Testing the M51 Gas Mask

Hello everybody, the clear winner of the poll I did is the M51 gas mask, on which mask shall I test next. So we are going to test the M51 gas mask, and this is obviously quite an old mask, and many of these masks today are in a poor state, so it wouldn't work. So we're going to see if this one works. Now this particular model I believe is a Belgian export version, and you can see on the rubber underneath, if the camera can focus, M51-2, I guess it's the second variant of it, from 1956. So a mask that's about 61 years old. So nothing more to say, I'm going to put a filter on it, it will hopefully work, and let's give it a test. And the filter I will be using on the mask is an SR6 respirator canister from the S6 gas mask, used by Avon Rubber in Leyland and Birmingham, made these, so it should be a good filter hopefully. I've done other tests of it recently and it seems to have worked. Okay, so first I'm going to put the mask on. Has a weird sort of strap system on this one. Basically you have to get some metal clasps inside the ring, that's one, that's two. Now let's test if this has got an airtight seal. Right, the mask has an airtight seal, so let's test it. Hopefully the filter will hold out and it'll work. I'll spray it away from the camera this time so I don't disrupt it. That's a fair bit sprayed and I can't smell anything at the moment, so I'm going to give that a couple of minutes. Now the M51 I'm not a massive fan of. It's got this weird strap system which isn't all that practical, but one of my issues with it really is how long it took France and Belgium to replace it. So in itself that might not make the mask bad, but it was the fact that these masks were still being used up until the Gulf War, or Desert Storm if you want to call it that, with France, and I think Belgium had them until a very similar period. And there's a couple of faults to this mask that hopefully I can demonstrate without breaking a seal. Let's get this off. I still can't smell anything. Right, there you can see where the exhale valve is, and the rubber on these is very weak so it can be compromised very easily. So on a few examples of these masks I've seen this has completely rotted away, where it's not actually, you know, very strong rubber. It should have been made to a better standard. If you compare it to the exhale valve on something like a GP5, that had a much better valve that wouldn't, you know, break as easily, thicker rubber, and it was a double valve system, not a single valve. But no, I still can't smell anything, so as far as I'm concerned, it's almost been two minutes now. If you get an M51 that's still in working condition, it works as a gas mask, I mean I don't think it's all that good a mask. You have a very limited vision range. It fogs up fairly quickly because your air, you know, hot air from you gets blown back up, but at least it does have a defogging system, so there is that. So yeah, overall, it's not an awful mask, especially for when it was made. It was just that they took far too long to replace it, but thank you for everybody who voted for me to test this mask. I've actually quite surprised this is all fully working, but it is. If I just break the seal and check... Yeah, I can definitely smell that. So, the M51 mask, despite its age, if you can get one where the rubber hasn't decayed, the masks still work. I mean, at least for the time it came out, it did take 40mm filters, which is pretty modern for a NATO mask that time. Most of those are still 60mm, but yeah, the M51 mask still seems to work very well. And the next mask test I'll be doing, because it's the one I saw the most comments for, is the MM1 tank crew mask from the Soviet Union. So I'll see you then when I do that video.