Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today, courtesy of
Select Fire Weaponry in Waukesha, Wisconsin,
we have a really cool, very rare rifle to take a look at.
This is an HK43, it is HK's "Paramilitary" rifle in 5.56.
Now this looks just like an HK33 and for good reason.
This is the original civilian semi-automatic version of the HK33,
which at the time Heckler and Koch was calling the "Paramilitary rifle".
The basic timeline on this is that of course HK
has its G3 adopted by the German military, roller delayed, 7.62 NATO calibre.
In 1968 they come out with the HK33.
This is ... essentially that big battle rifle scaled down to 5.56.
The US is potentially interested in something like this,
HK wants to have a go at getting a US military contract.
As an aside, there's actually a batch of essentially these rifles, although with a few different details,
that are made under the name of Harrington & Richardson
and actually tested by US Special Forces in Vietnam, that's the H&R T223.
And someday I'll get my hands on one of those rifles and do a video on it for you.
But they never managed to get an actual US military contract,
but the HK33 (in 5.56 calibre) becomes a fairly popular rifle for the ... military export market.
And it's successful enough that HK goes ahead
and also makes a civilian semi-automatic only version of it.
Now when they do that (which is 1974) the designation that they give it is the 43
and at this time there's also an HK41.
And for those of you who aren't familiar with HK's nomenclature system,
it's a ... two numbered designation.
The first number tells you the type of weapon and the second number tells you the calibre.
So for example, the HK91 is the semi-automatic .308 rifle.
The "9" means it's a semi-automatic rifle and the "1" means it's in 7.62 NATO.
The HK94 was essentially the semi-auto version of the MP5,
Again "9" means it's a semi-automatic rifle, "4" means that it's calibre 9x19.
You might think "Well, what would that be for this? That would be HK93, semi-automatic rifle in 5.56."
However, these are 40 series rifles.
That's because when HK first started making these semi-autos,
they were making them ... ideally for the German market.
And they started with the 41, and 40 series meant paramilitary.
What they intended by that was this was going to be a rifle that ... a reservist,
or even an active duty soldier could own him or herself to take out and shoot and practice.
And under German law it had to be semi-automatic, but it could otherwise
retain all the same features as the standard military rifle, or most of them.
And so the idea was we're going to sell these to reservists and soldiers,
and so it was the "Paramilitary" rifle. It's not quite military, it's for the paramilitary market.
So there were two rifles that came out with these designations,
the 41 which was in 7.62 NATO and was the more popular of the two,
and the 43, which is this rifle, in 5.56.
So let's go ahead and take a closer look at it, because there are a couple of odd characteristics
that it has, especially compared to the later HK93s that would follow it.
Let's start with the markings, then we'll take a look at some of the other physical characteristics.
On the left side here we have the designation HK43.
The date of importation which is March of 1974, and as far as I can tell they are all March 74.
And then we have the serial number, now the "E" means export,
and then all of the examples that I've seen referenced start with 1001.
So they're in the 1 million and 1,000 serial number range,
or rather they are in the 1 million range and they started at 1,001,001.
I don't know how many of these exactly were imported.
The highest number I've seen reference to is approximately 1,450
so maybe it goes up to about 1,500 total.
The records are ... not accessible to me at any rate.
Now ... these were manufactured by HK before HK had a US presence.
And so if we look at the markings on the right side we'll see "Made in Germany exclusively for SACO".
This was the company that handled importation and distribution of HK rifles at this point,
before 1975 when HK set up their own direct importation.
So SACO handled HK43s, HK41s,
and HK300s, which was HK's .22 Winchester rimfire Magnum rifle, interestingly.
Anyway, Arlington Virginia is where they were based, a zip code.
And calibre with a "K", that would change to "C" in the early 80s, calibre .223.
Worth noting these run just perfectly fine on 5.56 NATO.
They were marked .223 because ... well, that was the style of the time.
You'll find a lot of these older pre-ban military style rifles were imported marked .223, not 5.56,
but that doesn't mean there's any problem with ammunition interchangeability.
Now some interesting features here: the barrel is actually the same barrel that the HK33 uses.
Which is a little bit of a problem because that's a 15.35 inch barrel,
it does not meet US minimum length to be a non-NFA rifle.
So what they had to do instead was put on this flash hider
and then blind pin it in place, make it permanently attached.
Apparently some of these are welded on, some of them are blind pinned.
This one you can see the remnants of the pin there.
Later with the HK93s they would switch to a standard 16 or 16.25 inch barrel
so that they could just retain a threaded muzzle and a standard muzzle device.
The 43 has handguards set up to use a bipod should you want one,
although this didn't come with a bipod.
Oh, and because this pre-dates the NATO standardisation on 62 grain SS109 ammunition,
all of the HK43 barrels are 1 in 12 inch twist, which means 55 grain ammunition or lighter only.
Our selector markings here are "S" and "F".
Eventually that would later change to "0" and "1" instead of safe and fire.
And of course there is no pin and there is no thumb-paddle magazine release.
For the mag release you just have the button here.
And by the way, ... this is a steel 25 round magazine.
You could get 20, 25, 30 and 40 round mags for the HK43,
and of course these mags are completely interchangeable with the 33.
The lack of a standard push pin here is part of
what HK had to do to make these compliant with import law.
So you could not just take a fully-automatic fire control group
and plop it right onto a nominally semi-auto rifle.
So they welded on this ...
what's called a "shelf" down here and that took the place of the regular push pin.
And by the way these were all done in this black paint finish,
not grey, not Parkerised, these early ones were black painted. I think it looks pretty good.
Now for disassembly we can just punch the one pin here out.
Like so.
Note that 7.62x51mm HKs have two pins for the stock.
The 9mm and 5.56 ones have just a single pin.
With the stock off, the grip assembly just pivots down and off.
And I can pull the bolt assembly out.
The HK43 like I said is basically ... a military HK33 minimally adapted to make it semi-automatic.
And so it has a built-in buffer right here in the bolt carrier
that we would not see typically, at least not in the later HK93s.
On the later production guns they would put a buffer in the stock instead,
but here we have just a little bit of a rubber washer and that's it, there's nothing in the stock.
In the AK world you would call that an unbuffered stock and a buffered bolt carrier.
Of course the push-pin mounting point has been removed here.
There have been a couple of changes made to the fire control group.
So the auto-sear and the trip lever are both gone.
And the outer casing here has this detent on it
so that you can't push this selector lever
into what would be the full-auto position, which would be down here.
So they've made those adjustments so it is a semi-automatic only rifle.
Now it's true these came into the country before the 1986 Hughes Amendment,
which means there are at least a few of them that were legally converted
into "American-made" machine guns in the United States after they were imported.
But all of these were imported as semi-automatics.
And of course you can see the shelf here. The shelf gets in the way of the bits
that would allow the paddle magazine release to operate so it's been omitted
and you just have the push-button magazine-release instead.
Of course the military HKs give you both options: paddle or button.
In addition to leaving those parts out, normally you would have a surface right here
in the bolt carrier that would interact with the auto-sear, that has been milled out.
So this is a semi-auto bolt carrier as well as a semi-auto fire control group.
The thing that makes the HK43 so rare is the fact that ...
there was essentially only one batch of them ever made.
Because later in 1974 (after these were produced and imported into the US)
German law changed and the requirements for what a reservist could own changed.
And the impetus for having a 40 series of rifles available for sale disappeared.
They couldn't be as simply purchased and owned under German law
and so HK essentially discontinued the whole 40 series line.
Now they were still interested in selling semi-automatic rifles for various export markets,
especially the United States, but those required some kind of different characteristics
to meet US import law as well as other countries' import laws.
And perhaps they thought the whole "Paramilitary" designation
was a little bit scarier sounding than what they were really going for,
and so they were replaced with the 90 series of rifles.
So the very first batch of HK93 rifles, essentially ... in all practical terms identical to this,
the first of those were actually made in late 1974.
By 1975 that was the standard new pattern.
And ultimately, by the time US import law prohibited importation of this sort of rifle in 1989,
more than 18,000 of these rifles would have been imported.
So of the 18,000 plus HK93s you have to compare to,
the numbers are hard to get, but definitely not more than 500 HK43s ever made.
And I'm not sure how many of those actually came into the US.
So it was really cool to get a chance to take a look at this one.
A big thanks to Select Fire Weaponry out of Waukesha, Wisconsin, for loaning this to me to film.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.