In 1885, Hiram Maxim made a breakthrough in his design for an automatic machine gun. He realised that the gun should be easily field-stripped and his second prototype gun was too complicated. The Transitional MG (patented 8 July 1885) introduced the ‘sliding carrier’ to transfer a round from the feed belt to the chamber. The ‘sliding carrier’ design has been used in all subsequent Maxim and Vickers machine guns. This animation shows the operating mechanism.
Hi, I’m Rob, otherwise known as VBBSMYT.
I create the animations on my iMac using Cinema 4D, which I find very intuitive, and allows me to add smoke and flames, and then send the model to my trusty Render farm.
I make my models as accurate as possible through reference books and particularly good drawings. You may have seen my animations of early torpedoes and machine guns on YouTube. I enjoy finding out how things work and it has been fascinating to track the development from the late Victorian period up to World War 1.
