Design Details and Accessories
The M1918 is a selective fire, air-cooled automatic rifle using a gas-operated long-stroke piston rod actuated by propellant gases bled through a vent in the barrel. The bolt is locked by a rising bolt lock. The gun fires from an open bolt. The spring-powered cartridge casing extractor is contained in the bolt and a fixed ejector is installed in the trigger group. The BAR is striker fired (the bolt carrier serves as the striker) and uses a trigger mechanism with a fire selector lever that enables operating in either semi-automatic or fully automatic firing modes. The selector lever is located on the left side of the receiver and is simultaneously the manual safety (selector lever in the "S" position – weapon is "safe", "F" – "Fire", "A" – "Automatic" fire). The "safe" setting blocks the trigger.
The weapon's barrel is screwed into the receiver and is not quickly detachable. The M1918 feeds using double-column 20-round box magazines, although 40-round magazines were also used in an anti-aircraft role; these were withdrawn from use in 1927. The M1918 has a cylindrical flash suppressor fitted to the muzzle end. The original BAR was equipped with a fixed wooden buttstock and closed-type adjustable iron sights, consisting of a forward post and a rear leaf sight with 100 to 1,500 yard range graduations.
As a heavy automatic rifle designed for support fire, the M1918 was not fitted with a bayonet mount and no bayonet was ever issued. Only one experimental bayonet fitting was ever made for the BAR by Winchester. This was a standard, M1917 bayonet fitted at the Winchester factory with a special muzzle ring. The bayonet was attached to a standard M1918 BAR by means of a special experimental flash hider assembly. This prototype bayonet/flash hider assembly came from the Winchester in-house factory museum in New Haven, Connecticut with a tag printed on one side Winchester Repeating Arms Co./New Haven Conn., and handwitten on the other side: Combined Flash Hider, Front Sight and Bayonet Mount for Browing Automatic Rifle Model 1918 with Bayonet and Scabbard and the date - September 7, 1918. There is no evidence whatsoever of military adoption nor a military stock number, name, or classification.
Read more about this topic: M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle
Famous quotes containing the words design, details and/or accessories:
“You can make as good a design out of an American turkey as a Japanese out of his native stork.”
—For the State of Illinois, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Patience is a most necessary qualification for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request. One must seem to hear the unreasonable demands of the petulant, unmoved, and the tedious details of the dull, untired. That is the least price that a man must pay for a high station.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Men who care passionately for women attach themselves at least as much to the temple and to the accessories of the cult as to their goddess herself.”
—Marguerite Yourcenar (1903–1987)