Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today in the James Julia auction house
taking a look at some of the guns that are coming up
for sale in their October of [2016] firearms auction.
And today we're gonna take a look at the iconic German Sturmgewehr,
and this is going to be an introduction video to
this gun for the people who aren't really familiar with it.
We'll have a part two coming up after this on some of
... the more philosophical background and ... a little
more detail on the gun and its use, but
today we're just going to take a look at the mechanics.
What is this thing, and how does it work?
Well, the answer is this is a tilting bolt, semi-automatic, gas piston operated assault rifle.
This [is] the first assault rifle.
So, in many circles 'assault rifle' is seen as a very loaded political term and sometimes it is used that way.
However, it does also have technical definition, which is: a rifle capable of both semi and full-automatic fire
which is chambered for an intermediate calibre cartridge.
Intermediate meaning it's more powerful than a pistol round, and it's less powerful than a full size rifle round.
And this German Sturmgewehr exactly fits those criteria, because it really kind of is the archetypical assault rifle.
So there is a selector ... there are two switches on this rifle actually, which we'll show you in a minute.
There's a safety for safe and fire, and then there's a selector button for semi-auto and full-auto.
So, pick any combination of those two that you like.
This is chambered for the 8x33mm cartridge.
As you can see from the length of the magazine here, it's a nice short cartridge.
... The 8mm bullet is the exact same diameter as the other standard German rifles
of the time, which were in 8mm Mauser.
That of course makes manufacture simpler, because you've got the same tooling to make the barrels.
However, it fires a ... smaller projectile. It's about a 125 grain projectile,
travelling at about 2,200 or 2,300 feet per second.
It is slightly less powerful than the 7.62x39 Russian cartridge.
Now this is a rifle made largely out of sheet metal stampings, and the rationale for this
(and this is actually something that goes back into the 1930s)
was that Germany didn't have a lot of deposits of the specialty minerals
required for special high-strength steels in Germany.
That was all stuff they had to import, things like tungsten, and manganese, and vanadium.
All that stuff had to come in from outside the country and so there was a strategic imperative,
or preference, to be able to build weapons with a minimum of these specialty high strength steels.
And a good way to do that is to use a stamped receiver with a milled trunnion in it.
So you've got one piece up here that contains the pressure
and it holds the barrel and the bolt together and does all the real work,
and that's a small piece made out of really good material.
And then you can clamp or rivet that into a body made out of just plain, easy, cheap, soft, carbon sheet metal,
which only has to do things like guide the bolt, and hold the recoil spring, and hold the
trigger components in place. But it doesn't have to withstand any major pressures.
In fact, this is the same philosophy that was used in the design of the AR-15 rifle,
which has aluminium upper and lower receivers. The idea there being:
the aluminium is not strong enough to contain the pressure of firing,
however the aluminium holds a steel bolt and a steel trunnion and barrel together.
The trunnion in the AR-15's case being built into the extension of the barrel.
All that [the] aluminium has to do is pretty much hold all the parts together in the right orientation.
That's the reason why AR-15s can be made with things like polymer plastic lowers.
There's no strength requirement, really there's no pressure containing requirement for those lower components.
And that was the idea with the German stamped sheet metal Sturmgewehrs.
... There's only a couple of pieces in here that are expensive to make, the rest are fairly cheap.
German industry at this time had a long history of expertise with stampings.
If you look around you can actually find a lot of pre-war things like German children's toys
that are these little stamped sheet metal figurines and widgets and things.
But they are relatively complex sheet stampings.
And it was that expertise that was able to be translated into complex and
very effective stamped metal firearms, primarily this one.
So, let's go ahead and pull this thing apart. I'll show you how all the bits work inside,
because it's a good, effective rifle and it was definitely an inspiration,
although not the basis of a copy, for the Soviet AK-47.
So, a little bit too long to fit the whole thing in the screen here.
Let's start with controls, which actually requires taking a look at the other side of the gun.
First off, we have this big magazine release button. And the idea behind this thing was,
as a right hander, you grab the magazine with your hand, push the button,
pull the magazine out with a nice grip on it, and retain [keep] it.
Magazine production for these guns was never able to to pick up to where it needed to be.
You did not want to just go dumping magazines around willy-nilly, or you would very quickly have no magazines.
This is an MP44 designated gun.
You'll also find MP43, MP43/1 and StG44.
And the differences in those designations are something beyond the scope of this video,
suffice to say they're all basically identical mechanically.
We have our safety selector here on the left side of the pistol grip. This is the safe position,
this is the fire position. So once again, as a right-hander,
this sits nicely under your thumb and it's easy to take off safe.
One of the ... characteristics that was noted and appreciated about the Sturmgewehr
was that it was a very combat ready weapon. It was easy to leave in
a position where you could just grab it and go and start shooting and be very effective.
We have the other control, which is this push button,
which goes back and forth through the trigger group, and this is our semi or full-auto selector.
So on this side, you can see it has an 'E' for Einzel, single fire, that's semi-auto.
When I push it through, now we have a 'D' for, I believe, Dauer, Dauerfeuer, which is repeat fire.
This is the full-auto position over there.
Now this is easy enough to fire single shots on full-auto,
so I'm sure there are a lot of guys who just left the guns in full auto and used trigger control.
However, if you don't want to do that, or you want to make sure that your troops don't do that,
it's easy enough to switch the gun into semi-auto.
We have a serial number here on the side of the magazine well, and a production date.
Now one of the problems with the MP44s was this hand guard which is sheet metal and it heats up very quickly.
Not a huge deal, you know, you can easily wrap a piece of cloth around that if you want to.
But it was a deficiency that they never got around to fixing.
We do have a threaded muzzle here with a muzzle nut on it. That was there because these guns were capable of accepting
accessories like grenade launchers. That was not really used much, certainly with an MP44,
but it was a general characteristic of German arms that they wanted to keep.
And then this thing, which ... often confuses people, this is there for two reasons:
This is a plug in the end of the gas system, because your gas port is right here in this block.
So by taking this plug out, you can then clean the front of the gas system.
This also functions as a stacking rod, so that when you have multiple rifles (three of them)
you can stack them up in a field with just the butt plates touching the ground.
So that in muddy, snowy, wet, generally nasty places
where you have to set the rifles up, you're not going to get them full of mud.
Stacking swivels normally are found underneath the muzzle,
but there's no reason [they] don't work just as well in a position like that.
The rear sight here is graduated from one hundred to eight hundred meters.
Combat range of this was typically considered to be 300,
but if you got the sight there you might as well move it all the way out,
give people the opportunity for longer range fire if they want to.
The rear sight has a V-notch. The front post is a ... tapered post, a barleycorn style of sight.
So we do have this spring-loaded cover for an oil bottle, which is not in this gun, but that's what would be stored there.
And in order to make these more cost effective, the stock is a simple chunk of wood.
[It] has a ribbed butt plate for some texture but that's still just wood,
and then the corners have these sheet metal reinforcing straps on them.
Again, this is ... German industry trying to make the most cost-effective weapon they can.
The corners here are the pieces that really get wear, we don't really need metal in other places,
so we'll just use the minimum necessary.
There is a dust cover on the ejection port, very reminiscent of the AR-15's dust cover.
That snaps into place, keeps gunk from getting in there.
Now, it doesn't close off this open slot for the charging handle, but it's certainly better than nothing.
And that does automatically open when you operate the charging handle.
So mechanically, this is a tilting bolt gun, (we'll take a look at the bolt in a [second])
but the trunnion is this length.
These two grooves are crimps to hold the trunnion in place, and then it is spot welded into the receiver as well.
The locking surface is right back here. The barrel comes in right up here.
In fact, looking at it from below, you can see that bolt tilting when I bring it back out of battery.
Right there, lifts up, right there, it comes into position.
See if we can get a better view of that.
So this is the bottom of the bolt: you can see as it comes forward
it's going to drop down just slightly towards the camera.
And when I pull it back, it's going to lift up
away from the camera, and cycle backwards.
That's what's actually locking the action.
By the way, while we're looking at this, here are some of our manufacture codes and inspection marks on the bottom.
Of course a Waffenamt, and then 'cos' is the manufacturer code for Merz-Werke,
which was a subcontractor that made the stampings for the receiver.
'qlv' is the armaments code for Erma. They are the company that actually assembled this gun.
We have another three-letter code here which would be for the subcontractor that made the hand guards.
When these were being made in the war, a lot of the parts were manufactured by a
wide variety of small shops, and then brought together for assembly at the major factories.
All right, now the fun part. Disassembly is super easy:
there is one pin and that's pretty much all we have to deal with.
I'm going to push that spring in, push the pin down, and grab it and pull it out this side.
It's not captive. That's maybe the one downside to it, you may recognize this sort of system from the HK G3.
Well, this was a rifle manufactured extensively by Mauser and a lot of those
Mauser engineers would go on to work for HK eventually. So, definitely lineage there.
Once that pin is out then ... the butt-stock slides right off the back of the receiver.
The recoil spring (it's a very ... long and large diameter recoil spring) comes out.
That recoil spring is situated in the buttstock.
By the way, this is one of the early problems that the MP44 had, was that the hole for the recoil spring was
clearanced too tightly. It was just a perfect fit for the recoil spring.
Which was fine, until you got into a humid or wet area and the wood swelled
and that hole shrunk and clamped down on the recoil spring and the gun wouldn't function.
So the solution to that was to drill those slightly larger.
Now, we have this guy, we can pull our trigger group down like this.
It's held by a rivet in the front, so the trigger group does not come out.
And we can pull the bolt and bolt carrier right out of the back of the gun.
So there's our gas piston, our bolt carrier and the bolt itself.
So the basic way this works is you have a recoil spring pushing on the back of the bolt carrier here,
so when this all goes into battery, the bolt is going to hit the chamber face and stop,
the bolt carrier is going to push right up against the back of it like this.
At that point we have a firing pin extension right there, you can see it coming through the front there,
that lines up with the actual firing pin, which is triangular, right there.
And the hammer can then come up through this slot, hit the extension, which goes forward,
which then hits the firing pin, which extends out the front and fires the rifle.
You then have a gas port on the front of the barrel, that's going to tap gas onto this piston.
When that piston moves back the bolt is still in place and locked
(you can see this is pushed down so that this surface right here locks into the trunnion)
but when the bolt carrier goes back, it's going to get to here, and then those two hooks
are going to interface, and they're going to pull the back end of the bolt up.
(It doesn't come up very high, it's just the difference from that position to that position.)
That unlocks the bolt, and then the bolt carrier's hooks allow it to pull the bolt backwards to cycle.
If you are interested in the real nuance technical details of this system and
some things about like how the trunnion was made, and how the locking shoulders were installed,
I would suggest you take a look at a series of videos on InRangeTV that we did
looking at these details with Hill & Mac Gunworks. We've got a lot more engineering nerdery there.
Now the fire control group on this gun is kind of a ridiculous Rube Goldberg mess.
It has way more pieces than it needs because it is stereotypically German.
However, I will point out a few basic things. It is hammer fired,
we just talked about how the hammer comes up through the bolt carrier. That's the main thing.
This is not removable, I would not consider this easily field serviceable.
This is the sort of thing where if this breaks, you give this back to the armourer and
what he'll probably do if he can't easily fix it, he'll drill out that rivet, put in a whole new trigger group,
rivet it back in place and send you on your way with a replaced part in the gun.
And that's all there is to a fully field stripped MP44 Sturmgewehr.
It's a very simple gun to take apart in the field.
Very combat effective. There were some things that they
could have improved on it, but overall it was a well-executed gun.
Thank you for watching guys. I hope you enjoyed the video.
This rifle is of course coming up for sale here at Julia.
It is fully transferable and fully functional and if you'd be interested in having it yourself,
check out the description text below the video.
You'll find the link there to the auction catalogue page on this gun.
You can take a look at Julia's pictures and description.
If you like it, you can place a bid online or here in person live at the auction.
And of course, tune in to our second part on the Sturmgewehr,
which goes into a little more background historical detail
and more detail on how these guns are actually implemented in World War Two.