I happen to own a Hotchkiss portative light machine gun. Now that I have it working, with the help of my friend John, I find it one of the more fun guns to shoot.
So since last December I have been working on a couple of accessories for it. Well it happen that on Sunday I had a little Chuck time and went out and finished one of the accessories that I have been meaning to build. In this case it is a feed strip ammo box for the gun. I have looked at the original design and want to make something that would at least look time period correct.
I did not like this style of box.
A couple of pictures of an early American feed strip box.
Another view. This basically the style I wanted.
A Japanese ammo box. I found this one to be to basic.
In my collect of old ammo boxes I had a couple of Czech 8mm wooden boxes that were almost perfect in size.
A quick check with a few strips of 303 showed that this box would be excellent.
So some measurements were made and a solid model was made to allow be to design the spacers.
Then it was out to the wood shop to have a little fun. Now on to finding material from the pile of scrap stuff that I have. The side panels came from some material that Axel, a friend of gun lab, found on his last trip out to Arizona.
The dividers were already in my scrap pile from some cabinet building I did a while back. As is always the case nothing was the correct thickness, but a trip through the planer solver that problem.
Once it was the correct thickness it went to the table saw for the width then off to the radial arm saw for length. Cutting the groves was a little bit of a challenge as I don’t have a router table. A little changing on the radial arm saw and we got the dado blades from the table saw to work on them. Next a real basic fixture was set up on the saw and we cut all the groves to the proper depth and spacing.
So now this is the final product. I need to add a felt pad on the bottom of the trays as soon as I find enough. I have a few pieces of felt from 303 Vickers ammo cans, just not enough.
A fun project and it will definitely make it easier on range day with the Hotchkiss.
Great to have the woodworking equipment to go with all your metal working tools and tooling, huh? I can see where having that planer could be a godsend.
Pete
A wood shop helps with so much. Pattern making will be coming up in the future
your photography has gotten really good, I can make out all the details in that good light
Thanks Dan. I keep working on it.