hi guys thanks for tuning in to another
video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm in
McCallum and I'm here today at the Rock
Island auction company where we are
taking a look at a very common looking
flare pistol you can find these sorts of
things very easily on the surplus market
here in the United States made by
Bulgaria and Poland and Czechoslovakia
however I thought it would be
interesting to take a look at where this
actually came from because originally
this is a Russian design from World War
two and not only that but it was
manufactured or rather it was designed
by someone whose name you might
recognize Georg II semionovich boggin
the same guy who developed well who had
a hand in guns like the DShK and the guy
who basically developed the ppsh-41
toboggan first joined the Russian army
in 1916 where he was put to work as an
armored after the war and after the
Russian Civil War he went to work at the
kagra of Arsenal which is where it was a
machine gun Arsenal at the time and that
was where designers like in particular
deck Jeff and fedorov were both based
and working so he got to start
interacting with those guys and
apparently developed his skills fairly
quickly because by 1922 he was actually
assisting in design work there at the
Arsenal and of course he would go on to
be one of Russia's notable firearms
designers with iconic guns like the
ppsh-41 so let's take a closer look let
me show you what exactly he did to make
a flare pistol for the Soviet Union so
when the Soviet Union went into world
war two they were initially using a
flare pistol designed in 1930 something
that actually looks quite a lot like the
German flare pistols of the time a
little bit longer barrel had a hexagonal
chamber on it it was a nicely made and
finished gun which became a problem by
the middle of World War two when the
Soviet Union is very seriously short on
materials and manpower and factory
construction time so having finished his
work on the 1941 pattern submachine gun
vagan was put to work developing and
improved flare pistol and so his first
model was actually done in 1943 and it
was something like a 30% reduction
Costin materials over the existing guns
and it's not quite this this is the 1944
pattern which he simplified even more so
the 43 one has distinctive for having
kind of an angled grip and also has a
trigger guard on it this the SP SH and
by the way I know there are a bunch of
folks watching who actually speak
Russian and are consistently annoyed by
the fact that I use the I say SH because
in English we don't have a single letter
for that sound
the shoot sound which in Cyrillic does
have its own single letter so in English
its SH sorry about that anyway
shabanam went ahead and further
simplified the design to this one which
is really really simple but still
totally effective it does everything
that it needs to so it is a single
action gun have a hammer back there that
you have to manually [ __ ] the lever to
open the gun is this little
spring-loaded piece on the bottom of the
trigger so there's only one marking on
this thing and that is this Arsenal
stamp a star in a shield
that's the stamp for the Millat Arsenal
and originally swaggin was working at
cover of that Factory was moved east in
1941 to make sure that it wasn't overrun
by the Germans and by 43 and 44
Sheboygan was at molla much farther to
the east in Russia so that's where these
were produced later on they would start
marking them with eighths and serial
numbers but not this early in the war I
guess I shouldn't say this early in the
works I can't tell you for sure if this
was made during the war or shortly
afterwards that's the period when they
were actually using wood grips a little
later after the war had ended they
switched to plastic grips but this is
either a wartime or just shortly postwar
version with those wood grip panels now
mechanically it is single action and
it's a break open type of system so
there's a little spring-loaded lever at
the bottom of the trigger push that and
the barrel opens this is chambered for
basically a one inch flare 25.4
millimeters which is pretty typical and
standard of the time
all it does is just pivot open and
closed so put in a flare close the
barrel it latches you can then manually
[ __ ] the hammer pull the trigger and it
will fire there is a bit actually it's I
can show you the firing pin the firing
pin is not spring-loaded when if you
don't pull the trigger the hammer can't
go far enough forward to hit the firing
pin once you pull the trigger you take
that block out of the way and then the
firing pin can come forward so you have
all the basic necessary safety
mechanisms the gun can't fire just if
you accidentally hit the hammer so that
sort of thing and you'll notice here
actually in order to prevent this from
ever having the possibility of firing
when you just close the action with a
flare in it since it's not a
spring-loaded firing pin the bottom lug
on the barrel here actually pushes the
firing pin back into the breech face
when you close it so if the firing pin
doesn't go back on its own that pushes
it back before the action closes and so
this new super simplified model would do
very well for the Russians you know as
little manpower as necessary for a basic
utilitarian tool on the military flare
pistols were important for coordinating
attacks signalling locations all of that
sort of stuff the design would go on to
be copied by copied widely or licensed
widely in Warsaw Pact after the war and
that's why you see so many of them
around today you just don't nearly as
often see early pattern actual Russian
production ones as I said at the
beginning you can find this pattern of a
flare pistol really quite easily in the
US they're being expensive and a lot of
people actually just have them for their
purposes as flare pistols as signaling
devices however I think it's pretty cool
to see one here that's actually that
actually goes back to the original roots
of the design World War two or just
after World War two in the Soviet Union
so if you would like more information on
this one you'll need to take a look at a
rock island's catalog page it's in a
batch of five flare pistols there you
can either find their website on your
own or you can go to the link in the
description text below that's for
weapons calm and from there you can find
your way over to their catalogue page
thanks for watching
you