Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the National
Firearms Centre, part of the British Royal Armouries
in Leeds, where we are taking a look
at a very interesting hybrid weapon.
This was manufactured in the Dominican Republic,
it was designed by Hungarian refugee Pál Király.
And it is basically a Beretta submachine gun
scaled up to .30 carbine,
but with Pál Király's style of lever-delayed blowback system on the inside.
So this is the Model 2 San Cristóbal carbine, named after the
region and the arsenal where it was manufactured in the Dominican Republic.
This was made under the direction of Rafael Trujillo,
who was the dictator of the Dominican Republic,
and he wanted to expand the Dominican military,
and also its manufacturing capabilities in the late 1940s.
So in 1948 he, with some Hungarian technical assistance,
again some refugees from the falling Iron Curtain basically,
set up Armería San Cristóbal, in the San Cristóbal area.
And this was actually like a full-service arsenal that manufactured
a bunch of different guns, machine guns, mortars.
Most of these things being copies of other products.
But their most ... notable, their most interesting and recognisable product
was this, the San Cristóbal carbine.
So Pál Király himself arrived in 1948 and got to work designing this gun.
He's an interesting guy, and he was actually born in 1880,
so he was really fairly elderly by the time he got to the Dominican Republic.
... Well, during World War One he was actually I believe a captain,
an officer in the Austro-Hungarian military. Survived World War One.
In the inter-war period he went to work for SIG,
where he ... had a hand in the SIG MKMO submachine guns.
Which is the first appearance of this lever-delayed system.
During World War Two he then went back to Hungary,
where he worked for FÉG and had a hand in the
Austrian 39M and 43M submachine guns,
which are also the same basic lever-delay system.
And a lot of the same basic design from that original SIG gun
brought over to Hungary where those guns were mass produced.
And then of course after World War Two, when the Iron Curtain starts to come down,
he escapes to conservative Dominican Republic where he offers his services again as an arms designer.
Interestingly, offering basically the same gun that he'd been doing all his life.
The one design he had that was particularly successful was this one.
So let's go ahead and pull this apart,
and I'll show you how the lever-delay system works.
And how this gun was put together,
because it really is just a hybrid of a couple of different systems.
Starting with the markings as usual.
We've got the armoury markings up here: "Armería E.N.",
"San Cristóbal R.D.", República Dominicana, Dominican Republic.
Back here we have the calibre and the serial number. So calibre is .30 carbine,
and this is number 6651.
The serial number is also stamped in big numbers on the side of the buttstock there.
In addition to the Hungarian engineers who were working in the Dominican Republic,
there were also a number of expatriate Beretta folks there.
And that is really obvious as you look at this gun, there's a ton of Beretta influence to it.
First off is just the stock, the sling attachment style, the serial number style,
very Beretta, lot of Beretta influence there.
The trigger mechanism here is also ... a very obvious Beretta influence.
You have two triggers, the front one is semi-auto, and the rear one is full-auto.
The safety lever is again a Beretta influence.
This is basically a Beretta 38/42 submachine gun scaled up to .30 carbine,
and given a lever-delay system internally.
So the front position here, "F", is fire, and the rear position is safe.
Now the rear sight is actually not a Beretta thing,
this is much more just based on a typical sporting sight.
It is an aperture, and then you have this lifter here ...
to lift the sight itself up for different extended ranges.
Although it's not actually ... marked what those ranges are.
The magazine is a 30 round double-stack type, with the magazine release back here.
This appears very similar to the Beretta Model 57 magazines, but they are not interchangeable.
Note that this one has three witness holes for 10, 20, and 30 rounds.
Where the Beretta 57 locked open when empty, because it was a closed bolt gun,
this has no hold-open tab on it and this does not lock open when it's empty.
Because it fires from the open bolt, so it always locks open.
You'll notice that this does enter the gun at a bit of an angle.
That's to improve feeding, because it works a little bit better that way.
So there's your magazine. It's a nice sturdy magazine actually,
a lot better than the US M1 carbine magazines.
Further evidence of our Beretta influence here
is the fact that it ejects out the left side of the gun,
and has the charging handle on the right side of the gun.
Why Beretta did that exactly with the Model 38 ... I'm not entirely sure.
I'm sure they had a good reason for it, there are a number of potential reasons.
But because they did that, everyone who then later went to copy the system
copied that feature as well.
Including the Hungarians working in the Dominican Republic.
So, like I said, locks open.
The charging handle is non-reciprocating,
so you can slide it back to close that open slot in the receiver.
And then lastly, at the very front we have a nice big square front sight post
with a protective hood around it.
No setup for a bayonet on these.
Disassembly is done by removing the receiver end cap, again a very Beretta influence there.
... It's not threaded on, you rotate it 90 degrees and then it unlocks.
You can see the little lugs that are pressed in.
However there is a locking button, which I really just can't get a camera angle in to show you.
But you can see this cutout here, that is to allow you to get a tool in to the locking button.
So I'm going to put this in there, just push that in, and then I can rotate this. There we go.
There is a very strong recoil spring in here,
so you have to be careful when opening this to let it out slowly, there we go.
There's our end cap, and then we can pull out the bolt assembly.
And this is the interesting heart of the gun, because it has this lever-delayed system.
... Well, we'll start by taking it apart, there's a couple of bits in here.
First off, this is lever delayed, so this ... piece right here is our lever.
And it's going to dictate the interaction between the bolt head and the bolt rear.
Now this just drops out, there we go.
So there's that piece.
We then have a piece right here which locks these two together,
and limits how far they can travel forward and backward.
That piece also just drops out.
This one's a lot simpler, just an oval with a block on it.
And then we can pull these two apart.
So this is our bolt face. It's going to pick up cartridges here from the magazine.
It's got our extractor, ... the extractor comes all the way back there.
All that sort of good stuff, but it does not have a firing pin.
The firing pin is actually located on the rear portion,
and it is removable, it just sits on there in fact.
It's held in place when this is inside the main bolt head.
And that's the firing pin, right there. So pretty simple.
Now the concept of delayed blowback is simply that on a standard blowback firearm
... when you fire you've got a cartridge here,
and that pressure is going to cause the bullet to fly forward
and the bolt to fly backward.
Because the bullet weighs many, many times less than the bolt,
the bullet will go a lot faster than the bolt will.
And the concept on a simple blowback submachine gun
is to have the bolt weigh enough
that it doesn't actually pull the brass out of the chamber
until pressure is low enough that the brass can hold it and won't explode.
When you go from something like 9mm Parabellum
and step it up in power to, say, .30 carbine like this, you need something in addition.
Because if you want to do that with just simple blowback, you need a very heavy bolt.
Heavy enough that the gun gets heavy.
Firing it from an open bolt gets very difficult
because you have a lot of mass slamming forward when you fire, etc.
So there are a number of different mechanisms (these really like falling apart),
there are a number of different mechanisms for delaying that.
And the one we have here is one of the lesser used ones, the lever delay.
So you'll find this ... basically on the other guns that Pál Király did for Switzerland and Hungary.
And you'll also find a system like this in the French FAMAS assault rifle
[and the AA-52/AA-F1 machine guns]. And other than that,
there are no other large production guns that are lever delayed that I'm aware of.
So, the way this works is when the gun is coming into battery,
when this bolt is cycling forward, it's in this configuration.
And you have this little step, this little toe, on the bottom of the lever.
And this will hit a stop, a solid bar, in the receiver.
It will stop, and it will rotate down like this, as the bolt continues to go forward.
But the receiver is holding this in place,
so it does this, which forces the rear part of the bolt to compress forward like that,
which actually exposes the firing pin and fires a round.
Remember this is an open bolt gun, so
there is no circumstance in which the bolt will be closed
with an unfired cartridge just sitting in the chamber
(unless you just have a dud primer).
Then once the cartridge detonates, everything is going to want to go backwards.
And as the bolt starts to move backwards,
this lever is now going to hit an angled block in the receiver that it can't pass.
It has to lift up, like this, in order to get through the receiver and continue backwards.
But, because it has this protrusion on the inside
that interacts with the rear ... part of the bolt,
this lever can't go up until after the rear section of the bolt is accelerated backwards.
What this does is just take some time to do.
It takes just enough time - this is a minuscule delay,
but it's just enough time for the bullet to get out of the end of the barrel.
And for pressure in the barrel to drop, as I described before,
to the point where when the brass starts to get pulled out of the chamber
it won't explode from pressure.
So the ... rear half of the bolt gets pushed back just that far,
and then the whole thing can continue backwards and repeat the process.
The firing sear is right back here.
So the trigger system is really quite simple, it's just a basic submachine gun type.
Or a [Beretta 38/42] type fire control group.
The sear holds onto this notch.
When you drop it, then the whole thing comes forward
and goes through this firing and delaying and opening process.
And this guy really likes to fall out.
So that's the operation of the gun, there's really not a whole lot else on the receiver to show you.
The receiver just ends here with the barrel.
Because it's delayed blowback, there's no recoil system and there's no gas system.
So out here we just have a simple barrel under the handguard,
until we get out all the way to the muzzle.
And the receiver tube itself is just a plain hollow tube,
with the exception of one little surface inside there
to hold onto and basically actuate this lever.
Alright, now production numbers are up for debate here.
If you look through the various pieces of literature
you'll find a lot of people claiming that like 200,000 or 250,000 of these were manufactured.
I find that a little bit difficult to strictly believe.
... When you see numbers from some slightly more authoritative sources
talking about actual like monthly production tallies, they're usually 500 or less per month.
Which over the 16 year production span, from 1950 to 1966,
(by the way Király died in 1965, so by the end this may have been
in production only really because of his direct influence),
at any rate, if you're making like 500 a month, you can't make a quarter million in 16 years.
So, the most authoritative number I found was from Jean Huon,
who says 84,000 between 1950 and 1957, and an undetermined number between '57 and '66.
... My suspicion is ... probably a little more than 100,000 of these total.
A ... bunch of them were kept by the Dominican military for its own use, the Dominican Republic's army,
19,000 according to Huon, and then the rest were sold for export.
They were sold fairly widely around Central and South America.
Colombia bought them, Cuba was apparently one of the biggest purchasers.
So in terms of ... how they could have made six figures of these, but they're so rare to find today.
Well, if a lot of them, if the majority of them, went to Cuba, that's kind of a black hole.
Those aren't going to show up very much on the international trade once they get to Cuba.
So that would kind of account for that discrepancy.
You do definitely see ... pictures of these in pictures of Castro and the Cuban Revolution.
So Cuba was a big purchaser,
and then smaller purchases by a bunch of other South American countries.
Because they're a very simple ... gun,
the .30 carbine cartridge was around because of US military aid
with surplus M1 carbines that were floating around most of the world.
And tactically it's a very interesting idea, an open bolt .30 calibre carbine,
sort of intermediate between a submachine gun and a rifle.
Now if it were me, I think I would have much preferred the Beretta 57,
which is basically the same time period and very similar gun overall,
but it doesn't have the lever-delay system,
and it has a locked breech and it fires from a closed bolt.
And to me this gun would make a lot more sense with a closed bolt.
The open bolt is kind of like a big submachine gun.
Making it closed bolt, like the Sturmgewehrs,
where we see a very similar decision tree going.
Where the MKb-42s were all open bolt guns,
and it was realised that that was really not the best way to go.
Both because it left the bolt open to let dirt into the gun,
and also because it was hard to fire accurate single shots
when you had the bolt slamming closed ... at the beginning of every trigger pull.
And that's why the Germans went from open to closed bolt on the MP43.
Well the Beretta 57, if we want to consider that the analogue to the MP43,
is a much more effective gun in semi-auto because it is a closed-bolt system.
Anyway, I'm kind of wandering afield here.
These guns do show up, but they're really quite rare.
So hopefully you guys enjoyed taking a look at one.
I'm very happy to have got the chance, especially comparing this.
We do also have a video up on the Beretta 57,
so if you're curious about guns of this style, take a look at that one as well.
It's linked ... at the end of the video.
I do also need to give a big thanks to the Royal Armouries in the UK,
in Leeds specifically, for giving me access to their collection to grab guns like this one
and take them apart and show to you guys.
Their collection is not open to the general public,
but it is available by appointment to firearms researchers.
So if there's something in particular that you're interested in,
get in touch with them, their website is in the description below.
And arrange a visit to the Armouries.
Thanks for watching.