A friend of mine really wanted a miniature Gardner gun and with none available took [...]]]> I enjoy making things, specifically guns and any thing associated with making guns. I also enjoy chatting with people who make guns or any thing dealing with that. I also love mechanical machine guns. That leads us to today’s topic.

A friend of mine really wanted a miniature Gardner gun and with none available took it upon himself to make one. In fact not only one but a number of them. He has since sold the complete operation and tooling but this is a little write up of the process it took to do it. I really wanted one of these and to complete the project, there was just a little problem, money. The amount of work required to make this weapon much less a miniature one was immense. There were no usable blue prints to work from. There were no patterns available. So to complete this project he had to first find a gun, reverse engineer it, draw it up in a modeling program ,then reduce all the components to make it in 22lr. This was a task only one person would even think of doing, Papa Joe.

The original Gardner guns were made in 577-450, 43 Spanish, 11mm dutch and just about every other military black powder cartridge and 45-70 then finally in 303 British and 6.5 Dutch, can’t remember where I saw this at.  The weapon was used up to WW1 by the Dutch. It was even copied by the Nepalese in the form of the Bira Gun. It is a manually operated machine gun that came in one,two and five barrel versions.

On wheeled mounts.

A two barrel version with no jacket.

A two barrel version with a jacket.

This is what the hole in the top of a water cooled version looks like.

Then to the 5 barrel version.

A nice example.

It was a beautifully made piece of art. There are a number of varieties, as I have shown you some come with no jackets, some come with solid jackets and some come with open top water jackets. It is currently being reproduce by two different companies both as a bronze casting and as a fabricated steel one that is plated.   No mater which model or style you look at they are just great. It was even made as a belt fed gun.

Papa Joe took it upon himself to make the most complicated one possible. The two barrel full jacketed water cooled version. Part 2 will continue on with this saga and go into a little more history.