Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the
James D Julia auction house up in Maine
taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be selling
in their upcoming Spring, or April, of 2017 Auction.
They have some really interesting things here, and in particular this
Polish unicorn rifle, This is a [wz.38M].
And it is the result of some Polish Army semi-auto rifle trials that took place just before World War Two.
Which of course were, not surprisingly, cut short by the dual invasion from Russia and Germany.
Now, to break this down a little bit, wz stands for "wzor", or model,
38 is of course the year, 1938, and M stands for the designer who is named Maroszek.
His full name was actually Josef Maroszek,
and he enrolled in 1923 in the Warsaw Technical University,
studied arms design and finally graduated with a thesis in 1930
on modernising and updating the Polish Mauser, the wz.29 bolt action rifle.
He was then employed by the military, basically, and various arms factories.
They decided they were interested in his version of the updated Mauser, and
so he was hired to build some prototypes and start testing them.
And that project didn't really go anywhere, and ultimately his rifle,
they weren't quite able to finalise it and get it working just right.
However, right about the time that ... that project finally ended, the Polish Army announced a
competitive trial for self-loading rifles, semi-auto rifles. And there weren't really actually all that many criteria.
Some pretty basic stuff, had to have a 600mm barrel - same as the Mauser,
had to weigh no more than 4.5 kilos - or basically 10 pounds,
had to have a 10 round magazine firing 8x57 Mauser ammunition
- because that was what was standard for the Polish military at the time.
And then it had to ... basically it had do what everyone wanted semi-auto rifles to do.
It had to be cheap and easy to produce, simple to operate,
not that many parts, basic stuff.
... In the end when they announced these trials in early 1934,
and rifles had to be submitted by December 1st 1934. When they were, they got, like, nine different entries.
Unfortunately Polish archives are pretty sparse on material about this,
largely because the Polish military archives were ransacked, like,
18 different times during the course of World War Two by pretty much everybody.
So unfortunately we don't even know much about the other competitive guns.
They were all identified by basically abbreviations or code names,
so in many cases it's not even known who designed them.
But of all of these guns, three were chosen to continue onward, and
Maroszek was one of them. Now this wasn't ... at this point
this was an early Maroszek rifle design
and it actually was third place of the three that went on.
It wasn't all that great, it still had some functional problems to it.
And in the meantime, Maroszek had also started working on an anti-tank rifle,
which would become adopted as the wz.35Ur for Uruguay
... that's a different issue, we'll get into one of those later on.
But Maroszek didn't have a whole lot of time on hand to fix his semi-auto rifle,
the anti-tank rifle was kind of taking up most of his attention.
But then, like right at the end of the trials period in '35, he kind of had
this sudden inspiration for a great way to redesign the rifle and make it better.
And his proposal was was looked at and they went, "Seems like a pretty reasonable set of ideas,
We'll give you six weeks to redesign the rifle from scratch and resubmit it."
Which is like no time whatsoever.
I mean six weeks is like the design timeframe of the Sten gun.
But Maroszek and a couple of teammates were able to actually go through and do this,
and they produced a new prototype which used this
- it was a prototype of this rifle.
And this is really a remarkably fantastic gun,
and the military recognised that as well.
Ultimately by 1937 five prototypes were taken for testing.
That went quite well, and in '38 they ordered 55 of them to be manufactured for troop trials.
Those were supposed to be delivered by January 1st 1939.
Now, they were delivered. This is serial number 1048.
All the known guns fall into the serial number range of 1001 through 1055.
There is no further paper trail in the Polish archives after that order and delivery date,
so we don't know what happened there. But we do know of course in September
World War Two started with the invasion of Poland, and you can understand why no further development took place.
That also explains why the Germans didn't produce this gun, to make it,
because at that point this thing was only still a troop trials gun.
It wasn't actually in mass production anywhere.
So there are only a couple of markings on this rifle
and the main one is right here on top of the receiver, it's Zbr.2 and 1938.
1938 is the date of course, Zbr.2 was for a long time kind of a mystery.
Turns out it's the name of the arsenal where the rifle is manufactured, "Zbrojownia 2".
Which literally translates in Polish as Arsenal Number 2, this is where Maroszek was working in Warsaw.
There's also this. This is a very small marking that you will see repeated on the inside the gun in a number of places.
It looks like a "Z" in a circle, which is potentially going to cause some confusion as that is a Czech proof mark.
However, this is not actually a "Z", it's actually a 2,
reference Zbr.2, it's a 2 in a circle.
So you'll actually find this same mark on Maroszek's anti-tank rifles
which were also manufactured by Arsenal Number 2 in Warsaw.
Lastly, we have a serial number on the left side of the receiver. This is number 1048, they started at 1001 and went to 1055.
You'll find that 48 repeated in a number of places, here for example on the lower assembly of the gun,
and lots of places on the inside which you'll see in a minute.
Lastly we have selector markings here, it's a two position selector - this rifle was semi-automatic only.
A little counter-intuitively to us [non-Poles], the zero is actually the fire position
and 'Z' is the safe position. ["O" = Odblokowany = unlocked, "Z" = Zablokowany = locked ?]
Now when we take a closer look at this thing, you'll start to see elements from other guns in it.
Czech, Polish - a variety of interesting influences. And the first one is right here in the disassembly lever,
this is extremely reminiscent of the Polish BAR, well BARs in general. And that makes sense
because the Poles were actively manufacturing and using their own version, the wz.28 version, of the BAR.
So for Maroszek to have copied that takedown lever makes perfect sense.
And, of course, the beginning of takedown is to rotate this
90 degrees down, and then it is a keyed lever.
There's a little nub right there. It comes out, and then we can continue with disassembly.
Next up, I'm going to remove the trigger group and that's super easy.
We pull the pin out, this simply rotates down and out of the gun.
The magazine is fixed in place,
the fire control mechanism is back here. We'll take a closer look at that in just a moment.
But first,
our next disassembly step is to remove the gas piston and handguard.
It is dovetailed in here and another very, very reminiscent
tie-in to some other guns. So we're just going to slide this forward,
And then this is actually going to lift out with the operating rod.
That comes out. We just pull the operating rod out,
and then you've got those two assemblies right there.
Last but not least, we can take the bolt out and once the op rod is out,
the bolt just slides right out of the receiver. Kind of like a BAR there as well.
Now when you look at the hooks on the bolt here,
this is very reminiscent of the zb.26 and the zh.29 rifles.
So some Czech gun influence there.
And that's it. This is a really impressive gun in that it is extremely quick and simple to take apart.
It disassembles into a number of large, discrete pieces.
The closest thing you have to a small, easily lost component is this takedown pin.
But even that's not too bad, one pin holds the whole thing together.
This is a really slick design by Maroszek, and had the war not continued on I think it really would have gone somewhere.
So the locking system on this rifle is really kind of a hybrid between the zb.26,
and some other guns like it, and the Petter model 1935, a French pistol and some other pistols like it,
in that the bolt tilts up and down. So this is the unlocked position and then when the carrier goes forward,
these sloped surfaces at the back lift the back of the bolt up like that. And then this surface right here,
right there - that shiny bit at the top of the bolt - that locks into the top of the receiver,
right here in this cut-out.
Now, in Petter pistols that was the barrel locking into the slide.
In this case it's the bolt locking into the receiver, but the principle is the same.
The recoil spring is held here inside the operating rod assembly so it cycles in and out like that.
The guide rod for the spring runs inside the gas piston,
and then we have a little cross pin here that locks it in place. I'm not going to pull that off,
there's no need, but it's a really slick captive recoil spring.
And it drops into and out of the receiver extremely easily, no chance of losing it.
The handguard here has this pin that locks it into the receiver.
So this locks the upper receiver, the trigger group, and the handguard (which is also the gas tube) all together with one pin.
That's efficient and effective. And then we have a gas tube up here,
(that's the back), the gas piston is going to ride inside that,
just like so, All the way forward,
cycles backward.
And then, what's kind of interesting, is we actually have an adjustable gas system.
So the front here is just a threaded plug, and it's only finger tight, which I'll explain why in a moment.
So there's a hole in the barrel right there, vents gas into that,
and then there's just a slightly tapered plug that is going to control the amount of gas
that comes from this hole through into the gas tube.
And it's ... (actually let me show you here, if we can zoom in on this...).
The gas plug is actually numbered on three facets, number 1, number 2 and number 3.
Now I'm not sure exactly why that was, because in
changing from 1 to 2 to 3 you're getting ...
you're closing this tapered plug by an increment of one eighth of its thread pitch.
So you're getting really just this miniscule amount of change. And ...
that's not enough change to, for example,
tune the rifle to different bullet weights, or different types of ammunition.
This was still a troop trials gun at this point,
so it might just be in an effort to get the rifle running just right on the
specific ammunition that they were using for the trials.
There's this score mark on the front of the gas tube,
and that's what allows you to line up the 1 the 2 or the 3. And then what's cool, it doesn't have to be
tightened down into place because once you put this onto the gun that
prevents ... these flats
can't turn against the barrel.
The rear sight on the Maroszek is basically identical to that of a Mauser bolt-action carbine, or bolt-action rifle.
Which isn't surprising, because that's what the Poles were using and clearly they liked it.
The front sight is also basically identical to what they had on the Mausers.
And it's also interesting to note that there is a
simplistic muzzle brake cut into the front of the barrel right there.
Now some other rifles of this period had that. The SVTs, the Russian SVTs,
had muzzle brakes actually kind of similar to this,
but most other self-loading rifles of the period, military ones, did not.
Looking at this you'll notice some more 48s. So it's marked 48 on the upper handguard,
here, there,
it's marked 48 on the face of the bolt handle there.
The magazine here is not removable. This is permanently fixed into the base of the rifle,
so there's a stripper clip guide on the top of the receiver,
right there. It's actually, ... the stripper clip guide is the same surface,
or the rear of it is the same surface, that is the locking surface.
This of course holds 10 rounds of 8[mm] Mauser.
In fact you can kind of see this optical illusion at the back, you'd think that this is one solid piece of metal.
But it's actually not, it's slightly deeper here than it is down at the bottom.
Fire control group is pretty simple.
Interestingly this is one of those rifles that locks open on an empty magazine
and you actually pull the trigger to close the bolt.
So you have to load the magazine via stripper clip,
then pull the trigger, and it will close the bolt and ... your next trigger pull will fire the rifle.
So ... that was something that a number of different people did at this time period,
that was seen as a simplistic, convenient, and efficient type of control for a rifle.
And the bolt handle is non reciprocating.
So, bolt handle is very reminiscent of a BAR,
slides open, like this.
But it does not cycle when you fire the rifle. So it just acts as a lever with which you can
push
the bolt backwards. You can see this little nub, right there.
The other interesting thing you'll notice there's a little cutout right here.
And the bolt handle actually rotates slightly, that allows you to use this to manually lock the bolt open.
There's a tab connected to the bolt handle and so if this were under spring pressure
and I wanted to lock the rifle open without the magazine being empty,
I can pull the bolt handle back rotate it down, and it will hold it in place like that.
With the gun now reassembled you can see that locking system working when I pull the bolt handle back.
The bolt drops down right there, out of
its locked position, and then it will cycle backwards.
Now I'm not going to actually demonstrate dropping the bolt by pulling the trigger because
it's meant to be done when you reload the magazine,
and if you ... have the magazine empty and you want to do this,
you have to hold the follower down while pulling the trigger and ... you then also have to
hold the bolt handle when you do that, or it'll drop onto your finger
that's holding the follower down. So it's kind of a three handed, tricky manoeuver that isn't easily done on film.
But that is how the thing functions.
So to me the Maroszek really is one of these interesting rifles that
didn't get taken into service, but not actually for any real fault of its own.
It didn't get into service because German and Soviet invasions of Poland
interrupted its development cycle.
Usually when you see a cool looking trials gun like this, if it didn't go into service it
... there's usually a good reason, it had some huge, terrible flaw.
The Maroszek, as far as I can tell, is a really nice rifle.
The reports I've seen from people who have shot them
(because, by the way, apparently there is a gunsmith in Poland
who has made just a couple of hand-built reproductions of these),
apparently, they're a very nice cycling rifle.
I'm really impressed by the simplicity and the ease of field stripping,
and the major components that you end up with once the gun is stripped.
Compared to ... the other guns available at the time in the 1930s, it's really ahead of its time, it's really well done.
You know, taking this apart makes an M1 look like a
jigsaw puzzle, really. So
had it not been for World War Two,
Poland might have ended up with a really nice
... semi-auto service rifle by the end of the 1930s.
Of course, that's a, you know, a "could have been" that we can't change now.
So, as I had mentioned, there are five of these still known to exist today, with rumours, I believe, about two others.
Two of those are in Poland, two of them are in the United States, one of them is in Germany.
So if you're interested in having a
Maroszek rifle in your own collection,
you're not going to have too many opportunities at this one,
and this particular rifle is a magnificent example, it's in fantastic condition.
I don't see any reason it wouldn't be shootable.
Although simply because of the scarcity I'm not going to go out and shoot this one.
But if you'd like to yourself, make sure to check the description text below for a link
to the James Julia auction ... catalogue page, on this rifle
It is coming up for sale in their April Spring of 2017 Auction, and if you'd like it, place a bid on it.
Take a look at their high-res pictures on Julia's website if you're interested.
Thanks for watching.