired machinist I know what you mean. Plus you get the well meaning individual who offers to put in his 2 cents. After yuo are past the point of no return. We had a boss checking on what his people were doing on th heir jobs. One guy had a job in the lathe. Taking about .020 off. The boss steps in, stops the feed starts another cut after cranking the tool in and stepping up th he feed. "Thats how yo run a lathe". The reply was "that was my finish pass".
“He’s not a team player, short tempered and difficult to work with”.
I really want to have beers with this guy, sounds like basically everyone in InfoSec.
Are they all convicted of murders too?
LOL
@@billbolton Convicted?
Not so far. ;)
Sounds much like a "rockstar programmer" as well; not someone you ever want in your development team. I'd take an average developer who is a team player over a brilliant prima donna anyday.
Rather have a classic scotch or French 75 with him.
"We can design the perfect weapon, but we have a bloody war to fight"
"Perfect is the enemy of good enough"
Some quotes from the chieftain
The US military was seriously considering the 6mm Lee Navy cartridge (.243-cal in a .308 case) leading up to WWII. It was Gen. MacArthur who intervened and insisted on the 30-06
This kind of situation came up when the newspaper corporation I worked for was shifting to online ops and it was REALLY new territory fir us. "Good enough" was considered good enough to get things rolling, and we could always refine it when the crisis eased.
.276 Pederson was the main contender for the Garand
@@ronroberts110 I think his reasoning was logistics but I heard it was moot since the ammo used for MGs and for rifles was different and had different factories?
I think that it might be Russian in origin.
"Final assembly is done on Friday, Sept. 12. They have to submit this gun on Sunday the 15th." You lost a day somewhere.
Oops - I meant Monday the 15th.
Ric I was looking if anyone else noticed.
That year there was an extra leap Saturday.
@@lepuuttelu back then everyone used to hang an onion from their belt, which was the style at the time.
@@kylebradley3 Stop it! You're killing me!!!! BWAHAHAHA!
"Sometimes timelines are critical elements for projects like this" CHAUCHAT INTENSIFIES
I have met people like Humeston. Amazingly talented people.
Interestingly when people talk about why they cannot build engines like they used on the Saturn rockets it's because they had people like him building them. It's not that we cannot build those engines any more, it's because when they left the knowledge of how they were built went with them.
Every single part of those engines had to be tweaked and massaged into place, and there just isn't that much fabrication expertise left. We can 3D-print and CNC an engine to exacting specifications, but that requires the design to be correspondingly accurate, and they didn't have that back then.
Punctuation could make your statement easier to understand.
The rockets we build now are built to far more exacting specifications than the old Saturn rockets, with far lighter AND fewer materials, extremely tight safety factors, and much greater repeatability in the manufacturing process. It isn't that we can't build Saturns anymore, it's that we don't have to. It isn't that the ability disappeared with the passing of the great machinists, it's that the technology and manufacturing techniques have advanced so much we've long passed the need for them. If the need was still there all technical schools would still be teaching those skills at advanced levels today and we'd still be churning them out. The simple fact is that those skills are no longer marketable in the age of micro-precision CNC machines and fully-computerized design. Automation killed the great machinists.
Basically you're just repeating the Damascus steel myth. Nobody knows how to make true Damascus steel anymore because today all we need is the ASME Carbon Steel Handbook.
@@andrewsuryali8540 there isn't any point in speaking with people that perpetuate, "dont make em like they use tah". Just let them believe what they want, because their opinion doesn't change reality.
@Terminal Boy Agreed. Being self-sufficient is important to a nation, but of no importance to international capital. For them, maximum profit and minimum expenses are the only things that matter and thus we get stuff like exported industries and chronic unemployment back home.
That’s what I like about this channel. Interesting stories about the people behind the guns.
Did you know Audie Murphy carried an M1 carbine in combat for almost two years and they recently found it according to the serial number and put it in the U.S. Army museum.
Now that gun has a body count...
How did THAT happen? Is there a story or video??????
Is that a question?
Knew he carried one in ww2,fascinating that it still exists-wonder where it was all those years?
@@akilgour13 It was sent back to be refurbished after the war as it had a cracked stock and was then put into a military warehouse. Someone saw a video of Audie Murphy on a talk show from the 60's where while talking about his carbine he recited the serial number which he still had memorized. They then thought it would be worth searching the surplus weapons to see if they could find it and they did. It was a Winchester. Anyway that's the condensed version.
The way these machinists performed under the pressure of a rapidly approaching deadline reminds me of every project I ever had in school. If only my work yielded something half as good as theirs.
When a million years ago i served in the Italian Carabinieri, we were using M1s as public order batons (!!!).
My heart was bleeding evrey time I had to use such a superb piece of kit just to use as a baton, I asked if I could keep one, but they laughed in my face:-)
After working as a machinist for over 30 years, I have been put that that position many times to make something work with only hours to get it done. THANK YOU, Ian for calling this out.
Sir, Wonderful video as always, and kudos for giving props to the machinist, many times the unsung heroes of weapon inventions/improvements. I have a friend by the name of Vito Cellini. He is a 96 year old WWII veteran, an OSS operative, master machinist with 19 patents to his name. His specialty is stabilizers, which he has tried unsuccessfully over the years to get to the US Troops. In fact, he donated 1,000 of his stabilizers to Delta Force many years ago, and Ross Perot gave him 25k for his donation.
Vito's latest stabilizer was designed for the GAU-5A Aircrew Self Defense Weapon (ASDW) platform which will be part of the pilot's survival kits under the ejection seats of all combat coded A-10, B-1, B-2, B-52, F-15C, F-15E, F-16, and F-22 units. One of my previous bosses (full bird Colonel) was in the process of getting Mr. Cellini a meet a greet with the folks at Lackland who could test the stabilizer...and then the Corona virus hit. Mr. Cellini is definitely bummed about it, but what can you do? Hopefully he can still get there soon.
If you'd like to learn more about this amazing man, you can buy his biography on the internet "CELLNI - FREEDOM FIGHTER". I was playing poker with him last year and someone came up to the table with a book for him to sign. I became curious and struck up a conversation and we have become close friends. In fact, he lives 10 minutes away from me! You can also get a quick synopsis of his life by watching a video I came up with for Vito. You will also see a variety of weapons with his stabilizers to include stock footage of Special Forces testing his creations. I am MC Mike. The guy in the video with the beard with no grey in it is Brandon Lacey, the guy who filmed and edited the video. Enjoy! ruclips.net/video/XgtkXA1_1js/видео.html or just do a search for Vito Cellini in RUclips - it is the 23 minute video.
"That's an impressive collection on your bookshelf."
"What bookshelf? That's just the spare gun-rack that I also use to store all my books."
That is a miraculous story! The skill needed to make a replacement bolt from memory is just astounding. Thanks!
My grandad (whom I mentioned in your previous M1 Carbine video), while he still had some of his faculties, told me a little bit about working for Standard Products during the war. Mainly, he said that the walnut stock blanks were part of German war reparations from the Great War (possibly, but might have been something someone said to him). Grandad went on after the war to largely invent a rubber encapsulation technique for impact absorption for tank crews, which is still used today.
A great example of what my OR professor preached “quick and dirty” beats “slow and clean” in the real world.
Well ish. Right first time does
What is an "OR" professor please ? Nice quote and thanks .
Ehh, having come in afterwards to fix a bunch of 'quick and dirty' things on the IT side... Yea, it may work, but you really want to pencil in time to actually come by again and fix it properly. Because if you don't, the 'quick and dirty' will stay in use until it bites you on the ass later, sometimes to the tune of 'why o why god did we not fix this when we had the time'.
Well yes and no. Certain workers are allowed to do the job "quick and dirty" but woe betide another worker who does quick and dirty.
Personally, I'd rather do the job 100% right coz I know I'll end up paying for it later if its found to be 80% right.
As someone who has had to deal with a lot of problems caused by "quick and dirty" fixes, no. That is ALWAYS to be a last resort. Do it right the first goddamn time.
Ya know, I hope Ian does a video on Edwin Pugsley someday. The man was amazing.
Having worked as a toolmaker for a while now Im sure they were making drawings and taking notes as time when by
Hey Ian I just wanted to say that I really really like these "video essays", my favourite parts about your normal videos are where you give the gun context and this is even more that.
Not only excellent information on the M1 and its development process, but also a fantastic bit of storytelling, Ian! Hopefully we can have even more of these Fire(side)arm Chats with Ian in the future!
I hope you make more of these type of videos, the kind of "Christmas miracle" stories. I really enjoyed this one.
I would guess he took the broken bolt with him , the gun has to stay but I wouldn't think a broken part would count , still a remarkable feat
Or he snuck it with him. He left the gun there like everyone wanted, nobody noticed the bolt was missing from it.
Edwin Pugsley has got to be the most weaselly sounding name ever. Even if he was a stand up guy, that name just sounds like an absolute martinet.
The M1 carbine is my favorite US surplus gun. It also handles well and is easy to shoot.
In my experience in the aerospace industry, we called the high level draftsmen "designers". These guys were great to work with. You could describe a problem you were having and they would come up with solutions that were practical and buildable. My father was this type of designer at an Army weapons lab that did fuses for everything from mortal shells to nukes. He even worked on the design of the bomb bay of the B-52. What these guys did was often incredible. He even did layouts of integrated circuits, up to the maximum size that a human could do. The drawings, that drove the manufacturing process were 35' long. After that it took software to do this.
I feel like there could almost be a full series just on the "Real Heroes of XYZ Gun".
As an engineer this story of the bolt replacement sounds unbelievable! The mind and skill of this machinist sounds awesome.
There used to be a lot of these guys in the world. Now, with all the 'engineers' and 'CNC operators', they have become very few.
The crew that put it together sound like Scotty from Star Trek.
Captain "I need this up and running."
Scotty "Aye Captain, the manual says three days. Get back to me in two."
Captain "You have an hour."
45 minutes later
Scotty "Here you go. She's not pretty, and I ain't guaranteeing nothing. But it will work once."
"The sequencers bypass like a Christmas tree, so dinna give me too many bumps"
As a machinist with a lot of prototyping experience I totally get this. When you're on a job like this your mind is constantly working out the problems and figuring out the math, and I can see how he remembered the specs for the bolt.
It's a machinist thing, and the best seem to have ADD and COD while their mind is working the problems.
I have 2 books on the M1 Carbine. First is U.S. M1 Carbines, Wartime Production by Craig Riesch and the other is M1 Carbine Carbine Owner's Guide by Larry L Ruth with Scott A Duff.
This proves the advantages of having one skilled machinist who is familiar with the intimate details of the product. Thanks so much for a great story.
This is *officially* my FAVORITE gun (design) story EVER.
It's also a great argument against my own perfectionist tendencies XD
Building something from memory..... holy crap that's *impressive*
I love hidden stories like this. Behind the scenes miracles. And then that gun goes on to play the part of history that it does.
Army: bolt broke you have 24 hours to fix.
Humeston: shit hold my beer watch this (crafts perfect bolt from memory)
Here you go
Army: congrats you win for being awesome.
Gun Machinist Makes Gourmet Carbine Bolt
Hold my beer? Nah, he didnt have time to ask that
He just dropped the beer, did the work and grabbed the glass again before it could touch the ground
and Chuck Norris said, "Wow!"
@@Italianchef26Machinists prefer the metallic tang of a canned beer.
The classic underdog football team overcomes all odds and in the last seconds throws a hail mary and wins. Love it.
Hahaha... sounds like one day every six months as a Machinist here in Switzerland. Boss comes running in "we need something. It's gotta be Perfect, we have only one piece of material, we need it yesterday and it's gotta be cheap" XD
Cheap? In Switzerland?
@@terry7907 cheap to produce. The selling price will be high of course. All hail to the profit margin 😉
A firearms designer, possibly Mikail Kalashnikov, once stated making a complex firearm is easy, the true skill is making it simple. The M-1 Carbine IS a very simple design and that's what makes it so outstanding. As with book Ian references, it was a result of some very talented people who did show the true skill.
The brilliance of using your books on the shelf as an improvised gun rack!
One of the Engineers I used to work with, told stories about his Grandfather working at Winchester back in the 30's thru the 50's. He was hired away from a Detroit Automaker for his skill at producing tooling. His job at Winchester was to produce prototype gun parts and tooling for production. The important of building guns isn't only the design of the gun, but the design of the tooling for the guns. You can design really great guns all day, but if you can't mass produce them than you're done. For instance, Browning was not only good at designing guns he also helped design much of the tooling needed to build the guns. Garand, Pederson, Maxim, and Stoner were all well known for doing the same thing. However Williams wasn't quite so talented. He liked to hand build his stuff and then figure out the drawings and specifications. He was a good intuitive gun designer with limited engineering education (eighth grade education and self taught after that point.). He would go to Winchester machinists and demand they recreate what he built, but without the detailed drawings to do the job. It drove them and the engineers crazy especially as the demand for their guns increased closer to the war.
That was one of your best stories Ian - GREAT!!!!!!!
Absolutely a great video and story! Thank you so much for taking the time to tell it!
Wow! That was an awesome story man. Definitely agree with you, anyone capable of doing what that dude did, in regard to the replacement bolt, deserves recognition.
Great video! Having been a tool and die designer and manufacturing engineer for the better part of 40 years this truly is an amazing story of the development of this iconic project.
I was lucky enough to be part of the development of the M60 E3 feeding mechanism as a vendor for Saco Defense, now known as General Dynamics Armament Division.
The original M60 design was as you know was a proven weapon that for the better part of at the time of the early 1980’s had been in service for almost 25 years.
When the E3 lightweight design was proposed there were many aspects the were looked at to remove weight from the gun.
One of which was the feeding mechanism.
So having been through this first hand in seeing the mistakes that were made in that project makes the M1 carbine prototype and trial performance all the more amazing that it was accomplished in that time frame from essentially one man’s recollection and skill all the more astonishing.
Thank you Ian for your sharing this with your great insight and flair.
This is like several miracles in a row and should be made into a movie!
Your story telling is just special. One would think that you had been there. Thanks for the rest of the story.
Please do more of these history lessons, Ian.
This was an amazing watch!
Mad respect for machinists, that stuff almost seems easy until you see how quickly and easily an experienced machinist works
Seriously, the real story is so much better than the Hollywood version. Why the heck is this not more well known?
Write up a treatment and try selling the idea to producers. Prepare for years of effort.
The enthusiasm you put into your stories is infectious.
The reality: talented people matter, and so does luck.
I closely follow vintage aviation as well and have heard this type of story time and time again. Very often the Designer's concept was saved by the machinists and fabricators who just "knew" what would and wouldn't work. When the Design Office and the Prototype Shop worked in close collaboration magic could happen.
That machinist was a genius, the likes of those who built the Saturn V rockets.
BANNED FROM VEGAS.. would have been a heck of a card counter!
Yup. The machining that went in to those F1 engine injector plates was amazing.
Thank you Ian. I enjoyed geeking out along with you as a former Master Technician. More please.
Great story. You brought out the personalities and stresses involved very well. I only knew about the guy who was a perfectionist and made the gun by himself. This is a much better story. It should be a movie. Hollywood will never make it. American know-how and perseverance in action. Thanks for sharing.
And to think, they made a movie about Williams and he took “Carbine” as his moniker/nickname. I got my copies of War Baby, and II nearly 20 years ago, but this was a very nice telling of the story. A small part of my deep and undying love of the M1 Carbine. It is the most fantastic small arms story of WWII hands down.
Damn impressive to make it from memory and it work perfectly
My Dad was a bazookaman in Germany very late in the War. He carried the tube, of course, and Avery, his loader, carried the carbine. Dad said they hated it. It was built by Underwood, and when they would get in a firefight, the carbine would disassemble itself!
Not a great confidence builder.
Much as I love the regular videos this sort of thing is what I aadore - details about specifics, debunking myths and both eduacational and informative, as ever. Oh and in pretty much any form of engineering the assumption is that if it goes right first time you've missed something important and it's going to go hideously wrong at a random point in the future. Much like it is almost impossible to reassemble something and not have screws left over (I swear the things breed when you aren't looking!)
Oh lord, I am a mechanical design engineer and I unfortunately see myself in Williams, not the sulk but the deliberation to get a design right. Search for perfection but if you can't find it commit to the best design in hand. As for the machinist that built the carbine from the internal design in his head, damm, that is fantastic. I can't do that, I can design it and make a drawing then build it. No where near as good as a toolmaker machinist. You putting him up as the real hero of the initial design is spot on.
Ian,
The extra content you've been giving us lately such as this video and the fakiest fake berth video is awesome. Keep up the good work sir.
Winchester manager Mr. Pugsley is an amazing man. This book is a must read. So is "Beyond The Muzzle: The Firearms Instructor and Shooter Development Guide, Author Bettis".
The only way to avoid the whole "Carbine, Carbean" is to call it either Carabine, or long short rifle. Yeah, long short rifle sounds good
But is it a long short-rifle, or a short long-rifle?? xD
Carabine is a type of hook for ropes
@@zacht9447 That's a carabin*er*. Carabine is what it does. Right? ;>)
@@zacht9447 Carabine was the weapon carried by Carabiniers
When people disagree with how I pronounce words that were pulled from another root language and do so annoyingly, I tend to deliver muzzle strikes with my long short rifle.
That is an epic story of “getting it done” and “failure is not an option”
Imagine the trepidation of Fred the machinists on the first trigger pull of the replacement bolt?!
Well done
No worries... we got whole weekend, to test and fix a brand new prototype we've never fired before, it's fine!
*telephone calls*
Uhhh guys, turns out we only got Saturday.
...
I think this is the best thing you have done; real heroes, no nonsense, a true glimpse into history.
A clip fed M1 Carbine would have been terrible now that I think about it...
The idea that the M1 Garand actually works with a clip… I just can’t understand how that gun is so “amazing”
@@Swat_Dennis gotta put yourself in the time. They're coming from a bolt action rifle that's doctrine, and all of a sudden you can rock and roll the gun empty in the time most recruits can cycle the bolt twice. Stripper clip be damned that's firepower.
@@Hawk1966 It's not a stripper clip, that's why it's looked on fondly.
Hard to imagine an en bloc clip the size of a metchbox and a tiny very high pitched "thiiing" when expelled.
In a way, it would be ridiculously funny, and tragically impractical.
The Garand is an absolutely amazing rifle. It's a full power cartridge without worrying about the stripper clip or needing to be really proficient with reloading. You'd get a good idea of how great the rifle is if you actually shoot one compared to a bolt action.
I've noticed that with each subsequent generation following WW2, there is more more reliance on (for a lack of a better term) external memory and calculation devices such as notepads, iPads, etc., such that many young people today think it astounding that older generations can remember things like phone numbers of all their friends and relatives, recipes from an entire cookbook without having to look it up, or multiple place arithmetic calculations. Both of my grandparents never went to college, but could do 3 or more place multiplications in their head - not even needing a scratchpad. Then there is me who have to spend nearly an hour trying to find my *&@! car keys because I forgot I left it on the coffee table.
Forgotten Weapon Stories, love it.
“A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week” - George Patton - applies to this situation as well..
Great bit of history. I don’t remember that being in the James Stewart movie.
Not sexy enough for Hollywood. Ernest Borgnine could have played the machinist
That is worthy of a movie, the amount of drama and tension involved is amazing.
Ian, you are a fantastic history communicator! Thank you for the great story!
Amazing story. Would be really interesting in hearing about the other carbine submissions to these trials.
Your story telling prowess is on par with Samuel Clemens-Mark Twain!
Great story. Humiston must have been an absolutely incredible machinist. That is quite a feat. That is why i have long heard that any halfway competent engineer will work closely with an experienced machinist. The machinist keeps the engineer grounded and will tell him or her what is and is not feasible from a manufacturing and assembly standpoint. Engineers are notorious for coming up with brilliant technical designs that are completely impractical to actually make. Anyway, i had heard that War Baby is a good book. Thanks for confirming it. Great video as always. Thank you
#AskIan
Ian, sorry for maybe a dumb question:
Are assault rifles actually a true "evolutionary" form of SMG?
I mean, original SMGs appeared because there was a need for light automatic weapon. Rifle rounds were too much for that. Fedorov ended up using the lightest rifle round available, italians and many others came to use second available option ie pistol rounds. Both of those were result of using available ammo for new idea. WWI was also the time when the first intermediate rounds appeared later on as bold as it was creating a completly new round out of nowhere in the eyes of military instead of using available reserves. And on the other end of timeline chinese had been calling assault rifles as SMGs for decades and even nowadays we see both intermediate rounds and rifle rounds used by infantry together.
Sorry for failing to shape the idea properly before writing it down.
Depends what you mean by "evolutionary", submachine guns didn't slowly make incremental changes until they reached the point of being considered assault rifles. Sub machine guns through world war 2 and shortly after were becoming simpler, lighter, smaller and cheaper. Assault rifles weren't.
The StG44 has a fundamentally different operating mechanics than previous submachine guns, it has a locked breech, fires from a closed bolt and is operated by a gas piston. That's far more like all the many self-loading service rifles being developed at the time, the difference is you can't put a full-auto switch on a garand, the rounds are too powerful. But because the StG44 used a less powerful round this allowed full-auto.
That sounds less like the SMG evolved and more like a separate invasive species drove the SMG to the brink of extinction. If we're using the animal analogy.
Going off of old Q&A with Ian and Carl: The initial adopters of assault rifles came to a similar weapons platform while trying to fix a different issue. Germany wanted more effective rifle fire and their field test results showed that combat was happening within 300m which allowed their automatic rifle development team to scale down the cartage, though they did go through a political pressure phase and were branding it an SMG for some reason. Whereas the Russians were simply trying to improve their SMGs and figured further effective range was needed and they scaled it up; which due to their inability to reliably stamp parts perceived need for a rifle lead to a weird phase where they were running SKS and AKs simultaneously.
edit: short answer: no; long answer: yes
They have largely displaced SMGs from military service, but then again we are talking about the relatively recent adoption of carbine length rifles by armies and police forces across the world.
Also SMGs are still around fulfilling niche uses for armed forces and will still be used by police for the foreseeable future.
From what I have read (between the lines of history) the "assault rifle" (which to my knowledge has no unified definition) is a blend of the carbine, and the SMG.
Early carbines were full sized rifles with short barrels made to be more handy. Recoil was brutal, since they still chambered full rifle calibers, but they were very mobile and not used often. Early machine guns were also full rifle caliber, and then somebody have the idea to make a portable version and eventually that evolved into pistol caliber sub machine guns. On a separate track, carbines started to get their own special calibers, usually just shortened rifle calibers, more make the carbine easier to operate. Finally somebody looked at the intermediate carbine round, and the full auto SMG and thought "Sturmgewehr!" The STG44 (storm rifle 1944) is often credited as the first "assault rifle" probably not 100% true, but accurate as a practical matter.
@@mitchellpatterson1829 .30 Carbine is better example here with its weird round. But yes, I see your point.
@@Treblaine I mean if the military and designers weren't constrained by costs and time, they would have designed smaller rifle round or bigger pistol round for this purpose back when SMGs first appeared. Ie SMG was an attempt to make AR, but with available tech. So when they have gotten the budget for new round, it had obviously gotten new mechanism to work with it. But the purpose, niche and driving idea was always the same. It's not blimp vs helicopter situation in my eyes, but rather an gyrocopter and helicopter. Hopefully that describes my thought process clearly enough.
It's almost like Ian just bought one of those M1 carbines from royal tiger, has it laying around fresh on his mind and is pumping out M1 carbine content to fill time during quarentine
I love this. You should do more "Gun stories" like this. There must be soo much weird stuff like this in history
I was/am somewhat an amateur machinist. The house I grew up in had a small lathe in the basement I could play with and make model cannons that actually fired etc. The point is I kind of have an idea as to what's involved in turning out a rifle bolt and the tale you just told is amazing. The gentleman must of been the Merlin of Machinists. To have it work first time is incredible. A bolt action ok but an automatic is a totally different kettle of fish so to speak. It has so many facets that need to come together perfectly its really impossible to put into words what was accomplished. Divine intervention?
Thanks again for another entertaining and educational post.
Only 6 Comments when I found the video?! Last time I was this early, the musket was still the height of gun technology!
Hahahahaha, good one.
11:53 i worked in machine workshop, i never had broken drill so i expectet that drill would catch itself and rifle would start spining and flying all ower the place... happens a lot :D