Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today: does the G36 melt when it gets hot?
That's of course the very hyperbolic version of the question.
The more appropriate question to ask would be: does the group size, does the precision, of the G36
suffer when the barrel gets hot? And more specifically, does it suffer to an extent that would
conflict with the basic stated German Army requirements for the G36?
Now, I want to preface this by saying no matter what I tell you in this video
I will get flak for it from some people. This has become a very emotionally charged issue
because there's a lot more going on here than just the technical facts of the matter.
And spoiler alert, I can clear up a little bit of this right now,
part of the reason for that is the Bundeswehr and the German government have never actually done
a formal scientific study to determine if there is a problem, and if so, what that problem specifically is.
So what they should have done was take hundreds, if not thousands, of issue rifles with issue ammunition
put them on a standardised range, fire a standardised course of fire that involves something like:
fire a test group when the rifle's cold, heat the rifle up, fire another test group, see what happens.
They've never done that. And I think in large part this is because this conflict has become,
poisoned perhaps is not too strong of a term, by political and economic considerations
both in government and in private industry, so.
Let's start with where this actually began. The news headline of course is
if you put X rounds, some rounds through the G36
(this is often taken to mean, like, "if you get in a gunfight with a G36"),
it will get very hot and you will no longer be able to hit people at any reasonable distance.
This is, of course, a statement largely devoid of specific facts that looks great as a headline,
and kind of doesn't mean much ... without specifications to it.
Now where this actually began is kind of curious. It actually began
as the result of a new German rifle training program in ... late 2012 up in northern Germany,
where one of the administering officers (and by the way, we're talking 50,000 or 60,000 troops
who went through this training program, so we have a substantial volume of data
that this was based on, although it wasn't ... scientifically documented.)
What happened was one of the officers overseeing the training program came to the conclusion
that when the rifles were all laid down on a blanket or tarp at the range
(you know, they're doing some administrative stuff in between shooting) when the sun was out,
the rifles would heat up, but only on one side, and the point of impact would shift.
Now, this is hypothetically, theoretically possible,
the G36 has a polymer receiver with a ... steel trunnion and barrel embedded within it.
Polymer is not a very efficient transmitter of heat, this is part of the reason that we like to use it for things.
If you heat up one side of a solid block of metal the other side is going to heat up pretty efficiently at the same time.
So if you were to lay a metal gun out in the sun it tends to all get hot,
and you wouldn't have a situation where one side has differentially heated from the other.
In theory, with polymer, that's possible.
... And in theory if one side gets hot and the trunnion shifts because, you know,
the polymer expands on one side and doesn't expand on the other,
OK, hypothetically we can see a shift in point of impact.
Now the question is are the conditions sufficient to actually cause that to happen?
... How much does that polymer actually expand or contract with variations in temperature?
And, I don't know, and nobody really knows. Nobody's done a scientific survey on this that I'm aware of
outside of the original testing that was done on the G36 when it was adopted, which we'll get to in a moment.
So that's where this story actually originated.
And there ... was a substantial enough complaint that the German military initiated a program to look into it.
Now at the same time there are also complaints coming in from German soldiers in Afghanistan
that the guns aren't accurate, they can't hit anything with the G36s, and they're not happy with them.
Now in many ways, not to disparage German troops,
but these sound very similar to the complaints of US troops in Korea saying that their .30 carbine rounds
are deflected or stopped by Chinese padded jackets in the winter.
And in that case what we're looking at is nonsense.
What's actually happening is those American troops aren't hitting the Chinese.
Or perhaps they are hitting the Chinese, but the Chinese guy's buddies
drag him off the battlefield and so a body is never found,
and an American soldier who shoots someone and sees nothing happen, or doesn't find a body,
then just determines that, "Oh, well, I mean I obviously hit him because I'm great, but it didn't hurt him."
And some of the complaints coming out of the Bundeswehr troops in Afghanistan are similar to that.
You often have a situation, and again this isn't studied, this is just a hypothetical here,
but you often have a situation where you'll have a group of mechanised troops are on a vehicle,
they come under fire, they dump a bunch of rounds as, like, an ambush response,
while booking it to a safe location on their APC.
They get to a new location, they deploy, they set out a security perimeter to figure out exactly what's going on.
And their guns are still, by the way, nice and toasty from a mag dump or two,
and then, you know, something pops up 300 yards away. Everybody has optical sights,
that guy, that target that pops up at 300 yards in World War Two or Korea might not have even been visible.
But now that everybody has magnified optics they see the guy, and they take a potshot with a hot barrel under stress,
they miss, but instead determine that, "Well, it's not me missing, it's the gun's not good enough."
Or in many of these cases there were complaints that the 5.56 cartridge was insufficiently effective.
Sounds very much like .30 carbine not penetrating a winter jacket.
Anyway, that is the origin of ... two separate, similar and easily misconstrued situations
are what led to the investigations and all of the hullabaloo about the G36 losing accuracy when it gets hot.
So, if we look at this from a factual perspective, what we're going to see is that,
first off, question: if you dump a bunch of ammo through the G36 will its group size increase?
The answer is yes, absolutely it will. And it will on every rifle ever made to a certain degree.
Now I have it on informal
non-scientific basis from people who have done some testing on small numbers of rifles side by side,
that if you do a test of basically, shoot a group, dump some ammo get the barrel hot, and then shoot another group,
the G36's increase in group size is actually quite good.
Better than many other comparable rifles, and far, far from the worst.
So it's actually pretty good in that way. But you have a situation that is very easily misinterpreted by people who
either aren't really educated about what they're looking at, or people who have an agenda and a bone to pick.
So, just as a hypothetical let's say we have rifle A shoots a 1 inch group when it's cold, and a 3 inch group when it's hot.
Rifle B goes from 2 inch to 4 inch. Well one way you could report that is,
"Rifle A when it got hot shot a 3 inch group, rifle B shot a 4 inch group. Therefore rifle A is the better one."
You could be still 100% perfectly accurate and say,
"Rifle A's group size tripled when it got hot, rifle B's group size doubled when it got hot."
That makes rifle B sound like the better one.
And these are issues that you get into with media reports,
and even in many cases like high-level bureaucratic level officers, who are very far removed from
the mechanics of firearms technology, looking at these issues, so.
Ultimately, the reality of the situation is the G36 is a pretty darn good rifle.
And if it wasn't, if this was a legitimately serious problem,
we would know about it from more sources than just the Bundeswehr, just since about 2012.
And frankly, this is what the court system in Germany found.
HK sued over this, there were allegations that the G36 was inaccurate to a point that
HK had misled the German government when the gun was adopted, it never should have been adopted, and it should be replaced.
And HK's response was, "Our gun met all of the requirements."
Every firearm design is a balance of compromises. ... And in this case you're trading sustained fire capability,
like how much energy, how much heat, can the barrel absorb before its temperature changes enough
that the group starts to get, you know, badly large, versus weight when you're actually carrying the thing around.
And the G36 made a ... compromise that is more towards weight than it is towards sustained fire.
And we can actually see some of this, like a hint to point in this direction,
is the fact that the light machine gun version, the MG36,
was not adopted by the German Army because they didn't have sufficient sustained fire capability.
They stuck with other machine guns already in service,
and are replacing them with other different machine guns. But not the MG36.
Because its steel trunnion in a polymer receiver, even though it had a heavier trunnion and barrel than the rifle version,
it wasn't sufficient to meet German Army requirements.
Now in the court case, the courts found that HK was correct. The rifle is good,
the rifle meets military specs. It did when it was adopted, it still does today.
So for many people ... that closes the book, like that's the end of discussion, the G36 works.
However, ... from an outsider's perspective this clearly looks like something
where there are political forces at play that have a bone to pick with HK.
And at the same time, HK has been far from their ... own best ally in this, because the stereotype is kind of true.
They're difficult to work with, they're not really all that great at customer communication and support.
We joke about that here in the US, but especially when it comes to HK in Germany,
they can be a kind of obtuse organisation to work with. And ... their reactions to many aspects of this problem,
this media furore and political furore over several years didn't always help them.
Even in cases where they were right, like sometimes if you're right
you need to be a little nicer to convince the people on the other side that you are right.
Anyway, clearly there are some people involved in this politically and bureaucratically who don't like HK,
and found this as an opportunity to pick and choose the worst ways to look at some of the results
and the data and the opinions, and try to use them to hurt HK.
So ultimately, while HK was found correct in the legal system, there was also this push that
the German Army is going to reject the G36 and they're going to replace it.
And there is a tender in place to replace the G36.
Now interestingly that tender should have finished six months ago, the trials program.
It hasn't, because none of the rifles in the trial have been able to meet the accuracy requirements - when they get hot.
Huh? It's almost like the new requirement is so stringent that it is an impossible set of compromises.
The gun must be this light, it must be this accurate when it is this hot.
Sometimes you put those combinations together and the result is impossible.
For example, the M14. The ... requirement for what became the M14, was supposed to be
a rifle that was like 8 pounds, was fully functional as a light machine gun, and also sniper level accuracy at 800 yards.
It was an impossible set of requirements to put together.
So at the moment, every foreign company has bailed on that tender. You'd think companies like
FN for example, or many smaller up-and-coming companies, would jump at the chance to take advantage of HK
getting kicked while it's down and trying to get a German Army rifle contract.
Like that would be a really impressive thing to pull off, and here's a perfect opportunity to do it.
In reality, there are only two companies still involved in this German rifle trial.
One of them is HK, HK has two of the rifles in the trial. It's the 433 and a version of the 416.
And then ... Haenel Merkel is the other company, and it's a long story, the chances of them winning it I think are like zero.
But if the requirements that have been set out, the new requirements that someone wants to hold the G36 to,
if they're actually possible, there would be companies that would be jumping at the chance
to meet those requirements. And the fact is there aren't.
Now, like I said I will get flack for this from all sides because this is a very emotionally charged issue,
and because there has been no actual formal scientific study to try and understand what the problem really is.
And so we're left with speculation, anecdotal evidence, which oftentimes can look very, very convincing,
even if it's not. Anecdotes are not scientific.
And we're also left with, you know, political pushes, people who are deliberately, on both sides,
trying to obfuscate the issue. People who support the G36 who are trying to prevent any investigation of it,
even if that investigation might actually vindicate it, because they're like
they're worried that maybe something would go wrong and then they'll look bad.
And people on the other side who want to get rid of the rifle and are pushing any opportunity to get rid of it.
And yet there are some interesting outcomes of this at the same time.
So aside from that tender, you might note that a lot of the recent rifles and guns that
... the German military has been adopting, some of the latest patterns of the 416 and the MP7 are sand coloured.
And a lot of people look at this and go, "Well, that's stupid, like we're in the process of trying to get out of Afghanistan.
Are we really going to do another desert thing? Like why do we have desert camo as a standard now for new German rifles?"
The answer is that may look like desert camo, but it's not.
That is a colour chosen to be less absorbent of heat from sunlight when the rifle's sitting on one side.
So, is that an abundance of caution? Yeah, probably.
Is it an acknowledgement of a secret failure of the G36?
I guess maybe, but probably not. Like I said earlier on,
ultimately I think it's very easy to go deep down a rabbit hole on this issue,
and you know, you get to the point of conspiracy theory nitpicking like,
"Well what about this? This little change to the polymer, like that was probably done, and
you know, and that resulted in this, which resulted in that, and there was this colonel who did that with it,
who's probably trying to cover something up."
In reality, if you step back and look at this ... question from the larger scale,
there are a bunch of countries that have adopted the G36. There are countries
that have continued to purchase the G36 after all of this came to light.
You know those people are going to do their due diligence and look at this,
and they're gonna try and find out if this is a problem.
And if this were a problem, realistically speaking, we would see it from more sources.
We would have actual good data to show it.
It is very unfortunate that we haven't gotten that sort of good data to show, either way, from from the German military.
But I am very confident in saying the G36 is a perfectly effective rifle within the criteria that it was designed for.
Taken outside of that working criteria, all bets are off.
Yeah, it's gonna get hopelessly hot if you dump enough ammo through it. So does any rifle.
If you put 400 rounds through an M16 fast enough you'll blow the gas tube,
and the gun will stop working. That doesn't mean it's a bad rifle.
That means you're using it in a way that it wasn't designed to be used.
So, hopefully that is of interest to people.
Please don't send me death threats if I have said things that don't match with your understanding of the issue.
But I think I've done a pretty fair job of going over what did happen, what didn't happen, and what the reality of the situation is.
Thanks for watching.