Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and thanks to my friends
at Bear Arms in Scottsdale. Today we have
a P8A1 to take a look at. This is the military version,
in fact current military issue version for the German
Bundeswehr, of the USP pistol, made by H&K [Heckler & Koch].
Now, before we take a look at what exactly makes the P8
different from the commercial USP, and what makes the P8A1,
the improved version here, different than the original P8,
just a little bit of background on the USP in general.
This is a standard tilting barrel, Browning style of action.
Which is something that a lot of companies have been making for many, many, many decades.
However, it was kind of a new thing for H&K.
They started development on this in 1989, and prior to this, their pistols all had
weird and interesting mechanisms to them. They had the P7 with its gas delay system,
and really innovative squeeze cocking thing. They had the roller system in the P9 pistol.
They were both expensive, they were good pistols, but a little idiosyncratic.
And HK wanted to have something that was a little more standard, cheaper (both cheaper to buy
and presumably to have a higher profit margin within the company),
and the German government was looking for a new military pistol as well.
So what made the USP a little bit different than a lot of its competitors, a lot of the similar pistols
out there on the market, is that it was actually developed specifically for the .40
Smith & Wesson cartridge, which was actually out when this was being put together.
Most of these sorts of Browning style pistols were designed for the 9mm Parabellum,
and then when .40 Smith & Wesson came along in the 1980s companies looked at it
and realised that .40 Smith & Wesson will fit in the same magazine size and the same frame as a 9mm.
and so well, let's just take our 9mm pistol and basically re-barrel it, build a new ...
bolt and breech face to it, and we'll just adapt it to .40 Smith & Wesson.
The problem is, as much as people don't really want to accept it, .40 Smith & Wesson
is a higher pressure cartridge than 9mm, it's a harder cartridge on a gun than 9mm is.
And a lot of the conversions from 9mm to .40, they worked, but they ... kind of sort of work.
Like, they developed problems, service life wasn't all that long.
And HK, being able to go the opposite direction had a big advantage in that area.
So, by developing the USP specifically for the higher pressure, higher power of the .40 Smith & Wesson,
and then adapting it down to 9mm, they were ... able to end up with a 9mm service pistol
that had an exceptional service life, very reliable, very durable,
capable of running on really hot 9mm ammunition.
Which is a good thing, because that's what the German government would be using.
And ... there aren't a whole lot of companies that did it in that direction, so score one for HK on this.
Now, beyond that, it's kind of a typical modern black service pistol. What you would expect,
a polymer frame, steel slide, tilting barrel action, double stack high-capacity magazine.
So at this point, let's take a closer look at this
and I'll show you what differentiates the military version from the civilian USP.
So the biggest distinguishing characteristic here is going
to be that the military version has P8 or P8A1 written all over it.
We have it down here on the grips. The first version said HK P8, this, the updated version, says P8A1.
We also have that here on the slide, and just for the record, that P8 is Pistol 8, 'Pistole 8'.
P1 was the Walther, basically a redesignated Walther P38.
The P2 was the SIG 210-4, the P3 was the Astra 300 which the
German ... police actually bought in reasonably large numbers after World War Two,
the P4 was a short barreled P1, the P5 was the Walther P5,
the P6 was the SIG 225, the P7 was the H&K PSP
(and by the way, ... these are German interior ministry designations, not specifically military designations).
So ... a lot of these were used by the German police rather than the military.
In particular the P5, the P6 and the P7 were all designated and adopted simultaneously,
after Police trials. And Police agencies were given the option of picking whichever
one of those three they liked, because all three passed the trials.
Anyway, the P8 is the USP here, the P9 was the Glock 17,
and then the P10 is actually the compact version of the USP.
Moving on to some of the other markings. This is of course a German made gun,
we've got our calibre designation up there. CIP is the proof stamp.
The antler here is a final acceptance mark from the German proof house.
BH is a date code, B equates to the numeral 1, H to 7, so this is a 2017
production gun, very recent. Got our serial number, of course.
On the right side you've got H&Ks manufacturer's mark on the frame down there,
and then a lot of duplicate information up on the barrel.
In a lot of European countries barrels are controlled items, so they've got the
serial number on the barrel, as well as on the slide, and also on the frame.
In the United States the frame is the controlled part, unlike most of the rest of the world,
so there is a metal insert plate with the serial number on the frame there,
as well as the import mark because these weren't brought in by HK directly,
they were brought in by a third-party importer, and that had to be marked on there.
Now, really the main difference between this and a standard USP is the safety.
So the USP, first off, had a pretty cool safety system, where you could get, like, 10 different versions of it.
All with just a single plate on the inside that they would change out to change the function of the safety lever.
There were both right-hand and left-hand versions, this is a right-handed one,
but you would have a variety of systems.
You could have a safe position, a fire position, and a decocker. So you could cock the pistol,
but then put it in safe and carry it, so-called cocked and locked.
Or decock the gun and carry it in the fire position, but with the hammer down,
so that requires a double action trigger pull to fire.
Then there were also versions that didn't have the decocker, there were versions that didn't have
... where you couldn't engage the safety when the hammer was cocked,
so you can only carry it with the hammer down.
There was even a version that had no safety lever at all, that simply functioned as a double action only pistol.
Now the military version here, the P8, they actually took ... the full function safety lever,
so you can carry it as you saw, cocked and locked. However, the safe position is down
and the fire position is up. And that is something that would not be particularly popular
today in most markets, because ... normally what you're looking for is a gun that is
kind of ergonomically friendly to work with the shooter. And what you want is to go
from safe to fire, a natural down stroke of the thumb in the, you know,
you can do that in the process of getting a proper shooting grip when you draw the gun.
This is backwards. On this, you're gonna draw the gun with the safety down,
and then you're gonna have to push it up before getting a firing grip.
However, there was a good reason for that, or at least there was a reason for that.
On the P1, like this guy, the safety works the same way, down is safe and up is fire.
Now on this it's a little easier to engage that safety as you're drawing the gun and taking a firing grip on it.
But in order to maintain the same training standards, they wanted the safety to
operate the same way on the P8 as on the P1. And I think it's important to point out that
this was the pistol that succeeded this guy in German military service. So
going into the 1980s, the German military was basically using P38 pistols,
design unchanged since about well, 1938, and G3 rifles. And they replace those with
very much more modern G36s, and very much more modern P8s.
At any rate, once you get used to the reverse action safety, you do also have
a decocker all the way down, which then returns to the safe position.
The markings, fire and safe, are on the frame, on the standard USP they are actually
marked on the back of this selector lever here. That's a pretty minor change.
And then the magazine is a little bit different on the military guns.
So the mag release on these guys is an ambidextrous lever that you simply push down,
like so.
And the P8 magazine is this sort of translucent plastic, not transparent, but you can see through it.
You can see a dark section right up here, that is a metal insert
to keep the plastic from fracturing over time.
And of course the reason for this is so that you could actually see the cartridges inside.
Just by looking you could tell how much ammunition was in the magazine.
Disassembly is really quite simple. It's gonna work just like every other Browning tilting barrel gun.
Pull the mag out, bring the slide back to right about here, and then push out the slide stop pin.
There we go, pull that out, and then the slide just comes right off the front.
There are no major metal inserts in the frame, which is kind of cool.
HK did that deliberately, and they spent a lot of time
working on the engineering to find a polymer material that could handle that.
That prevents the metal elements from shifting in the polymer.
It also makes this definitely more economical to manufacture.
Up in the slide we can see ...
One of the characteristic parts of the USP is the recoil spring assembly. It is captive,
and it's actually a two part spring. So there's a second buffer spring down here
underneath, or inside, the main recoil spring. And that's going to help absorb the
force of the slide decelerating against the frame with every shot,
and that helps contribute to the durability and the longevity of the gun.
Now, one other thing that makes the military USP different from the commercial, is
the standard cut rifling that you can see in there.
Now the USP, the commercial USP, when it was originally put into production had
standard rifling like this, which was another change from H&K's previous guns using
what's called polygonal rifling. Where the whole bore is sort of a contoured shape
that twists as you go down, rather than having a perfectly cylindrical bore with rifling cut in it
(and the pros and cons of that are a subject for a different video),
but when HK started making the USP originally, they went with traditional rifling.
This caused some concern with their commercial customer base,
and so they actually pretty quickly changed it to polygonal.
However, by this point the German government had already received it's
... first guns, of the type that had standard rifling.
And they opted to stick with that through all of their production.
So, even today, all of the P8s and P8A1s have standard rifling.
Now, as for the elements that distinguish a P8 from an 8A1.
There're only three of them, aside from the markings. The first and the most obvious are the sights,
you can see these have a greenish tinge to them. These are glow-in-the-dark night sights.
They do not use tritium, very specifically. They use a luminous paint,
and that was an update from the original just plain white dots on the P8 pistol.
The finish on the slide was changed for the P8A1. It was made a little more more durable, more resilient.
They had some problems with the finish coming off on the P8s.
And then lastly, they ... beefed up a few little areas, like the one right here on the inside of the slide.
Apparently the German military was having some trouble with slides cracking
as a result of using pretty darn hot ammunition.
And so, despite the .40 Smith & Wesson genesis of the design,
they were still having a few issues with them over the lifespan of the pistols.
So HK did a ... little bit of additional engineering, found where the
major stress points were ... in the slide and beefed up those
specific points. So the exterior profile of the slide is identical,
they just added a little bit of material in a couple little places inside.
And that is what made it into the P8A1.
By the way, while I've got this apart, I should point this out to you.
This little plate back here, that silver plate with the hook, that's called the detent plate.
And that is the part that is changed out to change the various functions of the safety lever.
So there are a number of different configurations of that plate and that acts as the interface
between the lever itself and the actual internals of the fire control mechanism.
Interestingly while H&K sells this gun internationally, there very few of them
in the United States, because H&K has decided, for whatever reason
(... honestly, probably good commercial instinct that the military version of the safety
isn't really going to be a popular option here in the United States),
HK has decided not to commercially export the P8 or P8A1 into the US.
So what you end up with is a relatively hard to find pistol.
... I mean, only maybe a couple hundred of these came into the US, all through third-party importers.
So they're they're pretty cool examples to have today, if you're interested in collecting
military-style firearms. Because, of course, this is the German military version of the USP.
So again, a big thanks to Bear Arms in Scottsdale for providing the gun here for today's video.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed it.
Thanks for watching.