Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I am Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction
Company taking a look at some of the guns that they're going
to be selling in their upcoming September of 2017 Premier Auction.
And today we're taking a look at a very unusual
handmade prototype rifle. This is a 1936 pattern Stendebach.
And the only reason we know that is because it's actually written on the receiver of the gun.
So ... well everything about this rifle mechanically is rather unusual.
It uses a rotary spool type magazine, it is a toggle ... delayed blowback rifle.
And there's only one piece of documentation that I was able to find on this,
and that comes from a 1961 edition of Guns Quarterly,
which describes it as having been brought back from Bavaria in 1945 by a US soldier,
who found it in a collection of confiscated firearms after the ... occupation of a town.
And it apparently was something quite unique and unusual to the soldier,
and so he brought it home to ... Goliath, Texas.
And from there it passed through several hands, and ultimately has ended up here.
Now there are two things to look at on this gun.
The first is the mechanics, and the second is trying to figure out what it originally was or what its historical provenance is.
So let's dive right in.
So here's the only marking on the gun, Stendebach Mod 1936.
Now there are some patents under the name of Friedrich Stendebach
which date interestingly from 1913 and 1914. And then some additional ones in the '20s.
The 1913 and '14 patents cover a toggle lock.
And that's what this gun is (if I can get it all the way back, there we go).
This is a toggle action, and the patents do seem to apply to that.
Although ... the drawings in particular with the patents are quite simplistic,
and don't really give you a feel for this particular gun.
Interestingly, those patents weren't published until 1920.
My take on that is that might very well mean that these were actually being looked at by the military,
(or a predecessor obviously, not the 1936 version).
But some early version using this patent could have been of interest to the military,
and thus kept secret until after World War One.
The patents expired in 1928.
... I mean it would appear that Stendebach then continued working on this into the 1930s, if not the 1940s.
So mechanically this is closer to the Pedersen than any of the other toggle action designs.
Guns like the Luger were actually short recoil guns, where the toggle was fully locked in place
until the barrel recoiled backwards, which then allowed the toggle to open.
This gun has a fixed barrel, no gas system,
and the idea here is just that the mechanical disadvantage of the toggle
slows down its opening long enough for pressure to drop to a safe level.
I removed this screw from the forward part of the stock along with the barrel band and nose cap,
and then we can take the stock off of the action.
And now you can clearly see that there is definitely no gas system, and this is definitely a fixed barrel.
There's literally nothing down under there.
The inside channel of this stock is rather crudely cut out.
The only markings on the underside of the barrel are these two little proof marks just under the chamber.
This has a little spring-loaded pin right there.
I just need to push it in
while I unscrew the nut. ...
With that off,
I can now push out the hinge pin.
That comes out nice and easily.
And then we can lift this whole assembly up and out of the action.
There we go.
Now you can get a look inside.
And we have two recoil springs that are located in two tunnels, here and here.
And you can just sort of see one in this track down here.
So the way that spring tension is put on this gun is the bolt head up here is
riding in those two tracks, one on either side of the receiver,
and when it comes back, it is compressing ... those two springs.
Alright, at this angle you can just barely see the spring coils,
and when I pull the bolt back you can see those compressing, right there.
So when you're pulling the bolt back in this position,
where we don't have to deal with the mechanical disadvantage of the toggle,
those springs are actually relatively light weight.
However, when this is all engaged and in battery, and you're trying to lift it against the toggle mechanism
they get a lot heavier. And that's ... reassuring because that's how it should be.
That suggests that this mechanism is putting a substantial delay on the action.
Now the way I believe this is actually technically working
is that we have two cam surfaces on the toggle, one here,
and one right here. And those are moving in these machined cam paths.
So when the bolt starts to push back from pressure on the cartridge when you fire,
the ... curves and angles on these surfaces interacting with these pads
are what dissipate some of the energy, and direct the opening of the toggle.
The trigger mechanism in this gun is not functional.
When I pull the trigger you can see that little piece down there moving,
so that ought to interact with something back here. But there is nothing there at the time being.
So this was an unfinished prototype.
And ... we'll come back to the fact that that was unfinished in a minute.
So there's the toggle in the fully open position. It takes a bit of force to keep it there.
And we can get a bit of a look inside the action here.
Now what we see down there is a rotary magazine, so let's take a look at the bottom of the gun.
Down here we have a magazine cover that is, interestingly, made out of aluminium.
And this raises one of the biggest questions of the rifle to me.
But we'll come back to that after we see the internals.
The latch right here, it looks like a safety, it's actually the release for the magazine cover.
And under that we have this, ... it's a 10 round spool magazine basically.
Now it's spring-loaded, as you can see, and it actually has a winding mechanism over here.
So you can pull this lever back and forth.
And when you push the button down it then engages these gear teeth, and
winds the magazine.
I'm not entirely sure how this was supposed to work, I suspect it's not quite fully functional right now.
But I believe the idea is that ... when you loaded this you would wind it up.
And if it ran out of spring tension, this gave you a way to retension it
to make sure that it would continue to feed all the cartridges.
With the stock off we can also see a bit of a view of this front winding system.
You can see there's a coil spring that's wrapped around
a circular piece there that extends to put tension on this lever.
So this door on the bottom is there to unload the thing.
To load it we have a kind of Johnson or Krag-like system here on the side.
There is a lever right here, when you push it down it cams open this loading cover.
Note that right here is a setup for a stripper clip,
so you could load this by hand one round at a time, or
you could stuff a 5 round clip in there and load 5 rounds at a time.
... It appears that this is all done while the bolt is closed and in battery,
so you can top this thing off one or two rounds at a time if you want to,
while engaging in a reasonably constant steady fire.
... That's an interesting system.
This is way too many parts for a military firearm. Obviously you'd have to
really simplify and make this a more elegant style of system.
But for a prototype, well, that's an interesting idea.
Pop it open, load some rounds, close it up.
So we have really zero information about any potential use of the Stendebach in military trials.
If it were patented in 1913 it seems likely that something from Stendebach would have been
tested by the German military at some point.
But no idea. And certainly no documentation on anything as late as the 1930s, like this purports to be.
Now the use of aluminium is curious here to me.
And we have a number of aluminium parts, the bottom cover, the trigger guard assembly,
the rear sling swivel,
the butt plate,
the middle barrel band,
and the front barrel band and the bayonet lug.
These are all made out of aluminium, which seems like a very odd choice for the 1930s.
Aluminium was an expensive material, it was a somewhat exotic material.
There's a reason that the AR-15 was a particularly exotic and forward-looking rifle in the '50s
when it was produced out of aluminium.
So why Stendebach would have chosen aluminium for some of these parts,
makes me wonder if they weren't potentially made by somebody else.
Now that one magazine article that I mentioned earlier in the video, that came out in 1961.
And in the pictures in that article you can clearly see these parts, and they're bright and shiny just like they are today.
So whatever their origin, these aluminium parts have been on the gun since at least the '60s.
A couple other things to consider here. The bayonet lug is too far back from the muzzle to actually fit a bayonet.
Which makes one wonder why the bayonet lug is actually on there.
The barrel band here ... has an interesting design feature to it, in that it was made with this little extension tab right here.
So it is the style of a standard Mauser barrel band which would cover a handguard and hold it in place.
However, this tab is specifically there so that this ... barrel band fits onto the barrel without a handguard.
So this was clearly made for a gun that didn't have a handguard.
The stock here is clearly made for a gun that was fitting a handguard.
This seems ... like something that could very easily have been a replacement part made at some point.
I didn't mention it, but the magazine spool here is also aluminium.
So one possibility is that Stendebach, for whatever reason, decided to make these parts out of aluminium.
Another possibility is that when the gun was actually recovered in the '40s
it was incomplete, and someone between '45 and '61 decided to make it into a finished rifle.
They presumably decided that it should look better with some German-style military fittings,
like that barrel band and nose cap and bayonet lug.
And produced those at some point to complete the gun.
I have no evidence for that, I also have no evidence that it was done by Stendebach.
This is speculation in both directions.
One other interesting feature here is the rear sight of the rifle,
which is a tang-style thing that actually folds down into,
well, into the rear tang of the receiver.
So when you fold it up you then have a rear aperture sight back here.
Lift it up like that, and then you actually have to have this lifted all the way up.
Pushed down it will fit into the receiver, but it won't clear the rear of the action to give you a sight picture.
It's only when it's lifted up that you can actually see the front sight.
The Stendebach overall is a rather unusual and an interesting example of a prototype gun.
Because most of the time when we think of German prototypes,
we're thinking of the major German companies, Walther, Mauser, DWM, these guys.
And their prototypes are often extremely well made, and documented and provenanced.
And that gives them a lot of historical authenticity.
Something like this is really much more of a mystery.
We basically know nothing about Friedrich Stendebach,
we know nothing about what trials his guns may have gone through.
It's interesting that, you know, he patented this before World War One,
and yet apparently in 1936 was still working on it.
There's just a lot of mystery to this gun.
So, there are of course plenty of folks out there who are really into that sort of thing.
If you are one of those people and you'd like to have the 1936 Stendebach rifle,
well, take a look at the description text below.
You'll find a link there to Rock Island's catalogue page on it, where you can see their pictures,
description, price estimate, and all the other good information you might want.
And you can place a bid on it live here at the auction in September, or over the phone, or through their website.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]