[ SMG Guns' Semiauto DPM ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am out here today
with a semi-auto DPM light machine gun.
Now, this was the modernised version of the
standard Soviet light machine gun from World War Two.
And ... they are not a very well-known gun here in the United States.
I'm sure people have heard of them, but there are not many of these out there.
And I've wanted one for a very long time, so I'm
really excited to actually get a chance to do some shooting with this one.
Now, a little bit of background on the DPM.
It originally started as the DP, that is Degtyaryev Pulemyot.
So the machine gun from a designer named Degtyaryev.
Degtyaryev was a guy who actually started working in the Russian ordnance system at age 11.
I presume sweeping the floors, or something like that.
And ended up all the way at the rank of Major-General,
and being ... recognised as a Hero of the Soviet Union.
Which was in fact for his design of this light machine gun.
He started working on this is the early 1920s, and it was actually entirely of his own accord.
He was doing this on his own time, on the side, because the Soviet military
system didn't recognise the need for a light machine gun, and he did.
Well, it wouldn't take more than a couple of years before the Soviet system
really did recognise that they really needed a light machine gun.
Prior to that the doctrinal idea had been,
"Well, we'll just depend on heavy machine guns, the belt fed machine guns."
When they started realising that they needed one, well,
here was Degtyaryev with his design pretty much already built.
And it's a really good Soviet design too, this is a very simple gun.
It's reliable, it's effective, and it really is no surprise
that this did excellent service for the Soviet Union all the way through World War Two.
Of course the Finns, well-known connoisseurs of military firearms,
were thrilled to capture these during the Winter War, and they made extensive use of them too.
That's always a good selling point.
And what Degtyaryev set up here ... was an open-bolt gun,
it had only a handful of moving parts, it is gas piston operated, and uses flapper locking.
So there are two flaps on the side of the bolt,
open up, lock the bolt in place, gun fires, unlocks, recoils, etc.
We'll take it apart in a few minutes, but first I want to do a little bit of shooting with it.
So, originally the DP series of guns fired from an open bolt,
in fact they are full-auto or safe only, there is no semi-auto function on them.
And originally you would pull the charging handle back,
and the bolt would lock to the rear ready to fire.
This is a semi-auto conversion made by SMG, Smith Machine Group.
They are perhaps best known for their semi-auto FG-42s,
... in fact the guys there have been doing semi-auto DPs
since before SMG was its own stand-alone company.
They did a lot of the guns that were out on the market many years ago.
They have decided to start doing them again,
and they made a couple of improvements to the system, and it's pretty slick.
So, it is ... now a closed bolt design.
And instead of using a striker firing system like most semi-auto machine gun conversions,
they've actually gone ahead and come up with a really clever little hammer-fired design.
We'll pull it apart after we're done with the range here, but
it's pretty slick, and what it means is that it actually has a pretty nice trigger.
It's not a match AR-15 awesome-spec trigger,
but it's about an 8 pound trigger that has a very crisp break.
Which is something you generally don't get with a striker-fired semi-auto machine gun.
And with this trigger you can absolutely shoot this thing accurately, it's a lot of fun.
I have had a number of other semi-auto machine guns that I have either owned or borrowed,
and usually the triggers in them are just kind of atrocious.
And you deal with it because that's how semi-auto machine guns are.
Not with these new SMG DPs.
So, to go ahead and get started, the magazine catch is located right here.
The little wings on the back of the rear sight, we've got a locking tab on the front.
So to load this, lock the tabs in, bring it down.
And then this is supposed to be loaded on an open bolt,
because that's how the gun was designed.
So it just takes a little more force to push it down
with the round in the magazine compressing onto the back of the bolt.
Alright, mags on, charge it, and we're good to go.
You'll notice as I am shooting, the ... internal section on top of the magazine will rotate.
Which means that this little loading tab is an ammunition indicator.
It will make one full revolution around the magazine,
which means I can tell by the position exactly how much ammo I have left.
Kind of handy.
So this version is actually a DPM, modernised, and this was introduced in 1944.
These, in this configuration, did actually see a little bit of service
right at the very end of World War Two.
And there are ... three main things that they did to change the design.
And the first one is the buttstock. So the original DP had a standard traditional style of grip.
It had a grip safety in here.
And it just wasn't nearly as comfortable
or utilitarian as a proper pistol grip, so they changed that.
They changed the recoil spring design.
In the original gun the recoil spring was actually wound around the gas piston.
Which is fine, and it saved space, and it made for a nice efficient compact design.
The problem is under sustained fire the gas piston got very hot,
which meant the spring then got very hot,
and the spring lost its tension and the gun would malfunction.
So they moved the recoil spring to being behind the bolt.
Which is why they now have this little tubular extension to hold the recoil spring.
That's the second change. And the third change,
probably the least substantial of the three, was to redesign the bipod.
So the bipod on the DPM is bolted onto the top of the shroud.
It has a little bit of pivot, not a lot, but a little bit.
And of course the legs fold up.
The original bipod, the DP bipod, instead was a unit (this one's a little sticky),
that clamped ... around the shroud, ... and it was fixed in position,
and the legs were a bit flimsier.
These got lost because guys would take them off and then lose track of them.
The new bipod was much better.
The gun is chambered for 7.62x54 rimmed, which makes sense. That was the standard
Russian cartridge for everything at the time, the Mosin-Nagants and the Maxim heavies.
And it uses this very distinctive pan magazine. Holds 47 rounds.
And the problem with 54 rimmed is that it's got, as the name implies, a big rim.
And that makes it difficult to make box magazines,
because you tend to get malfunctions where one rim get caught behind another.
They have made a few, the Finnish LS-26 has a 20 round box magazine.
And of course the Russian SVT would have a box magazine, the Dragunov has a box magazine.
But these are typically 10 round, 15 round in the case of the AVTs.
They are not high capacity magazines, and
trying get a high capacity magazine in 54 rimmed is a tricky proposition.
That's why Degtyaryev used this pan instead.
It's ... kind of a bullet-proof magazine. ...
It takes a little while to load, because you can only load one round at a time.
Again, we'll get into the mag loading in a minute.
But, it's a pretty effective magazine.
The downsides to it are that it's bulky and weird to carry.
So I have an ammo can ... that holds three of these things.
... There's no easy way to carry this. Imagine the webbing to carry these things.
What you end up with is a big satchel full of magazines.
But that's the option, so that's what we have.
Now in 1946 they would develop a final iteration of the DP,
where they basically built ... a belt fed adapter that would latch in place in place of the magazine.
And that was used after World War Two.
It wasn't necessarily the most effective conversion, because it was lacking some things,
like there was no attachment for a belt box to the gun.
So if you wanted to get up and move,
you had to unload the gun, or drag this belt behind the gun.
There wasn't any easy way to deal with it.
But in its World War Two usage, pan magazines are what they had.
Well, I can certainly see why the Soviets liked this thing.
It has basically no effective recoil from the ground.
Now the downside is there's really no good way to shoot this thing from the shoulder.
You can kind of strap on the sling and fire it from the hip.
But it's not really an effective way to use the weapon.
From the ground on this bipod it's comfortable to shoot, it's accurate.
It's really easy staying on the sights, and it's a lot of fun.
... I've had other ... semi-auto machine gun conversions,
and this is the most fun of all of them I think.
Alright, so one of the other things that makes the DP such a cool gun
is that it's really kind of AK-like in its simplicity and durability.
We'll go ahead and do a quick field strip here. The first thing we do is take off
the recoil spring extension, so there's a little plunger on this side.
Push that in and rotate it 90 degrees up.
So, there's the plunger, right there.
That comes out, recoil spring comes out.
Then we want to take the lower frame assembly off. We have a screw right here.
By the way, the first time you do this, and every subsequent time,
you will irrevocably scratch the finish on your gun, just get used to it.
It's kind of like the safety scratch on an AK.
You unscrew that, take it out, and then (various bits of this are a little hot)
but then the lower assembly just drops right off.
Now, here we can see this cool hammer mechanism that SMG came up with.
This is my DP lower, and it has the original fire control mechanism,
which is extremely simple, it's just a sear
because there was nothing but full-auto on this gun.
Pull the trigger, sear goes down, gun fires.
That obviously won't do for a semi-auto gun,
so what SMG came up with was this really clever, kind of a linear hammer.
So when I pull the trigger, this is going to snap straight forward.
There's a compression spring behind here.
And what makes this clever is that there is very little
real estate to work with in the lower assembly of the gun.
And there's really not a whole lot more space in the receiver either.
So it would be completely impossible to put in something like an AR-15 fire control group.
So this makes a huge difference in the shootability of the gun.
Unlike most of the striker-fired type of conversions of machine guns,
this is a trigger that's a little bit heavy, so 7.5 or 8 pounds,
but it doesn't have any [creep] to it.
It is crisp, it goes nowhere, nowhere, nowhere, fires.
Now once the lower is off we can take out the internals, just pull the bolt back.
And there you have it.
So in both of its forms, the DP and the DPM, it is a flapper-locked action.
And so you have these two flaps, this is the locked position,
these flaps are pushed to the outside by the firing pin, which I'll pull out in a moment.
When the ... carrier goes backwards,
these flaps retract to the inside, parallel to the bolt, and that allows the whole thing to cycle.
When this is going forwards, the bolt hits the barrel face, it stops,
the carrier keeps going, the flaps open up, the gun is locked.
Now, in its original guise, this
(which has these flat surfaces which push the flaps out),
originally this had the firing pin attached directly to it.
And so what would happen is when it locked, the flaps come out,
the firing pin would then immediately protrude out the front and fire the gun.
So despite being an open-bolt gun, this didn't have a fixed firing pin,
it did have a movable firing pin right here.
This is actually not that much different than a G43 in some concepts.
What SMG did is they replaced the firing pin, they cut the firing pin off that,
and they added this firing pin, spring loaded, and that's what the hammer hits.
So it's a pretty clever little system.
Take those off, there's a pin in here that holds the firing pin in place, so I can leave that.
But you can see this still fits and operates right there.
So it's a slick conversion that they did.
Not a whole lot to the bolt carrier,
it's got grooves down here that allow the flaps to move in and out.
Piston head is up there. This is all one complete solid assembly.
On the original DP the recoil spring was right in this position.
And of course that led to problems with heat affecting the spring tension of the spring.
Alright, we have a quick-change barrel mechanism here as well,
but I'm going to show you that later because I've been shooting this thing,
and the barrel is a little too hot for me to just grab.
Which is, I suppose, one of the potential downsides to the design,
there is no carry handle on the barrel, there's no easy way to grab it, you would need a glove.
Alright, loading the magazine. DP magazines are going to have a little tab here.
You'll notice right now this tab is nice and flat, when I pull it, it is actually going to lift up.
Like that. That's supposed to happen, don't worry about that.
What we are doing here is we are rotating the inner piece of the drum,
while leaving the outer piece in place.
And what you have to do is pull it, drop a round in.
There's one round, pull it. Drop a round in.
This is kind of a tedious magazine to load.
But I've yet to have any malfunctions with these,
there's not a whole lot to go wrong with them really.
In fact, as drum magazines go, they are pretty impressive.
This is 47 rounds, which is a weird number, but I suppose that's what you got with the ...
OK, so there's the issue, is you have to be able to pull it far enough,
which means you kind of have to change your grip on this thing every few rounds.
And I'm out.
So if you are interested in one of these, they are available from SMG,
Smith Machine Group, they are making them right now.
And one of the cool things is what they are actually doing is
they are actually making receivers, and they are making barrels.
Barrels have always been one of the really hard things to get for the DP guns.
And they are brand new production on both, so it is a from the ground up semi-auto receiver.
They will sell you a complete gun like this (I did provide the sling myself),
but they will also sell you just a barrel,
you can buy just some of the semi-auto parts, just the receiver.
If you have a parts kit you can send it to them and they'll build it for you.
That'll ... save a little bit of money on the cost of the whole package.
So I have a link to their website in the description text below,
definitely check that out if you are interested.
These are expensive guns, but as semi-auto machine guns go,
they're actually pretty darn reasonable.
This is one of the cheapest guns of this sort out there.
Well, I've had a lot of fun with this thing so far, I haven't had any malfunctions of any kind.
Which is both really cool, and also as it should be with
a parts kit that is as rugged and durable as a DP,
and the fabricating skills from a company like SMG, they do really good work.
Don't let their kind of horrible looking website fool you,
they are not web designers, they are machinists.
And that's what they do, and they do it well.
So don't hesitate to get in touch with them
if you want some cool, awesome piece of commie World War Two hardware like this.
I should say, they are doing both DPM and DP, so whichever you want.
Thanks for watching, tune in again next time for more Forgotten Weapons.