The Down Range Forum
Member Section => Down Range Cafe => Topic started by: Hazcat on February 06, 2015, 12:00:59 PM
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Excluding the occasional gun hipster who throws out “Maxim!”, most gun hobbyists, when asked who the greatest firearms designer of all time was, will answer without hesitation, and with a tone of almost worshipful reverence “John Moses Browning”.
It’s difficult to argue with this. Others designed mechanisms more clever (Pedersen, for example), or laid more pivotal foundations for future work (e.g., Maxim), but none produced so many designs that dominated their respective competition for so long. Browning has not one, not two, not three, but many timeless classics to his name, including the M2 machine gun, the M1911 handgun, the FN M1905 “Baby Browning”, the FN Model 1910 (a handgun that, while less popular in the US, had an incredibly long production life at FN, only being discontinued in 1983, and that was the only single firearm to start a world war), the Browning Hi-Power, Winchester Model 1894, Browning Auto-5, and Ithaca 37.
It was therefore a real treat to tour the John M. Browning Firearms Museum in Ogden, UT, the place of Browning’s birth. The museum is small, and resides in he second floor of the old Ogden train station. The facade of the museum (itself also inside the train station – there is little indication from the outside that one of the most important pilgrimage sites for the shooting sports is there), is so adorned with modern products of the Browning Firearms company, that when I first poked my head up the twisted iron staircase, I became a little worried at the thought that the well-presented glass cases inside would only contain representative examples of Browning firearms, and not any historically relevant artifacts. Not helping this worry was the case of (functional) miniature firearms that, while neat, were not really what I came to the museum to see.
Much more including pictures; http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2015/01/30/tfb-field-trip-john-m-browning-firearms-museum/
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Maxim may have armed ALL the WWI armies but the Browning is still in use with little change beyond removing the water jacket.
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Very neat. I'll try to keep that in mind if I ever make it out that way.
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It will be along time before we replace the m 2, at least 50 years, maybe more. It is the best anti light vehicle weapon in the hisory of fire arms, I don't see that changing any time soon.
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When I was in the army I worked on M2 and M85 .50 caliber machine guns. The M85 had dual rates of fire, was 20 pounds lighter, and small enough to fit in the cupola of the M60 series tanks, but after the M1 tanks came out they switched back to the Ma Deuce. It's been in service 82 years so far and will likely serve well over 100 years. 99% of them I worked on were made at AC Spark Plug in Flint about a mile or so from where I lived.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M85_machine_gun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M2_Browning
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Miniaturize this,