Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten Weapons com.
I'm Ian, I am here today again at the James Julia
Auction House up in beautiful snowy rural Maine right now,
taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be
selling in their upcoming March of 2016 auction.
And today I'm taking a look at one of their very interesting,
and in this country, very unusual submachine guns.
This is a Czech ZK 383.
Now these were originally developed in Czechoslovakia in 1938.
And if you think about that date, it's not really a very good time to be
starting any brand new endeavours in Czechoslovakia.
Because it was not very long at all after that before the Germans came in,
annexed the Sudetenland, and occupied Czechoslovakia.
Well, as part of that they occupied the Brno factory, CZs famous factory.
And the ZK 383 here was in production at that point.
And the Germans took a look at this thing and went,
"It's not a bad gun, ... why don't you guys keep on making those?"
And it turns out ultimately they actually kept making them into the 1960s.
A total of apparently about 20,000 of these were manufactured.
And really the two most notable users were the Bulgarian Army and the German SS.
So there is some reason for that.
The Bulgarians had just ordered these commercially from Czechoslovakia.
Of course, the CZ Factory at Brno made a huge assortment of guns.
They made, for example, ZB 26 and ZB 30 light machine guns that were very popular worldwide,
and a whole slew of different pistols, and many, many other things.
So this was but one of their many products.
Now, it's an interesting concept for a submachine gun.
It does use a standard 30 round stick magazine.
However, it's got some features that you'd typically think of as a light machine gun.
Most obviously it's got a folding bipod on it.
That does fold up under the stock here to get it out of the way,
and then ... folds down and deploys quickly.
It also has a quick-change barrel to it,
which is an unusual feature you don't normally see in a submachine gun.
So why would they do that? Well, the answer is they kind of actually
had the idea that this could double as a light infantry support weapon.
And that's maybe not the craziest idea ever.
If you think about it, particularly at relatively short ranges, 100 or 200 yards,
having a bipod lets someone get a much more accurate, effective fire from a gun.
Even if it is with just a pistol calibre cartridge.
So this is kind of a hybrid gun, it functions quite well as a submachine gun,
it functions theoretically sort of OK as a light machine gun or a support weapon.
Obviously it didn't become vastly popular.
Two primary clients over 30 years, 20,000 total guns, it's not exactly burning the house down.
However it is an exquisitely manufactured gun.
This is an example of kind of the height of pre-war Czech manufacturing prowess.
... While it's got this ventilated shroud, all of this is purely machined.
There's no stamped components on this anywhere, with the exception of the bipod legs.
And really a gorgeous gun.
So why don't we go ahead and bring the camera back here, and let's take a closer look at it.
We can determine what probably the most likely history behind this particular example was.
We'll take it apart, see how it works.
And then I think we'll also take it out to the range, and do some shooting.
Alright, let's start with some identification work.
So right off the bat, there only two markings on this particular gun.
We have the serial number, 144.
And we have the manufacturer marking on the magazine well.
Now this is indicative and telling: this says "Waffenwerke Brünn",
and then that thing, which I'm not even going to try and pronounce.
The important part here is Brünn is the German name that was given to the Brno factory.
So this tells us without any doubt that this gun was manufactured under German occupation.
Now what would the alternative be? Well, here we have
a magazine well from a ZK 383 cut parts kit.
This would have been a Bulgarian contract gun, and manufactured purely under Czech auspices.
So here we actually see the "ZK 383" marking, which was the Bulgarian Army marking.
And you can see it's marked ČZ Brno.
So this is a Czech manufacture gun, this is a German manufacture gun.
Now that being said, if this were manufactured under German supervision
we would kind of expect to see some German markings on it of some sort.
And we don't on this gun, it is totally sterile, other than the serial number and that marking.
So one of the theories that one of the folks here at Julia has,
and I think this is a well-founded theory and I certainly can't come up with anything better,
is that this weapon was probably used by the guard staff at the Brno plant.
Those guys would have needed guns, ... they had factory security who needed to be armed.
And this is ... an extremely low serial number.
The Germans started renumbering the guns when they took over,
so that 144 is an extremely low German serial number.
And the plant guards needed some guns.
There weren't really enough of these to justify issuing them out to a unit in this kind of quantity,
so ... at least it seems highly plausible that they would have given this to one of the plant guards.
Of course they have the guns right there, they have parts for these guns should they ever be needed,
they have the magazines, all that sort of thing.
And that would explain the lack of general markings.
And it would also explain why the gun remained in such exquisitely good shape.
This is not a rebuilt cut gun, this is all original, curio and relic.
And clearly this thing did not go through the horrors of the Eastern Front,
this is a fantastic condition for a bringback World War Two machine gun.
So the idea that it was used by plant security really makes a lot of sense.
If it wasn't that, it was probably some type of rear-echelon guard duty.
Perhaps a prison guard, a POW camp guard, railway guard, a postal guard, something like that.
Someone who needed a weapon, but probably wasn't ever going to use it,
and had the opportunity to take care of it very well, so.
With that in mind, let's take a look at some of the controls. It's a very simple gun to operate.
We have a safety button here. Push that through for safe, push it back to fire.
And all that does is simply physically lock the trigger from moving.
And then we have a selector switch, pretty self-evident there.
"30" is for full-auto, "1" is for semi-auto.
There's a little notch here in the middle, and that is actually used for disassembly.
So we'll get to that in just a moment.
The rear sight here is graduated out to 800 metres.
That's kind of goofy for a submachine gun,
but it actually does kind of make sense given the bipod.
You could in fact hold this reasonably well on target,
and at 800 metres you're probably not going to hit a specific target, but you'll scare some people.
Alright, how about some disassembly?
Let's go ahead and pull the magazine out.
This is an open bolt gun, so the bolt is wide open right there.
I'm going to want to close the bolt to disassemble it
because I need to take tension off the mainspring.
So drop the bolt like so, the bolt is now forward, you can see it there.
By the way, on ... an open bolt gun like this, having the bolt forward and closed is the safe condition.
So this gun is now safe.
Now we can proceed to remove the recoil spring.
We're going to do that by opening up the rear butt plate.
There's a little spring-loaded catch here,
I push that down, and then
the butt ... plate opens up. And inside here we have this thing.
Now that is keyed, so I rotate it, there we go,
unlock it, and then I can pull out the quite lengthy recoil spring.
There's that. We've got our guide rod, recoil spring.
And this is a plug in the front of the recoil spring
that hooks onto the tail of the bolt, which you'll see in a moment.
Now I do want to point out while we're back here in the stock,
there is also a cleaning rod,
and an oil bottle back here.
This unthreads, and there's the applicator tip of our oil bottle.
And then, because we've got some really cool Czech engineering here,
we can also take the cap off the cleaning rod,
and it threads onto this, which gives us a handle for the cleaning rod.
And it has a slot for a patch at the other end.
So these are both held in place in the stock by the tail on the spring guide there.
Leave those out. Now close up the butt plate to keep it from bouncing around.
Now what I need to do is put the selector in its centre position.
And then I can push on it on this side.
And this is a captive pin, there we go.
Pull it all the way out, like that.
And now I can pull the rear receiver backward and down, just like this.
This stays captive in place so you don't lose the two pieces, nor do you lose this pin.
And then the bolt comes sliding right out.
Now at this point, if I want to disassemble further I can take the barrel out.
We do that by grabbing this spring-loaded catch here, pulling back,
(my hands are a little bit oily, there we go),
pull back, rotate the barrel 90 degrees,
and the barrel slides right out.
So there you go, one completely field stripped ZK 383.
Alright, let's take a closer look at the bolt while we have it here.
We have this tail which hooks into the plug on the back of the recoil spring.
This keeps everything centred and running smoothly.
We can remove that by pulling the bolt handle out, and then the tail just comes off.
Now we also have this thing that sits in the bolt here,
but it is completely loose, and just comes right out.
This is another very interesting feature of the ZK 383.
This is simply a ... weight to allow you to change the mass of the bolt and adjust the rate of fire.
In theory, what I've read, is that ... without the weight this is a 700 round per minute gun,
and with the weight it's about 500 rounds a minute.
We will actually check that and find out when we go out and do some shooting with it in a minute.
So the rest of this is a very basic fixed firing pin, heavy, bolt.
There is no locking system, it's just a blowback action.
There's our fixed firing pin, we have our extractor up here on the side.
And then this side is just set up with a slot for the ejector,
and to pick up a new cartridge. Very simple, but gorgeously done.
When you rack the bolt on this thing, it feels like it's oiled glass.
... On the barrel here we have our two locking lugs that hold the barrel in position,
and then a conical feed ramp, basically, around the entire circumference of the barrel.
Looking at the other end, we've got our front sight,
the ... little ventilated front cap to vent the barrel jacket, and that's it.
Alright, we're going to do some shooting with the ZK 383.
I have high hopes for this thing, it is a fantastically made gun.
And, well, enough talk, let's get right to it.
[Slow: 470 rpm]
It is an extremely smooth shooting gun, very soft recoil.
I mean when you handle this one dry, it feels like buttered glass.
And you really get that feeling shooting it as well.
Alright, let's try taking the bolt weight out, and see how that changes the rate of fire.
[Fast: 750 rpm]
That really significantly increases the rate of fire.
Doesn't really make it that much less controllable though,
it's still an extremely smooth-shooting and steady-shooting submachine gun.
This thing is really slick.
Alright, so of course the other way to use the ZK 383 was off the bipod
as sort of a support weapon.
So I've put the bolt weight back in because I kind of like it at the slower rate of fire.
And let's see how this runs.
You know, ... there's basically no recoil off the shoulder,
so you wouldn't expect there to be any off the bipod.
Just gives you a nice stable shooting platform for longer range shooting.
Pretty slick really, ...
well obviously it was an idea that didn't really get used widely, but.
Alright guys, thank you for watching. I hope you enjoyed the video.
This is, as I mentioned, a very unusual weapon to find in
the United States in full, live, transferable condition.
Especially in this sort of really excellent condition.
So if you would like to add it to your own collection,
it is a fully transferable C&R machine gun, and it's coming up for sale here.
So take a look at the link in the text description below.
That will take you to the Julia catalogue page on this gun,
where you can read their description, see their high-res pictures,
and decide if it's something you'd like to put a bid on yourself.
Thanks for watching.