You can't miss those buildings if you are sitting on a train. The buildings are right next to the tracks and there's a huge KIVÄÄRITEHDAS (Rifle factory) sign on the wall.
@@danielescobar7618 My girlfriend lives in one of these renovated apartments. Big windows and thicker concrete walls than I've ever seen anywhere before, something like 40cm thick. Also these peculiar wide "windowsills" made of concrete. The height of the room is something like 3m. But because of the old ventilation systems, it gets very cold during winter. The air intake is from the bathroom ceiling, so on cold days, the incoming air is nearly as cold as the outside, so when it's -20 degrees celsius it makes the toilet a bit... uncomfortable. :D
Even the army didn´t teach troops to clean the recoil spring, it was trained in the Civil Guards. So during the winter war soldiers issued with LS-26 had some issues with reliability, unless the soldier was lucky to be trained in the Civil Guards. I happen to know a war veteran who was a light machine gunner during the continuation war and according to him, with proper cleaning and maintenance LS-26 runs reliably. Biggest disadvantage comparing to the Soviet DP-27 is small magazine capacity. That´s biggest reason why he preferred DP-27.
So all the people who ran it post war didn't maintain it properly either? While all DP-28's in existence were properly maintained? Ok, good to know. Thanks for the info.
@@TheArklyte DP does not need maintenance :) That thing has still record of least number of parts of any locked breech automatic weapon. LS was finicky, but doable in field with trained crew. 20 round mags, fed from bottom was the killer. ZBs for example also had 20 round mags, but from top feed, every mag change is 2+ seconds less fumbling. DP had 47rd mag (even some tank DPs in ground use with even higher capacity). LS served till the end of wars in 1945 on infantry units, there were just so much captured DPs that many units were capable of running solely with them.
War in north was many tines small unit clashes in middle of nowhere. If holders of recent battlefield, Finns tended to dump enemy weapons to some lake or swamp, but DPs were carried home even from distant wilderness. There was need to start domestic magazine production for them. Rarely enemy captures outnumber to such degree own standard issue in any class of weapons.
The US M60 has a reputation for unreliability. I carried one for one field problem, I cleaned it every day, and it ran like a top. The other gunner in the platoon wasn't as fastidious and his pig had issues.
From following discussions elsewhere, the age of a particular gun was also an issue. Soldiers who used new guns swore by it; those who got worn ones swore AT it...
At this point I feel I owe it to Ian to try my best to increase his engagement numbers as much as possible whenever a Finnish firearm video is posted. Please do the same, guys!
Uncommon gun, but the complete parts sets were available in the US many years ago and they were very nice. It's a shame the guns get cut up but they make great example guns to see how everything works. The LS-26 was one of the more interesting parts sets I've owned since the barrel and entire locking system was still intact and only the boxy 'receiver' had been cut. Mocked up, the gun would still hand cycle and display fairly well.
Damnit, Ian, you did it! You made a tie-in from a Finnish LMG to your book on the guns of Chinese warlords! That's such a subtle plug, hat's off to you.
Based on all the WW2 history I've seen, in Russian designs the realities of mass production and achieving production numbers that actually matter always seemed to be kept in mind from the very beginning. Somehow it almost feels like the opposite of Finnish weapon design, which led to expensive guns slow to manufacture.
@@herrakaarme I think it matter for military that chose such design in the end, but for designers it was different. As you may know there were lots of competing designs in Soviet trials and Finland simply didn't have luxury to choose the best, as there simply was no internal competition.
Just because the prop department in the original movies were lazy and just took some old guns and put some random parts on them to make them look sci-fi instead of designing something new.
@@Immopimmo Or more like pragmatic? Why design something from the ground up when adding some greebles to existing firearms did the trick just as well? That not only worked well with the aesthetics Star Wars was going for (rugged, sort of gritty, foreign but something that looks like it was made to actually work), made blank firing props a breeze, and no doubt helped reduce the costs.
@@MosoKaiser Yeah, but nowadays you can't watch a single video on a 19th-20th century gun without some dumb star wars fan commenting on how it would make a great blaster. :p
Someone claimed you can load the magazines up to 15 rounds without a tool, if you go rim first and rotate, like loading a Winchester 1895 without a clip. I don't have a LS magazine to hand, but if you got one I'd be interested to know how it goes.
The LS-26 may have been superseded in front-line use by the KvKK 62 in the 1960's, but I remember still carrying an LS-26 on maneuvers in 1980. The coastal artillery had a bunch of old weapons still in stock for training and fortress defence; we also had Finnish model Mosin-Nagant rifles (that we were trained to disassemble and assemble -- including taking the bolt apart -- with a rucksack over our heads in under a minute) and Maxims, although our personal weapons were 7,62 RK 62's (Finnish AK's) and we did have KvKK's as well. But then some of our artillery dated back to 1905...
I would counter that "didn't get along that well", with sounds like they got along very well; they were Fin's. As proof, the military man helped push it all the way through military trials. If you every meet two Fins, at the same time, who have been neighbors for decades, maybe you could introduce them to each other.
I wish you'd take a course on the subject at a university. I'd not only never miss a class, I'll be wide awake in all of them. You're a wonderful storyteller ( rather , a 'raconteur ' par excellence)
@@NexnDystxpia Russian small arms development was like that across the board, more or less. Designers openly collaborated with each other, so you'll see a lot iteration on existing ideas. I don't specifically know what ideas Kalashnikov contributed, but he absolutely did find the right iteration.
Aimo Lahti was the John Browning of Finnish weapon designing. He developed the Suomi KP/-31 SMG, the Lahti L-35 pistol and the Lahti L-39 Anti-Tank rifle, all of which would see lots of use during WW2. He also designed the Finnish modifications to the Maxim MG. Some of his more rare designs was the Sampo L-41 MMG which went through trials in the Finnish Army during the 1940s. The gun itself was air-cooled and belt fed machine gun and was capable of firing the 7,62/53R rounds 600-800 Rounds per minute. The Sampo was shelved after it had numerous problems while the gun was tested and only 35 examples were ever made.
'they didn't get along' Sounds like the fresh out of school engineer had a chip on his shoulder and looked down upon the degreeless, but very talented designer. Seen it before.... Several times
Question about Finnish military organization & doctrine - based on what Ian said about how the first soldiers issued the lmg didn't know to clean out the packing grease, it leads me to believe there wasn't an intermediary who would have prepped the gun for use. Did they not have armorers as we know them today? Can someone with more knowledge of the Finnish military during the Winter War/Continuation War explain the organizational setup?
I wonder if that "accelerator" would be better described as a "decelerator" for the barrel and extension? Build the geometry right and it would *significantly* reduce the impact forces when that big mass comes to a stop by smoothly transferring the motion into the bolt.
I waited till I got to my friends house to watch this so I could put it on their fancy telly and stand right up close to get a good look at that wall 🤣🔥
So I'm gonna guess the recoil assembly got stuck during retraction and just stayed like that until it was opened and bumped forward. I wonder if someone just said forget the recoil assembly and connected something like a bed spring to the charging handle and heat shield
I'd hate to be the soldier to the right of the machinegunner. It seems to spit out empty cartridges straight to the right at a very high speed. I guess better for the gunner than a MAG that piles up hot cartridges under the gun and they start getting into your sleeves...
I was in the artillery and we got some basic training for these still in 1991. The damn box cover dropped and squeezed my thumb black. Also it was said not to load more than five rounds in the cartridge, to avoid jams.
I have understood that Aimo wanted to design a gas operated gun but the army specifically told him not to. After designing LS-26 he started to design the gas operated gun he wanted to design but was forbidden earlier, this gun become the LS-34 which was the better gun, but the army wasn´t interested in buying them since they had already bought many of the LS-26´s. This was a real blunder in part of the Finnish army.
at some point he's going to take random parts off a bunch of different guns and frankenstein them together then play it off as some obscure Finnish gun and none of us will be the wiser
Hey Ian; if you were a mad recluse with a radical idea for a firearm action specifically geared for answering the 'quickest-burstfire-possible' question (Antonov AN-94, H&K G11,) but located in Canada and with pretty much no funding to back it (the 'mad recluse' thing.) , who would you go to in Canada to further explore the idea? Would you think any weapon techs at a CFB might be persuaded? 'Radical' in this case means 'scary' so I think the kind of people who deal with the biggest guns are the only ones who can safely (and legally,) handle it. I figure a scary rifle has to flirt with scary actions if it wants to get anywhere. I can fiddle with sketches and math all I want, but it takes machineshop time, a safe range, and legal certification to make it reality, none of which I am likely to achieve easily in the next 50 years. What Would Hiram Maxim Do?
