Bira gun

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Bira gun
Type	Machine gun
Place of origin	Nepal
Service history
In service	Royal Nepalese Army
Production history
Designer	Gehendra Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana
Produced	1896-1897
Specifications
Cartridge	.577/450 Martini-Henry
Caliber	.577/450
Barrels	2
Action	Reverse Gardner Action

The Bira gun was a .577/450 Martini-Henry calibre machine gun designed and manufactured in Nepal during the latter part of the 19th Century. It was a development of, and based upon, the American Gardner gun but was single barreled and was fed by an overhead drum magazine similar to the later Lewis gun. It is not known if the Bira gun was ever deployed operationally.

Actually the Bira Gun has two barrels. It was invented by Nepalese General Gehendra Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana (1871-1905.) While similar in some respects to the American Gardner (especially in the reciprocating bolts) the internal mechanism is actually quite different in a number of ways, especially as it is hand-crank fired but anti-clockwise as this was found more reliable than clockwise . Bira Guns were manufactured in 1896-97 and are literally hand-made, with few parts from one interchangeable with those on another. They were apparently never used in battle but are interesting artifacts, in that they were built at a time when fully-automatic machine guns, such as the Maxim, had been developed. The Bira harkened back to the earlier days of mechanical rapid-fire.