Operation
The Lanchester is an open bolt, self-loading blowback operated weapon with a selective-fire option (located in front of the trigger) on early versions. A tubular receiver was attached to the front of the wooden stock, which could be pivoted barrel down for maintenance and disassembly. The wooden stock was patterned after that of Lee-Enfield rifle, and a bayonet lug centred below the muzzle accepted the 1907-pattern knife-bayonet.
It used a straight 50-round magazine containing 9mm Parabellum cartridges (special pouches were produced to hold three magazines each) which fitted fed into a brass magazine housing from the left, with spent cartridges ejected on the right. It was interchangeable with the shorter 32-round Sten magazine. Stripping of cartridges into the magazine was aided by a catch on the top of the receiver.
Mk.1s featured a front blade sight with adjustable rifle-type sights, marked between 100–600 yards. Mk.1* featured a much simplified flip-up sight marked 100 or 200 yards.
Manual safety is made in the form of locking cut, made in the receiver, which engages the bolt handle to lock bolt in open (cocked) position. It proved notoriously susceptible to accidental discharge if the weapon were dropped. For cleaning the weapon had a brass oiler bottle and pull through held inside the butt stock (similar to the Lee-Enfield rifle).
Read more about this topic: Lanchester Submachine Gun
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.”
—Francis Bacon (1560–1626)
“Waiting for the race to become official, he began to feel as if he had as much effect on the final outcome of the operation as a single piece of a jumbo jigsaw puzzle has to its predetermined final design. Only the addition of the missing fragments of the puzzle would reveal if the picture was as he guessed it would be.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
“You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don’t have, at the back of your minds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)