Recoil-operated, water-cooled, crew of four to six, and still shooting down cruise missiles over Kyiv in 2025. That last detail stopped me cold when I read it.

As of 2022, Ukrainian troops have used original PM M1910 Maxims against Russian forces. On September 7, 2025, a volunteer using the call sign "Hrek" shot down a Kh-69 missile over Kyiv with one.

A gun that filed its first patents in 1883 is still doing work. Next time someone at the counter tells you a design is "outdated," think about that. Fundamentals are fundamentals.

In his short-recoil design, the bolt locks to the barrel at the moment of firing. Barrel and bolt recoil together for a short distance, then a toggle mechanism unlocks them. The bolt continues rearward, extracts and ejects the spent case, strips a fresh cartridge from the belt, chambers it, and locks again as it returns to battery — all driven by the energy of the previous shot.

This is the part that should matter to any shooter who's ever wondered why their semi-auto pistol works the way it does. Browning refined it, scaled it down, chambered it for handgun cartridges — but the core idea came from Maxim watching recoil energy get thrown away on a .45-70 and deciding that was a waste. Every locked-breech pistol you've ever run at a match traces back to that moment.

Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not. — Hilaire Belloc, 'The Modern Traveller' (1898)

Belloc wrote that as satire — dark humor about colonial arrogance — but the British Army probably read it as a mission statement. The article is honest that the gun's dominance depended heavily on terrain and whether opponents could be maneuvered into open-field engagements. Broken terrain and dispersed tactics blunted it considerably. That's a lesson that didn't get learned fast enough before the Western Front.

Trials demonstrated that a single Maxim could deliver fire equivalent to approximately 60 riflemen of the era.

That number gets thrown around a lot, but think about the logistics behind it — a crew of four to six, a water jacket that needs constant refilling, 250-round belts that have to be pre-staged and managed under fire. The firepower multiplication was real, but it came with a supply chain attached. Nothing in shooting is ever just free performance.

The air-cooled variant story is worth noting too — 135 units built, praised for portability, still a commercial failure because a machine gun that needed rest breaks wasn't much of a machine gun. Some problems don't have elegant solutions. You can relate that to any suppressor-host barrel swap situation where the answer is just "add more mass and deal with the weight."

What's the oldest firearm design — by action type, not specific gun — that you still shoot regularly, and does knowing the history of how it was developed change how you think about it?

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Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team