Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I am Ian McCollum, and today, courtesy of the Mosin Crate,
we are taking a look at a Croatian sniper rifle.
Specifically, this is an Elmech EM-992,
manufactured just shortly after Croatia gained its independence after the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Now during that break up ... and civil war there was actually a fair amount of small arms manufacture in Croatia.
But most of it was fairly crude stuff, the sort of thing like, "I own an auto body shop,
I've got some machine tools, I wonder what kind of gun I can make in secret in the basement?"
And so a lot of it was submachine guns: simple designs, crude designs, crude fabrication, emergency sort of stuff.
However, after Croatia fully established itself they went looking for some small arms for the Croatian military.
And in fact the Croatian military specifically requested
development and production of this rifle to equip its army.
... It was manufactured by the Elmech Company,
which I unfortunately don't really have any good background information on.
And it was originally developed for .300 Winchester Magnum,
which I believe is what the Croatian Army was using, or was going to use, or did use for its snipers.
So the action on this is sized to be large enough to fit .300 Win Mag.
Now they would also go on to produce it in 7.62 NATO.
Specifically, the EMM-992 is in .300 Win Mag, and the EM-992, which is what we have here, is in 7.62 NATO.
The majority of the production apparently was .300 Winchester Magnum.
So we actually have a number of kind of interesting features on this rifle,
so let's go ahead and take a closer look at it.
Starting up at the front, we have an integrated muzzle brake.
You'll note that the back set of holes are angled forward, where the rest of these are just drilled straight through.
That's in place on both calibres of the gun, both the .308s and the .300 Win Mags.
Makes for presumably a nice little bit of recoil reduction.
There is a set of backup iron sights that are mounted on the rifle.
These are intended for use out to about 400 metres. So you can see the front sight is drift adjustable for windage.
A relatively heavy profile barrel here. The bipod is just a standard Harris bipod.
There are a number of things that appear to have been really good choices on the part of Elmech,
recognising that their core strength was not going to be the ability to manufacture every part of this rifle.
So they subcontracted out it appears some really good aftermarket elements, like a good Harris bipod.
We may have fancier things available today, but for the early 1990s that was absolutely the way to go.
I have read that the barrels were purchased from [Sako], but I don't know if that's actually true.
If it is true, it would make sense. They make a darn good barrel, and contracting that out
would be a really good way to save some time and money, and focus on things that Elmech was better suited to making.
Here you can see the rear emergency backup iron sight. It's just a simple notch.
And this is not out of line for a military sniper rifle,
I will point out that the FR-F1 and FR-F2 also have similar backup iron sights like this.
They also had a very good choice for optics for the time.
They went with as a standard optic for the military,
(and the police use as well, ... police agencies in Croatia did also use these rifles),
they went for a 3.5-10x power by 24mm Leupold scope.
And that's what we have here. You can see it's got nice big ol' target turrets on it.
Again, we have fancier things today,
but that's a darn good choice for the time when this rifle was actually being manufactured.
It came with a rear scope cap, Leupold branded there.
And here is our magnification adjustment from 3.5x power up to 10x power,
with, interestingly, what appear to be range recommendations.
So you're thinking, "Ah, I'm at 400 yards, what magnification should I use?"
Well 4, that's going to correspond to about 7x power.
This is not a bullet drop compensator.
You can kind of tell that from the fact that it uses yards and metres interchangeably there.
And the reticle on this scope is ... a duplex crosshair.
Meaning that the crosshair threads are very thin in the centre, and then wider at the outside.
But there's no mil dot, there's no ranging capability built into the reticle.
The action is based on the Mauser and then manufactured by Elmech,
and it is a very smooth bolt throw here.
In fact, I can just take the bolt out.
Push down that, pull this out.
Taking a look at the bolt here we have a pair of locking lugs in the front,
and we also have a pair of locking lugs at the rear.
Again, this rifle was designed for .300 Winchester Magnum,
which has a bit more strength requirements than simple .308 or 7.62 NATO.
It is a push feed style, it's not a controlled feed action. There's a little plunger ejector in there.
A nice fully supported case head which is a good thing.
And a very large bolt knob, easy to operate.
The rifle has detachable magazines. Unfortunately, this example is missing its magazine.
You can see that the magazine length here is quite a bit longer than you would normally need for 7.62 NATO,
that's because the action is designed for .300 Win Mag.
Presumably the 7.62 magazine has a spacer in it to keep the rounds from sort of bouncing around too much.
The magazines for these rifles were capable of holding either 5 or 7 rounds.
And the magazine release is right here in the front of the trigger guard.
You just pull that back, and then you can drop the magazine out.
The trigger is fantastic. And it has a safety located right up here.
It is in fact a Timney trigger. Now, assuming that that was a standard product that was used by Elmech
and not just something that was replaced in this one particular rifle,
that's another example of a really good choice of outsourcing.
Timney makes fantastic triggers, and being able to simply drop in one of their trigger units
is another great way to reduce the expense and increase the quality of a rifle like this.
And lastly looking at the buttstock of the rifle, the whole stock is made of laminated wood,
which is a nice good durable choice.
This was patterned after, basically, hunting rifle stocks that were commonly in use at the time.
So there's a little bit of a raised cheek pad for a right-handed shooter. A nice rubber recoil pad,
which would probably be fine in 7.62, and quite nice to have for .300 Win Mag.
It is marked Elmech on the left side of the receiver, and there's our model ... designation, EM-992.
On the opposite side we have the calibre, 7.62x51.
And a serial number. And I do not know where the serial numbers started or ended,
or the exact meaning of that Z suffix, which looks like it was added after the fact.
If you look closely here at the barrel and the stock, you'll see that this is free floated.
You do have space all the way around the barrel, and that was done
very deliberately to improve the precision capability of the rifle.
There are two screws for disassembly. One of them is here at the front of the magazine well,
and the other one is somewhat awkwardly located here at the back of the receiver under the scope.
And they did helpfully make that a socket head screw.
So I don't have to get a whole screwdriver in there to disassemble it,
I can instead use an Allen wrench here. I've got that loose already so I can
take that screw out, and then we can take the front screw out.
Removing these two screws allows me to remove the trigger guard and magazine well.
So we have a little flat spring here to keep pressure on the magazine.
You can see the magazine release lever a little bit better right there now.
And then that is the socket that the rear action screw goes into.
The action then lifts nicely out of the stock,
and you can see the Timney trigger unit in place there.
Like I said, assuming that that's not a replacement for some sort of standard Mauser style of trigger,
that was a really good choice on Elmech's part.
This thing has a truly magnificent trigger pull, as you would expect from a company like Timney.
There's our front block where the action is mounted into the stock.
The rear action screw is actually still sitting in here.
And then not a whole lot to see on the inside of the stock itself.
The rifle was developed in 1991. Production began in 1992, and ran only for a few years until about 1997.
I don't know the grand total that were produced, or the exact breakdown between the two different calibres.
However, the rifle is no longer formally in service with the Croatian military. It has been replaced by the Sako TRG 42,
as well as a few other specialty rifles, I think they have a .50 BMG rifle for really heavy duty stuff.
Any rate, these are no longer in use. They were originally also used by Croatian police forces,
some of whom I suspect still have them.
This particular example did in fact come from a Croatian police department.
So that may be why it's in 7.62 NATO instead of .300 Winchester Magnum.
Interestingly, a number of these have managed to wind up in Syria.
And a number of them have been documented and reported in the Syrian conflict,
including in the hands of ISIS, which is kind of an interesting path for the rifle to take.
Of course this one did not, it ended up here in the United States.
And I'd like to give a big thanks once again to the Mosin Crate for loaning it to me for filming.
If you happen to know where one might find a magazine for this, you would make the Mosin Crate very happy
if you were able to help them out with that. So I'll throw that out there for them.
In general if you're just interested in unusual and cool surplus firearms,
check out their YouTube channel. I'll link to that down in the description.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]