 The M2A1 50 caliber heavy machine gun is a belt-fed, recoil operated, air-cooled, crew-served machine gun. The machine gun is capable of firing single shot and automatic. It's capable of right hand or left hand feed. It weighs 128 pounds complete with a tripod. The cyclic rate of fire is 450 to 600 rounds per minute. The effective range for a point target is 1,500 meters and 1,830 meters for an area target. Hey Marines, my name is Sarn Heitzelman and today I'm going to show you how to properly disassemble and reassemble a M2A1 heavy machine gun. The first thing we have to do before we disassemble an M2A1 is we've got to make sure it's clear. In order to make sure it's clear we have to make sure it's on safe and single. So I'm going to look down, I see the S for safe and my bolt latch releases in the up position making it single shot. At that point I'm going to grab the retracting slide handle, I'm going to rip it to the rear and maintain positive control the whole time. After that go ahead and look and grab your cover latch, once you have control of it, put your head down away, open the cover and you can just sweep down, sweep across the feedway and then you have to visually and physically inspect the chamber in the face of the bolt. So I see my finger in the chamber, come back, touch the face of the bolt, there's nothing in there. Now I do what's four fingers of depth. I just put my four fingers on the rear side assembly and I push down the bolt latch release. The reason for that is if you don't put four fingers up here and you get lazy you could also push the trigger down at the same time. The bolt latch release goes, you could potentially end either weapon system that way. So four fingers of depth is what we call it, push the bolt latch release down, ride about half way, slam the rest away and you can sound off clear. Now the weapon system is clear so we can go ahead and we can take the barrel off. Now to take the barrel off you have to push the bolt to the rear just a little bit and the reason for that is there's a spring in here, it's called a barrel locking spring and it has to have some room to move out in order to take the barrel off. So what you do is you push back in your tracking side handle until you see the little square match up with the circle on the side of the receiver here and all you got to do is grab your barrel carrying handle, flip it in the upward position, release pressure and you can pull the barrel the whole way off. You can either pull the whole way off or you can put it so it's hanging in the barrel sport. Either way it doesn't matter but for today's video we're just going to turn the whole way off. So now that the weapon is clear and the barrel is off we can go ahead and we can pull the operating group out. So I'm going to walk back. In order to take this piece off it's called the back plate. These are the grips and the whole thing right here with the trigger and the bolt latch release is called a back plate. At the bottom of the back plate there's a latch and there's a latch lock and I have to pull out on the latch lock and I have to pull up on the latch. I can grab the back plate and now I can lift it straight off the gun. Once it's straight off the gun I'm always going to set this down with the spades on the ground. I don't want to damage any of the springs or levers in the back plate. So you can just put that down just like that. Next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to disengage the driving spring rod. It's in the right side of the receiver here. You just push in and to the left with your thumb and it'll pop right out. After that I like to pull it out a couple inches so I have a stopping point so my bolt doesn't lock to the rear. In order to take the bolt out there's a bolt stud that's right here. You have to slide it back and inside the receiver rails here there's two cutouts. So you have to match the stud up with the cutouts right there and then you can just go ahead and you can pull your bolt stud out. Once you pull this out you always want to make sure you know where you have it so you can either put it on top of the rear side assembly or put it underneath and close the rear side just to make sure it doesn't go anywhere. The next thing I have to do in order to physically pull the whole operating group out of the gun is I need to take a punch rod and I need to use the threaded end or the skinny end. Right back here in the back of the receiver you'll see there's a little silver spot inside the spring. That's the barrel or the buffer body spring lock. So all you need to do is you need to press that spring you'll feel it right here. To press the spring grab the spring right here and pull it out. Once you get it started you can release pressure. Always grab it just by the spring here because if you grab it by the actual housing right here it's going to the operating group is going to fall apart on you. So just pull it out the whole way and we're going to put it down on its left side. The reason for that is this is called the barrel locking spring and this is the barrel locking spring lug. So when we took the barrel off this is that little square that was in the side of the receiver. If we put it down on the other side we could damage and or break the barrel locking spring lug so if you put it down on the left side it'll always work for you that way. The next thing we're going to do is this is a cocking lever right here. So we're still using our punch rod at this point. You can sweep the cocking lever back and right in here there's a cocking lever pin. So all you got to do is sweep that back you can punch the cocking lever pin out and then this big round pin down here is called your accelerator pin. All you got to do is punch that out as well and you can put the punch rod down. After that you strip the bolt off of the operating group put that down over here because this is going to be its own, we're going to have our own workspace for that piece of gear right there. The next thing you do is you're going to separate your barrel extension and your barrel buffer body so all you need to do is grab the body, separate those two and this is your barrel extension. That doesn't need any disassembly you can set that down as it is. The spring that's in here all you need to do is up end this, pop it out and that spring will come out. Alright so in order to disassemble the bolt there's about as many pieces to the bolt as there is to the entire gun that we have sitting over here on my left. So all we're going to do, the first thing we're going to do is take the driving spring rod which is right here pull it the whole way out of the back and set it down. The next thing I'm going to take off is the extractor. So in order to take the extractor off of this piece right here it has to be 90 degrees or perpendicular to the top of the bolt and you can pull it straight out just like this. After that you can set that down. The next thing up here, this half circle part is called your bolt switch. That just lifts straight out of the top of the bolt and you can set that down. Now I'm going to pull out my cocking lever. My cocking lever is what I'm going to use. I'm going to use this as a tool to disassemble some of the pieces of this bolt. So right down in here it looks like a monkey wrench that's called your sear stop and pin. If you notice back here at the back of the sear stop and pin there's like a half moon cut out. All you're going to do is you're going to push down with the end of the cocking lever, the flat end push down and disengage that from the side of the receiver. After we do that we can rotate our cocking lever back and we're just going to use this to press down on the sear. This is a sear right here, this flat piece up here and this piece right here. Just going to push it down until we hear a click. That is the firing pin releasing. We're going to hold downward pressure. We're going to take our finger and we're going to side out the sear slide. This is the sear slide right here. This is the slide right out. After that I can completely 180 my bolt into the bottom. This is the post on the sear stop and pin, this little piece right here in front of the spring. Again I'm using my cocking lever as a tool. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to depress that, punch that the whole way out and that should cause my sear stop and pin to fall out. Now all I'm going to do is tap it lightly on the mat and that should cause my sear which is right here and my sear spring to come falling out. After that I can just tilt my bolt to the side, take out my firing pin and my firing pin extension, set them down on the mat and now my gun is completely disassembled.