Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
taking a look at a very rare Steyr MP34 in .45 ACP.
Now one of the cool things about the
Steyr MP30 and MP34 series is
they made them in like six different calibres.
And the gun is pretty much standardised
and they just switched out barrel, bolt and magazine
to allow them to chamber 7.65 Luger, 7.63 Mauser,
9x25 Mauser, 9x23 Steyr aka Bergmann or Largo,
9x19, the German Army had these ... being manufactured in 9x19 as the MP34(ö),
("o" with the little umlaut on it for Austria).
And then there's the .45 ACP one, which is perhaps the rarest of all of them.
Now .45 ACP was not a particularly popular calibre on the European continent.
And so it wasn't a priority of Steyr's, the manufacturer, but they did offer it
because there were a bunch of South American ... countries in particular that liked .45 ACP.
You have Uruguay, for example, with its ... .45 calibre pistols, as well as a bunch of other countries.
So, they went ahead and manufactured it, and they had to make a few changes to do so.
But they sold about 500 of these in total.
Now, interestingly, they actually sold a handful of them to the New York Police Department in the 1930s.
Alas, the NYPD threw them in the ocean when they decided they were obsolete.
So we don't have access to those, but we do have this particular one.
So, this was actually one of a batch of 7 guns that was brought in in the late 1970s from Guatemala,
so it is a pre-'86 dealer sample gun.
But as I said, these were mostly used in South America: Chile, El Salvador, Uruguay, Bolivia, Guatemala.
And that's where this particular one came from.
So let's go ahead and take a closer look and I will show you
how it is similar and different to a standard 9mm one, like this, which is actually an Austrian Army example.
We'll start with a quick front to back overview.
This is of course an open-bolt fixed-barrel submachine gun.
We have a bayonet lug here on the side, we have fixed open sights,
a nice [barrel] shroud, because there is really no forward hand guard on this.
So you can hold onto it out here,
and that will at least heat up a lot slower than the barrel itself.
The magazine is side mounted, this is a 20 round .45 calibre magazine.
Standard for the 9mm guns were both 20 and 30 round magazines.
I don't think they ever manufactured a 30 round mag for the .45, I think it was just 20s.
We have a rear tangent sight that is calibrated out to 500 metres.
We have a selector lever over here.
"D" is for 'dauerfeuer', which is multi-shot or full-auto,
and then "E" is for 'einzelfeuer', or semi-auto.
And that does of course work, so in semi-auto it locks open after each shot.
I'll show you why when we open it up here.
Back end of the stock, nothing in particular there.
We have a serial number on the stock, 1243. This gun is not quite matching, but it is close.
The number on the receiver itself there is 1259.
You can see that this gun has led a fairly hard life,
it has a lot of corrosion, and it has been beaten up on the front end of it.
Frankly, South American arms repositories, I'm not all that surprised.
These guns are really cool when you get into the inside, because they're just really simple.
Close the bolt. In order to open the top cover you just push this lever in,
and this intricately, finely machined top cover just folds up into the front of the gun.
No tubular receiver here, it is a round bolt, but everything in here is just very nicely machined.
Then we have the bolt, and we have a tail coming off the bolt,
much like you would see on a FAL.
That runs to a recoil spring that is compressed inside the buttstock.
So to disassemble this we are just going to pull
the bolt back, and then carefully, there we go,
lift it out of the receiver.
So you can see our fire control group here.
When I have this in full-auto the disconnector drops down out of the way.
And as long as I hold the trigger, the sear is held down,
and the bolt will just cycle back and forth firing.
When I do have this on semi-auto, we now have this [disconnector] that pops up.
It's spring-loaded here, when I pull the trigger the sear is going to drop,
which is going to let the bolt go forward.
But, ... the bolt's going to go forward, as soon as the bolt starts to come back,
it's going to hit this and snap it down, which resets the sear.
So I'm still holding the trigger. The bolt is going to come back, lock on the sear,
until I release the trigger and then the whole thing resets.
And I can pull the trigger again and have another semi-auto shot.
So that's how the semi-auto disconnector works.
The bolt's pretty cool here, we can take the back piece of the bolt,
and it just rotates 90 degrees and comes off.
We can then pull the charging handle out, that just comes off the side.
And then I can pull out the firing pin. So the firing pin is replaceable.
If it gets worn down or anything like that, it can just be replaced
instead of being milled in as a fixed part of the bolt face.
And there is a little spring-loaded buffer in here, ... inside the firing pin.
So that's a very tight spring, but that will absorb a bit of the
impact when the bolt hits the back of travel on each shot.
Now Steyr really had no illusions about, I suspect, how successful, how popular
the .45 calibre version of the gun was going to be. This was a limited market.
I'm sure they didn't anticipate realistically being able to get a contract with someone like the US military.
So what they did is make as few changes as possible
to their standard 9mm guns in order to offer them in .45.
So the overall dimensions of both guns are identical.
And the receivers are of particular importance here, the receivers are identical.
You saw how much machining went into these receivers,
you don't want to have to have two different versions of them.
So all that's the same. There are really only four components that are different between the two guns.
The bolt, obviously, because it has to fit a different size cartridge.
The barrel, obviously, for the same reason.
The top covers are different, but only because the rear sights are different.
And the magazine housings are just slightly different,
but even the magazine housing isn't all that different.
So the most noticeable change
is that the 9mm versions of the gun had this very intricate extra assembly here,
which allows you to actually take their magazine, snap it into the bottom of the magazine well,
and then load the magazine with stripper clips.
Like your stripper clip loader is built into the gun itself.
And to facilitate that there's a second magazine catch, right here,
that allows you to lock the magazine in vertically.
There really are no good stripper clips out there for .45,
so on the .45 calibre versions of the gun they got rid of this.
So in some ways the .45 was actually probably a simpler and cheaper gun for them to make.
Because they got rid of the opening at the top they also didn't need to have this extra catch,
so none of that is present on here.
That also, by the way, makes the stock slightly different.
But in this case it's a difference of there's a little bit less machining that has to be done,
or carving that has to be done, on the .45 calibre stock.
So it's actually easier to make than the 9mm.
Now we do have a change down here that some of you will probably have noticed,
this is a difference in safeties.
So this particular pattern, which is not necessarily unique to all of the 9mm ones,
has a safety lever right there. Were the .45
uses a cutout in the top cover that you can lock the bolt into as the primary safety mechanism.
You'll notice that that cut's not here, so
that's more a difference between models than the difference between the two calibre versions.
Now the rear sight leaves on these two guns are the same, and the markings are the same.
And the way they accommodated for the difference in trajectory between 9mm and .45
is by changing the profile of this slope
that ... determines how high the sight gets raised for each particular increment.
So you can see that the .45 ramp here goes up much higher, which pushes the sight higher,
which allows for, or defines, the more dropping trajectory of the .45 calibre cartridge.
There's one subtle little difference out here
and that is that the .45 calibre version of the gun takes a different bayonet.
The bayonet lugs are identical, but because the outside diameter of
the .45 barrel is larger than the 9mm, the bayonet has to have a muzzle ring that will fit this.
So the bayonet is slightly different between the two guns.
One thing that I do want to point out is while the magazine housing had to change
because of the difference in magazine dimensions,
it didn't change as much as you might think.
So here's our .45 calibre magazine, and
it is too wide to fit into the 9mm magazine well, but the overall length is identical.
So if I take my 9mm magazine it'll wobble up and down in the .45 calibre magazine well,
but it fits front to back quite nicely.
And so that is what allowed them to keep the receiver basically identical,
they didn't have to change the length of this component, just the ... height.
The development history on these is a little cloudy
because, like many of the inter-war submachine guns,
Germany wasn't supposed to be doing this sort of development and production.
And so German companies would kind of branch out to other nations
in order to avoid the requirements of the Versailles Treaty.
So the designer of the gun here was actually Louis Stange, who was a very talented designer
who would go on to be involved in the FG-42, among many other projects.
He initially worked for Rheinmetall, Rheinmetall acquired the Swiss firm of Solothurn,
(which is located in the town of Solothurn),
as a way to avoid some of the national boundary rules of the Versailles Treaty.
The conglomerate then acquired (and that was I believe 1929 they acquired Solothurn).
They would later acquire the Steyr firm as a production factory basically,
so these guns were made in Austria.
But some of the development work was done in Switzerland, hence you have Steyr-Solothurn.
Anyway, if you're interested in these, definitely the best book
(unfortunately about the only book that really covers them in any sort of depth),
is called "The Schmeisser Myth" published just a few years ago by Collector Grade, written by Martin Helebrant.
So if you're interested in these that's the one resource to check out.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Hopefully you will enjoy the next video even more
because we're going to take this out to the range
and actually do some shooting with it, and see how this handles in .45 Automatic.
Thanks for watching.