Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction House taking a look at
some of the guns that they have coming up for sale in their April of 2015 Premier Auction.
One particular one here that I actually had a chance to shoot
(not this particular one but an example of the gun a while back,
unfortunately it was back when I had a very low resolution camera),
is a Czech ZH-29 rifle. And because my last video didn't have really any disassembly footage, or any HD footage at all,
I figured it'd be really cool to take a closer look at this one, and I can show you how all of the internals work.
... This is frankly one of the very early semi-auto rifles that was produced by Brno in Czechoslovakia.
It's a really intriguing design, it uses a bolt that actually locks sideways into the left side of the receiver.
Which is a very unusual system that hasn't really been copied by hardly anyone else actually.
Maybe for good reason, we'll take a look at the internals in a moment.
At any rate, these were introduced in 1929, they were floated around the entire world looking for contracts, for military contracts.
The US government tested one of these and turned it down. A bunch of other countries tested them and turned them down.
There were only a couple of places that actually decided to buy them. The biggest one was China, so the Chinese actually bought 285 guns.
There was a combined order between ZH-29s like this one and ZH-32 rifles which were a follow up design.
The Lithuanian Police bought 50 of them. And the Ethiopian Army (commonly at that time called Abyssinia) bought 100 of them.
You could have them in pretty much any calibre you wanted, Brno would would build them to order for a large contract.
However all of the ones that were made ended up being in 8mm Mauser, 8x57.
It is kind of nice today because it's ammunition you can actually get.
This one unfortunately does not have a magazine with it.
However it is my understanding that you can actually use ZB-26 magazines which are fairly easy to come by,
and they are fantastic, strong, well made magazines.
That would make sense given the Czechs had basically just started marketing the ZB-26
and its follow-up gun, the ZB-30, right around the same time that they were producing this rifle.
So it makes sense for them to use the same magazine in both of them, especially when they were both chambered for 8mm Mauser.
So I think I should probably bring the camera back here and we can take a closer look at this
and some of its interesting mechanical features. Because it's got a bunch of them.
Now before we start looking at the internals,
I want you guys to take a look at this rifle from the point of view of the sights.
If you look closely you'll notice that the rear sight is offset to the left and the front sight
is offset to the right.
And if we look down the barrel
you see the barrel is actually not square to the receiver.
It's pointing off to the right slightly, which is why the sights are aligned as they are.
This has to do with the locking system which involves the bolt tilting to one side.
So let's go in and take a closer look at that inside and you can see why they deliberately mounted the barrel offset in the receiver.
Alright, ... from an operational point of view pretty simple, pull the bolt handle, bolt opens.
Now what's interesting is that the bolt is locking into the receiver right here.
And we can see that very obviously if we look at it from the bottom.
Now here's our bolt. When I open the handle
you can see it pops what looks like up on your perspective, which is into the right side of the rifle.
So our locking shoulder is right here. When I open the bolt, it lifts the
locking lug of the bolt out of that shoulder, which allows it to travel backwards.
While we're in here, I want to point out one other neat thing.
This is our magazine release obviously, but we do have a spring-loaded catch for the front of the magazine.
These magazines had catches, lugs, on the front and the rear.
But because of this spring-loaded catch you didn't have to nose in and rock back on the magazine,
you could just push it straight in.
And this lug would depress under its spring, and then snap into place to hold the magazine in position.
So there's a lot done on this rifle to make it very efficient,
and to have a minimum number of operations required to actually operate the gun. And that's a good example of it.
They make it a little bit more complex by adding a spring and a moving part here,
but the trade-off is that in exchange for that you get to push magazines straight in
and not have to bother fiddling them front to back.
Now disassembly is also very simple. We have two cross pins, here and here.
I'm going to pop this front one through.
(It's fairly tight, we'll use my precision tool here.)
Pop that through,
pull that pin,
and the gun breaks open. I'm going to do the same thing to this pin
and our entire lower assembly comes off. Take a look at that in a moment. For now what I want to show you is
the bolt.
So our gas piston comes out.
Our locking recess is right here.
So this is the bolt.
This hook engages in the bolt carrier, and that's what causes it to pop left to right.
And then this surface right here on the back is what engages
right there.
If you start to wear out the headspace on the gun you can take that screw,
which is this screw right here,
take it out, and then your locking shoulder comes out.
You can replace it with one that has been properly sized to adjust for whatever wear and tear may have happened on the gun.
A very cool design. ... Gives them a much longer service life than they would otherwise have.
The gas system of the gun is of course located up front. We have a gas port right here,
and a gas tube running underneath the two pieces of handguard there.
Now I can't take this one off, but if we look at it up close you'll see that there is a nut at the end here.
In order to disassemble the handguard, you take off this nut. And then the front sight and the bayonet lug
and gas adjustment are actually a sleeve. So once this nut's off, this whole thing slides off the front.
Once that's off the aluminium handguard, the radiator,
slides off, and then finally the wooden handguard slides off.
So actually pretty clever, pretty easy to disassemble.
But I'm not going to go cranking on this with a wrench at an auction house.
To work with that system we have this bolt carrier and gas piston.
Obviously that's the piston, slides right into the gun right there.
Drops in and locks like that.
So if we were to put this on the outside of the gun, that's where the gas piston is sitting underneath.
We have this recess in here, that is what locks into that big hook lug on the side of the bolt.
So that is the bolt as it's travelling, this is the bolt when it's locked in place.
So now you can see why we've got this angled face on the bolt,
which matches up to the slightly angled face of the barrel which isn't square to the receiver.
... You want this surface to be perfectly parallel to the surface of the barrel in order to have the gun function properly.
... Once you fire, the gas piston comes backwards
It grabs the hook right there, which pulls the bolt in out of its locking surface, and then pulls it backwards to cycle.
Now let's take a look at the lower assembly,
Very elegantly simple really, it's only got one spring which ... is used to do all of the functions of the trigger group.
Our main spring is right here it runs down into the stock, and it's got this plunger which is acted upon
by this lug at the bottom of the operating rod. So that sits right like that.
Pushes against the recoil spring there.
Our trigger is very much like, say, an M1 Garand trigger.
With the exception of one very interesting feature.
Alright, first off let me point out it was a semi-auto only rifle. We have selector settings for single shot and safe.
And what safe does is simply rotate this plunger,
this round dowel pin, such that
the little nose on the trigger right there can't move in, which prevents the gun from firing.
So set it back to semi-auto. You'll notice there is a semicircular lump on the top of the hammer here.
Which just so happens to fit a semi-circular cutout on the bottom of the bolt.
When the bolt is retracted, say when the bolt locks open on an empty magazine, the hammer actually catches it and holds it.
So I'll show you that in a moment when we put the gun back together, but
when the gun is actually cycling, when I pull the trigger, fires the gun,
and then the hammer comes back and it hooks behind the rear sear.
And it hooks low enough that it doesn't connect with the bolt. The bolt travels over the top of it like this.
... When you fire a normal shot, by the time you release the trigger
the bolt has already cycled back and then gone forward.
And when I release the trigger, the hammer comes up slightly as it engages with the front sear.
At this point the bolt's forward, you're ready to fire another shot. If it was the last shot in the magazine,
fire the round, comes back.
There's a tab at the back of the magazine that will lock the bolt open,
which gives the shooter time to release the trigger. At which point the hammer
engages in this notch in the bolt and locks it open.
So that when you take the magazine out to replace it, the bolt stays back.
Once you put in a fresh magazine what you have to do to ... close the bolt is actually to pull the trigger.
When you pull the trigger
it drops down just slightly,
like that,
and actually releases ... the bolt to go forward. When you pull the trigger a second time
then it fires.
So what we have here is another example of the engineering being designed to make this a very efficient gun to operate.
Instead of adding an extra control for a bolt hold open,
they're simply making an existing necessary control, the trigger, into a dual-purpose device.
Now a lot of people would look at that kind of idea today with some horror for safety reasons,
but frankly if you had a military force whose only issue rifle was the ZH-29 that's not that big of a deal to train for.
You simply train that you keep the gun pointed in a safe direction when you drop the bolt,
which frankly is something you ought to do anyway.
Now let me put the gun back together and I'll demonstrate the bolt hold open actually in use.
So when I pull the bolt handle back it's going to lock open.
And in order to drop the bolt I simply pull the trigger.
Now if I pull the trigger a second time it will dry fire.
As long as I'm holding the trigger down I'm holding the hammer down slightly lower, and the bolt doesn't lock open.
So it's dependent on the follower holding the bolt open when I initially run out of ammunition.
Then when I release the trigger the hammer takes over that job, holds the bolt back,
I pull my magazine out, put a new magazine in,
pull the trigger to drop the bolt and then I'm ready to fire.
Well, thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
We've a very cool piece of Czechnology here that you don't often get to see, so.
If you would like to add this to your own personal collection, and truly who wouldn't, they're fantastic guns,
it is coming up for sale in April here at Rock Island.
If you click the link below that will take you to their catalogue page on it.
You can check out their high-res pictures, their cataloguer's description.
And really see everything you need to set up an account,
place a bid on-line or come down here in person to participate in the auction.
Thanks for watching.