Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the James Julia auction house.
I'm taking a look at some of the guns that are coming up for sale
in their upcoming March of 2016 auction.
And there's one here which I know I have a
bit of a reputation for kind of bad-mouthing,
but this is a really interesting and very collectible firearm here.
Specifically ... this of course is an H&K G3.
This was the adopted German standard combat rifle.
These were adopted in 1959 by Germany.
It's kind of interesting actually, they did a bunch of testing
and they actually adopted the FAL, made by FN in Belgium.
And they adopted that formally as the G1, Gewehr 1,
and then they went to try and negotiate a contract to licence production in Germany, because you know
no country really likes to be dependent on buying its military weapons from someone else if they can help it.
And FN and the Belgians kind of looked at them and went,
"You know, we're not really comfortable giving you rights to produce a bunch of guns,
given the fact that you know you did kind of stomp in and occupy us twice in the last century."
So ultimately negotiations broke down, they weren't able to licence production of the FAL,
and they went looking for a new gun. And what they came to was the Heckler & Koch G3.
This had been adopted by Spain, a very similar rifle developed by the same people.
A lot of these engineers were German engineers from Mauser, ... they were
legally unable to do weapons development work in Germany immediately after the war,
so they travelled around a bit. They first went to France.
They did a bunch of experimental stuff there, but nothing that really came to anything.
They then moved to Spain where they developed the CETME rifle.
Which is pretty well known today because there are a lot of semi-auto sporter style CETMEs in the US,
but there's actually a whole line and series of CETMEs which we'll get into one day.
Ultimately, when they were able to, these guys came back to Germany
(when they were able to do so and legally continue working in the arms industry),
they came back to Germany, they formed Heckler & Koch in 1949, 1950.
And here we have the rifle that was just what the Germans were looking for when they were not able to licence the FAL.
So this is a roller-delayed blowback .308 calibre rifle, 7.62 NATO. And the fact that this is technically just a delayed blowback is
unusual and kind of interesting. Not a concept that a lot of other countries decided to run with.
Anyway, Germany adopts the rifle in 1959, and of course there's always some interest in civilian copies of military rifles.
So ... we're now talking the early 1960s, there's an interest in this. And the Golden State Arms Corporation out of California,
which is one of the large major gun importation/arms dealing companies in the US, but it works internationally.
They contacted HK about getting a batch of civilian semi-auto only HK G3 rifles.
And HK did this in three sets. ... Actually there were groups of these rifles imported in March and July and November of 1962.
Not more than a couple hundred total between all three batches, although I don't know the ... total production numbers.
And that was it, until 1966 there was another batch imported.
And then there's a dry spell until 1974, and in 1974 they released the HK91,
which is the civilian version of the G3 combat rifle.
Now, what we're looking at here is a March of 1962 example.
So this is quite literally the very first batch of HK G3 rifles imported into the US,
or really of HK rifles of any sort imported into the US. And what makes that interesting is
... with each batch of imports they had to do more and more to differentiate these guns from the actual military rifles, so.
And there's kind of a similar pattern with the FAL, the very early imports are extremely similar to military FALs,
and this, the very first import of the G3, is virtually identical to a military G3. Now in external looks
I know, because it's got this very early wood stock and handguard which is what the G3 had,
we're used to seeing that in this country on cheap CETME rifles, but this is in fact what HK started with.
... They're small details, and you kind of have to know what to look for to notice them.
So I'll point out a couple when we disassemble this rifle, but suffice to say for the moment
what makes this very interesting to collectors is if you want a military G3,
this is the closest you can get to it in a basic semi-auto non-NFA weapon in the United States, so.
Given that, why don't we go ahead and pull this apart and I'll just show you those little details right now.
Alright, let's start by taking a look at the markings.
We have markings on the trigger housing and we also have markings on the receiver. So this is the stamped receiver,
this is a separate component. Up here kind of the more important legal markings.
We have G3, this was still given the model number G3. In 1966 they would be importing guns
and they'd call them the G41 to distinguish them from military rifles, and then after the 1970s they were called the HK91.
MK is a serial number prefix that was used on all of these 1962 guns.
And then I believe, ... I can't prove it, don't hold me to it, but I believe they started at serial number 2,000.
So this would be rifle number 85, I think. And then our HK logo and the date of manufacture, which is March of 1962.
Then on the trigger housing we have the markings that are specific to this import batch.
So, made in Germany for the Santa Fe Division of the Golden State Arms Corporation, out of California.
Calibre 7.62 NATO. And you'll notice this has a two position fire control group.
So of course a military one would have what's called an SEF.
We have safe, semi-auto, and full-auto would be down here. This is however a semi-auto trigger pack.
And then of course this is German so we've got serial numbers on a bunch of other parts, all matching, number 85.
Alright, now let's take a look at some disassembly. With the military guns
these are set up to be very quickly and easily dismounted and you know what, boy they really are, it's pretty slick.
We've got two push pins back here that hold on the rear cap and the buttstock.
I can pull these two pins out,
and just wiggle this off,
and then I have the buttstock with the rear receiver cap and a captive recoil spring.
Then on the military guns, you know what this looks like? Doesn't it look kind of like a Sturmgewehr?
... You know what? These were Mauser engineers, they were intimately familiar with the Sturmgewehr,
why not copy that sort of disassembly system, it works really well. So the trigger group ... has one additional pin.
Pull it out, and the trigger group comes down just like that.
The fire control group is then a separate box inside the trigger housing.
If I rotate the selector lever vertical I can then pull it out, like so.
And then the trigger components.
There is our trigger box.
So this unit holds all the fire control parts. For an armourer this makes it a very simple rifle to maintain and service.
If anything goes wrong in the fire control group, you just pop this box out,
drop a new one into the trigger housing here,
put it back on the gun and presto, you're ready to go.
And then you can fix this later at your convenience.
So lastly, we have a bolt group to take out. So the charging handle here stays in the receiver,
I'm not going to pull that out. But we can pop it up and use it to unlock the bolt.
Push the bolt back, and the bolt
just slides out the back of the gun.
Now this tube up here is often mistaken for a gas tube.
It kind of looks like that, however there is no ... gas system on the G3, this is a delayed blowback gun.
What we have is a pair of rollers.
And when ... the gun is locked, these rollers are pushed out by an angled wedge inside the bolt head.
They lock into the receiver, and because they're sitting on an angled wedge when you fire, what happens is these rollers
split and distribute the rearward force of recoil and pressure in the chamber.
Most of it goes sideways out into the receiver, and much less of it is pushed straight back, trying to open the bolt.
That's a very carefully engineered system, such that when you fire a .308
the rearward force is calibrated to only open the bolt after pressure has dropped to a safe level.
I actually have an entire lengthy video on the development history of this system,
which I would recommend you go take a look at if you'd like to know where exactly these guns came from.
So with the importation of these guns, of course this is the first batch, the bolt carrier is
identical to a standard HK military bolt carrier.
With the later batches in 1962 they would start making some changes to the bolt carrier to ... differentiate them more from the full-auto guns.
So that's it for disassembly. There is your complete HK G3 pulled apart.
Alright, here's a little pro tip for guys who have G3s or CETMEs
and haven't played with the internals a whole lot. You can see the bolt is standing off slightly from the bolt carrier here,
don't push that ... backward, don't lock that thing in. What you have is a really tight spring right here.
This is an anti-bounce lever. It was introduced into the rifle because, since this is simply delayed blowback,
when the bolt closes it actually has a tendency to bounce open slightly,
and it'll open and close two or three times as it shuts, simply because metal on metal contact is bouncing under spring pressure.
And what they found in testing was occasionally that bounce will coincide exactly with
a second shot when you're firing in full-auto, and it will cause the gun to
open prematurely because it's firing when the bolt's not quite fully closed yet.
So they added this latch and spring so that when the bolt closes the first time this spring snaps down and prevents it from bouncing.
If you push these together you will then have a kind of obnoxious
time trying to depress this spring and pull out this typically slippery and oily bolt and unlock it.
So when you pull the ... bolt out of the receiver it'll be open like this.
Just leave it that way until you're familiar with the best ways to actually fix that.
Alright, so I mentioned this pivoting lower trigger housing before, but I want to expand on that briefly,
because this is the main area where these guns differ from the later imported semi-auto rifles.
And there's some interesting mechanical detail here. The way this is built, the HK has a double magazine release.
It has a paddle here that you can push in kind of like an AK,
and it also has a button here that you can push like an AR.
Now the way this thing functions is that when you run the paddle it actually pushes the button for you,
because both of these have to move in order for the mag release to actually get out of the way and let you remove the magazine.
And the way this is built is that the pivot for this paddle is also a reinforcement for this pin,
and it's a reinforcement for the pin holes in the receiver
here.
So, when HK started importing a lot more of these rifles they had to make it so that
full-auto lowers were more difficult to fit onto semi-auto guns.
And the way they did that was by getting rid of this pin system entirely. They replaced it with a little ledge and shelf inside.
Which doesn't really make the guns any more difficult to disassemble or difficult to use.
It doesn't really impact in any way, except for differentiating them from the full-auto guns.
Well part of the problem with that was when they got rid of this pivot hole they got rid of the paddle mag release.
So that's a visual
differentiation that a lot of people don't like.
That wasn't the goal, there was really no reason they had to get rid of the paddle mag release.
Except that they had to get rid of the pivot and the paddle was kind of built into the pivot, so the paddle just went away.
Figured you've got the button, so that's fine. For a sporting rifle doesn't make any difference.
Now there are gunsmiths who have come up with ways to replace the paddle mag. That was kind of a cool innovation a while back,
someone figured out a good way to put in a paddle with a shelf type lower assembly.
So you can now get sporting rifles that have the paddle release as well, and that helps.
But of course nothing is quite the same as having the original HK.
Thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
This is a pretty rare version of a rifle that we're all used to seeing, but I think it's actually really cool
to be able to take a look at what these originally looked like in their finer details,
what the G3 looks like as a military rifle because that's what this is.
So if you'd like to own this yourself, put it in your own collection, of course it is a
simple basic Title 1 firearm, not a machine gun, not NFA controlled,
take a look at the description text below. You'll find a link to the Julia catalogue page for it.
You can take a look at their description, their high-res pictures and place a bid on-line,
or come up here to Maine and participate in the auction live.
Thanks for watching.