Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm here once again at the Rock Island Auction House,
and we're taking a look at what is, I think,
the star of the September Premier auction.
This is an absolutely gorgeous original FG-42 rifle,
or machine gun rather, this is NFA registered, transferable.
I believe there are only about 26 of these that are actually papered and in
private hands in the United States. And this is a very, very nice one.
Now this is a second model FG-42, its serial number range is in the 2,300s,
so it's kind of the middle of the range of production for the late version of this gun.
To back up a bit, the history of these. They were originally requested by the Luftwaffe after a rather
disastrous attack on Crete by German paratroops. The Germans originally dropped
only with their small arms. And their rifles and machine guns were all dropped separately in weapons canisters.
On Crete those didn't land all that close to the paratroops, and a lot of the fighting was done with
things like pistols and hand grenades. Didn't go very well. So the Luftwaffe decided that they needed a
multi-function ... shoulder arm that they could actually drop with while they were parachuting.
They put out a request to 6 different German arms manufacturers.
Only two actually responded, Krieghoff and Rheinmetall. And Rheinmetall submitted the better design.
This was designed by a German fellow named Louis Stange, who is a genius of firearms design,
extremely talented, had an extraordinary reputation ... in the German arms community at the time.
And really this is a wonder of technical achievement what he was able to do with this rifle.
The Luftwaffe requirements for the gun were, in a nutshell:
it had to be no longer and no heavier than a standard Kar98,
had to be capable of both full-auto and semi-auto fire.
They wanted full-auto from an open bolt for cooling, and
they wanted semi-auto from a closed bolt for accuracy, which makes sense.
They wanted an integral bipod, they wanted an integral bayonet.
And they wanted it to be able to be fitted with an optical sight
for greater long range precision. Had to be fed with box magazines.
And really that presents a serious technical challenge to meet all of those requirements.
And Stange was able to.
So the first versions of this gun were produced in 1942 after a rather short development cycle.
And they looked a bit different than this, the first version had a full milled receiver,
it had a very distinctive swept back pistol grip,
had a different style of muzzle brake that was smooth instead of having these serrations.
And it had a bipod that was actually pinned here at the front of the handguard with the
legs going forward and pivoting down.
About 2,000 of those guns were made.
And it was determined they ... were a bit too light, they were a bit fragile.
There are a lot of improvements that could be made.
Now the company that actually made the improvements was Krieghoff,
which is unusual, considering that the original design was created by Rheinmetall.
Krieghoff actually made almost all of these guns. Although Rheinmetall won the contest for the design,
they didn't have the production capacity to actually mass produce the guns.
So that contract was given to the Krieghoff company, and when it came time to redesign the gun,
that work was also done by Krieghoff.
Now when the redesign was taking place,
materials were getting scarcer for Germany, this was getting a little bit later into the war. And the
original receiver required some pretty high quality steel to manufacture, they ran low on that.
They found a substitute, but then they ran low on the substitute.
Part of the problem was that this ... gun was a Luftwaffe project, and not an Army project.
The Army at this time was deeply in development of 8x33 Kurz firearms, small calibre assault rifles basically.
And they didn't think it was appropriate or necessary to be developing
a new semi-auto in the full-size 8mm Mauser cartridge.
So this rifle didn't have Army support.
It was difficult to get it a lot of priority with manufacturing and materials supply,
and so when they redesigned it what they did was change from a milled receiver to a stamped receiver.
It was much easier to acquire ... the base raw materials for a standard gun, and that's what they did.
So this late model has a stamped receiver, it was changed to a heavier wooden buttstock,
the bipod now pins at the front and folds down this way, the muzzle brake was improved and changed.
A number of other smaller changes,
a shell case deflector was added, changes like that.
The basic fundamental mechanism stayed the same though.
And this version about 5,000 were made later in the war. As I said this one is 2,314, so it's pretty much mid-range.
There's a different serial number range for the early and the late model guns.
Now there's a lot of misinformation out there on these and their practical application.
They're actually quite comfortable to shoot, the second model in particular is a bit heavy.
It has a recoil mechanism in the stock, has an extraordinarily good muzzle brake on it,
and the recoil on this is surprisingly light. Now I haven't fired one in full-auto,
... I would be curious to find out how they actually feel in full-auto, but in semi, great gun, fantastic.
In fact, it's interesting in that in order to make this gun meet all of the Luftwaffe requirements
of size and weight and so on, and still have all of the technical capacity that it does,
Stange ... was really good about cutting this rifle to the bone everywhere that he could get away with
to make it work. Mechanically, the engineering factor of safety in this rifle
is probably pretty slim. In fact if this were a new production rifle, it probably wouldn't get through
a good engineering department, because it's just barely strong enough everywhere to run reliably.
Interestingly one of the ... very clever elements that Stange put into this gun is the chamber.
... For World War Two it has a gas port unusually close to the chamber, it has relatively high pressure
at the chamber. The gas port had to be this far back in order to keep the gas piston short,
and all the other components short and thus light.
But you ran the risk of the bolt opening too quickly and venting...
Basically opening too quickly at high pressure and venting gas. What Stange did was actually cut a
special creative chamber for the 8mm. Normally the 8 Mauser cartridge is very slightly tapered,
he cut chambers in these rifles that are perfectly cylindrical,
so that when you fire, the brass actually blows out into a cylinder.
Which allows it to maintain a gas seal even as it is just starting to extract,
that allowed the pressure to drop sufficiently before the cartridge was fully extracted.
You can see that in fired cases, in addition to being cylindrical, they'll have a slight double shoulder
to them from this really unique chamber design. Stange really knew what he was doing with this gun.
So this particular one has a 4x power ZF-4 optic mounted on it,
That was the standard German optical sight during the war.
Some of the guns, probably not a lot, were originally issued with these sights.
But all of the guns, at least all the late model guns, had a universal scope rail to mount them.
Now unfortunately we can't actually disassemble this gun. It is extraordinarily valuable,
and it is up for consignment at an auction.
And nobody wants to damage the gun, so I can't pull it apart to show you.
However I do have some other videos already posted disassembling both reproductions and
another authentic second model FG-42, so you can take a look at those if you're interested.
Alright, so there are a couple of things I want to point out on the FG, just interesting elements to it.
First off, it has both a fire selector between semi-auto and full-auto,
and it also has a safety between safe and fire. What's kind of fun about this one is...
presumably this was brought back by a GI, and either he or someone at some point
... couldn't remember what the German markings meant. The 'E' is for [einzelfeuer] and
on the other side is 'D' for a German word I don't remember [dauerfeuer].
Anyway, ... one of the previous owners actually etched single and auto and safe into the grip there
... to remind himself what the markings meant.
So right in here you can see the block that comes up from the gas piston that holds the firing pin,
and acts as a cam to rotate the bolt. You can see the firing pin spring there,
that is because there is a little bit of extra oomph needed to ensure that this fires reliably,
rather than just the mainspring (which is located underneath along the gas piston).
Of course we have our folding rear sight.
That pops up. So if you're not using the optic you can go ahead and use the folding sight.
This is a drum adjustable sight, very similar actually to the Johnson light machine gun.
And the way this operates is it has a cammed track in it that adjusts the height of this ... rear peep.
And in order to adjust it you push the peep sight down, and you can then rotate the drum.
You can see as I do that, the peep comes to different heights.
And then these numbers, of course, appear on the back, and so the number
that is facing you as a shooter tells you what elevation you're set for.
The folding front sight to go with the folding rear sight, is pretty simple.
Snaps up, locks in position.
It's a basic round hooded post.
So the FG-42 bayonet here is short. It's a plus shaped cruciform, just a spike,
very similar actually to the French MAS 36 series of bayonets, and it has the same sort of attachment.
You'll see that when I press one of these locks the other one depresses, and it stores under the gun in this sleeve,
press this in, lock it in place. To deploy the bayonet we can pull it out
and it slides back into the exact same mounting point ... back to front.
That mounts the bayonet in there. Now in practical service this is a pretty useless bayonet,
but it did make sure that the gun fulfilled the Luftwaffe requirement of having an attached fixed bayonet.
Now the muzzle brake is also interesting. As I've said, this is a very effective muzzle brake.
This one is actually not on quite correctly.
So there's a very large coarse thread that mounts the main body of this muzzle brake.
The brake has a whole series of holes cut in the front of these serrations. So there are no holes in the back,
all the holes in the front, that helps redirect the gases forward to counteract recoil.
And you will notice there is one section here that does not have any holes,
that section is intended to be mounted vertically facing down,
so that when you're shooting prone you don't blow up dust in your own face.
I have tried that out with a modern replica, and it actually works very well.
So we have a spring-loaded latch here, pull that up.
You don't actually have to tighten the muzzle brake, you just rotate it to the correct spot.
That's indicated, of course, by this cutout which the latch fits into.
Lock that there, now you can see that the solid portion of the brake is pointing down.
So I'm being very ginger with this rifle, because frankly
it's probably worth more than all of my worldly possessions combined,
but I do want to show you how the bipod works.
I should point out that bipods were kind of notoriously fragile on these guns,
they had to make them very light in order to meet the overall weight requirements.
They're a stamped component, and what they do is fold out like this, and then have a spring-loaded latch in place.
I'm just going to open up this one, you can see how it is. The other one's a little bit tighter.
There is a little spike stamped into the body of the bipod leg, and you can see the bayonet stored here underneath.
Alright, so a little bit more on the gas mechanism here.
This is our gas block, this nut is threaded on to the barrel and holds it in place.
And then the gas piston operates inside here, you can see it going back behind those vent holes.
This is simply a plug that unscrews.
That gives you direct access to the front of the ... gas piston. And then you have a little U-shaped
retaining pin here,
and in order to change the gas setting,
you pull that out like so, then you can rotate this, and I'm not going to do it, but you can rotate this
to expose one of four different sized holes that vent gas from the barrel into the block.
Then you just put that back in place, ... thread this plug back in,
and leave this loose the way it was. But typically the front of that U-shaped retainer spring
locks in between two of these notches and prevents this from opening back up.
Now as you can see here, I have the bipod extended. The bipod does rotate just a little bit, allows the gun to pivot there.
And then the bipod legs fold back and lock around the gas cylinder.
Another interesting element we can see, this wooden handguard was a little bit fragile
and potentially could overheat. What they did to ameliorate that was actually put a piece of
corrugated metal sheet pressed into the handguard all the way around, you can see it right there.
That prevented it primarily from cracking.
Alright, another area of interest on the second pattern FG is this wooden buttstock.
On the first pattern guns, these were stamped in either aluminium or steel depending on the variant.
But they went to wood and a larger profile on the second pattern, and the button here releases the
... buttstock so it can come off the gun. The receiver is stamped and runs inside the stock back to here,
and then there's a big spring-loaded recoil buffer back in here.
What all of this means is that they basically had to hollow out the entire stock to make room for it.
... So the stocks were actually hollowed all the way through, and then they put a
plate on the back, that's actually more of a plug. You can see here the line,
that this ribbed butt plate is actually a separate piece that's held in by two roll pins here and here.
So some initial troop trials of the FG determined that it was very easy to get mud, or dirt, or gunk
inside the magazine well here if there wasn't a magazine in the gun.
You can see that the mechanism is very open and exposed there.
So one of the recommendations during the development was to add doors to cover the magazine well,
and they did that. So there are two spring-loaded, stamped doors.
Just pull the magazine catch slightly forward and it locks those doors in place,
and that keeps dirt out of the gun, when you don't have a magazine in it.
Then when you want to load a magazine, all you have to do is push the mag catch forward,
and they both snap smartly open. They both have coil springs up here to do that.
So one last thing I want to take a look at here is the magazine. This is a 20 round box magazine,
which is the typical magazine for an FG-42. They did also manufacture 10 round versions which,
in theory, you ... would jump with. While you were parachuting you'd have a 10 round mag in the gun.
Those are ridiculously rare. 20 rounders are the standard, they're still extremely difficult to find.
They are not identical to any other German box magazine,
they're not interchangeable with, say, ZB-26 magazines or MG13 mags.
They're rather similar in many ways, but they're not interchangeable. In fact the magazines between
the first and the second major patterns of the FG-42 are not interchangeable with each other either.
Being that this is Rock Island Auctions, this rifle of course is up for sale.
Really I can't imagine a gun collection where this wouldn't be one of the very top jewels of the collection.
And it can be yours if you have the dough. This is lot 1465 in the upcoming auction,
So I would strongly recommend you to go take a look. If you're seriously interested in buying it,
you may already be on your way out here to Rock Island to take a look at it in person.
But even if not, you should definitely check it out. It is an extraordinary gun that you very rarely get to see, so.
I will also say if you're the person watching this later who bought this gun,
if you want to shoot it on video, drop me a line. I would love to get some high-speed video
and some very cool cinematic quality video footage of one of these shooting.
So thank you guys for watching, hope you enjoyed the video, got to see a really awesome rifle.
And tune back into ForgottenWeapons.com for more World War Two paratrooper rifles.
[Thanks for watching.]