Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the
Rock Island Auction House taking a look at, well,
one of the anti-tank rifles that they're going to be
selling in their upcoming May of 2017 Premiere auction.
This is a Swedish m/42,
I'm going to mess this up, but it's going to
be something like ... Pansarvärnsgevär.
It's an anti-tank rifle.
And it's a really interesting hybrid style of system.
So it is a solid 20mm projectile, and quite the potent one too, that is a ... 108 gram
projectile traveling at 950 metres per second.
For us Americans, that's like a 1,650 grain bullet going at 3,150 feet per second.
So that's heavy and fast, and it's a tungsten cored armour-piercing bullet.
But it's a recoilless rifle, in name, if not strictly speaking in practice.
What we're looking at here is the first development, or one of the very early developments,
getting away from the idea of just a standard anti-tank rifle.
Now this began in World War One, when the Germans needed something to counter the emerging British tank threat.
And they basically scaled up the Mauser bolt-action rifle to 13mm, big armour-piercing projectile,
going nice and fast. And that worked pretty well on British tanks in World War One.
Then during the interwar period, pretty much all the major military powers
in the world would work on developing that sort of thing.
So the British had the Boys anti-tank rifle in .55 calibre.
The ... Germans and the Poles both developed 8mm, but very high velocity, anti-tank rifles.
The Finns had the 20mm Lahti, ... the Swiss developed the 20mm Solothurn S1000.
Everyone was building bigger and bigger anti-tank rifles,
and these were all on the same principle as a rifle: a locked breech, and
powder explodes, and all of the force pushes the bullet down the barrel into the tank.
The problem was by the time World War Two really got going,
these were kind of reaching the point of diminishing returns, tank armour was getting heavier,
and it was getting past the point where you could actually have a
reasonably portable rifle that could actually penetrate the armour.
So, some of the better ones were these 20mm Swiss and Finnish guns,
but you're looking at, like, a 120 pound gun at that point. That starts to really push the limits of portability,
and at that point, like you know, maybe we should just step it up a little bit to, like,
a 37mm or a 50mm gun and make it an artillery piece, because we're losing
the portability of a rifle already anyway. Well, what would eventually develop were shaped-charge
projectiles, where ... instead of depending on a hardened armour-piercing bullet core
to just power through the armour based on its velocity, instead you'd get an explosive charge
that was shaped in such a way that it would create a very thin stream of molten metal
that could cut through armour using thermal properties instead of just velocity.
And this is a hybrid between those two. So the thing is with a shaped charge,
you've got a relatively large diameter projectile, and you can't just fire that through a rifle.
This is one of the early recoilless guns, which is the technology that was developed
to allow shaped-charge projectiles to be used effectively. Now one way to do that is a rocket,
which is, say, what the US did with the Bazooka. The other way is a recoilless rifle. Now the idea behind ...
First of all, recoilless doesn't actually mean there's no recoil, it just means there's substantially less.
And the reason for that is it's firing both directions at the same time. This concept goes, frankly, back to the
US Civil War where there was a development of a gun that fired a ... charge in both directions simultaneously,
and the idea was ... the recoil of the one going backward counteracted the recoil
of the one going forward. So, yes, you're losing half of the energy of the cartridge,
but ... you can make that cartridge very large and still be man portable
because you're not trying to contain it all. And so it's worthwhile. That's what this did.
So we'll take a look at this up close in a minute, but the base of this cartridge,
instead of being totally sealed, actually has like a little fibreboard
pad that is deliberately intended to blow out when you fire.
And the propellant gases go shooting out the back of the gun.
You don't try to contain them like in a locked breech rifle.
So, you're wasting a lot of the energy, but you're able to get
what is effectively a more powerful round than something like the Lahti or the Solothurn,
in an 11 kilo (or just under 25 pounds), single-man portable weapon, and
that was a really interesting concept. Now this was developed by the Carl Gustav company
from basically between 1940 and 1942. It was adopted into Swedish military service in '42.
It's interesting, the Swedes had a lot of, kind of, stuff a little bit ahead of the game in
World War Two, despite being not a substantially combatant nation. They had a 1942 pattern
semi-automatic rifle as well, which was actually a really good rifle, the Ljungman.
Anyway, they would order like 3,000 - 3,200 of these, although only about a 1,000 of them
had been actually delivered by the time the war ended, and they, of course, never really saw combat.
What they really did was help lead to ... the 1946 to '48 development of the 84mm Carl Gustav
recoilless rifle, which is a fantastically long-serving weapon.
Versions of that weapon are still in military service today.
And this is really what what sparked the development of that rifle.
We'll start with the ammo, and this should give you a decent size comparison.
There's a nice full clip of 30-06 for an M1 compared to a single cartridge
for the m/42 anti-tank rifle. Now this is a 180mm long cartridge,
which is just ludicrously huge, but remember that this is not a locked breech.
So ... all the powder is being vented out the back of the gun, which means you're losing
a lot of the potential thrust to the bullet, so the amount of powder is
oversized to compensate for that in the first place.
Looking at the back of the case, you can see a standard primer right there,
but then we have this brown area in the middle. Now when we look at a fired case,
you'll see that primer is dimpled, and this is blown out in these two areas.
And again, that's deliberate. That's what makes this recoilless,
... there's a solid bullet going forward, there is a lot of a powder and debris going backwards.
And that's what balances the recoil and makes this a
practical gun to actually fire from the shoulder.
It is loaded from the back (and this would be operated by a team of course,
so you'd have a gunner and a loader),
what the loader is going to do is push this lever forward, which is going to unlock the breech,
and then allow it to pivot open, (actually on ... this side), push that forward,
then it pivots open like this.
Got a little bit of extra kick at the end which operates the extractor.
Alright, and then we have the chamber. Our extractor is right here, it's spring-loaded
so you have to push it in in order to close the breech, and then when you open,
if the spring pressure itself isn't enough to push the case out, you can kick it open a bit like that to push the case.
This is our venturi nozzle, so powder blast is going to come out of there. You do not want to stand behind this thing.
We have a trigger up here at the front with a safety switch. So it's currently on fire, when I pull the trigger
(it's a really simple mechanism, there's just a long transfer bar that goes all the way down this tube
until it reaches the back, right here), and when I pull the trigger it's just going to push that bar back,
and that bar connects to this, right there, which trips a striker and releases the firing pin.
So this is our actual breech block. It has the same pattern of openings right there
that you see very obviously burned into the empty fired cartridge case,
right there. Now this plate does very quickly erode as you might expect.
It's getting a lot of very high pressure gas on it when you fire.
Apparently this plate lasts about 20 rounds of armour-piercing ammunition
or about 40 rounds of practice or high-explosive.
Unlike a lot of anti-tank rifles, this thing was actually made with, or shipped with, or equipped with
both solid armour-piercing and high-explosive projectiles. And the high-explosive,
because it wasn't velocity dependent, was a little bit lower pressure
and thus less damaging to the gun to fire.
There's a carry handle right here pretty much at the balance point of the gun, just for general transit.
But then, when you're actually firing, this is your shoulder rest. You have a nice padded cheek rest here.
And then the front end contains your firing grip, firing mechanism, and sights.
There are two different types of sights on here. We have a set of folding iron sights,
these are calibrated to 300 metres, just a little front post like that.
And then we also have an optical sight.
Interestingly this is a Meopta, made in Czechoslovakia, and it is basically a ZF-4 optic.
Which is pretty cool, in fact, it is a ZF-4.
It is detachable, like so.
This also comes out, it's a little bit loose at the moment,
but you could take the optical sight mount off if you didn't want to use it.
And if you did, this is your scope unit.
Right there, Meopta,
and then it's a 4x power scope, 4.5 degree field of view, and a serial number.
And then it is on this externally adjusted mount, so there are standard ZF-4
elevation and windage adjustments, which you would use for zeroing.
But then once it's on, once the scope's zeroed, your range adjustments are all done using this dial,
which moves the mount, pivots it quite a lot.
Because the trajectory of that 20mm is going to be substantially different than,
say, an 8mm rifle bullet that this scope was originally designed around.
There's also a windage adjustment here, it's going to slide the scope in its mount.
And the BDC is calibrated out to
a 1,000 metres.
Now the reticle on this is pretty much a standard ZF-4 with a German post,
but it does also have a couple of additional stadia lines,
kind of box shaped stadia lines in there, which I believe are for tracking a moving target.
So this does balance pretty well, they've got the grip and the shoulder rest at the the proper point.
And, yeah, it weighs about 25 pounds.
It does have recoil but not like a rifle, or an anti-tank cannon kind of recoil.
Armour penetration on this was better than most of the equivalent calibre guns.
This could go through about 40mm of tank armour, flat on, 90 degrees at a 100 metres distance.
So that's really above most of the comparable guns, that's more than a Lahti or a Solothurn could do.
And doing that in a light and portable package like this is really a neat trick.
Now even this thing's capabilities ... by the middle of World War Two were not really sufficient,
and that's why what this really led to was development of the 84mm recoilless Carl Gustav.
So to open this thing, this would normally be done with a two-man crew,
but pull the lever, rotate it open.
This last little bit of spring tension pushes on the extractor, pops the empty cartridge out,
put a new one in and a push on the extractor there to release ... the breech block,
pop it down, lock it in place, and you're ready to fire. You would not want to stand
where the camera is now because this jets out a whole lot of flaming debris.
So ... there are a couple of pieces of footage out there that you can find on YouTube
of people actually shooting these. In fact, I don't know for sure, but I suspect
at least one of those may be this exact same gun, and it's pretty cool. You can see, first off,
there's a tremendous amount of back blast that you do not want to stand behind.
And you can see that there is in fact recoil, these make a huge amount of noise,
and a large concussion, and they absolutely do recoil, but nowhere near
the amount of recoil you would have from one of these actually firing from a locked sealed breech.
If you would be interested in owning this one, it comes with all the stuff up here.
plus some other things. There's a carry case, sling, transit bags, all sorts of extra goodies.
And you can take a look at pictures of all of those on Rock Island's website.
You'll find a link to the catalogue page for this piece in the description text below,
and you can place a bid right there on-line if you're interested.
This is a NFA transferable destructive device, so it does have to go through an NFA transfer.
But fully transferable, so
anyone who can pass the background check can own this, and have a lot of fun with it.
Thanks for watching.