Found one last clip from SHOT 2020 and my associated regular trip to Battlefield Vegas that I’d neglected to upload. I would have been flying back from SHOT 21 just yesterday if it weren’t for the kung-flu’ry going on but alas, I’m hopeful for next year and as anyone will know that’s gone many times the show gets pretty hard work when you go every year. I was kind of dreading it in some ways this year, but I’ll be raring to go come Christmas time.
What is the Ultimax 100? A little known machine gun made in Singapore and used by the Singaporean armed forces, also in my opinion one of the best machine guns in existence, potentially vying for the top spot. The KAC LAMG could maybe have it beat but the current iteration of that gun wasn’t produced until just a few short years ago.
Jim Sullivan himself had significant input in to the design of the Ultimax and for those that don’t know Jim was instrumental in taking the AR-10 (which wasn’t very successful and actually had a fair few problems) and turning it in to the AR-15, arguably the most successful weapons design ever. The real secret sauce here is the recoil mechanism; while the short stroke piston and rotating bolt are fairly conventional, the specific design of recoil springs, receiver and gas system mean that the bolt never actually hits the back of the receiver when firing, it is slowed to a stop by the springs and sent forward again before doing so.
The effect of this is that while you do get some recoil on the first round fired, you get basically none on all subsequent shots in the same burst and I think that’s shown quite well in the video here. The weapon simply vibrates a bit for the rest of the string of fire and feels a lot like a typical electric recoil airsoft gun. Between this excellent feat of engineering, the incredible light weight of the thing, a slim profile and very low rate of fire to conserve ammunition, the end result is seriously impressive.
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