Hi guys, thanks for tuning into another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction House,
and I'm looking at some of the guns that they're selling
in their upcoming December of 2015 Premier auction.
And in this auction they have not one, but two
Volkssturmgewehr Gustloff carbines, also known as the VG1-5.
Now, 1-5 is actually not the correct nomenclature
for these, it appears that that actually came
from a misreading of some Volkssturm rifle trial
documentation by some US servicemen right after the war.
These were sometimes known as the MP507, and they were also ...
Typically they were just called the Volkssturmgewehr Gustloff, because they were manufactured by the Gustloff company.
Now, this is from the period right at the very end of World War Two where the Nazi party,
distinct from the Wehrmacht, was trying to develop and procure weaponry to arm the Volkssturm,
the last-ditch, enlist everybody sort of militia army to defend the German homeland.
And the production and distribution of these guns was actually done by the local
government organisations, instead of by the Army.
So you actually ... it's kind of weird, you had these two distinct procurement plans going on.
So, these rifles were all used in the province of Thuringia (which I've probably mispronounced).
... It appears that 10,000 of them were probably made. In fact, one that we have here is a very late serial number
Has a couple late features on it as well, which are interesting.
What makes these distinct from most of the other Volkssturm rifles is most of the others
were basically simplified ... Mauser bolt-action rifles. This was actually a semi-automatic rifle,
and it was chambered for the 8mm Kurz cartridge, which is pretty cool.
It uses this interesting gas delayed action ... gas delayed blowback.
These pretty much function as straight blowback rifles in 8mm Kurz.
Ultimately, despite their crude nature, these actually weren't really that much cheaper or quicker
to manufacture than MP44s at the end of the war, simply because the production tooling and machinery
and production lines for the MP44 had already been set up with the idea of mass production.
And just the economy of scale made those guns kind of hard to beat
by anything that was going to be produced in smaller numbers.
However, the party was looking for more weaponry, and so it wasn't necessarily
a matter of economising the economy as a whole.
... There was infighting in the government between Army factions and Party factions,
and it's a mess. A very interesting mess to study, but ugh, a mess.
Anyway, I figured this would be an excellent opportunity for us to take a look in HD at the internals of a VG1-5.
So why don't we go ahead and do that?
Alright, let's start with a little bit of comparison and background here.
These are manufactured primarily from stamped sheet metal components. The top cover is stamped.
The receiver is two pieces of sheet metal that are both stamped and then welded together along the bottom,
and then there is a separate magazine well, that's stamped out as well,
and welded inside the two sheet receiver pieces.
You can see here (I think more on this one) that this is actually spot welded.
So that's the receiver spot welded to the magazine well on the inside.
The hand guards are riveted on, these are not removable, which is kind of unfortunate,
but it was easier to produce them that way. The butt-stock was also riveted on.
Now this is the correct original set of rivets. This one, the rivets have been replaced with some brass bolts.
So, in another attempt at simplifying and making the production cheaper and more efficient,
the sling is actually not removable. It's this U-shaped piece of metal, ... it looks like they
basically put it on, put the sling inside it, and then bent it down and hammered four nails through it, so.
This guy ... unfortunately this rifle, the sling has come off.
This one you still have it, so that's pretty cool.
Controls on the VG1-5 are pretty simple. We have a rotary two position safety.
It's got a little hole in it to tell you what's been selected. So it's safe there,
and then if I rotate it (this one's kind of stiff) ... rotate it around, now we're in the fire position.
There were, I think, a couple of these made experimentally at the Gustloff factory that were select fire,
but that was never adopted or produced in quantity.
The 10,000 guns that were actually made were all semi-automatic only.
Now our magazine release is this button right here.
It's a standard push-button mag release. It is interesting to note (look at the other gun here),
the very early ones had a much simpler magazine release that ... it was judged a little too simple.
And it was actually a piece of flat spring steel that was riveted into the receiver back here,
and then ran all the way up to the front and had a little tab sticking out.
And to remove the magazine you would actually pry up that tab with your finger
and that would remove the metal from the magazine catch and let the magazine come out.
Now, they didn't do that for very long, they pretty quickly replaced that with this push button style instead.
See how that works on the inside there, pretty standard.
However, they already had these two holes in the receiver stamping dies, so they left them there
until they had to make a new set of receiver dies, which took a while.
But, on the late guns, like this one, you'll notice we have our magazine, but there are no holes.
So this is the latest of the three styles of magazine catch.
Now the serial numbers for these guns are actually in the stock. There's a 'Th' for Thuringia, and then this is 29,
looks like 2,909. So that's a reasonably early gun, kind of third of the way through production.
This one is 'Th 9901'. So this actually a very late gun, because they only made 10,000 total.
Sights on these rifles are extremely simple. There's a big U-notch that's just dovetailed into the top of the slide,
and a little front post, with a couple of protective ears on it.
Now mechanically, the way these work is pretty unusual.
If you have a Steyr GB pistol, it works exactly the same way as these guns.
So the basic mechanism for these is a gas delayed blowback. Up here at the muzzle we have ...
(pull this back against the spring), we have four gas ports, two on each side.
Those two ... got ... two more right there.
Those four ports vent gas from the barrel, once the bullet gets to this point, into the inside of this tube.
That gas pressure sits in there and as long as the bullet is in the bore, that pressure holds this tube forward.
So, there is a gas seal on the barrel about here,
and then we have a gas seal made by ... this front bushing.
This section of the tube is pressurised with gas when the gun fires,
that forces this to stay forward.
Once the bullet leaves the muzzle, then recoil and inertia have enough energy left
to push this back and cycle it like a giant pistol slide.
So that's the basic operating idea. Now, let's go ahead and take one apart.
Alright, disassembly actually starts by dry firing the gun,
we have to have the hammer down in order to take it all apart.
So, we will open the action, it is empty, then put the selector in fire. Dry fire the rifle.
Now, we move to the front of the gun and I have this flat spring which is sitting in a cut in this barrel bushing
I need to take this out. So I lift this up, and then I can rotate the barrel bushing.
It's got a pair of interrupted thread lugs, and pull that out.
This is what creates our gas seal at the front of the barrel gas chamber.
Now, ... I wobble the slide back ...
We have our mainspring which is sitting around the outside of the barrel on the inside of this slide,
so we'll take that out. Now, the next bit is to come back here
and take out this pin, which I just push through, it's got a little wire retainer.
So, there's the disassembly pin. And then lastly, we have to take out the safety. You can see that when it's in safe
or fire, the safety is actually locked into the receiver and the rear cover here.
So what I need to do is push it all the way up like that. Which unlocks it from there, and then
once the safety is in this position we can then pull it out of the gun. There's our safety lever.
Now, with that all out, all of the guts of this thing will work themselves ...
There we go, there's the slide.
Now this one has a firing pin that was actually unlocked in there.
And then this is our super nasty looking trigger group.
Alright, so let's take a closer look here at the receiver.
As I said, this is two stamped halves that are welded together.
Here you can see much more clearly the magazine well insert.
And then there is also a steel block held by this rivet.
That comes up here and has a hole drilled in it for the barrel. So the barrel is pressed through from the back here.
The barrel has this shoulder on it, so it presses through until it can't go any farther
And then ... if we ... it's a little hard to see it, but this hole in the receiver
is where there was a pin pressed in to go through this block and the barrel to lock the barrel in place.
We can kind of see it on that side as well.
So that's how the barrel is held in place here. Then the front end of the receiver, out here, acts both as a support
where you can rivet on the handguard and it also acts as a guide to keep the slide straight.
This groove right here rides on that front flange of the receiver.
You can see this, this thing, this lug was just very crudely welded on, but that's how they did them.
Our bolt in the back... The bolt is a separate piece and it has a shoulder on it right here.
What they did was they cut a groove in the receiver tube to match, put the bolt in,
rotate it around into the correct position, and then run two pins through it to lock it in place.
So the bolt is fixed to this slide. This is actually technically very much like a pistol slide assembly.
And see, we've got the two holes here where they had rivets holding on this very simple
sheet metal charging handle, and that's pretty much everything ... for this.
Oh, except the firing pin. There is a spring in the firing pin and this guy
goes in, pushes and rotates and locks in place.
Now, unfortunately the firing pin in this particular one has had the tip either clipped
or unintentionally broken off, so this one won't fire without getting a new firing pin.
But the other one does have an intact pin, for what it's worth.
(Put that down.)
Now, here on the barrel, again you can see that this has these gas seal rings.
So our chamber is basically here. That fills up with gas when the rifle is being used.
This front buffer sits right there.
... and it's this area that fills up with gas to delay the action from opening.
Last but not least, this is our top cover and fire control group assembly, thing.
This is another stamped piece. The rear cap is also stamped and then welded into place on it.
And you can see elements here, two hooks for a semi-auto trigger. The hammer is right there.
That's a hammer. This bar, right there, that you can just barely see, is a safety. I can push it up and down.
If the bolt is not in battery that prevents the gun from firing, so that's a basic mechanical safety there.
All in all, this was a pretty clever design. It was reasonably simple.
They riveted all of this together to make it, frankly, simpler than trying to have disassemblable pieces.
The service life on these guns was not anticipated to be very long,
and this was basically a non-user serviceable part.
There you have it, one disassembled VG1-5.
So I did have the chance a couple years ago to do some shooting with an original example of one of these rifles.
Figured throwing a few thoughts on that. It is a very front heavy rifle.
You've got about six pounds of reciprocating mass between
the bit at the muzzle, and the bolt, and the slide and all that working back and forth.
... It's basically heavy enough to work strictly as a straight blowback rifle.
It does also have a fluted chamber to aid with extraction.
[It] used the original standard 30 round MP44 / StG44 / MP43 magazines.
Some of the Volkssturm rifles were intended to be issued with 10-round magazines.
Those were never produced in any significant quantity, and the Gustloff carbine actually
was supposed to have (because it was semi-auto), ... was supposed to have full size magazines.
The controls of this rifle are quite easy to use. There's nothing particularly weird about them.
It is a somewhat unpleasant rifle to shoot.
It doesn't have a harsh recoil, but it does have a rather abrupt recoil.
So, comparing this to an MP44, this is a lot jerkier.
Your recoil is all going to be compressed into a shorter time, the stock is not as comfortable,
the grip on this is ... nyah, it's pretty uncomfortable. And of course the sights are quite crude.
So, if you had gotten issued with one of these things, you know, it should be
pretty obvious just from that fact that the war is over. It's too late.
But there are some pictures of these actually in use. They did see combat service.
These are safe to shoot, although I don't think they have a particularly long service life.
So if you do either own one already or if you do decide to buy one of these two,
I would recommend not doing a whole lot of shooting with them.
They weren't designed to last forever and, you know, they're valuable rifles now,
and there's no need to beat one up to the point that it breaks, so.
Ultimately, I think the concept of a last-ditch Volkssturm semi-auto rifle like this is a bit flawed.
I think they would have been better off just putting the resources that went into projects like this
into manufacturing more MP44s. I think that would have been more effective.
Yes, this is a simpler gun, but if you have to set up the facilities and the engineering and the tooling
and the gauging to get this into production, if you don't have very much time to make them
it's not going to end up being more cost-effective than just working with what you've already got.
It certainly is cool that they went ahead and made some weird rifles like this for us to check out and drool over today, though.
... If they're issuing this, it's probably already too late.
But it is not too late for you to own one of these yourself. Of course they do have two here,
both for sale in this auction. If you take a look at the link in the description text below, you'll find
Rock Island's catalogue pages for both of these rifles (they are separate lots of course),
and you can check out their pictures and descriptions and place bids on one or both.
So, thanks for watching, and best of luck to you.
Yes, in theory you could get serial number Th 1138 if you were to find it.