Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video episode on ForgottenWeapons.com.
Today we're at the National Firearms Centre at the Royal Armouries in England up in Leeds.
And they've very generously allowed us to take a look at a
particularly unusual pistol they have in the collection here.
This is a last-ditch German Volkspistole, Mauser made
(there was also one done by Walther).
But you don't see these around all that much
and they're an interesting piece of work. We're going to go ahead
and take this one apart and take a look at how it does function.
So, first of all ...
standard P38 Walther magazine.
And to disassemble we have a block right here, pull that down
and then (if I can hold this right) ... the slide comes all the way back
and off
and this is ... It looks like a fairly typical fixed barrel blowback pistol, when in
fact there's a little more going on here than you might think at first.
So when this pistol was first designed, instead of just blowback
they decided to try out a system where they would cut
two vents in the barrel. You can see one right here ...
and there's one here on the opposite side.
They're plugged by screws right now, but initially they weren't.
Those two lead just in front of the chamber inside the barrel.
And when the gun is fired, gas (see if you can see this),
gas is blown through those holes into two recesses on the
inside of the slide. So as long as the ... bullet is in the barrel,
gas pressure is coming in here and holding the slide forward.
Actually very similar to the idea of the VG1-5 rifle,
or the Horn experimental rifle.
Now what's interesting is this pistol was never issued, it was never formally adopted,
and this particular one went through a bunch of different testing.
Which we can tell by looking a little more closely at it.
Over the course of development they decided to just try running
this as a straight blowback pistol (9mm) without this extra gas deal.
So they put a couple of set screws in the gas ports,
they welded on some extra plates to the slide to make it a bit heavier,
and discovered that it actually works just fine as a straight blowback pistol.
So another interesting thing we have going on on this gun is the mechanism for firing.
Alright, so when we look at the trigger mechanism, we have a bar here. This is directly, you know,
this is one piece with the trigger, and it's sliding backwards
And there's a spring back behind it to put tension on it, when it gets
to the very back (you can see it's running on a pin, right here),
it drops down at the back.
Now the reason to have that
is inside our slide, we have a striker. So we have this machined,
basically, bolt that's held in by a single pin. And inside it
the firing pin is spring loaded, right there.
So what happens is when ... this trigger is coming back,
this square cut-out is
pulling that spring-loaded striker back, and back, and back, and then it drops it.
Very, very simple.
Now, there are a few other interesting quirks here as a result of this being an experimental gun.
One is there is actually a threaded barrel sleeve,
and for a long time the pictures showed this with this sleeve
... threaded out on the end of the barrel.
That is nothing, that was never done. The reason for this sleeve is,
as part of the development, they were thinking about going
from this regular main spring to a toroid spring. Where you have
multiple wires basically braided together, twisted together,
like an MG42 spring. And in order to do that they had to turn
down the barrel slightly, because that toroid spring is wider,
requires more space inside the slide. So they turned the barrel down,
tried that out, ended up going back to the regular spring, and rather
than put in a new barrel (just like they added these
Allen screws instead of a new barrel), they just machined
this threaded slide to go on top of the barrel.
We have that on good authority from an interview that
was done with some of the folks who designed this
pistol for Mauser at the end of the war.
And that's pretty much all there is here. There was, at one point,
a last round hold open on the gun, it's not there now,
... it's long gone.
This was, like I said, ... an experimental gun that was being modified
back and forth, and tested, and re-modified and tested again.
But, it's a really interesting example of just how simple you can
make a pistol, even in a relatively potent calibre like 9mm.
It's straight blowback, there's no lock to it, and it works fine.
As a military gun it's pretty much worthless.
You really wonder why the Germans would have invested
time and effort into a last-ditch Volkspistole.
What good it would have done? But it's certainly an interesting project to look at.
So, we would certainly like to thank the National Firearms Centre
very much for letting us take a look at this. And if you're ever in
the area, it is definitely a collection well worth checking out.
I'm sure I don't need to tell you that.
And tune into ForgottenWeapons.com for more information on interesting experimental German pistols.
Thanks for watching.