Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video episode on ForgottenWeapons.com.
Awesome piece here today. We're taking a look at an authentic second model FG-42.
This was a German paratroop rifle.
The requirements for this gun when it was requested by the Luftwaffe were pretty stringent.
This had to be the same length, the same weight as a standard 98k Mauser.
And it needed to fire from an open bolt for full-auto to keep the gun cool and prevent cookoffs,
and it also had to fire from a closed bolt for semi-auto.
It needed to be magazine-fed, it needed to be in full power 8mm 8x57 Mauser.
Very demanding standards.
And the gun was actually designed. There was a first model built which was all milled.
There's a second model, and this is the second model, it's primarily distinctive for
the pistol grip. The first model had a much steeper grip angle on it.
There are a number of other changes made to this gun.
Historically not a whole lot of these were made, very few of them are in the United States.
And this was the design basis, largely, for the M60 machine gun.
So we're gonna go ahead and take this apart, and take a look at it, and show you how it works.
Alright, so let's go ahead and take this apart. We're going to start
by removing the magazine. These are distinctive for a very large front catch on them.
See that there. Alright.
Now like a lot of other German guns, the first step in disassembling this is to push this button.
This will allow me to release the stock.
So our stock fits over the end of this stamped receiver. Next,
we're going to take the recoil buffer here out,
there's this spring we hold in, rotate 90 degrees, and then this comes out.
You can see the teeth here
lock into this section of the receiver.
So we have a rather long recoil spring, and the end of this fits into our buffer tube.
Alright, so once we've got the buttstock off, the recoil buffer out,
next we're gonna go ahead and take out the bolt and bolt carrier and gas piston.
So we're going to take our cocking handle,
you can see back here the cocking handle slot is enlarged, that's where it can come out,
so I'm gonna pull it back to there,
pull out the cocking handle,
and then
the bolt and gas piston come out the back.
Now this one has been deactivated.
So they've ground off part of the gas piston and the front of the bolt,
but we can still see the whole action, or almost all the action. They also welded the firing pin in place.
So, the way this gun works, it's fairly clever.
We have a firing pin riding inside the bolt,
(in this case the front of the firing pin has been clipped as part of the demil process),
and it's held on
right there.
So when this is in the gun, you can see our locking lug is vertical
(there are normally two, the opposite one's been ground off here as part of the demil),
there are two locking lugs, and they're vertical when they're traveling in the gun.
If you look very closely at the front of this locking lug,
you can see that it's not perfectly square to the front of the bolt. It has a slight angle back,
and the reason for that is there's some very subtle design features on the FG-42.
In order to reduce friction inside the gun while this is all moving, there's nothing,
in fact you can see right here there's a flat surface
... where the piston connects to the bolt.
So when this is traveling back and forth there's nothing pushing it to rotate.
And if there was, that would be putting a lot of friction in the system,
and require ... more forces to operate back and forth.
So the way this rotation starts,
when the bolt face hits the very end of the barrel there are two small nubs that come out
and give this just a little bit of a nudge clockwise, like that.
Once that's happened, then we have this track. So we're sitting like this, square up,
until the bolt is just nudged slightly,
and then, under spring pressure,
the bolt stops against the back face of the barrel, the gas piston keeps going forward,
and rotates the bolt closed.
So as I mentioned earlier, the FG-42 is designed to fire from an open bolt in full-auto
and from a closed bolt in semi-auto.
So if you line this up with the gun, this is the sear for semi-auto operation, and
this one is the sear for full-auto.
And the way it works,
obviously in full-auto when you pull the trigger and hold it down,
nothing catches on this sear and it simply fires until it runs out of ammunition.
On semi-auto it has a disconnector, and what it does is catches and ...
... holds the piston about 5/8 of an inch back, and remember that this piston is connected directly to the firing pin.
So if the piston's not all the way forward the gun doesn't fire.
So the semi-auto catch holds it right about here. You can see a little bit of a gap there.
When you pull the trigger, what it does is release
the gas piston to move forward under pressure from this firing pin spring.
The mainspring is sitting inside here, so there's lots of pressure on this. The problem is in
semi-auto you only have this little bit of a short distance to move. So in order to ensure
that the gun fired reliably in semi-auto, they added another spring behind the firing pin to help push it,
because even though this spring is long it's almost all the way
extended when you're ready to fire in semi-auto.
Now it's interesting to note that they did design the M60 from this gun largely, and they went and put in
a spring like that as well in the M60 because they didn't fully understand how the FG-42 worked.
In an M60, which fires only from an open bolt on full-auto, this firing pin spring is completely unnecessary.
And in fact only created some of the problems that the M60 has.
Anyway.
Once we're in here, when you pull the trigger on semi-auto it comes out of this sear,
goes the rest the way forward, and if this were not a demilled gun,
the full length of the firing pin would stick just a hair out from the bolt face and fire the gun.
The cocking handle sits inside
the gas piston like this, but it has a bit of play in it. And this is reciprocating when you fire the gun
because it is ... solidly affixed in the gas piston. These guns developed problems with the cocking handle
rocking back and forth like this excessively, and eventually wearing to the
point that they come flying out and hit you in the face, which is a problem.
What they did on some of the later guns was put this notch in the back surface of the cocking handle. That
holds the front plug of the recoil spring,
and this interaction right here ensures that the cocking handle can't come out of the gun,
because it constantly has spring pressure holding it in place.
Now let's go ahead and reassemble this. We'll put in the gas piston and bolt.
So we want to put this in only far enough to reinsert the cocking handle.
Like so.
All the way in ... and you can see very clearly because of the side of the bolt,
when it locks all the way in place, the bolt rotates to lock.
Alright. Next step is we're going to put in our mainspring.
Get that all the way in. And then our recoil buffer here at the end.
Spring rotates up and holds in this opening here in the receiver.
And now the last step is simply to reattach the buttstock.
This slides over the whole rear assembly, and it just clicks into place.
Like that.
Now I said there was one other interesting feature I'd show you at the end here once we had it assembled.
That recoil buffer has springs acting in both directions,
so when the bolt comes back that ... buffer compresses and...
(... we're gonna have to show you against my shoulder), when you fire the gun, if you look right here,
you can see under recoil the gun actually compresses into the stock.
So on a full-auto 8mm Mauser shoulder-fired rifle this helps make a big difference.
This actually isn't that unpleasant of a gun to shoot, has quite a bit of concussion and quite a bit of flash,
but recoil is significantly improved with this, you know, three or four recoil spring setup.
A couple other quick features.
We do have an integral ... folding bipod, like so.
We also have a spike bayonet, a little tiny pretty much worthless thing,
mounts on like so.
They had problems, especially with some of the early guns, with this just coming out under firing.
And on this side
you can see the gun operating very clearly through the open mag well.
So when I open this up, the bolt is going to rotate,
cam in,
like so.
We do have
little doors to cover the magazine well to keep most of the dirt out of it.
And the magazine.
This was 20 round. They did also make a 10 round magazine to actually jump with.
Remember this is a paratroop rifle so a magazine like that sticking out of the side of the gun would really get in the way.
They made a short one that you could jump with, and
then once you got on the ground, replace it with a full size 20 round magazine.
And they did also make scopes for these guns, not all of them had scopes.
They all had backup iron sights underneath. And a little ZF-4 4x power scope.
These are awesome rifles, I'm really happy that we got to take a look at this one.
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photos and video on more interesting and unique firearms.
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