USPSA With a 105-Year-Old Artillery Luger Rig

Hey guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and this is an Artillery Luger snail drum complete rig. Well, less the holster, because I left the holster at home today. And we are out here today at a USPSA match, six stages of ... well, in this case I'm entered as in pistol calibre carbine, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to be the only Luger shooter out here. But we're going to try running literally a 1918 105 year old Artillery Luger and an original drum through a USPSA mag. Alphas, alphas, alphas, alright! Mag worked perfectly, so far so good. Gently, gently. I almost forgot it, but didn't quite forget it. I'll just drop it straight down the magwell. So I spent way too much time on that stage because I was trying to make good solid hits, which maybe wasn't the best choice overall for score, but ... I'm hearing a lot of alphas. We'll see what the score comes out at here. I forgot that guy lying down behind the port. Alright, so the loading process for this drum is a little bit complicated. So you load the first two rounds by hand, which I've already snapped them in just like a normal mag. What we do next is we open up this lever, and we're going to crank it all the way around. This is a little spring-loaded button that locks into this little keyhole. So essentially I am pre-tensioning the coil spring. It is really strong, so be very careful. You get this locked in, fold the handle back, and then I have the loading tool. This is a reproduction tool, but this is what they actually used. It has its own little magazine catch, just like the gun. So we lock it on there, and then I can get a lot of extra leverage to press the round down and drop in the next one. Now the first handful here are going to be really easy because I've completely ... pre-tensioned the spring. This is not a rapid process, ... this takes a lot of time. This is why when the Germans did this for real, they had a whole transit chest full of magazines that would go forward with guys who are using these guns for something like a serious trench raid. Now I'm going to go back to my spring here, I'm going to pull this back out. All I have to do is pop it back, the spring button releases, and now the spring is actually pushing on the cartridges. And if we look at this, there are numbers here, so 32, 27, 22, 17, 12. As I shoot, the follower is going to advance up the magazine, and this handle here, this winder, will unwind a round, and it actually tells you how many rounds are in the magazine at any given time. Yep, got those. I think I actually hit them all this time. Alright, 3-1-5-5, I remembered all the targets this time. I tried doing a little more shooting on the move right here, so not too bad. I feel like I'm not properly exploiting the potential handiness and speed of the Luger because this sort of game is kind of new to me. They are fairly tiny. It's interesting that the sights are actually almost too close. Like Luger sights are designed to be held, I feel like, at arm's length. With the carbine, they're closer to my eye, and I actually have a harder time picking out the sights. And maybe that's because I'm getting old and I ought to have glasses, but overall not too bad. OK, so this one ... has a mandatory reload. 8 rounds, and then 8 rounds. So I'm starting with a standard 8 round Luger mag, fire the first 8, then I'll switch to a drum that I have stuffed in my pocket. Alright, this is not a fast reloading gun. There we go, and I think I missed one of those. That's a mic, I pulled that one off. I knew it when I pulled the trigger. So, one mic? One mic, 11 alphas, poor Charlie. Ready? That was not so good. Yep. Ready? Alright, that was slow, and by USPSA standards, terrible. But ... ready? I hope I got him. Alright, so two Charlies on the swinger. Alright. OK, so my overall conclusions having run this now through six stages are that it is glacial to load, like you have to be ... it's glacial to load the drum, and then it's slow compared to anything remotely modern to load the drum into the pistol. You have to be careful with it, you have to have the toggle locked open, gentle with it. Like, the magazine's old, the magazines are relatively fragile, and yet it ran almost flawlessly. It wasn't until the very last stage that we had one, one lousy little magazine that I was able to clear by just racking the toggle. So, super impressed by the fact that, like, a lot of people have trouble with a generic regular Luger working. We've got an artillery Luger, original matching artillery Luger, with an original trommel drum on a stock. The stock's mismatched, by the way, but that doesn't matter so much. And it actually ran almost perfectly through a USPSA match. So, I'm not sure at this point how I placed. Actually, you'll be able to see it in the text below, because by the time I get back and edit this, we'll know. But my goal is to have beaten somebody, anybody. I felt like I went really quite slowly, I was trying to be gentle with the gun. But it was a lot of fun. As far as practicality, I would say the sights are a little bit low. They're designed to be pistol sights. This stock, if it actually had a little more drop to it, it might work better. I felt like I had to either really scrunch my face down on the stock to get a good sight picture, or pull the stock. You know, I'm used to shooting kind of like this. To make it work properly, you kind of have to pull it up here to get a head up sort of position to get a good sight picture. That was ... I found myself fighting that a little bit. But, man, for a World War One era piece, this would be seriously impressive, seriously effective to use in the trenches of World War One. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.