Hi guys, thanks for ... hold on ...
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Thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, if you can see me behind this incredibly monstrous firearm here.
And today I am at the Royal Army Museum in Brussels,
part of the Belgian War Heritage Institute, taking a look at some of the
particularly interesting firearms from their museum reference collection.
And today we have this monstrosity of a PTRS, a PTRS-41.
This is a Russian anti-tank rifle from the Second World War.
And people are probably going to be most familiar with it in the context of the SKS,
because this rifle was essentially the father of the SKS.
Which is this thing scaled down by about 50% or more.
But let's talk for a moment about Soviet anti-tank rifles.
This was of course developed in 1941, but during the 1930s the Soviet Union, the Red Army,
was interested in having some sort of organic infantry anti-tank capability for the infantry squad.
They initially looked at recoilless rifles, deemed those unsafe. Which I can understand
having been around a recoilless rifle that's firing, those things are pretty terrifying.
And then between 1936 and 1938 they developed and tested
no fewer than 15 different prototype anti-tank rifles in different cartridges.
And none of them were deemed acceptable.
Ultimately the one that sort of went into production was called the Rukavishnikov in 1939.
It had problems. It was unreliable, it was very slow and expensive to produce,
and just really not a suitable solution to the problem.
... They first adopted the actual cartridge that would be used in this rifle, which was the B-32 cartridge.
This is 14.5x114mm, it is a huge cartridge.
It used a tungsten carbide core bullet for a ... very hard bullet core,
along with very high velocity to give it substantial armour penetration capability.
This would fire a 986 grain cartridge at a whopping 3,280 feet per second.
To put that in perspective, that's essentially the same muzzle velocity
as a 20 inch barrelled M16A1, but with a bullet that's about 18 or 19 times heavier.
Couple that with the tungsten carbide core,
and you got 40mm of armour penetration capacity at 300 metres range.
This was an exceptionally effective anti-tank rifle.
Now even saying that, it was not effective on frontal armour
of really any of the substantial tanks of World War Two.
But for much of the war it remained very capable of penetrating
the side or rear armour of a lot of vehicles up to and including Panzer IVs.
... Everyone talks about the Panthers and the Tigers and the King Tigers,
but the vast majority of German tanks, especially in Russia, were of the lighter variety.
Early in the war they were Panzer Is and IIs.
And even through mid and late war it was
Panzer IIIs and Panzer IVs, and the vehicles based on those, StuGs and such,
that were the majority of German armoured vehicles.
And those could be ... effectively disabled with rifles like the PTRS.
Now, I said at the beginning they had this Rukavishnikov that wasn't so great.
Well, there wasn't a ton of energy being put into the anti-tank rifle program,
because the Soviet military hierarchy didn't really see a lot of practical use
for anti-tank rifles before World War Two actually started,
or rather, before the Germans invaded the Soviet Union.
Similarly, they didn't see a whole lot of use for the submachine guns.
There were a few submachine guns in Soviet service,
but it really wasn't until the Winter War with the Finns
that they realised just how effective submachine guns could be
and started putting them into much higher production priority.
Same thing goes for anti-tank rifles.
Stalin personally intervened in military policy in July of 1941
to essentially dictate that anti-tank rifles would be built.
And in July of '41 they put two ... star Soviet designers onto this program of
"we need an anti-tank rifle", and those guys were Simonov and Degtyarev.
They would both develop rifles that were tested by the end of August of 1941.
So these were both extremely fast ... design cycles.
And this was possible because Degtyarev designed a very, very simple single-shot rifle.
I actually have a video already on the PTRD-41,
so if you're interested in the Degtyarev design you can check that video out.
Simonov designed a much more complex rifle, this is a self-loading 5 shot magazine design.
So a lot more going on, but he based the ... mechanism
on the AVS-36 rifles that ... had already been developed and ... had been in production.
And then of course the SKS
would be the daughter of this design, and we'll take a look at that in a moment.
At any rate, after testing in August of '41 both rifles were actually adopted.
The Simonov, this one, was the more ... effective rifle,
because self-loading, 5 round magazine, you ... had a lot more firepower to it.
But the Degtyarev was a much faster gun to produce, and a much cheaper gun.
And so while they both went into production, in 1941 they only managed to build
a grand total of 77 PTRS rifles compared to thousands of PTRDs.
1942 production of these guns finally really took off,
and they produced some 60,000 of them in 1942.
For what it's worth, they also produced 185,000 PTRDs.
The Red Army had a tremendous number of these anti-tank rifles.
And of course in addition to tanks, they were also very effective on machine gun nests,
light fortifications, various light armoured vehicles, half-tracks, that sort of thing.
By 1943 every infantry regiment in the Red Army was equipped with 54 anti-tank rifles
of either Degtyarev or Simonov design.
So they met that goal of "we want organic anti-tank capability in the infantry squad."
That was successfully accomplished by 1943.
So let's take a closer look and let me show you
how this thing works, because it's a lot simpler than you might expect.
Alright, I'm going to start by just pointing this out right now.
SKS, PTRS. As we take this guy apart I will show you the comparison to the SKS parts,
because it's almost eerie how similar the two are.
These are really the exact same rifle, just built to a different scale.
So basic operating system here.
We have a magazine down in there, just like the SKS.
It holds 5 rounds, and the rounds came actually on an en bloc style of clip.
So you didn't have to actually strip the rounds out, you did put the entire clip into the magazine.
Unfortunately I don't have one of those to show you, but.
There is a latch here to release the magazine, just like on the SKS.
There's our magazine spring. And there is a bolt hold open
that locks the bolt open after the last shot.
It is right there.
You don't want to give yourself PTRS thumb, but I'll reach in, depress that,
and then I can close the bolt.
We have a safety lever here, that's the fire position.
Bringing it all the way around there is in the safe position,
where of course for a right-hander it blocks access to the trigger guard.
So that you can tell even in the dark that the safety is engaged.
The rear sight is just a simple tangent leaf graduated out to 1,500 metres.
Most of the time I would say 1,500 metres is ludicrously optimistic.
In this case, I'd kind of prefer to stay
a ... rather long distance away from a German tank if I'm trying to shoot at it.
So we've got a nice big folding bipod on here. It locks in the open position.
You squeeze the legs together and you can fold it forward, like that.
And then to deploy it you just pull down,
there is no fixed lock to hold the bipod up.
By the way, I normally try to set up all my shots on videos
so that you just have the plain tablecloth in the background.
That doesn't work when the gun is 50% longer than the table,
so you're going to see a bunch of background stuff in these shots and I apologise.
Up here we have the gas block. That's just the pin that allows you to take out the gas piston.
But yeah, taps gas off here just like an SKS.
You can see there are three little vent holes. So that once the gas piston
starts moving excess gas is vented out there.
And then we've got our front sight here.
You can see that this can be adjusted side to side for windage.
This is just the mounting, pinned in place.
And then a gigantic round cookie cutter style of muzzle brake.
There's the view from the front of the muzzle brake.
You definitely want something with this cartridge,
because you want to absorb the recoil as best you can.
Before we start disassembly, I want to take a moment to look up close at the fabrication on this.
These parts are crudely, crudely made.
You can see these milling cuts, they're as much gouges as they are milling marks.
This was a forged receiver, obviously,
and the absolute minimum amount of time was spent final machining the forged parts.
These were manufactured during an absolute emergency for the Soviet Union.
Literally German invasion was in progress, and the more of these they could produce
the more likely they would be able to stop that German invasion.
And so these were done with basically no care left
for the outside aesthetic finish of the guns.
The ... quality of the machining cuts here on the outside really has no impact
on how well the gun's going to work, and so no time was wasted on those elements.
Now the internal parts, the bolt and the bolt carrier, that's a bit different.
These have some discolouration on them from wear and age.
But these run smoothly, and they have to be strong and safely built
or else the gun's going to basically explode in your face, and that doesn't do anyone any good.
Alright, the first step of disassembly, and the biggest difference between this and an SKS,
is that the PTRS has a detachable barrel.
So I can push down this button, pull out this locking block,
and then I can just pull the receiver off the barrel.
So we take that ...
and there's the barrel, there's the receiver.
Looking up at this end, this is our actual short-stroke gas piston.
So when the gun fires, that's going to come back and push the bolt carrier back.
The rest of this disassembly is made a heck of a lot easier by taking the barrel off.
So our next step, like an SKS, is going to be rotating this lever up.
Now on the SKS this is a [captive] pin,
on here it's just a keyed pin, but we pull that off.
And then we can take off the top cover ...
and the two-part recoil spring with its central pin.
This particular gun is absolutely, completely, filled with Cosmoline.
We already wiped it out a bit, but there's still a ton in there.
Now bring out the bolt carrier ... and the bolt.
Here is a comparison of bolts: PTRS, SKS. Extractors are in the same position,
the basic geometry is exactly the same.
And the same goes for the bolt carrier. You can see we have the hooks here
that are going to pull the bolt in and out of lock.
We've got the angled elevated surface here that pushes the bolt down.
So the basic functioning of these guns is a tilting bolt system
where the bolt comes back, drops down like that, and then the bottom surface here is locked.
And the same thing for the PTRS.
Goes in like that, locks like that, and this surface right here is the locking shoulder.
They are both hammer fired, so we've got a firing pin ... there on the back.
And if we look inside the gun, that's the hammer. That thing is as big as your thumb on the PTRS.
And then of course there's the magazine.
Top cover is also a slight difference in that the PTRS has a guide rod in the top cover,
the SKS of course has a captive recoil spring as opposed to the PTRS's non-captive spring.
But you can see how mechanically these two guns are essentially identical.
And there we have the receiver internals. So locking shoulders are here and here.
We have bolt hold opens right there and right there.
Hammers inside of the receiver.
You can see the disassembly pin captive here on the SKS
and it goes through that hole on the PTRS.
A couple of vital statistics I should throw out there, this has a 48 inch barrel.
The whole gun is 86.6 inches long [2.2m],
it weighs in at 45 pounds approximately, that's 21 kilos.
It's a heavy gun. It's a very awkward gun to carry around,
this is really a two-person thing to carry,
just because the weight is just distributed over this incredibly long gun.
That said, very effective, ... this is probably
the most practical and effective anti-tank rifle of World War Two.
And that explains why it was in active use through the entire war. Unlike guns like the Boys.
... The German anti-tank rifles were actually rebuilt into grenade launching rifles.
The Panzerbüchse 39s, they didn't ... only stop using them as anti-tank rifles,
they rebuilt them as grenade launching rifles.
The Boys anti-tank rifle quickly became ineffective and was replaced by the PIAT.
The US never even bothered to have an anti-tank rifle.
Well, the Soviets with that 14.5mm cartridge had something that was truly, truly effective.
Significantly more effective than the 20mm guns like the Lahti and Solothurn,
because of its tungsten-cored projectile design.
Again, I should point out they did also have a hardened steel core variety,
that was the B-41 cartridge. The tungsten core was obviously the more effective of the two.
Anyway I've been wanting to do a video on one of these for a long time,
they are quite scarce in the US, and well, pretty scarce everywhere else too for that matter.
So a big thanks to the Belgian Army Museum for giving me the opportunity
to break out this beast for you guys.
If you're ever in Brussels I would highly advise taking some time
to stop by the museum and check out their small arms displays.
Not only do they have cool firearms from World War One and World War Two and beyond,
but also uniforms, artillery, vehicles, and all sorts of other cool stuff
on display in a whole bunch of different galleries.
So, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.