Other Toggle Applications
By far, the most significant application of the toggle lock to firearms was its successful adaptation to automatic weapons by American-born inventor Hiram S. Maxim in the 1880s. Maxim machine guns were sold worldwide, and their reliability and prodigious rate of fire made late 19th-century military ground combat tactics obsolete. Though big and heavy, these weapons can still be found at war today. Ukrainians are using World War II vintage Russian-built Maxim, water-cooled, heavy machine guns to shoot down Russian drones. Unique to Switzerland but still worth mentioning is their toggle action 7.5x51mm Leichtes Maschinengewehr Modell 1925, a domestic design developed by Swiss Army Colonel Rudolf Furrer. It was adopted in 1925 and stayed in service into the late 1950s.
Manually locked toggle actions were most famously used in American lever-action repeating firearms, beginning with the Volcanic pistols and rifles in the mid-1850s, progressing to the Henry Rifle in 1860, and perfected in the Winchester’s 1866 and 1873 rifles. With the exception of the Volcanic guns, modern reproductions of all these toggle-lock lever actions are still in production.
With the exception of the Walther Automatic Shotgun, a semi-automatic toggle action produced from 1921 to 1930 in fairly small numbers, semi-auto toggle action long guns never attracted sufficient military or civilian interest to warrant production. Among the most notable ideas that floundered were rather advanced guns from John Petersen, Karl Heinemann and even George Luger himself!
On a visceral level, I speculate that semi-auto toggle action centerfire long guns may have just offended human sensitivities about personal space with their violent, exposed operation. John Browning’s popular lever action repeaters (Model 1887, 1893 and 1897 shotguns and 1894 and 1895 rifles) all exposed their metal private parts while cycling, but they projected them downward, below the line of sight. By contrast, most toggle actions threw their junk right up in front of your face. Nobody likes that.
One place where the toggle action resurfaced long after its heyday was in the world of rimfire competition rifles. Russian Izhmash manually operated toggle action .22LR rifles were used in Olympic biathlon competitions by Soviet athletes going back to the 1980s and are still in production. Just this year, Hamerli Arms introduced the Force B, .22LR/.22WRM switch barrel sporting rifle, with a similar side cycling, manual locking toggle action. It is delightfully easy and fast to shoot and can be cycled with just one finger.
Subscribe To American Handgunner
Read the full article here