Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company
taking a look at some of the guns they're going to be selling
in their upcoming May of 2017 ... Premiere Firearms Auction.
And they have a couple of submachine guns in this particular auction,
and I wanted to take a look at this one today.
This is a Star Z-63. Now Spanish firearms here in the US
don't have a very good reputation, and sometimes that's earned and sometimes it's not.
And I am going to go out on a limb and say that with this particular gun,
a general prejudice against it simply because of its Spanish origin would not be a fair or justified complaint.
So firearms manufacturing in Spain was consolidated into just a couple of companies after the Spanish Civil War.
And one of those was Star Bonifacio Echeverria.
And after World War Two they started making the Z-45, which was basically an improved copy of the German MP40.
And then in 1962 they introduced a much better, more modernised, gun and that was the Star Z-62, which is very similar to this,
but in addition to being available in 9x19, the 62 is also available in 9x23 Largo.
They fairly quickly realised that the Spanish Army was really the only outfit in the world still using 9mm Largo.
If they wanted to really move into the future of small arms, if they wanted any export contracts,
and really if they wanted to keep pace with what the Spanish Army was probably going to do,
they really needed to just be available in 9x19.
So they were able to simplify the gun just a little bit, shorten some of the components by dropping the 9x23 option.
So the standalone, only available in 9x19, gun became the Z-63.
It was actually introduced in the mid or late '60s, not in 1963,
they just gave it that name because it was one slight iteration beyond the Z-62.
Now this at first glance looks kind of like a generic blowback submachine gun, and that is how it works.
But it has a number of interesting features, mostly safety related features, that were added into the bolt.
And I want to take a look at those, because ... there's a lot more under the surface of some of these guns
than you might realise if you just look at them all and assume they're all generic blowback submachine guns.
So let's take a closer look at the Star.
A couple basic starting statistical facts here. Rate of fire on the Z-63 is about 550 rounds a minute,
and it weighs in at about 2.9 kilos, or about 6.3 pounds.
Although it actually kind of feels a little bit heavier than that because the grip is
pretty much right in the middle, at the balance point of the gun.
Which means when you're holding it you're pretty much holding all the weight in one hand.
With something like a six pound rifle you'll typically have one hand at the back and one hand at the front,
and you split that weight and it feels lighter. This is actually lighter than it feels because one hand.
Now submachine guns aren't particularly complicated things. The controls on this are no exception.
There is a cross bolt safety here in the pistol grip.
So that is on the fire position, you can see the red. ... So when I look at the S for safe and push the button, it's on safe.
The other side has an F for fire.
We have an interesting trigger here in that it's a two finger trigger.
And if you pull the bottom it fires in semi-auto, and if you pull the top it fires in full-auto.
And the way it does this is on the bottom it's just pivoting,
but if you pull at the top it actually pushes the ... trigger back this direction.
So, having not actually fired one of these, I've just played with it dry firing a bit, and this seems to work pretty well.
Although firing it in full-auto is a little bit awkward.
I think the best way to do this would actually be to keep two fingers on the trigger all the time.
Which is a little weird for those of us who are used to shooting, say, rifles,
but for a submachine gun I think that would make more sense.
The magazine release button is right here on the side, and that's very standard.
We have a double-stack double-feed magazine, so good magazine design.
And lastly on controls we have a non-reciprocating charging handle, right there.
We'll get to this in a moment because this ... has some of the safety mechanisms built in, ... they are pretty cool.
But when you're firing it doesn't move, it snaps forward, stays nicely out of the way.
The markings are a little bit hidden under this bed liner sort of finish.
Actually really reminiscent of the Sterling submachine guns in several ways, but the finish is one of them.
Anyway, Star which was located in Eibar, España.
And it is the Modelo Z-63. We have a serial number up there at the top.
As with many submachine guns, the stock is a folding type.
So on the butt plate what we're actually going to do is pull it backwards this direction.
That will allow me to fold the butt plate up like that.
And then we have a keeper latch down here. I'm going to pull the whole stock backwards to pull it back behind that,
and then the stock folds up.
And at the front this,
push the butt plate back against spring pressure, and we can hook it inside the front of the receiver tube there.
Then, what was the butt plate now serves as a front grip.
And then you can use the gun without the buttstock, should you want to.
Thanks to the cooling holes, this stays away from the barrel so you can actually grip it
all the way up here on the receiver tube without it overheating and burning you.
The sights are an aperture type, and it's an L-shaped flip sight.
So there's a ... 100 metre aperture and a 200 metre aperture.
Pretty standard basic hooded front post there.
OK, now we can get to the cool stuff on the inside.
And to do that we're going to start by removing the end cap from the receiver.
In order to do that we need to depress this little plunger in the middle,
and ... one of the poor design elements of this is that there's a lot of spring pressure on this as soon as I take it off.
So hold on to it tight, or it will go flying across the room. We'll just use our Universal Disassembly Tool here,
Push that plunger in and then we can rotate the end cap.
We want to rotate it 45 degrees, and then it's going to come off.
As I said, there's a lot of pent-up recoil spring in there just waiting
to fling this thing off into your face or your ceiling or your nice picture window.
... Interestingly, the recoil spring also has a big heavy weight in it. This helps reduce the rate of fire.
Alright, now we can see one of the cool safety features of the Star.
As we know, one of the persistent potential safety hazards on a submachine gun
is that if you hit the back of the gun, you can give the bolt just enough bounce to come back far enough to pick up
a cartridge, but not hit the sear. And then run it forward into the chamber and slam fire it. Truly an accidental discharge.
With the Star they've added a mechanism so that the bolt can't come out,
even if there's nothing holding it in place.
If I want to take the bolt out I have to actually use the charging handle.
The charging handle is just a little rod, it comes back and it's on its own spring.
So now that I've gotten it there, I can slide the bolt out.
Let's take a look at how that safety works.
So the unusual thing about the front of the Star bolt is that it has these two dowel pin, button, things in the front of the bolt
It also has this ratchet sticking out the side of the bolt. What happens is that ratchet is connected to
... that rod.
So when you use the charging handle, the charging handle
rod lines up with that ... button, that rod, and when you pull the charging handle back it pushes
that plunger into the bolt and thus allows it to travel.
Otherwise the ratchet locks into this recess in the receiver, and that's what prevents the bolt from going back,
no matter how hard you might hit the butt of the gun on the ground, or someone's head, or anything else.
Now the Star also has a moving firing pin. You can see it here how it doesn't protrude up through the bolt face.
That's another added safety feature, it's really hard to have
... a mechanically unintentional discharge if the firing pin is not exposed.
So the firing pin itself is actually connected to this other button on the front of the bolt face.
Push that in and the firing pin comes out.
What this does is when you fire the gun, the bolt of course slams
into the rear of the trunnion or barrel face, and that button gets depressed flush with the face of the bolt.
And that pushes the firing pin out.
So this is like an automatic hammer. As soon as the bolt closes, like physically because the bolt closes,
it causes the firing pin to protrude and fire.
So there's a lot more complexity to this bolt then you would normally expect just from looking at the outside.
Because of their mechanical simplicity, it can be really tempting, I think,
for designers to make submachine guns that are really a little too simple,
and prone to some of these potential accidental discharge types of malfunctions.
And it's really cool to see that Star took the other route and actually put a number of
clever little features in the gun to prevent those sorts of things from happening.
Give you a quick little demo of the trigger mechanism here.
This is of course an open bolt gun, so the bolt's going to lock open.
And then if I pull the bottom of the trigger the bolt slams forward,
and I'm holding the trigger down and the bolt will lock back open,
forcing me to ... release the trigger in order to fire it again.
However if I pull on the top of the trigger,
the bolt goes forward and it continues to cycle until I release the trigger.
So I think the way you would actually want to use this really is, awkward as it may seem to us, to have two fingers on it.
And if you're firing semi-auto you can kind of do this thing, and index your ... index finger and fire with your middle finger.
And then if you want to fire full-auto, it's easier to use both fingers
than to try and use one which has a tendency to slide down to the bottom of the trigger.
Alright, well hopefully we have a new perspective on a gun that many people would just naturally assume to be junk.
This is actually a really slick little submachine.
Now it is coming up for sale here at Rock Island, it is however a dealer sample gun.
So there's a pro and a con to that. The con is if you don't have a machine gun dealer's licence, you can't legally buy it.
The good news is if you are a machine gun dealer,
it'll be nice and cheap because these guns don't bring the value that transferable ones do.
So if you're interested in buying it yourself, or just keeping an eye on it,
check out what those machine gun dealer values are, well, take a look at the description text below.
You'll find a link there to Rock Island's catalogue page on this guy, and you can see their pictures,
their price estimate, their description, and everything else that you need in order to place a bid on it should you want to.
Thanks for watching.
[ cc by sk cn2 ]