Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're taking a look
at a really remarkably simple pistol manufactured
by the Musgrave company in South Africa.
Now Musgrave had been really the largest commercial
gun manufacturing company in the country.
They're pretty well known for sporting rifles, in particular
hunting rifles, but they expanded into other things.
It was Musgrave that marketed the Galil copy,
the R4s and the R5s, to the South African public.
And over time they'd actually ended up
becoming a government-owned entity.
... Now, the pistol that we're looking at today dates from 1995 to 1996.
which is right at the end of Musgrave's existence.
So in 1996 the company was amalgamated with Vektor and basically ceased to exist. And by 2003
Vektor was shut down as well. So the reason here is the company was owned by the government,
and the government at that point (the new government having been elected in South Africa in 1994),
decided that it wasn't really interested in supporting commercial firearms manufacture,
small arms manufacture, and so that's why they ended up shutting it down.
But before that happened, Musgrave did develop this pistol. And the purpose of this
(and by the way, it doesn't really have any designation, it's just the Musgrave 9mm pistol,
... this particular company hadn't really been involved in handguns at all, so this was a new venture for them),
and apparently what happened is the director of the company, some time in '95, brought in all his engineers,
and had some examples of confiscated, ... homemade criminal guns taken by the South African Police,
and he basically tossed these things on the table and went,
"Look, if these guys with basically no tools and no education can make a cheap, simple gun, why can't we?"
And so they put together this, largely to compete with actually the Norinco 213
that was being imported in fairly large numbers and was a really very inexpensive handgun.
And the market that they were making this for was the black market, and I don't mean the illegal market,
by that I mean the brand new and expanding market to sell handguns to
the black population of South Africa. Now, this had been technically legal
during apartheid before '94, but typically black citizens of South Africa would have owned
rifles or shotguns, and just would have had a hard time
legally acquiring a handgun. It was legal, but very few people actually did it,
... you know, for a variety of reasons. Partly they were expensive...
Anyway, in '94 this started to change and there became a big potential market for this,
but in order to exploit that market you had to come up with a gun that was very inexpensive
because the typical black citizen of South Africa was quite poor,
literally you have guys living in mud huts. And to compound this the legal regulatory
structure of South Africa required a couple things at this point if you are going to buy a handgun.
You had to have a safe to put it in. Well, that's difficult if you live in a mud structure with a dirt floor.
... How do you mount a safe, because it can't just be a safe sitting on the ground,
it has to be actually mounted somehow. You also had to have a certificate of training.
This was introduced because prior the typical gun owner was white, who had been in the army,
had military training. The typical black gun owner had not been in the military.
So had to get a certificate of training, had to get a mounted safe, ... it's a lot of obstacles to overcome.
And so what gun shops would actually do in this period, which I find really fascinating, is put together
basically a package deal for something like 1,000 Rand, which was as affordable as something like this could get.
And that would include your pistol, which at the time would have probably been a Norinco 213
in 9mm Parabellum, that was the calibre that everybody wanted.
It would include a training certificate, where basically the shop owner would take you into the range
and give you a, you know, here's how it works, go through the basics, and then sign off on it,
a training certificate. And it would include a simple safe, and a big steel post, and a bag of
pre-mixed concrete. And literally what you would do is dig a hole in the floor of the house,
put in the post, mix up the concrete, pour it in, bolt your safe to it, and
presto, you have met the legal requirements to own a handgun.
So what Musgrave was doing with this was attempting to compete in that market.
So they had to make something really, really simple and inexpensive, because what they were competing with
was actually a legitimately pretty nice pistol that had been manufactured in China by the gazillions,
and was not being sold for the cost of manufacture. Think of them as basically surplus pistols.
So let's take a look at what they came up with.
The design here is just simple straight blowback. It has a polymer frame,
which is even more interesting than you think. And then a steel slide and barrel assembly,
and if we take a look at this, it's just this whole tubular frame
reciprocates back when you fire. There's a big spring in here,
we'll take this apart in just a minute.
Big breech block on the back, and this is actually the safety.
So when you have the red dot up, it's hot and ready to fire. And when we rotate this
around, like so, now it's in the safe configuration. It is hammer fired.
Sights are are pretty basic there, but effective. And then the magazine on this is
a Beretta 92 magazine, it locks in the base with the standard Beretta locking catch.
Now the reason for this is, well twofold. First off Musgrave was actually the licensed
representative or dealer for Beretta in South Africa, they did mostly long guns, shot guns and that sort of thing.
But they also manufactured a copy of the Beretta 92, called the Z88, later the SP1.
The Z88 also used Beretta magazines, so Musgrave had ... tons of Beretta magazines
to work with, so it was a natural thing to pair with this pistol.
Definitely no reason to design a brand new magazine if you're trying to make a cheap pistol.
Not much there in the way of markings. We have a serial number on the barrel,
and then that stamp right there is a South African proof mark.
There's a little Musgrave logo in the grip, also the other side of the grip.
And they stamp Musgrave on the frame, which they then proceeded to put the barrel mounting screws through.
It has a single action trigger. When the safety is engaged the trigger [hammer] is unable to drop.
That fires.
Trigger pull is not great, but, yeah, ... we'll just go with not great.
For disassembly we're going to start at the muzzle.
There's supposed to be a little set screw in here that holds this muzzle plug on.
That set screw is missing on this particular gun, so I can just unscrew this cap at the front.
This is what holds in the recoil spring.
That comes out, spring comes out. Then we're going to go ahead
and take out these two ... hex bolts. These are what hold the barrel into the frame,
and that is done with an Allen key.
Once those are loosened those can
come out. And then lastly, we have a pair of screws holding this rear collar on.
With those loosened, we can dump those two screws out. And then this whole assembly is going to come off
the frame. Once that's off, we can then take the barrel out, and then this collar slides off
(there, slide that off the front sight).
So I said the frame was more interesting than you might expect, and the reason for that is it's actually
moulded in two halves, a left and a right. And you can see the seam very easily here,
and then they're not, like, seam welded together, they're actually screwed together.
So a couple of screws here, the magazine catch,
this is what holds the frame together as as one continuous piece.
There's no metal infrastructure in here, because the way the blowback system works, all of the
... pressure bearing parts, all the moving parts, everything like that is contained in the upper assembly.
So you can see a little metal there, under where the barrel goes.
That's actually just a very thin little plate. I'm honestly not entirely sure why it's in there, but it is.
The fire control group is a hammer system. So there's the hammer.
Single action only and an ejector right next to it. And that is all there is to the frame.
And there's really not a whole lot more going on in the slide. This is one,
aside from the safety block at the back, this is one unitised, complete part.
As far as I can tell it is machined with the breech block still in it,
so they turn the outside on the lathe, and they drill in from the back, drill in from the front.
That way there's no need to have a separate pin.
Well, I guess simpler to make, or at least one part instead of two.
You can see how the safety works, this is the fire position and when I rotate this around,
it moves that big ol' block, and that's just going to prevent the hammer from dropping.
So ... actually, mechanically, it's a very effective safety.
Now, you're not gonna break that safety. There's nothing to go wrong there.
And then the firing pin is right there, hammer hits it,
we have an extractor up in the top and an ejection port and that's it.
And then there is a serial number (this one's actually mismatched),
and another South African proof on the back of the breech block.
Here's the rear collar, it's a cast part and you can see that clearly in the ... surface finish.
This has the rear sight in it and it also serves to hold the rear end of the
... breech block assembly down onto the frame.
There's the whole thing laid out. They certainly accomplished the goal of making a very, very simple pistol.
Although they didn't accomplish the goal of successfully competing with the Norinco 213
because they made a very small number, and these are today, you know, only 20 years later
and within a country that has a relatively small firearms collecting community, these are very scarce firearms.
The fellow who owns this one knows of a total of five, and has only ever seen two in person.
So apparently the ones that do show up tend to get exported, because foreign collectors
who are interested in this sort of thing are willing to pay substantial amounts of money for them.
But that's the Musgrave pistol.
In total apparently ... the original contract for these was 600 guns, just to see how the whole thing worked.
And I don't think they actually completed that. This one is, as you saw, is number 400.
They probably made something like 500 of these, and they're actually really quite scarce today. They are
not particularly good quality guns, as a side effect of having to be very inexpensive,
but they are certainly really interesting guns to take a look at.
Hopefully you enjoyed the video, hopefully you learned something.
Thanks very much for watching.