Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Milkor USA
taking a look at a pair of 40mm
rotary revolver-style grenade launchers.
These are an M32 and an M32A1.
And these ... were and are in use by the US military, specifically the US Marine Corps.
Now, this design actually originated back in South Africa in the very early 1980s.
And it was the brainchild of a guy named Andries Piek,
who if you've been watching videos, you may ... recognise from some previous videos.
Piek got his start first converting full-auto guns to semi-auto
for the South African commercial market, and then tried his hand at gun design.
Which resulted in the BXP carbine and submachine gun,
which turned out to be very successful and very popular in South Africa.
The South African police forces needed a 37mm riot-style gun,
and so he threw one together in like two months called the "Stopper".
We also have a video on that if you're interested in it.
And coming off of that project he happened to be relaxing one evening,
and went and watched the "Dogs of War" with Christopher Walken.
... In which there is some use of a Manville 25mm gas gun,
in the movie it's portrayed as a grenade launcher.
The Manville ... has like a 25 round rotating cylinder
for use with low-pressure tear-gas type riot-control cartridges.
And Piek saw that and it triggered his imagination like,
"Aha! You know, I could do a gun like that, but set up for grenades."
And thus was born the MGL, the Multiple Grenade Launcher.
This was originally developed, like I said, then in South Africa in 1983,
it was adopted by the South African Defence Forces, the SADF, as the Y2.
It was very successful in their use, and then it started to become pretty popular internationally.
Today they're being made not just here in the United States by Milkor USA,
but also by a couple of other companies around the world.
They've been sold to a lot of different countries.
And there were some US Marines in particular,
who encountered these things in Foreign Familiarisation Fire, and started thinking,
"You know what? We really like these too."
And this eventually leads in 2004 to the establishment of Milkor USA,
which is not really a subsidiary of the original Milkor,
(which by the way is an abbreviation of military corporation with a "K", k-o-r in Afrikaans).
Anyway, ... this was a couple of businessmen who thought,
"You know what, ... we can make this in the United States.
We want to help sell this, we think this is a good product."
And they made a deal to licence production and buy the rights for the gun in the United States.
At the very beginning they imported guns from South Africa,
and then very quickly recognised that if this was going to see any substantial sales,
especially sales to the US military, they would have to be manufactured in the US.
And at that point they went about finding a partner, set up their own manufacturing,
and these guns are now entirely 100% manufactured in the US.
And they've gone through a number of evolutions, so.
... Now that brings us to the present day here, ... well, let me back up just one bit.
The story of this then goes on like in 2004 they set up Milkor USA.
They hand over the first couple of prototype guns for testing by the US military in '05.
In 2006 the Marine Corps kind of bypasses the regular procurement system
with a declaration of urgent need, and buys a couple of hundred of them for use in the Middle East.
Development continues, in 2008 US SOCOM (Special Operations Command)
bought ... some more of them under the designation Mark 14 Mod 0.
And by the way, at that point this transition is already in the works.
So a lot of these A1 upgrades were in the Mark 14.
In 2010 the US Marine Corps formally ... designated and then ... started acquiring M32A1s.
So they signed a 5 year, indefinite quantity contract basically.
And in total, something like 3,000 guns were sold to the US Marine Corps,
they continue to use them today, they're still being supported for parts,
they are very much part of the modern US Marine Corps squad makeup.
The idea here was not really to replace the M203,
but rather to introduce a specific grenadier role back into the squad.
And this makes you a much more effective grenadier than a single-shot 203 hanging under a rifle.
So let's go ahead and take a closer look at what the original M32 was,
and what they changed on the A1.
Alrighty, so the basic premise here is: chambered for 40mm.
This will take 40mm low pressure, 40x46mm, grenade cartridges.
This one, well it probably will fire medium velocity cartridges, but it's not really rated for it.
That is something that would come in the M32A1.
So we'll touch on the improvements for that in a moment.
However they share all the ... identical operating characteristics.
Obviously this is not selective fire, it's semi-auto.
It's actually really more like a double action revolver
(sort of - with a gas assist), than it is a true semi-automatic firearm.
So there is a safety switch, safe and fire.
And it is ambidextrous, it's on both sides.
So it has a very long trigger pull on it, although it's actually kind of a two-stage trigger.
So comes back to here, and then you've got a nice stop. And then snap, and it fires.
But heavy and long, not necessarily a bad idea on a 40mm high explosive grenade launcher.
Now one of the other characteristics of a 40mm grenade is that it has a quite low muzzle velocity,
and thus a very rainbow-like trajectory.
People talk about that with firearms, with a 40mm grenade it actually is rainbow-like.
And so that means that the optic has to adjust, which we'll look at in a moment,
but it also means if you're adjusting this optic out to the ... 15 or 20 degree angle,
your cheek weld gets impossible.
And so this has a buttstock that can be reconfigured for high angle shooting.
Squeeze the two buttons in, snap it into position.
Now that looks pretty awkward for a rifle shooter,
but when you're trying to aim the gun at that kind of angle, this works really well.
Now along with that we of course need to adjust the optic, again because of the trajectory.
... You do need to be pretty accurate in your range estimation in order to get an ... accurate hit.
Now the reticle is going to help with that a little bit, we'll take a look at that in just a moment.
The sight itself here has range increments, they're marked here,
you've got holes every 50 metres from point blank out to 375.
And then there are actually some intermediate locks at 25 metre increments.
Now in order to adjust this,
you just grab these two little spring tabs
and you can adjust the sight to whatever position you want.
However there is a potential issue: what if it's at night and you can't read
those little numbers on the range scale?
Well, you can also actually click this thing up and down one at a time.
A little pressure on just one of the two tabs, push it up or down,
and it'll move in 25 metre increments up or down.
So as long as you know where the sight is at some point,
and you can of course start it bottomed out, then click it up to 50.
As long as you have a reference point, you can adjust this in increments in the dark
and know where you're aiming.
Now the reticle on this is this cool four-point cross hair here,
where each one of those hash marks is approximately 1 metre at 100 metres.
So those allow you to do some kind of in the field range estimation.
You know if you see a person standing up you know that's approximately 2 metres.
So if they are 2 hash marks tall, they're probably at about 100 metres.
And if they're one hash mark tall, they're at about 200 metres.
And then there are lots of other sort of standardised objects that
anyone in the military in this sort of role is going to memorise.
And that reticle allows you to use those to figure out your range.
And I think that brings us to the front end of the gun.
These original early M32s had 12 inch barrels on them.
They are, interestingly, progressively rifled. That's actually fairly common for large bore firearms.
... I should say, the principle of progressive rifling is that the rifling twist rate
starts very slow, and then increases as you get down the barrel.
So when the round is ... initially accelerating out of its cartridge
it's not also trying to be spun.
That would put a lot of torque on the projectile,
and potentially tear the driving band or cause other bad things to happen.
So instead, it's allowed to build some velocity and slowly start to rotate,
and it's only in the last third of the barrel or so that it's spun up to full rotational velocity.
... One of the interesting side effects of that is it means you can't just cut the barrel down on this.
This was actually an issue in Carcanos.
Early Carcano rifles also had progressive twist barrels,
and when people sporterised them, you lose all their accuracy.
Well, you try and sporterise this by cutting the front chunk of the barrel off,
you will lose accuracy. You will also lose the ability to actually arm a grenade
because the grenades are armed by the number of rotations that they have gone through.
And it won't be spinning nearly fast enough if you cut off the front of the barrel.
Anyway, these M32s not only had the long barrel, they were also a press-fit barrel.
Keep that in mind for when we look at the improved A1 version.
Now, how to actually open this thing up?
It pivots along this strut up here, and we have this lever that locks the whole gun together.
So I can pull this forward, like that, and then rotate the back end open.
Now, you can see that it says "wind".
That's because the cylinder is spring-loaded.
On a regular double-action revolver the cylinder is rotated
using force from your finger on the trigger.
This however is, of course, a much bigger cylinder, loaded with big heavy ammunition
compared to a traditional hand revolver.
So there's a spring set up in there to provide the force to rotate the cylinder for you.
Every time you pull the trigger it's going to rotate one iteration.
This is gas operated by the way, we'll look at that in just a moment.
But what that means is when you reload it, you have to rewind the cylinder.
Alright, so rewinding this is a little bit awkward in person,
and it has turned out to be basically impossible to do
with a camera pointing over my shoulder, and the gun resting on the table.
So instead I'm going to stand up here and do it for you.
What we're going to do is put our hand in here, rotate this like so.
And presto, the cylinder is all smoothly and fully rewound.
Now that it's rewound you can load cartridges into it,
snap it shut like that.
We have a big ol' strut on the bottom that locks into place.
And now you're ready to actually fire.
Now when you actually fire, there's a gas piston in the gun, right in here.
I can't take it apart, however I can tell you how it works.
Basically you have a pin that locks the cylinder into place
because you really don't want this cylinder to ever be out of alignment with the barrel
with an explosive warhead sitting in there.
So when you fire gas is going to come back, tapped off the barrel.
It's going to pop that piston
which is going to release the pin, and allow the cylinder to rotate.
The cylinder is always under spring pressure, but only when that pin is released
(which I can do manually with this button), does it then rotate to the next cylinder.
That also means that you can't ever accidentally partially rotate the cylinder,
you can't accidentally roll it back to a cartridge that's already been ... fired, anything like that.
So the alternative to that system would be having the cylinder locking pin built into the trigger.
This, by having it built into the gas system,
means that this doesn't release until the round actually fires.
Which is potentially a lot safer than having it connected to the trigger
in case of anything like a hang fire.
That pretty well covers the whole assembly and function of the gun.
And that brings us now to the M32A1,
the improved version that the Marine Corps adopted in substantial numbers.
So, the obvious thing that they changed here was to cut the barrel down.
Cut the handguard down as well.
This now has an 8 inch barrel on it, which created zero changes in velocity or accuracy.
So really no good reason not to cut the barrel down.
What that did was remove a little bit of weight,
which they were then able to migrate to other parts of the gun to make it stronger.
Because probably the most important change here
is that this is now rated for medium-velocity 40mm grenades
Medium-velocity grenades are substantially higher pressure, higher recoil,
harder on the gun, and longer ranged with more payload than the standard low-velocity 40x46.
So they did a number of things to the gun.
They also added a separate range adjustment to the sight.
With the medium velocity grenades, these can now go out to 800 metres instead of 375.
So more than doubled the maximum effective range.
Also more than doubled the actual point target accurate range of the gun.
It's worth pointing out that, unfortunately as a part of this,
that little range clicky mechanism was taken out.
The increased recoil of the heavier grenades
was potentially causing that mechanism to cycle itself.
Which you don't want to happen, so they got rid of it.
Now to adjust the range you squeeze both of these, set it up where you want.
And just get good and practiced if you want to use it at night.
The stock mechanism was changed, this now has a collar that you pull back to rotate.
This is a stronger system, and it's also a safer system for the user.
With this old version on the M32 it was possible to accidentally get
your finger caught in one of those little notches.
We have painful and bloody results if you get your finger stuck in there,
and then try to jam the ... stock into position.
The grip and buttstock were both changed.
Not in any fundamental mechanical way, just updated to more modern models.
Both of these now include battery containers, one here in the stock.
So you've got storage space there.
You've got storage space in the pistol grip.
You still have storage space along both sides of the buttstock.
More fundamentally, this bottom strut on the gun was significantly strengthened
to withstand the recoil from those medium velocity grenades.
You can pretty clearly see that here when we look at them side by side.
This is the original M32, this guy up here is the A1.
You can see it's much beefier in here, beefier in here.
The attachment to the front of the receiver is much larger than we have right there.
So that was probably the most significant mechanical change to the gun.
And then lastly there are some finish surface coating improvements to the guns.
So on the M32A1 the trigger has been NP3 coated,
along with basically all of the other moving internal parts. The barrel is nitrided.
The trigger pull in fact on the A1 is substantially better.
It is lighter, and it is a shorter trigger pull than on the original M32.
And I suspect that will actually make a substantial difference out on the range.
Alright, well hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Got a chance to take a close-up look at something you don't get to see all that often
because it really mostly is in active military service.
However, these are grenade launchers that are being pretty
widely sold to military and security agencies.
Manufactured right here in the US by Milkor USA.
They do have a bunch more information on these,
particularly the current production M32A1, on their website.
So if you're interested you can check that out, learn a little bit more about them.
And a big thanks to Milkor for giving me the opportunity to come here,
pull these part, and take a look at them.
And also to take them out on the range, so stay tuned for tomorrow.
Thanks for watching.