The MGD PM-9 was a French
open bolt
A firearm is said to fire from an open bolt if, when ready to fire, the bolt and working parts are held to the rear of the receiver, with no round in the chamber. When the trigger is actuated, the bolt travels forward, feeds a cartridge from t ...
submachine gun, designed in the late 1940s or early 1950s by Louis Debuit and manufactured in small numbers by French firm Merlin and Gerin in the 1950s.
The PM9 was an unusual design in three different ways: it employed off-axis
delayed blowback
Blowback is a system of operation for self-loading firearms that obtains energy from the motion of the cartridge case as it is pushed to the rear by expanding gas created by the ignition of the propellant charge.
Several blowback systems exist wit ...
, it had a clock-style spiral mainspring similar to that of the
Lewis gun, rather than the cylindrically-coiled spring used in the vast majority of self-loading firearms and, most unconventionally of all, used a rotating
flywheel
A flywheel is a mechanical device which uses the conservation of angular momentum to store rotational energy; a form of kinetic energy proportional to the product of its moment of inertia and the square of its rotational speed. In particular, ass ...
as a delaying mass in conjunction with the bolt.
It was furnished with a folding magazine, and some also had folding buttstocks, and this together with its original operating mechanism results in a highly compact weapon, but there is no known record of it being purchased or deployed by any military or police force.
See also
*
Barnitzke machine gun
The Barnitzke machine gun is a prototype machine gun of late World War II German origin. The weapon uses an unusual delayed blowback operation, where during firing the bolt opening is delayed by the rotational inertia of two flywheels, which ar ...
*
Hotchkiss Type Universal
The Hotchkiss "type Universal" is a submachine gun manufactured in France after World War II. It was originally designed as a semi-automatic police carbine but a full automatic version was made. It fires from a closed bolt. Its most unique featur ...
*
KRISS Vector
The KRISS Vector is a series of weapons based upon the parent submachine gun design developed by the American company KRISS USA, formerly Transformational Defense Industries (TDI). They use an unconventional delayed blowback system combined with ...
*
List of submachine guns
This is a list of submachine guns.
It includes Submachine guns (SMG), Machine pistols (MP), Personal defense weapon systems (PDW), and "compact submachine gun-like weapons" not easily categorized. Weapons may fit in more than one category.
S ...
References
External links
Modern Firearms
Trial and research firearms of France
Delayed blowback firearms
Submachine guns of France
9mm Parabellum submachine guns
{{submachinegun-stub