TroubleshooterBerlin Fires His Upside-Down Auto-5 FrankenGun!
Long-time TFB friend Axel, AKA TroubleshooterBerlin is the man behind the mysterious upside-down shotgun we blogged about a couple of weeks ago, just before the 2017 SHOT Show. Miles Vining spoke with Axel about his creation (and I mean creation in the “it’s aliiiiive!” sense) at Ventura Munitions during the show, and now Axel has released his own live fire and discussion video regarding the… What do we call it? The ReMG-42/11, maybe? Just watch:
Axel does a good job explaining how he troubleshooted the basic design of the shotgun, including his struggle with spring design, how inverting the shotgun changed the effective size of the ejection port (requiring some weldments to adjust the gun back to functioning), and the general perils of significantly modifying old guns.
There’s something delightfully Metro 2033-esque about Axel’s upside-down gun, as if it were made in underground tunnels by a talented mushroom farmer in the post-demonic apocalypse. In fact, If Axel’s next project isn’t a functioning Bastard rifle I’ll be very disappointed. Of course, one could always compare it to a certain shotgun from another video game franchise, if they wanted to be boring.
Axel told me that his reason for creating this gun was just “because he’d always wanted to”, a feeling I can hardly argue with.
Nathaniel is a history enthusiast and firearms hobbyist whose primary interest lies in military small arms technological developments beginning with the smokeless powder era. He can be reached via email at nathaniel.f@staff.thefirearmblog.com.
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So the thing about spotting this in the back of a pickup truck … that was a ruse.
You knew all along what it was and who made it.
I'm actually working on something like this with my father. I'm trying to convert a left handed 590 into a top-loader. If it works, it'll be cool. I'm sure someone has done it before, but I've never seen one and it'd be a neat father-son project to get my dad into guns post-retirement.