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 some of the guns that they are going to be selling
in their upcoming June of 2017 Regional Auction.
And today we're taking a look at a really interesting piece of American,
well let's just be blunt, counterfeit pistol manufacture.
This is a Rogak P18 pistol. These came out in the late '70s early 1980s.
And what's really interesting about them is that they are
sort of supposed to be a copy of the Steyr Model GB pistol.
Now the Steyr GB is a pretty slick gun,
it's a pretty quintessential forgotten weapon in many circles,
because it was developed by Steyr primarily for Austrian military service trials in the early '80s.
... The Austrian military was getting rid of its Browning Hi Powers, finally, and wanted something more modern.
And Steyr figured, "Ah, well it's for the Austrian Army. We're an Austrian company.
We know they'll choose an Austrian company, we've got this nailed."
And they put together actually a really cool mechanically interesting design.
It is a gas-delayed blowback 9mm Parabellum pistol.
Mechanically very similar to the Volkssturmgewehr 1-5, or the Gustloff Volkssturmgewehr,
which we've done some video on. ... Take a look if you haven't seen that.
And the GB was a well-built pistol, it was really good.
It ended up kind of falling by the wayside because it failed Austrian military trials because
some strange dishevelled designer named Glock showed up and won the trials, much to Steyr's surprise.
So Steyr actually then went on and tried entering the gun in the United States military pistol trials.
And they lost there to the Beretta, which had to be a stunning blow to the Austrians again.
After that they did do some sales on the civilian market, somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 of these were sold.
A lot of them in the US, and a lot of people really liked them, but it just wasn't a profitable pistol.
They've kind of been counting on a big military contract, and civilian sales just didn't have the profit margin to sustain the project.
So they dropped it and it went away, and that's the end of the Steyr GB.
Now where the Rogak comes in here, and by the way that name is quite appropriate for the gun, just the way it sounds,
Rogak was a distributor in the US who got his hands on the design for the pistol
before Steyr actually produced them in the US.
Now I've seen differing opinions on whether he stole the design, or whether it was actually licenced to him,
or whether ... he got the blueprints, the technical package, as part of
... some sort of distribution negotiation or US production negotiation.
And then ... he started producing them.
Whether he was actually licenced to do so by Steyr seems a bit vague.
... I can't find definitive information one way or the other on that, although there are a bunch of people
who say that Steyr actually filed a lawsuit to shut down his production once he started.
Now what he did sounds, especially, you know, in magazine print sort of terms, sounds really good.
It's an 18 shot magazine, all stainless steel automatic pistol, military-style service pistol no less.
And it is in fact all stainless steel, but the manufacturing on it is
more along the lines of Khyber Pass than Springfield Armory.
So these pistols, in a great example of magazine journalism, there was an American Handgunner review
when these came out, that was very subtle in its criticism of the manufacturing techniques.
It said that a lot of things could maybe use a little stoning or polishing, which is putting it mildly.
So let's just go take a closer look at this, and let me show you exactly what people were getting with the Rogak P18.
OK, let's start with a quick comparison. We have an authentic Steyr GB down here, and the Rogak P18 up here.
They obviously are very similar pistols. They are in fact intended to be the same pistol.
They have in theory the same operating system.
But as we get into the Rogak you'll see that certain things are a bit different.
Now, controls are pretty much the same with a couple of exceptions.
The GB has a de-cocker.
The Rogak does not, it has just a manual safety, and that's a hammer block safety.
It doesn't prevent you from dropping the hammer, what it does is prevent the hammer from hitting the firing pin.
And it's kind of stiff too.
This is your slide stop or hold-open, works the same in both guns.
Now the magazines are a little bit different. The Steyr GB has a magazine release here on the trigger guard.
The Rogak has a magazine release on the heel. Push it up and the magazine comes out.
These are both 18 round magazines. They look very similar.
They do not interchange because the Rogak mag has a lug on the back,
so it won't fit in the Steyr, and the Steyr mag won't lock in the Rogak.
Now disassembly is also a little bit different.
On the Steyr we have a disassembly lever here on the side.
And you flip that down, and that actually backs the recoil spring in just slightly,
which allows you to rotate this muzzle cap, and then pull it off.
And then the slide comes off and the recoil spring comes out. These are very simple and very cool guns.
We'll take a look at exactly how they work in just a moment, but let me take the Rogak apart first.
You will notice on the Rogak there is no similar disassembly lever.
Instead it just has ... a plunger that impinges into the front of this muzzle cap.
So what I need to do is push that plunger in, and then I can rotate the cap out of the way.
And the recoil spring is strong enough that I cannot use my trusty Universal Disassembly Tool to do that.
... This thing will go flying, if you allow it to.
Alright, there we go. Now we can pull out the recoil spring, the muzzle cap,
and the slide is going to come off the same way.
There we go.
As I mentioned, the way that the GB works is very similar to the Volkssturmgewehr Gustloffwerke.
It has a series of gas rings right here, and when the gun is assembled (there we go), this nose cap sits right there.
And what you have is actually a pressure chamber, right here, in between the outer face of the barrel and the inner face of this cap.
This is nice and tight, ... it's a nice precision machine fit right there.
And we have a pair of gas vents there and right there on the ... top and bottom of the barrel,
at the 12 o'clock and 6 o'clock positions, and there are little gas vents on the inside of the barrel.
And when the bullet gets to here, right there, gas vents out of those two holes
and fills up the area inside
(it's a little tricky to get on there when it's not actually on the slide),
that gas fills up this area and pressure there holds the slide forward,
because this piece is locked into the slide with these lugs.
Once the bullet is gone and pressure in the barrel has dropped then
(you know the whole time this is slowly moving backwards)
once pressure drops there's no longer gas pressure inside here,
and then the slide can cycle all the rest of the way backward,
eject the case, load the new case, cycle, etc. and you're good to go.
By doing this they accomplished a couple things.
First off, they're able to have a fixed barrel, which is conducive to very good accuracy.
A lot of guns like this one that have gas delay systems are known for being quite accurate guns.
The HK P7 is another excellent example. Different gas delay mechanism, but a fixed barrel and very accurate.
In addition, this makes for a very soft shooting gun.
You have the recoil absorption of like a locked- breech system, without needing a really heavy slide
or a really heavy mainspring because ... you have a separate delaying mechanism.
So it's not blowback, but you also don't have the complexity of needing a true locked breech.
And of course, it's really simple. This thing is totally field stripped in about five seconds, and there's only four different parts to it.
Now let's compare that to the Rogak, the idea is the same with a few slightly different implementations.
So instead of the gas vents in the barrel being here, the vents in the barrel are actually back here.
And then we have this sleeve that allows the gas to come forward
and actually then come out at the [3] and 9 o'clock positions on the sides, right there.
And at that point, in theory, it's going to work the same way.
You have the muzzle cap, this area fills up with gas, and that's going to delay the slide from going backward.
Except the ... clearances, the space, the fit between this sleeve and the barrel itself,
... So, it's hard for me to get this on film because it's subtle,
but there's ... relatively speaking, a lot of open space in between these two parts.
And the gas doesn't build up pressure so much as it just vents out,
which is not conducive to delaying the actual recoil of the gun.
And in practical effect these were basically straight blowback guns as built by Rogak,
because you'll notice there are no gas rings.
On the GB we have a series of rings, just like you would have in any typical pressurised cylinder.
Those rings dramatically reduce the ability of gas to vent past.
Gas will fill up one of the rings, and then it has to actually jump the next ring and fill up that space,
and the upshot is that seals. Having one poorly machined flat surface does not seal the system.
So Rogak had to do something about that,
and apparently they weren't able to improve their machining quality, so instead they added this.
This is a stack of metal plates and fibre buffers. And so the slide would impact on this when the gun cycled.
And in theory that would absorb the impact of the recoil, because the slide would be going much faster
than in a proper Steyr GB, since the gas delay system didn't really do what it was supposed to.
Additionally, and this is a really remarkable modification to have made, because the slide was going so fast,
and accelerating very quickly as soon as the gun fired, it tended to rip the rims off of cases.
... The pressure in the chamber was high, that was holding the case in place,
the extractor was trying to pull it back. The result was the rim broke before the extractor ripped the rim off.
And Rogak's solution to this was actually to grind off the extractor claw.
So here on the Steyr you can see we have a normal extractor,
It's in the same place on the Rogak here, except the claw is gone.
It's just a flat surface flush underneath the case. This does not extract.
On this pistol, if you chambered a live cartridge and then tried to pull the slide back to eject it,
that cartridge would stay in the chamber, ... there's nothing to pull it out.
Now when you actually fired, because this acted like a simple blowback pistol,
pressure in the chamber would push the case out backwards.
And as long as it stayed in one piece, this would actually function.
That's one of those ... little recognised things about blowback pistols is they don't necessarily have to have extractors.
... They will extract cases when fired without them.
So that should give you a pretty good idea for the shortcuts and shortcomings of the Rogak as a functional pistol.
But I want to go a little bit farther and I want to take a closer look
at some of the actual machining operations on these parts.
In order to get started in the right frame of mind, let's go right here, to the front of the front sight,
that right there is a casting seam.
The ... whole slide part was not actually a milled component, it was a casting,
and they still have the seam there on the front.
Once you understand that this was cast,
you can start looking and you'll find other evidence of casting without a whole lot of clean up.
The top surface of the slide here is a rough casting finish. They did mill the sides down to make the markings.
But if you start looking closely at these things, you'll see that there aren't a lot of smooth parallel lines.
Here's a good example.
If we look up close at the front of the ejection port you'll see ... the results of a not very good cast
that stainless steel was poured into.
If we look at the underside you can actually see rough edges.
This was never polished down, that's a rough edge on that.
... That's a pretty elementary thing to be fixing on a machined part of a handgun.
When we look in here, you can see things like some little voids there, uneven edges.
There are some more unpolished cast surfaces. You can see the parts of the safety there aren't really square, or smooth.
Just for contrast, take a look at the striker and safety components in the Steyr here on the left.
That's what gun parts ought to look like, not the uneven edges of the Rogak on the right.
Here on the frame you can see that the barrel collar was actually roughly welded onto the frame right there.
The front surface of the frame is not parallel, it's not even in thickness. It looks like it was done
honestly, I'd want to say a Dremel.
That seems like an awkward place to get in a Dremel, but that was clearly not done on any well-programmed machine tool,
or even well set up manual machine tool. That was definitely done by hand.
And of course the pièce de résistance, the grip screws, yeah, Phillips head machine grip screws.
That should ... have been a warning to any potential commercial buyer
who thought they were getting a proper military service pistol when these things first came out.
And no, those are not replacement screws, which was my first thought.
That's what they all have, that's exactly what they came with.
We've got them on both sides too.
Total production of these pistols is also a bit hazy.
... If you look on the internet you'll see the number 2,300 brought up a lot.
I suspect that's a misunderstanding, and I think there were probably less than that made.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was less than 1,000.
There are three different serial number ranges that you can find.
I have yet to see a pistol with a serial number under 2,000, so I suspect they actually started at 2,000.
And you'll see them running up, I think the highest I saw was like 2,600, so they probably did about 600 guns in that range.
I've seen pictures of one that had a serial number in the 6,000 range, and that I don't really have a good explanation for.
But it was low 6,000s, and I suspect they started a second serial range at 6,000.
And then you'll also occasionally find them in the 12,000 serial number range,
and that I'm pretty sure is a 2,000 numbered gun that they started tacking an extra one onto
to make it look like production was larger than it really was.
So I suspect there's 1,000 or a little less that were ever made. I think they're a bit rarer than people believe in general.
And obviously kind of for good reason, whether there's truth to it or not,
it is alleged that Steyr actually filed a lawsuit to shut down production of the gun.
Either because it was unlicenced or because it was just a horrible implementation of what Steyr intended.
And Steyr really did make a very good pistol, the GB is slick and awesome, the Rogak not so much.
Today ... I think it's a fantastic piece of firearms history. If you like the crude ... manufacturing methods,
normally that's something that you have to source out from, you know, Khyber Pass guns or Chinese knockoff guns.
Well, here's a fantastic example of exactly that sort of thing being made right here in Illinois in the United States.
So, they do come up for sale from time to time.
Obviously this one is here at Rock Island, if you want to add it to your own collection of
Chinese mystery pistols and Khyber Pass interesting designs, well, take a look at the description text below.
And you can follow that link to Rock Island's catalogue page on this pistol.
It comes batched with several others, and so you can see the pictures and the price estimate and everything for the whole lot.
And if you're interested, place a bid over the phone or right there on Rock Island's website.
Thanks for watching.
[ cc by sk cn2 ]