Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here at the James Julia
auction house taking a look at some of the guns that
they are going to be selling in their upcoming
spring of 2018 Firearms Auction.
In particular today we are taking a look at
a Steyr, or Steyr-Solothurn, S1-100.
Now these guns were also known as the MP30, the MP34 and the MP34(ö),
because of their adoption by various different people at different times.
This is a gun that was designed in approximately 1930 by a guy named Louis Stange, ...
who would go on actually to ... be the primary developer of the FG-42 rifle.
So quite a talented designer, and what he came up with was
arguably one of the highest quality, best submachine guns prior to World War Two.
And ... the history of this being a Steyr-Solothurn is a little bit hazy,
well, a little bit complicated, let's say.
Basically in 1929 the German Rheinmetall firm purchased ... Waffenfabrik Solothurn.
This little arms company in Solothurn, Switzerland,
that wasn't really doing all that much of anything at the time.
The issue was that because of the Versailles Treaty,
Rheinmetall was not legally allowed to be manufacturing weapons in Germany.
But they were a weapons manufacturing company.
So in order to preserve their business they bought ... and turned into a subsidiary
this little firm in Switzerland.
And now basically they could route all of their development and production
through Switzerland where it could be legally sold.
Now when they developed this, they ended up also partnering with Steyr
because Solothurn didn't have the production capability to put out a lot of these guns.
Together those firms formed a corporation called Steyr-Solothurn Waffen AG
in Switzerland, in Zurich I believe.
And so all of these guns were actually being sold out of Zurich, Switzerland.
Now they would end up being adopted by a wide number of countries,
including a bunch in South America actually.
The Austrian ... Army would adopt this as the MP34.
When the Germans occupied Austria and took over a bunch of the guns,
the Germans designated this the MP34(ö) for österreich, or Austria.
And it was used by the German military, as well as fairly extensively by the SS.
Because this was one of the guns that they could get
outside of the standard Wehrmacht production scheme, which is what the SS had to do.
Now in addition to that, there were a bunch of other contracts
that were made by Steyr-Solothurn Waffen AG before the war even broke out.
These guns were manufactured from 1930 through roughly 1939,
plus a batch that were actually delivered in 1942 to Portugal.
They were made in a variety of different calibres.
The first ones, what the Austrian Army adopted, were actually in 9x23, 9mm Steyr.
And then they also offered them in 7.63 Mauser,
and this is a 7.63 Mauser example.
They offered them in 7.65 Parabellum, which is .30 Luger.
They offered them in .45 ACP actually to ... a couple of South American countries,
those are the rarest, the .45 calibre guns.
And a bunch of them have been converted to 9mm Parabellum as well.
So this particular one, as best I can tell, is actually a Japanese contract gun.
The Japanese bought a bunch of MP34s, or S1-100s, in the mid to late 1930s.
You'll find a bunch of photos of Japanese Special Naval Landing Force troops armed with these guys,
because the Japanese had some trouble coming up with their own native submachine guns,
and these things worked quite well.
They also sold them to Thailand. Both the Thai and the Japanese guns were in 7.63 Mauser like this.
So there are a number of cool
production design features on this thing that I will show you right now.
This really is the epitome of a first-generation submachine gun.
A ... completely milled receiver.
Even this front shroud, while it is round,
is a milled component integral to the rest of the receiver.
There was a ton of work that went into these, and they would have been expensive
and exquisitely well-made guns in the 1930s.
You'll notice there is a bayonet lug on the front.
This holds a standard blade pattern bayonet on the muzzle and then on that lug mounted on the side.
The end of the barrel is made with a ... hexagonal set of flats
so that you can change the barrel with a wrench from the front, which is handy.
In fact I believe this particular gun has a replacement barrel,
although the rest of it is all original.
The magazine is a double-stack double-feed magazine of very nice construction.
You'll notice we have an over-travel stop right there,
but then there's also kind of a backwards magazine catch right there.
And you might wonder, "What on earth is that for?"
Well, our magazine well here sticks out the left side of the gun.
The magazine fits in there, and you can see that that magazine stop prevents over insertion.
We have a release right there. That still doesn't tell us what this thing is for.
Well, as it turns out, that has to do with this block.
You want to talk about intricately machined add-ons to the gun.
Well, there is a second magazine release right here.
And we can actually install this magazine
vertically in the magazine well.
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense, except that this thing is a stripper clip guide.
So it's built into the mag well, you can clip the magazines in the bottom,
and use your stripper clips to reload them easily.
And that second magazine stop is in there to ... engage with this release lever.
As for controls: this is a select-fire gun, so it can be fired in either semi-auto or full-auto.
And you change that with this switch on the side.
Now we know this is an export model gun
because the selector markings are "D" for "dauerfeuer", and "E" for "einzelfeuer".
That's single shot and multi-shot in German.
Some of the other contracts will be marked with abbreviations in either Spanish or Portuguese
for various South American countries, and for Portugal.
The manual safety on the gun is actually right up here, and it's kind of an unusual style.
When this lever is rearward the gun is ready to fire.
And you can depress this button, shove this forward,
and that locks the bolt in place and prevents it from firing.
That works whether the bolt is forward,
as it is now, or locked to the rear.
I can still engage the safety, and then nothing happens when you pull the trigger.
In order to open the top cover we have a safety button here,
this was added on the 1934 version, it was not present on the first 1930s versions.
Push that down and then press the rear cap in,
and the top cover pivots open.
So pretty slick easy access right there, that gives you everything inside the gun.
In order to remove the bolt we simply pull it back all the way,
lift it up, and gently release out of the gun.
If we take a closer look at the firing mechanism, what we have
is just a simple dropping sear and a disconnector right there.
So I am currently in "einzelfeuer", single shot mode.
Which means when I pull the trigger the sear drops, the bolt goes forward,
and when it ... retracts it is going to hit this button.
When that goes down, it releases the sear to come back up.
As a result you only get a single shot each time you pull the trigger.
If I flip this to "dauerfeuer", full-auto,
that disconnector retracts down into the gun.
So there it is up, and there it is down.
When it's down, the only thing that holds the bolt back is the sear,
and so it will fire until you release the trigger.
It's a little hard to see here, but the recoil spring actually goes down into the stock.
And there is a tail on the bolt that pushes on that little button, right there,
connected to a recoil spring that comes all the way down here.
There is the bolt itself with that pivoting tail.
We can actually take that off, like so.
This is a rather heavy bolt, it does have a fixed firing pin.
So obviously it fires from an open bolt.
And the weight here gives this a relatively low rate of fire,
something like 550 or 600 rounds per minute.
And apparently these are exquisitely nice and controllable submachine guns
because of that ... rate of fire and the weight of the gun.
Which is just under 10 pounds, if I recall correctly.
Now taking a ... second look at that safety mechanism,
what we're doing here when you push this lever forward
is pushing this spring-loaded piece down.
If we look inside ...
that piece has a little bar on the end.
So when it's pushed down, that intrudes into the receiver area.
And the top of the bolt has two cutouts, here and here, that match with that little block.
So when that pushes down it drops into one of these two notches,
and prevents the bolt from moving, whether it's all the way forward or all the way back.
A couple of other little things to point out.
We do have a kind of standard notch and front post style of ... sight here.
The rear sight is a tangent adjustable up to 500 metres.
And something that not everybody knows,
if you look under the rear sight on these guns, right there,
you'll find them actually marked with the calibre, which isn't marked anywhere else.
So you can see 7.63, that's 7.63 Mauser.
And that indicates that that was in fact the original chambering of this gun
despite the fact that it appears to have a replacement barrel.
Probably the barrel was trashed, and someone replaced it so they could continue shooting.
You will also find this marking on the front of the top cover of the gun,
a diamond and some circles with kind of a stylised SSW.
And that stands for Steyr-Solothurn Waffen AG.
The diamond is sort of a Rheinmetall logo,
they combined the Rheinmetall and Steyr elements into that logo.
And you will also find a serial number on the left side of the receiver up front, 12910 on this one.
That is repeated on the buttstock. This is worn, but you can still read it there, 12910.
Sometimes on the Austrian military ones you'll find a unit mark on the butt plate.
But of course this wasn't Austrian, and so it doesn't have that.
And lastly because it's kind of cool,
we have an original German manufactured magazine pouch for this.
Holds three mags, and it opens outward like that.
A bunch of German stamps.
If I'm reading this correctly ...
right there, it's either 1935 or 1936.
Which would be just about right for the Japanese contract.
... Standard magazines here are 32 rounds, I believe there was also a 20 round version.
But there you go.
Unfortunately, I don't have any way to actually prove that this is a Japanese contract gun.
However, all of the circumstantial evidence really does suggest that.
It is absolutely a commercial export model of the gun.
Not one of, for example, the Portuguese contract ones.
We know that from the selector markings.
And then just the condition it's in, the calibre it's in,
the fact that it was an amnesty-registered gun.
Everything points to this being a veteran bringback from World War Two,
which would indicate it was almost certainly a Japanese contract gun
captured by an American GI at some point.
... Oh, and even just the colour of the magazine pouch, that light brown leather is
exactly what the Japanese would have requested when they were buying these guns.
So really, assuming that that is true, that's an incredibly cool provenance for a gun like this.
To actually have one of the Japanese contract ones that
fought all the way through World War Two, and probably in China before that,
and then was brought back by an American GI.
So a very cool gun, and this being a particularly cool historical example of it.
If you'd like to add this one to your own personal collection,
it is of course fully transferable per NFA regulations, so a background check, etc.
If you take a look at the description text below,
you'll find a link to Julia's catalogue page on this gun.
Where you can see their description, and their pictures, and everything else
you would need to know to place a bid on it and hopefully win it yourself.
Thanks for watching.