Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Morphy
Auction House taking a look at some of the
machine guns that they're going to be selling in their
upcoming fall of 2018 Firearms Auction.
And today we have a Smith & Wesson Model 76.
And this is a gun that's really got a bad reputation
from the several types of different clones made of it,
none of which are nearly as nice as the original actual gun.
However, it's interesting that the Smith & Wesson 76 is itself a copy of an earlier different gun.
So this is based on the Swedish Kulsprute m/45, or as it's commonly called, the "Swedish K".
... The Swedish K was originally procured in limited numbers,
but it was procured by the US Navy for use in Vietnam.
It was actually issued out to SEALs and SOG guys
who wanted a submachine gun that was plausibly deniable,
something that wasn't specifically tied to the United States.
The Swedish K is a fantastic little submachine gun, it has a very low rate of fire.
It was originally designed actually to use Suomi coffin ... mags and drums,
later updated into the m/45B to use the 36 round Suomi stick mags.
And the US Navy liked it, they bought a bunch.
And then by 1966, when they went to go buy some more of them,
the Swedish government refused the sale, because the United States was at war in Vietnam.
And policy ... for the Swedes was, "We are not going to equip warring nations."
So if the Navy wanted more of these guns, they had to find some other way to do it.
And what they did was turn to Smith & Wesson.
And in 1966 they submitted a formal request to Smith & Wesson
to develop basically a copy of the Swedish K.
The first prototype was put back out in January of 1967,
and what Smith & Wesson came up with was this guy.
Now it's not identical to the Swedish K, they're visually fairly distinctive,
and there are some significant functional differences as well.
So let's go ahead and take a look at that.
Fundamentally, this is just a simple blowback submachine gun
of pretty simple construction methods, welded, stamped, tube, that sort of thing.
However, there are a number of interesting features to it.
So let's take a quick perusal through the various features and the controls.
The magazine release is behind the mag, and you actually pull it down towards the magazine.
So to do this you grab the mag, pull the release down, and the magazine comes out.
The magazine itself is basically a copy of the double-stack, 36 round, Suomi stick magazine.
... Smith & Wesson did make their own magazines,
but it's pretty easy to convert Suomi magazines to run in these guns.
Now the Swedish version, the Swedish m/45, actually has the magazine well as a removable part.
And the original m/45s were set up to use Suomi drums and coffin mags.
... Once they adopted this double-stack 36 round mag,
they produced a separate magazine well for that mag, and that became the m/45B.
The Smith & Wesson is made only for those double-stack 36 round stick mags,
and the magazine well is permanently welded onto the receiver tube, so not removable.
The original Swedish guns were full-auto only,
where the Smith & Wesson ones have a selector switch: safe, semi, and full-auto.
And they actually put that selector switch on both sides.
So it's pretty much an ambidextrous gun, between the mag release and the safety.
These are not marked Model 76, they just have a Smith & Wesson marking up on the receiver.
The serial number is here behind the magazine well.
This one is a bit unusual, a "T" number. The commercial guns were in the "U" block.
I believe this would be a Navy acquisition gun, but I can't prove it.
Looking up above that we have a pair of sling ... bars, one on the front,
and one on the back behind the rear sight.
That sight is just a very simple non-adjustable aperture.
And a matching wing-protected non-adjustable post on the front of the receiver.
You can see that that's actually one piece of stamped steel,
and they stamped out around the post and then bent it upwards.
The stock is a flat metal bar here.
It attaches to the side of the grip, but because of this dogleg in it,
it is actually located centrally behind the receiver.
In order to fold it what you have to do is just lift the top end up against that spring,
and then it folds in like so.
It locks in place in the folded position.
In order to reopen it you just do the exact same thing,
lift it up, slide it around, lock it in position.
It does have this rubber coating on it so that it's not
hot in the summer, cold in the winter.
And ... you have a somewhat sharp edge here, and the rubber prevents that from ever being an issue.
The barrel can be very easily removed.
The barrel shroud is threaded on. And it also serves as the nut to hold the barrel in place,
with this little spring-loaded locking tab that locks into the serrations on the barrel nut here.
So if I lift this up (or down from your perspective there),
and then unscrew the barrel shroud.
That comes off, and the barrel came right with it.
So there's our shroud, there's our barrel,
the trunnion at the front end of the receiver tube that this slides into.
Interestingly, unlike most ... submachine guns that have removable barrels like this,
the Smith 76 does not have any index on it.
So when you put it back in, it will rotate freely.
And I have read that this causes some accuracy issues, because it's not 100% repeatable.
... I'm a little sceptical that there would be accuracy issues sufficient enough
to cause a problem on a 9mm submachine gun with non-adjustable sights.
To remove the bolt we're going to take off this rear end cap.
It is held in place with a cross pin here.
So we pull this out, and it has a pretty hefty spring in it.
So once you've pulled this pin out let this out gently.
There is an end cap that has the hole that the pin connects through.
And then there is a recoil spring guide inside here,
and the recoil spring itself.
Once that's out, then we can pull the bolt handle back to here, ... pull the handle out.
And then slide the bolt out the back.
Not a whole lot going on here, that's just a big, heavy submachine gun bolt.
Fixed firing pin. There are sear notches front and back,
because the safety mechanism on this
is the safety selector lever that you saw, which locks the bolt in place.
There is no other particular safety
to prevent the bolt, say, from bouncing backwards if the gun is dropped.
The idea would be if you're planning on dropping the gun, make sure you have the safety engaged first.
One curious thing to note however, is this wear pattern which is kind of unusual - like stripes.
Well, that comes from this other really neat feature here.
This isn't just a plain old stamped tube, it's actually got stripes, grooves on the inside.
... They look like rifling, they're not of course, these are straight.
What these do is give a little bit of space where dirt, or powder residue, or other debris,
can sit in between the bolt and the receiver tube, and not obstruct cycling of the gun.
This is the equivalent of like the sand cuts on the Israeli FAL rifles.
It just gives a place for dirt to accumulate until such time as
you can get around to cleaning it out. And that's a really neat feature.
There you go, one fully field-stripped Smith & Wesson Model 76.
Ultimately the US Navy didn't end up acquiring all that many of the Smith & Wesson 76s.
For a couple of reasons: one thing would be ultimately the wind-down of the Vietnam War,
and this wasn't continued in major procurement.
These were only being procured for pretty limited uses in the first place.
And once the ... M16 carbines, guns like the XM177E1 and E2, once those things became available
that, for a lot of the Special Forces guys, was preferable to a submachine gun like this.
So not a whole lot of them were out there,
but they absolutely did see use with American forces in Vietnam.
Now on Smith & Wesson's part, they would go ahead and continue to make these until 1974
for sale on the police and civilian market.
They made right about 6,000 of them in the U serial block, U101 to I believe U6100.
But production ended in '74. The Navy kind of scaled these out of use in the late 1980s
because once Smith & Wesson shut down production
there was a lot less availability for things like spare parts and maintenance.
So the Smith 76 has really got a bad reputation over time
because of the numerous cloned versions of it, both semi-auto and full-auto,
that have become available over the past couple of decades.
In particular, the clones based on Sten gun tubes.
Because of course there were Sten gun tubes available, and there were various parts for 76s,
and people kludged them together into guns of various quality.
Well, the original Smith & Wesson guns are actually really high-quality, and they're really good.
And I have been told by people that they're actually really pleasant, excellent guns to shoot.
I've never had the chance to do so yet,
but tomorrow we are going to take this guy out to the range, and try it out.
So I'm really curious to see ... how it handles.
So stick around, tomorrow's video will be this guy out at the range.
And of course if you would like to own a Smith & Wesson 76,
this particular one is coming up for sale at Morphy's in their fall of 2018 auction.
There's a link in the description text below that will take you to ForgottenWeapons.com,
and from there you can link over to Murphy's auction catalogue.
This is of course a completely legal, NFA registered, full-auto submachine gun.
It is not transferring as a C&R gun.
While these were manufactured between '67 and '74,
if there was data available to show exactly which guns were made in which year,
as each gun becomes 50 years old it becomes C&R eligible.
So by 2024 all of them will be.
This one almost certainly is a very early production, but
I don't have a serial number table to prove it, so until 2024 it remains a non-C&R gun.
Anyway, I'm rambling a bit. I am going to get this thing packed up
and head over to the range, so check back tomorrow for that.
Thanks for watching.