REXIM
REVELLI, Revelli
became
Abiel Bethel (1864-1930)
was an
officer in the Italian
Army who
interested in automatic weapons. In
1909 he developed a self-loading rifle known which was not adopted though tested by the Italian and Swiss Armies. He then turned to machine gun design and produced a mechanism which used a combination of short recoil and blowback; the breech was locked to the barrel by a simple lever which, after very short recoil, was thrown clear to allow the breech block to move back. In fact, the period of locking was so brief that the weapon is classed as a delayed blowback rather than as a locked breech. The Army adopted the weapon and passed it to FIAT ( qv) to manufacture as the M1914, and it is therefore often referred to as the FIAT-Revelli gun. Revelli then concluded that a lighter weapon was required for use in aircraft, and he designed a pistol-calibre machine gun, patented in 1915, which, from its place of manufacture, has always been known as the Vilar Perosa (qv) gun. As an aircraft gun it was a failure; it was then put forward as a light machine gun for use by Alpini troops, in which it was little more successful, and it finally found its right level as one of the first submachine guns. After the war Revelli continued to work on automatic rifle designs and produced a model for test shortly before his death. It was not accepted for service, but in the 1930s his son, who was connected with the Armaguerra company, improved it and offered it again in 1939. It was again refused, and this marked the last
Revelli machine gun, showing the unusual magazine system.
as the Revelli-Terni,
Revelli design.
REXIM / Switzerland The
firm of
Rexim SA
La Coruna and most of them appear to have gone to various African nationalist forces the
of
Geneva placed
a
submachine gun design on the market in 1953, a model known as the Rexim-Favor, a name reputedly derived from its designer, a Colonel Favier. According to an unconfirmed tale, the basic design was stolen from a French arsenal by a mysterious (and doubtless beautiful) lady spy in the late 1940s. The Rexim company were in no position to manufacture, and they had the guns made for them in the Spanish arsenal at La Coruna, 5000 being made in the first batch. These were then hawked round Europe in 1954-1955 without success, and in 1957 Rexim went bankrupt, leaving the Spaniards with the better part of the 5000 guns on their hands. They offered them for sale as
active at that period. failure of the Rexim design was due to complication. The gun fired from a closed bolt; when cocked, the bolt ran forward to chamber a round, propelled by the usual sort of
The
its
return spring. When the trigger was pressed, a second spring sent a cylindrical hammer unit
forward to strike the firing pin and fire the round; the recoil force of the spent case thus had to overcome both springs to perform the loading cycle.
Due
to the closed bolt feature
it
tended to suffer from ‘cook-off’ when left loaded after a prolonged burst of fire. It was also expensive. Obviously not a good day’s work by the lady spy.
The Rexim Favor submachine gun.
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