Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am up here today at Movie Armaments Group
in Toronto taking a look at a Star Z-45 submachine gun.
This is the first really successful mass production submachine gun manufactured by Star in Eibar, in Spain.
And it was produced, as the name implies, during World War Two.
This went into development in 1942, and was probably put together with the intention of being sold to the German military.
It is clearly based on the MP40. Star was selling a bunch of pistols to the German military,
and, well, it seems like a nice market if it continues.
Now the first prototypes were available in early 1944, and these were actually tested by the Spanish in mid-1944.
The Allied invasion of Europe, ... Normandy, appears to have been kind of a precipitating factor in the Spanish government going,
"Oh, we might want to look at kind of updating some of our guns because there's like, wow, ... the war has taken on a new aspect now."
At any rate, the Germans never did purchase any of these, they weren't in production in time
for it to have been a practical thing for the Germans to purchase.
This is obviously based on the MP40. But there are a lot of design elements to it
that are substantially different than an MP40. So let's take a look at those.
Markings here are going to be pretty typical for Star.
The sunburst logo, calibre 9mm which in this case refers to 9mm Parabellum.
These were used in 9mm Largo by the Spanish military, but they were also made for export and this is an export pattern gun.
Model is Z-45.
We have a serial number here, along with our trifecta of Spanish proof marks.
This one at the far end is a Star over I1, which tells us that this particular gun was actually made in 1963.
Which would put it right at the very end of production.
There is an additional serial number on the other side of the magazine well, and I'll be straight up,
I don't know what exactly that is. Presumably this is going to be an inventory number by
whatever organisation purchased this gun, but I'm not 100% confident in that.
Overall, we obviously have an MP40-like pattern to the gun, including this under-folding stock.
There is a release button here, just like an MP40. Push that, we can fold the stock out,
down and, just like an MP40 stock, it wobbles.
Now the trigger here is an interesting element that I want to go over for a minute.
It's obviously a two finger trigger, and there is no ... selector switch. There's no safety lever.
So what we have here is you actually do hold this thing with two fingers. If you pull this with just one finger
you can hear that snap, that's the disconnector. This is firing in semi-auto.
And even if you pull it with one finger at the top you still get semi-auto.
What's happening here is the trigger both pivots like this, and it also rotates on this axis.
So in order to fire full-auto you have to actually pull the entire trigger backwards this direction.
So right here that is firing full-auto. And I'll show you the sear in just a moment when we take it apart.
But ... you'll get a click, that's the first shot, and then you have to continue pulling back. And that will give you ... full-auto fire.
So I don't think I like this system. Progressive triggers in general I think are a little iffy.
This one requires a lot of force, and kind of an awkward sort of force that you're not normally
used to doing on a submachine gun to get this thing to actually fire full-auto.
Before we take it apart let me show you the sights here. This is a two position notch. This one is 100,
(it's really tight),
and then that one is for 200 metres.
The front sight actually looks vaguely Swiss.
The front post there is on this diagonal bar like one of the Swiss Schmidt-Rubin rifles.
So you can tap that forward and backward, and it will move it slowly side to side to allow you to zero it.
There is a nice safety lock on the bolt here, in the form of this lever that locks into the receiver.
So if you don't depress that lever, you can't open the bolt.
That means that no matter how hard you drop this gun on the back end,
the bolt can't be pushed open from inertia when the gun hits the ground, chamber and fire a round.
So ... in order to charge the gun you have to depress this lever, and then you can pull the bolt back.
It is an open bolt gun so the bolt locks open here, ready to fire.
And if you want to lock the bolt open in a safe sort of position, you have a notch up in the top like that.
Now the first bit of disassembly we're going to do is actually the barrel, because this has a quick removable barrel.
So we have this latch at the muzzle. You hold the bolt slightly open
(just to disconnect it from the barrel), push this latch in, and then you can rotate the barrel 90 degrees,
and pull it out.
There's our barrel. It's got that nice big compensator at the front built in,
but other than that just a pretty typical barrel. Pair of lugs right here to lock it into the receiver.
Taking apart the back end of the gun is just like an MP40. So we have a button here,
we're going to pull this down, and rotate it which locks that button down, and that unlocks the receiver.
So the receiver can now rotate in the stock assembly. Then we have to pull both triggers really hard to get the sear to depress.
And then we can rotate the receiver out and off the top.
I mentioned I would show you this sear. So in semi- auto when you hear it click, you can see it pop back up.
Which will stop the bolt and require you to press the trigger again for a second shot.
In full-auto I'm going to pull it back to here, single shot, and then if I pull it farther, then I can actually hold the sear down.
And you have to do that, by the way, to take the receiver off for disassembly.
There's not really anything in the back here. Just the interrupted lugs that lock the receiver into place.
Once we have this, we can then open the locking latch there, and pull
the bolt assembly out. This is a two part assembly, so if I rotate this guy to the right place I can pull this out.
This is a captive recoil spring assembly, very much like the MP40.
However, on the MP40 this included a fixed firing pin.
The Star has another, rather complex, safety mechanism built in.
The bolt body has this plunger right here, and that is actually connected to a lever back here.
When I push the plunger in, it pushes this lever back, which is pinned right there, which pushes the firing pin forward,
and the firing pin protrudes. The way this works is when you fire the gun it's going to pick up a cartridge,
press it into the breech face, stuff it into the chamber, and when the bolt face
hits the rear ... of the front trunnion, when it hits this surface right in here.
This pin slams into that trunnion surface and causes the gun to actually fire.
So it's sort of a hammer fired gun, kind of.
This system would be carried over into some of the later Star submachine guns.
And between this and the locking latch here, this really is ... mechanically a very safe submachine gun.
I don't like the trigger system, but you're not gonna have accidental firings with this thing. So.
... That's kudos to the design team for that.
The magazine looks quite a lot like an MP40 magazine, but it is not actually.
In fact, if we look up here at the top; clearly copied from an MP40 but it's longer.
This is a magazine that was intended to hold 9mm Largo,
and there has been a block added to it to turn it into a 9mm Parabellum magazine.
The military use, the police use for Spain of these guns was all 9 Largo,
but they were sold in other calibres, including Parabellum, for export.
The floor plate is also different from the MP40.
And in addition to that 30 round standard magazine, they did also make 10 round magazines for it, like this one.
Note also a block in the back of the mag to push 9mm Parabellum cartridges forward, where they'll feed properly.
So the first organisation to actually adopt the Z-45 was the Spanish Civil Guard.
They adopted it in the middle of 1945, in I believe June of '45.
The Spanish armed Traffic Police followed that up in 1946 by adopting the guns.
And then the Spanish Air Force got on board in 1947, they adopted it for their paratroopers.
And then in 1948 the Spanish Army finally got on board and also adopted the gun.
So these would serve in the Spanish military well into the 1960s. They would also remain in production until the 1960s.
They were ultimately replaced by the Star Z-62 series of guns
... both by the Spanish military and also for commercial export. So these were made for export.
They were available in a couple different calibres. In addition to the 9mm Largo that the Spanish organisations used,
you could also get these in 9mm Parabellum, like this particular one is,
or in .38 ... ACP, not .38 Super, and .45 ACP interestingly.
And they were purchased by a small number of countries, Cuba, Chile, Portugal. Saudi Arabia bought some of these.
So it was a reasonably successful gun for Star, probably mostly because of the Spanish military purchases.
But it would in fact be their first real successful submachine gun.
And it would go on to be the first of many submachine gun variants that they would go on to make,
until the whole company ended up dissolving in the 1990s.
Anyway, a big thanks to Movie Armaments Group for giving me the opportunity to take a look at this
very nice condition export pattern Z-45, and hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.