Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and thanks to the generous contribution of viewer Matthew,
we have a ZiP .22 to actually do some shooting with today.
You of course hopefully saw the desktop video on this yesterday with its history and its disassembly,
and now we're actually going to try and make it work.
So I want to reiterate, we touched on this yesterday,
this is a particularly potentially hazardous firearm to use.
Because these are the cocking handles out here at the very front,
where you basically have to stick your finger in front of the muzzle in order to charge this thing.
So this one is actually fitted with a special (there we go), special charging device,
which I'm going to go ahead and use as much as I can.
We have a Ruger 10/22 10 round magazine there,
go ahead and fit that in, and then pop that.
Now it's loaded and hot. I'm going to go ahead and shoot this left handed,
not just because I'm left handed, but because this is actually safer to shoot left handed,
because you're less likely to get your hand in the way of the ejection port.
Now there is a very slim chance this will actually work, but let's find out.
OK, I can't quite get enough strength on the trigger to fire it.
Alright, we're going to go with the middle finger trigger option here.
Oh, ha ha ha, safety was on. Alright, back to normal.
Well, it ejected.
And did not fire a second round. Alright, what we have there is a pretty basic failure to feed.
You can see inside there?
I should be able to fix that by just bringing back the bolt handle.
Nope.
Alright, that's going to be problematic.
And pull the magazine, and then being very careful with ...
There we go. There is no extractor on this, so if you have something like that, a partial failure to feed,
... you can't just like pull the empty case out, ... because there's no extractor to do that.
You have to fiddle with it until you get it all the way into the chamber.
So, alright. Let's try this again.
This, by the way, is Aguila Hyper Velocity .22. I have three different brands of ammo to try today.
We're going to start with that one. I suspect none of them will actually work, but here we go.
OK, now the striker safety lock has bitten me here, because
as we discussed yesterday if you only cock it half way, then it ... locks the striker as some sort of goofy safety mechanism.
There we go, that should be fully cocked now.
There we go, we did extract, and appear to have fed.
Hey hey, two rounds in a row.
I think that is the most successful string of firing of a ZiP .22 that I have ever seen in my life.
I watched a bunch of the other videos that people have put up on these things, just to get a feel for what I should expect.
None of them prepared me for it actually firing.
So maybe the Aguila ammo is the trick, I know it kind of wants high velocity stuff.
Next up we have a 15 round Ruger factory magazine.
Let's see if this can actually work.
Ha ha. Ah, no.
OK, didn't bring the thing far enough back to actually feed.
There we go, let's try that.
Interesting, it has locked open ... somehow.
It's not supposed to be able to do that, but it appears to have locked open on a loaded magazine.
It jammed that bullet back into its case, we're going to get rid of that one.
Let's try this again here.
No, didn't... So these recoil springs are actually really stiff to use,
and especially when you're trying to be careful not to put your finger in front of the muzzle,
they're difficult. ... What I did there is didn't quite pull it far enough back to actually fully chamber a cartridge.
There we go, now it is.
That didn't feel like it reset.
Nope, that has locked open again.
In fact, it looks like what's happening is it is jamming cartridges into the front of the magazine.
Yeah, so that's actually not a problem I can blame on the ZiP, that's a problem with this magazine I think,
in conjunction with ... this ammunition.
... When the bolt hits the back of the case, it's jamming it forward, and the magazine's not lifting it up properly to feed.
So, let's go ahead and go back to the 10 round magazine. Just for kicks I'm going to try a different brand of ammunition.
Alright, that last ammo was Aguila 30 grain. This is American Eagle Red Box 40 grain projectiles.
I'm going to use that charging thing here again.
There we go, we should be good to go.
Let's go ahead and try it right now, no I'm going to stick with that.
There's a failure to properly feed.
The ZiP here has no actual feed ramp, and so it's relatively easy to get this sort of thing.
I'll be honest though, this is performing far better than I had expected at all.
Now to get this clear I'm going to hold the bolt back.
There we go.
Nope, didn't quite get the bolt far enough back to actually
get a round in there. Let's try that.
That one, not entirely sure what that problem is because, offhand,
I can't tell if that's a round that's partially chambered, or partially extracted.
So let's start by taking the magazine out.
And then ...
Ugh, that's just locked up solid in there. Odd.
Alright, I'm not sure what has happened there, but,
if we look in there, see if you can see that, the bolt is not actually touching the cartridge case.
Something is jammed up.
... OK, so that case has fired,
because there's an indent on the back face.
So we should be in a safe condition, but it's a little hard to manipulate this thing
because there's no way to get into ...
How do we fix that?
Yeah, I have no idea what's happened there.
I think we're going to have to call the video here because it doesn't appear to be broken, but it's certainly not working.
So, overall, I'm actually fairly impressed by how well this did function.
I was expecting every other round misfires, and instead we only got
a couple misfires per magazine. So for a ZiP that's actually remarkably good performance.
[ When we came back out the next day to film the high speed shots, we never got two rounds to fire in a row. ]
... Handling on this is as bad as you would expect from dry handling it.
It is actually an uncomfortable gun to fire, despite the fact that it's just a .22 rimfire.
This is truly one of the worst guns that I've ever actually laid hands on, which is an impressive achievement.
So don't buy one of these, unless you want it as part of your menagerie of
terrible guns, which, hey, I get it. That's a cool collection to have.
And in that case, go nuts, and by all means try and find yourself the .22 Magnum single-shot conversion as well.
A big thanks to Matt for loaning this one to me. We'll be sending it back to you.
I'll hopefully be able to fix it before I send it back to you, but if not, well, haven't really lost anything.
So thanks for watching guys. Stay tuned tomorrow for more cool forgotten weapons.
Alright, I have this back home now to try and figure out what was going on with it.
As you can see, the bolt is about half way back, maybe two-thirds the way back, and just stuck there.
So, let's start by taking the top plate off.
There we go. And then ...
I'm going to go ahead and take the back cover off.
And I think the step that we need to do here is to take out the spring tension on those two main guide rods.
Unfortunately, these problems ...
I don't see anything really obvious there.
Unfortunately, these problems precluded me from being able to get any high-speed footage
because we were going to do that as soon as we were done getting the regular footage.
And then, of course, the gun seized up.
So previously when I did this, the guide rods walked forward under spring tension.
This time the screw is actually coming back out.
Yup, there it goes. Alright, so there's that one.
The screw's all the way out, ... but that rod does not want to come free.
Right, let's bring out the punch set.
I do happen to have a solid plastic punch.
The bolt forward a little bit?
This thing wiggles, but it does not want to come out.
The bolt looks like it's in its proper path and track.
Well if I can push it all the way forward, then I can get the striker spring out, and that should help things.
There we go, bolt's all the way forward now.
That still doesn't want to come out, but...
Striker, get those bits out. You can take the striker out.
Now we've got just the bolt in there.
Alright, I kept going. I fully field stripped the thing, and now it actually works.
I never saw a piece of brass or lead or dirt or anything fall out of it. I'm not really sure what happened,
but stripping these rods and springs out, tapping the bolt out,
when I went to put it back together everything just fit nicely. So.
Well, no, I will still not recommend these for purchase.
And I think that is finally all we've got on the ZiP.
Thanks for watching.
[ revised sk cn2 ]