Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video episode on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, today we're taking a look at another old German rifle, this time a Gewehr 41(W), Walther.
The G41(W) is a very distinctive rifle because of ... the large cover,
or shroud, over the nose of the rifle, and that's there for a very specific reason.
When the German army requested submissions for a new semi-auto rifle
(and this was just prior to World War Two starting, when they started the development process for these)
they specified that the rifle could not have any ports in the barrel for gas operating,
and it also had to have no moving parts on the top assembly of the gun.
Well, Walther went ahead and submitted this design as a prototype.
They ignored the no moving parts on the top requirement,
but they didn't drill the ... barrel for a gas port anywhere.
So this operates on basically the Bang system, first designed by a Dane named Søren Bang,
coincidentally enough for a gun designer.
The idea is gas pressure comes out the muzzle of the gun and is trapped by this front cone,
and can then be directed to do other work in the gun. In this case it runs a small piston in here
which operates the rifle. We'll take a closer look at that in just a minute.
About somewhere between 115,000 and 130,000 of these rifles were made,
although it's believed most of them were used on the Russian front and were destroyed or captured.
They are a pretty rare gun in collections in Europe and the US today.
But they're a very interesting design to take a look at.
Terrible in practice, these are not a particularly successful rifle.
Every rifle that's ever been built with this Bang system has had reliability problems.
The issue is simply that they're too easy to foul, and once they get dirty they just don't work well.
So, let's take a closer look at another one of these rifles that's partially disassembled
so we can see what's going on.
Alright.
So we have another G41 here, this one has been hacked on a little bit, but we're working on restoring it.
We've left the top handguard off of here, so you can see what's going on.
And on top of that I'm going to take off the nose cap as well.
This front piece un-threads.
Now it's important to note, and you'll see why in a minute, that there are two
semi-circular lobes in that nose piece on the inside by the threading. You'll see why in a second.
Then we have this cover that comes off and inside there is a little gas piston.
So, for this rifle to work, normally you have your gas piston in there, underneath the cover.
When the rifle fires, gas pressure comes out the muzzle and
it's trapped by the ... front exit of this cone, and gas comes back through these two lobes.
That gas pushes on the front of this piston
and the piston runs backwards like this, sliding right over the barrel.
You can see this top bar which runs the length of the barrel.
This is in effect the gas piston or the connecting rod we could say.
So, if we look back here at the bolt end, when I push this piston in
this, right here, is the very back of the connecting rod,
and it extends out over the chamber and pushes the bolt back.
Now it only pushes it this far. If we take a look at the muzzle here,
you can see that when the gas piston gets to this point,
it's stopped by a rib that's milled onto the barrel.
So at that point inertia takes over
and the momentum that the bolt has pushes it all the way back.
(This does lock open on an empty magazine, that's why it's stuck back there.)
And that's the basic operation. So this is ... basically a workaround.
This is how you build a gas-operated, piston-operated rifle without drilling a gas port.
The problem is because you have a large area, the gasses coming out the muzzle of the gun
have a chance to cool more than they would with a gas port,
and that leads to carbon build-up and fouling. And then the gun doesn't work well.
You can imagine, as you see here, this piston has to slide very smoothly on the barrel and inside this cover.
And if either one of those things start to get clogged,
you get a lot of friction on this and the gun no longer works reliably.
Alright, so in order to take a look at how the locking mechanism of the G41(W) works
we first have to do a basic field-strip so we can take the bolt out and take a closer look at it.
So what that's going to involve here is we're going to take the bolt carrier here,
pull it all the way to the rear and lock it into the back of the receiver cover.
There's a little switch here on the bolt carrier that allows us to do that.
So I pull it all the way back, engage that switch, and it's locked in place.
Now, I have the rifle set to safe, this is the safety lever out here,
and then this little cylinder extending out the back is the tail of the recoil spring.
So if I push that in, this whole assembly will come out as one unit.
All right, there we go. Now this thing is basically a little time bomb,
because our recoil spring is coiled up at its full compression inside here.
So we have to be very careful when we unlock the bolt carrier that it doesn't
proceed to throw the bolt across the room and out that window.
So, what I'm going to do is hold this...
There we go, now we have all of our separate pieces that we can look at in a little more detail.
Alright, so we'll start here with the basics.
Recoil spring assembly, no big deal, fairly simple.
We have our rear receiver cover, which basically just houses all the other components,
it doesn't do a whole lot on its own. It does have this sliding cover that keeps it closed,
prevents dirt and gunk from getting in when you're using the rifle by closing behind the bolt every time.
We have our bolt carrier. This is important, we'll get to this one.
This acts as a cover for the front of the rifle and this nub ... up in the front
is what moves the bolt back and forth, and engages and disengages the locking lugs.
In the bolt (fairly long bolt here, let's pull this out),
we have a firing pin and carrier and we have...
Let's see, why don't you come in and take a closer look at this?
We have our bolt here. We have two locking wedges.
(See if I can get this to stand up.)
We have two locking wedges, and we have this firing pin assembly.
So what happens is these wedges sit inside the bolt body, like so,
and the firing pin rides right in between them.
Alright, so you can see the firing pin here in the centre, and we have our two locking wedges,
and when the firing pin moves all the way forward it forces those two locking wedges out.
When it comes back it allows those locking wedges to retract into the bolt and they are no longer in the receiver.
When they're extended like this, these are both sitting in grooves cut in the receiver.
And that's what locks the bolt in place and contains the pressure of firing.
When it comes back, ...
When it comes back those two lugs pull back into the bolt and now the whole bolt can travel backwards.
And what does that, ... you see there is another little oval shaped hole in the firing pin piece,
that matches up with this little foot on the bolt carrier ...
like so, and now the bolt carrier operates the two locking wedges.
One of the interesting elements about the G41, part of why it was a rather difficult rifle to make,
is that it was very important that these two locking lugs be kept as a matched pair.
If you had a situation where one of these was slightly out of spec, say
the rifle was head spaced with one, but then these were switched,
you broke one so you brought in a new one, you might end up with situation
where one was just a couple thousandths out of dimension
which meant that the full force of firing was being absorbed by just one of these lugs.
And that would in fairly short order cause the one lug to crack,
and then the other would crack, and then ... everything just goes downhill from there.
Much better when you can make parts like these standard and interchangeable.
Alright, let's put this back together. Start with our receiver cover and our dust cover.
The dust cover has to go in a very specific way,
drop it in the back and the four little tabs on it will line up with slots, then it can come forward.
We're going to go ahead and put in the recoil spring assembly...
Works better right side up...
which is how I had it the first time...
There we go. Recoil assembly is in. Now, here's the tricky part.
We have to put in the bolt, align the guide rod with
the rear of the bolt, and then put on our bolt carrier ...
Yeah, and I lost it...
You may be starting to see why this wasn't hugely popular in the middle of Russia.
Alright, and lock it in place. Now we have it.
Now, before it explodes open ... Actually there's one thing I want to mention real quick before we do that.
You can see this side rail, right here, for guiding the front end of the the bolt.
Interestingly, when they first designed the forgings for the receiver for this rifle, they had a
symmetrical second one of these rails over here on the right side of the receiver.
It was discovered during some early testing that the bolt tended to bind between the two.
So they took a look at it and realised: "Well, we really only need one,
because with one of these semi-circular rails cut that's enough to hold the bolt in place and guide it".
So they just milled off the right side rail on almost all of the G41s,
because it was cheaper to do that than to go back in and change the forging die for the overall receiver.
So, depending on the skill of the worker who made the receiver sometimes, ...
This one we have a nice little lip here at the front from where they milled it off. Some of the really nice ones
are smooth enough that you can't tell there was ever a lug there if you didn't know.
Anyway, let's go ahead and put our bolt and bolt carrier back in.
These drop in, I have to push the recoil spring forward again ... and it drops down.
There we go. Now we can unlock the bolt.
And there we go.
So as you can see, these were really a bit overly complex and susceptible to a lot of dirt
and, well really not particularly good field rifles.
There were more than 100,000 of them made. Most of them went to Russia,
where they didn't get a real favourable reception. There are a lot of cases of troops who got these,
were really excited about them, and ended up tossing them out
and going back to using captured Russian Tokarevs instead.
So, this rifle was the basis for the later G43, which was a much better design,
but we'll cover that in a separate video when we have one of those here to take a look at.
So, hope you guys enjoyed it, hope you learned something.
Thanks for watching.