B is for Best Toy Ever? Working Machinegun

It's time for another Best Toy Ever post, and like the last one, thanks are due to Adrian Little (Mercator Trading) who took this along to a show where I was able to get a few shots off. Not 100% sure to the maker, but some of the ammunition resupplies are marked Märklin which is probably a good clue to the original maker too.

The contents were less than pristine having obviously been played with, well; you'd want to play with a best toy ever wouldn't you! Basically, it's a firing machine-gun, and I don't mean it makes a noise like a machinegun, I mean you feed it a belt of pre-loaded ammunition and it bangs . . .  as it fires rubber-bullets; it's too damn cool for the SF-Cadre!

A scaled-down feed mechanism and cap-firing hammer are operated by the turning of the handle, which is not far removed from the handle found on a Gatling Gun. Painting is similar to pre- or inter-war toys, but the two instruction sheets are cruder than you might expect from a 1930's toy, also at least one (the pink sheet above) seems to be that purpleish thing which I think we used to call  a 'roneo' (spell?) copy.

So I suspect it is just post-war? But using a pre-war tool, and painting style, just to get a product up and running in a blasted economy, and apart for the unconvincing clues to a post war sale, there's nothing in it.

This was the best bit! An exquisite chain of small brass turnings each of which can take a cap-gun charge at one end (top), and a rubber bullet at the other end (bottom), all tied together in a series of sort-of Morbius-loops or - more accurately - figure-of-eights, which allow for flexibility and a 'belt' feel, but which arrangement keeps the strings tight to the 'rounds' so they don't foul the mechanism, it's very clever!

The original bullets were small vulcanised rubber (tyre rubber) shells, but seem to have been replaced - due to loss - with small wooden splints which could be jammed in the blast hole between the cap-charge and the barrel, which must have worked because there were enough for the whole belt (with signs of jamming-in) which you wouldn't bother with if it all didn't work.

I couldn't try it as we had no caps on site, and you wouldn't want to break something like this if you hadn't paid for it, not to mention the cotton 'belt' arrangement looked like it might need replacing with some newer threads! But I can imagine what it must have been like spurting rubber death at ranks of composition or hollow-cast toy soldiers - best toy ever . . .

. . . 'till next time!