401 WSL) to fire automatically for military use. Seeing the threat of invasion and the sorry state of New ZealandРІР‚в„ўs armories, Charlton suggested to Field that he was considering adapting his Winchester Model 1910 self-loading rifle (chambered for. The two formed a freidnship in the late 1930s, and continued to shoot together into the early 1940s. Enter Philip Charlton (1901-1978) and Maurice Field.Р”В¬harlton and Field were both shooting and gun collecting enthusiasts Charlton an inquisitive engineer and Field with the financial means to back an entrepreneurial endeavor. Material was limited, production capacity was limited, and machine guns were in very short supply.

The British crown was unable to provide much help, being in the middle of a desperate fight with Germany and having lost an immense amount of material in the Dunkirk evacuation. Well, despite looking a bit Italian, it was really a triumph of engineering under adversity.Р”В®arly in the Pacific theater of World War II, New Zealand (and Australia too, but they are a story for another day) was facing a very serious perceived threat of Japanese ground invasion and was woefully underarmed, particularly in the realm of support weapons. New ZealandРІР‚в„ўs Charlton Automatic Rifle is the most successful of the true rifle conversions, as well as one of the most ungainly looking. Most of them were experimental (like this Dutch Mannlicher conversion or the Huot conversion of the Ross rifle), and the only one to really achieve significant production was the Pedersen Device, which was a blowback pistol caliber conversion rather than a true rifle caliber conversion. It used to come up fairly regularly РІР‚вЂњ most national armies investigated the concept at one time or another in the past 100 or 150 years.

The idea of converting bolt action rifles into semiautomatic or fully automatic designs is not a unique one. Charlton Automatic Rifle reproduction (currently for sale at Gun City in Christchurch, New Zealand)

Fully automatic weapons for sale cheap