[ Israeli Dror LMG (semi-auto copy) ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning into another video episode on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I'm out here today taking a look at another
very cool semi-auto machine gun.
This is a modern rebuild
of an Israeli Dror light machine gun.
These are pretty darn scarce, there weren't very many of them built.
And I think there's an extremely cool story behind these.
So I would like to thank my friend Mark for letting me do a video,
and do some shooting with this gun, ... which is his.
And frankly, I think you guys will want to thank him too,
because this is a really cool gun to take a look at.
So the backstory of this is ... after World War Two, the late 1940s, the state of Israel
(or what we now know as the state of Israel) was British occupied Palestine.
And in 1948 they went through a War of Independence
and created the modern-day state of Israel.
Well, the Jewish military at that point was called the Haganah.
There were a number of basically civil defence militia organisations,
which eventually amalgamated into the IDF.
... In 1948 they needed basically anything they could get that would fire bullets.
And they ended up, ironically enough, frankly with a lot of
captured and cheaply sold World War Two German gear.
They had a lot of MG 34s, they had some Bren guns.
They had some British stuff because the British ... did at the time occupy Palestine.
And one of the other guns that they ended up with was this copy of the Johnson light machine gun.
Now a number of the engineers in the Johnson Company
sympathised with the cause of the Palestinian Jews
(I think you would have called them at the time, today we'd call them the Israelis).
And they actually smuggled the technical package, the blueprints and the drawings,
and ... all the technology for the Johnson to a group of Jewish Palestinian guys in the US
who were trying to raise money and find arms.
So they spent a couple of months reverse engineering the Johnson light machine gun.
They managed to source all of the tooling
and machinery to manufacture the guns in the United States.
At this point there was a huge market for ... basically surplus arms tooling.
It was all being sold off effectively as scrap because the demand of World War Two was gone.
So they were able to buy up all this, get it shipped to Israel successfully,
and they started manufacturing Johnson light machine guns in .303 British calibre.
Because that's one of the calibres that was available because of the British occupation.
... They were called the Dror.
These early .303 calibre Drors looked more like a Johnson than these do.
They had the very distinctive kind of swoopy front sight.
They had a side mounted magazine, it was a single-stack 20 round magazine.
Because it was in .303 it had a very steep curvature to it.
Very few of those guns were made, frankly they just didn't work for crap.
Probably some problems with the rimmed cartridge.
The Johnson obviously was designed for .30-06.
Converting it to a rimmed cartridge on the sneaky by a group of people who
weren't technical weapons experts, it didn't work well.
So they came up with a second pattern of the Dror, which was this one.
This gun is in 8mm Mauser, which they also had large stocks of
from purchased and captured or turned over German equipment.
It used a bottom-mounted magazine, double stack, these are actually modified US BAR magazines.
And changed some of the general profile of the gun,
What it retains from the Johnson is the operating mechanism,
we'll take it apart in a few minutes and look at the internals. ...
It's a recoil operated machine gun, so the barrel actually comes back with each shot.
That unlocks the bolt, and it is a multi-lug rotary bolt very similar to the AR-15.
It is in fact the design that Stoner used as his inspiration for the AR-15 bolt.
Well, the Israelis copied it for the Dror here as well.
It is select-fire of course, it is a light machine gun.
So it has a semi-auto, a full-auto and a safe position on the selector.
It fires from a closed bolt, which is a bit unusual for machine guns.
What's kind of cool about that setup is it actually makes it a pretty easy gun
to build as semi-auto only legally today in the United States.
And that's what was done with this one.
It has a quick-change barrel - it is in fact a very quick change barrel.
We push this button in, lift up, lift to unlock the bolt,
and pull the barrel out.
This brown thing on the end of the muzzle is basically like a fibre board insulator,
so that you can grab the barrel when it's still hot.
There we go, back in ready to go.
It has a lot of very nice features to it.
And the Israelis were really excited about it, they really needed the guns.
... Before these guns had gone through their final testing
they put them into full-scale production.
They ended up making 3,000 and change of the guns.
Unfortunately they were making them before they'd finished testing them.
And what their field testing actually showed
was that these were not very effective, reliable guns.
The good news is that they were the most accurate of the machine guns that the Israelis tested.
Their primary competition were Bren guns and MG 34s.
And the ones that they had were all war surplus from World War Two.
So they were all fairly beat-up used guns.
The Drors in the tests were brand new and they should have done extremely well.
Well, they were accurate but they were not reliable.
They failed pretty much all of the reliability tests,
sand, mud, dust, water, sea water, they just didn't work reliably enough.
So ... a bunch of them were made before they discovered that.
They were used for training, almost certainly in small numbers.
They were used in combat, but they were never issued as a large-scale formal weapon.
That went to frankly the Brens and the MG 34s that were available instead.
So out here actually shooting this today, it's an interesting experience.
This is the first time I've shot one of these, and it's actually kind of a remarkably
violent and almost unpleasant gun to shoot. It has a pretty stiff recoil to it.
Frankly it is a fairly light gun for a light machine gun.
The stock is ... not padded, this is hard plastic.
And you kind of have to be careful because if you go too far back
the gun jerks you onto this hard metal edge.
If you go too far forward this metal edge hits you in the face.
So a little bit of finesse is required to shoot these well.
I should also point out ...
they do come with a dust cover to close over the magazine.
But there is not a dust cover over the bolt handle.
So a lot of opportunity for crap to get into the insides of the gun.
And I suspect that's why it had problems in the reliability testing, so.
But I think that's probably enough talking, why don't we go ahead and do a little bit of shooting with it?
Alright guys, I have a 20 round magazine of 8mm here.
This is a pretty simple magazine well to use, it's just nose in, rock back.
And then just like the Johnson, in order to rack it
you lift up on the bolt handle which allows it to unlock.
There we go.
Empty.
So these were not meant to be fired from the hip, because you never hit crap firing from the hip.
But that carry handle does make it awfully convenient to do so.
Alright, so disassembly. You don't need me in camera for this.
We're going to start with the barrel, we have a barrel latch here. You push the button.
Pop the barrel latch open, and then you have to lift up the cocking handle
which rotates the locking lugs out of engagement.
Then grabbing onto this fibre insulating pad ...
I can pull the whole barrel out.
This thing in the front here, this looks like a gas block - it is not.
All it is is a retaining lock to hold the barrel in place.
You can see this silver collar on the barrel, that's a nice precision machined fit.
Because ... it's a recoil operated gun, so the barrel slides each time it fires.
So you have a bearing surface up here, you have a bearing surface back here.
And that corresponds with these two nice shiny surfaces.
It is also worth noting that there is a recoil spring in here for the barrel.
So that the mainspring and the bolt don't have to do the work
of pushing the barrel back into position after each shot.
So, spring-loaded button goes in.
So, with that out of the way we can separate the upper from the lower.
We have this latch here on the side.
All I have to do is push that in and then pull.
I want to make sure it's cocked, which it is.
Push that in and then pull.
The lower comes out, a recoil spring comes out.
The lower assembly here contains all of the fire control parts.
I'm not going to pull those apart obviously.
But one of the other interesting bits we have ... this double-tubular stock.
... This is ... basically straight off of a Johnson Model 1944 machine gun,
which did not see nearly as much service as the '41.
But it also had this big serrated metal butt plate, and the double tubes.
The top tube houses the recoil spring, sits right in like that.
The bottom tube is actually for storage, we have a little spring latch here.
Which I can push in with a cartridge, ...
pop it open.
And you've got spares, you could have a bolt head in there,
you could have a firing pin in there. Whatever you need in there.
Today we'd say batteries, but of course there's nothing battery operated on this gun.
So that's what that's for.
That pretty much covers the lower assembly.
Now ... the hardest part of disassembly is to actually get the bolt handle out
which is kind of a tricky process.
What you do, you can see that there's a little spring-loaded nub here that I can pull out.
What you have to do is pull this nub all the way out,
and then the cocking handle slides backwards out of its little recess in the bolt.
This may take me a couple of tries, ... there we go.
So this is our charging handle, and this back piece is spring-loaded.
So in order to disassemble it, what you have to do is pull this all the way back.
And then this front bit is dovetailed and locks into the bolt.
So by the way, this bolt handle is one of the Israeli's complaints about the gun in general
that it was too small, and it tended to tear up your hand when you're aggressively using the gun.
Once the bolt handle is out, we can pull the bolt and carrier out the back of the gun.
A couple of things to note here, one is this big open slot in the bolt carrier.
That's because this is a hammer fired gun.
There's our hammer.
The hammer comes up inside this slot
and hits the firing pin right there,
causing it to come out the front and fire the gun.
We can disassemble our bolt head from our bolt ... extension.
Now there is a piece in here that retains the firing pin so that it can't come out.
Let's pull that off.
This has a little spring clip.
This little spring clip hooks around the firing pin in here.
And that prevents it from going too far forward or coming out the back.
And then this is our bolt ... extension, or bolt carrier.
The round hole here ... actually had some components for the full-auto mechanism,
which obviously is not in this gun because this is a semi-auto only gun.
So that's pretty much it, fairly simple.
Oh, the extractor is extremely similar to that of an MG 34.
It's a little bit unusual given how close the rest of the gun is to a Johnson.
It makes one kind of wonder if they had major extraction issues with the early .303 Drors,
and decided to use a known very effective system for their 8mm guns.
I don't have any proof of that, but that seems to make sense as an idea.
And then of course we have our ... multi-locking lug bolt head,
which would go on to be the inspiration for the AR-15 bolt.
The bottom two lugs here are very large, those are set to push cartridges out of the magazine to feed.
That's pretty much it to the Dror.
Manufacturing-wise the upper receiver is one assembly
the magazine box is a separate assembly, and they're riveted together.
You can see the rivets up here on the top and on this side.
There are actually a surprising number of Dror parts kits in the country
considering how rare the complete guns are.
This upper receiver is a very difficult part to find, the magazine box is also very difficult.
The barrels and the lowers are actually reasonably common,
probably because there's not a whole lot you can actually do with them.
So reassembly, I'm going to put our firing pin back in.
And I'm going to put the retaining plate back in and snap it in place,
like that.
Now the bolt head can go on, like so, it's spring-loaded.
And this slides into the receiver.
The bolt is fortunately easier to put back in than it is to take out.
Or at least it should be.
There we go, bolt handle's in place.
Now put the lower assembly back on.
The recoil spring ... sits around the bolt. And then we have rails that line up.
And this just slides ... in place, and the other cool thing is the disassembly catch is angled.
So when it's disassembled all I have to do is snap it together
and it will lock in place, just like that.
In order to disassemble it I have to push the button,
but to reassemble it just push it and it's good to go.
Then the last bit is to reinstall the barrel.
So I want to have the barrel latch open, take my barrel, put it in here.
The barrel also just snaps into place like that.
Push the button and lock it down.
And we're good to go.
Well thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
Got a chance to take a look at a really awesome Israeli light machine gun,
... they are very rare in the US today.
So hope you guys enjoyed it, thanks for watching.
Thanks again to Mark for letting us use his gun for this video.
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