- Yeah. - Like that. Ready? - Yup.
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, and today we're looking at an unusual H&K pistol. This is a P9S.
These were developed in the 1960s, came on the market in 1969 and they were produced until 1978.
And they're unusual in that they're actually a roller delayed blowback pistol.
The exact same mechanism as the main line of H&K rifles, just miniaturised for a 9mm pistol.
They did also make these in .45, but this particular one is in 9mm.
So go ahead and put a few rounds through it, see how it works.
The muzzle is a little high on this design, it has a little bit of flip,
but other than that it's a pretty comfortable gun to shoot.
It is of course a full-size 9mm service pistol sort of design.
So why don't we go back inside and take a look at the insides, and check out exactly how this works.
Alright guys, so let's go ahead and take a look at how the P9 actually functions.
We're going to start by removing the magazine, like other early European auto loaders this has a heel release.
It's a single stack 9mm, they did also make these in .45.
Now, double-check, make sure it's empty, which it is.
Now to remove the slide from the frame we have a little lever up here
inside the top of the trigger guard. What I need to do is push that in,
and then push the slide
forward.
And then the slide comes right off the frame.
Let's take a quick look at the frame first, discuss a couple interesting things that are going on there.
First of all, the trigger is a pretty standard double action. We have a hammer back here.
So when I pull the trigger, the hammer comes up. If the hammer is up, it has a double action pull.
I can manually cock it and fire single action. Now the de-cocker on this gun is pretty weird.
It's this lever on the side which acts both as a cocker and a de-cocker.
If I have the gun at rest like it is now, and I want to manually cock it for a single action shot
I can run the lever down and that will cock the hammer.
Now if I want to de-cock it, what I have to do is pull the lever down and then pull the trigger,
and that releases the hammer to its de-cocked position.
Which in today's safety mentality, we would never have a control involve pulling the trigger like that.
But back in the '70s when HK was building these, that's how they decided to do it.
So, interesting element to the design. The one other thing to take a look at while we're here,
under this piece of sheet metal there is actually a polymer buffer.
The front of the slide,
right here,
impacts on this block at the end of its cycle,
and then this block pulls on the polymer buffer which decelerates the system a bit.
So if you buy one of these and you plan to shoot it much, it'll probably be worthwhile to pull that apart
and just make sure that the buffer is in good shape and not desiccated and falling apart.
So, moving on to the actual operating mechanism. Looks a little complicated here.
We're gonna start by pulling the barrel out. The barrel and trunnion are fixed together.
I'm just gonna grab here, pull it back this way, and then lift up out of the pistol.
... Pulled that out, and we get the recoil spring
along with the barrel and the barrel trunnion here, with these two ears coming off of it.
We have, again very much like an H&K rifle, we have a bolt head inside here.
There's a little locking lever that I'm going to deactivate.
Push down on that little locking lever,
and then the bolt head slides out nice and easily.
Now it's like the world's most adorable little roller ... delay mechanism.
So what we have, we have our wedge right here that the rollers come to rest on.
We have the rollers themselves are sitting in this bolt head. You can see there
they slide in and out just like this.
So when the bolt head is forced back onto this wedge, it pushes both of the rollers out
where they proceed to engage
in these two recesses in the barrel trunnion. So I can mock that up here for you.
Put the bolt head all the way in, hold it in place,
and then simulating the wedge here with my screwdriver, you can see that we've got these rollers
coming out into the recesses in the trunnion. That locks the mechanism.
When you fire it, the pressure on those rollers is distributed partially into these ears and partially backwards.
And it allows a little bit of delay before those rollers get pushed in. And then the
bolt head and the slide can start moving backwards. The barrel on the P9 is fixed in place.
This lug locks into the frame.
So the barrel doesn't move and that has a couple of consequences for the pistol design, positive ones really.
Having a fixed barrel means it's a pretty accurate pistol, or at least it's a potentially very accurate pistol,
because the barrel isn't moving with each shot.
It also means it's a really good design to use a suppressor on. This particular one is in fact threaded for a suppressor.
Since the barrel's not moving, having the extra mass of a suppressor hanging out the front
doesn't do anything to hinder reliability like it does on a short recoil Browning style pistol.
So the P9 is a hammer-fired design, you saw the hammer in the frame.
And we have the rear end of the firing pin right here.
You can see when I push that in the front of the firing pin protrudes out, fires the pistol.
Does have a safety on the side of the slide. This isn't a de-cocker, we saw the de-cocker on the frame.
This is just a manual safety, and when I engage it you can see this rotates up into place
and prevents the hammer from pushing the firing pin far enough forward to detonate a cartridge.
Pretty simple there.
... Alright, we figured a cool comparison here would be to take a look at the P9, which is roller delay blowback,
and the CZ 52, which is a roller locked design. So they're very similar, but they do work a bit differently.
Now if we take a look at these, you can see the rollers here on the P9 locked into recesses.
You can also see the rollers here on the CZ locked into recesses.
The difference is in the HK these rollers are currently, in this position, they're resting on an angled piece of metal wedge,
where in the CZ they're resting on this flat surface.
So no matter how much force you put on these rollers in the CZ they can't open up.
Whereas in the HK here as you put force on them, some of that force acts
... to push the rollers inward and unlock.
So as I start to push the action back on the HK, you can see the rollers retreat into their recesses
and the action immediately opens.
That is just dependent on the amount of force being exerted by pressure in the chamber.
Whereas on the CZ, as I start to push, you can see that in the initial travel these rollers are sitting on that flat surface,
and it's only when they get to right there
that that wedge shows up and the rollers can move in and unlock. Then the pistol starts to cycle.
So the difference here is that the CZ the slide has to recoil,
the slide has to recoil about that far, so about a quarter inch, before the system unlocks.
Whereas on the HK as soon as the slide has started moving
the system is unlocked. And that's the difference between roller delayed blowback and roller locking.
- You remember how to de-cock?
Push the lever down,
hold it down, pull trigger - Oh god.
- release trigger, lever up. - Ah, wait, lever ... - What did you do? You just cocked it again. - OK.
Yeah, I think I'll just shoot it dry next time.