Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
taking a look at a really cool,
really special piece of firearms history.
This is a Rheinmetall MG42/59.
Now, this was manufactured in 1964,
and actually it came over into the US before 1968,
so this is a registered, transferable,
C&R eligible MG42/59.
Now, what is a 42/59?
Well, after World War Two of course Germany was occupied by the Allies.
It was not allowed to have its own armed forces.
That prohibition ended in 1954 and the Bundeswehr reformed itself,
and it had to go about choosing what weapons to use.
Well they chose to use the MG42 because frankly, it's a fantastic machine gun.
It was available, a lot of the guys knew how to use it, there was institutional knowledge.
However, they didn't actually have ... a technical package
for making the MG42, it had been destroyed during the war.
So they do have the Rheinmetall Company.
Rheinmetall sets about developing a new ... TDP, a new set of blueprints for building the gun.
They have to essentially ... re-engineer or reverse engineer the whole thing.
In the meantime, they do convert about 40,000 existing World War Two MG42s to 7.62 NATO.
Remember that this is post-1954,
West Germany is part of NATO, they need to use the 7.62 cartridge.
Now the original conversions were actually adopted as the MG2.
And they changed as little as possible, only the absolute necessary bits.
So the barrel, the feed tray to take .308 cartridges, and the feed cover to feed .308 cartridges.
They actually left the sights exactly the same, they didn't bother to change
the range settings on the sights, because it just wasn't considered all that important.
Now they adopted it as the MG2 because the newly manufactured guns
that were factory original in .308 were coming, and that was supposed to be the MG1.
The idea is the 1 is the proper gun,
the 2 is the conversion to bring old stuff up to standard, makes sense.
Anyway, it took Rheinmetall until 1958 before they were finally able
to start production on new MG1 machine guns.
Now that "MG1" is the German army designation.
Within Rheinmetall as a corporate entity it was still referred to as the MG42.
And the company, Rheinmetall, was looking to sell these to as many people as they could,
not just the new West German army.
So they offered these commercially for sale, and they called them the MG42.
Now the German army would start tinkering with improvements and upgrades to their guns.
And they would go through a series of designations
as Rheinmetall developed new things to suit the German army.
They had the MG1A1, MG1A2, the MG1A3 was ultimately finally adopted as the MG3.
Which is sort of the standard iteration, the gun that was widely adopted,
the modern version of the ... MG42.
On the commercial side, outside the German army,
Rheinmetall was identifying these with year designators.
So they had the MG42/58, and then they had the MG42/59.
And this is a commercial MG42/59 (although it's just marked "MG42"),
manufactured in 1964 for the export market.
And the big thing that it does is reduces the rate of fire from the comically insane.
The thing that the MG42 is known for, its really high rate of fire,
this reduces it to 700 to 900 rounds per minute.
Which is a lot more sustainable if you're the guy carrying the ammo for it.
So there are a number of other changes that were made at the same time,
things that would get into the MG3 eventual adoption.
So let me go through this and show you what all the different elements are.
Alright, let's start with the markings.
As I said, Rheinmetall continued to identify these guns as MG42
on the commercial market after the war.
We have our Rheinmetall logo here, proof marks,
1964 production date, and that is the serial number.
It is worth pointing out that 31725-37, so just two digits away,
is actually pictured in Folke Myrvang's excellent book on "German Universal Machine Guns"
as an example of a Rheinmetall commercial production ... post-war 42.
So we've got some good provenance there for it.
Now the most obvious changes that were made to the design
were converting it from 8mm to 7.62 NATO.
So the top cover is a 7.62 NATO top cover.
It's also worth pointing out that they developed a new hinge for the top cover,
... it's like a high friction hinge.
So this will just stay wherever you put it, instead of falling back down onto your fingers
whenever you are trying to work on the gun, like the original MG42s had a tendency to do.
The feed tray was also changed here, and this was incorporated into the Bundeswehr's MG3.
So a couple of things that are different here, of course it is dimensionally set up for 7.62 NATO.
They added this extra feed pawl which prevents the belt
from falling back out under its own weight, which would happen with the 42.
And it's got this extra material down here
that allows it to take the modern German army ammo cans.
And that's what this latch is for, it's for attaching essentially a belt box to the gun.
Naturally the barrel was also changed to 7.62 NATO.
Interesting to note this has a "cyq" mark, this is a wartime production barrel extension on it.
Also something that would be adopted as part of the MG3 program,
there is an anti-aircraft sight permanently mounted
on the receiver in front of the regular rear sight.
The original MG42s had a socket for attaching an anti-aircraft sight, but it was a separate item.
And the muzzle booster was redesigned, not really any change in functionality there,
just a different manufacturing style.
All that being said,
I think the most interesting part of this conversion is in fact the heavy bolt assembly.
So let's go ahead and take that out to show you.
So the way to reduce the rate of fire of the 42 is to hugely increase the mass of the bolt,
so that it just takes the gun longer to get the bolt moving to accelerate it up to speed.
And they did that here, increasing the bolt weight to 950 grams, that's 2.1 pounds, almost double.
The original standard bolt was 550 grams, or about 1.2 pounds.
So they nearly doubled the ... mass of the bolt.
And that brings the rate of fire down to 700 to 900 rounds per minute.
Now you'll notice that this is marked in English in fact,
"Use only with rate reducing buffer."
Now that's in English because this is a commercial export gun, this isn't a German army gun.
In fact the German army tested this heavy bolt system, and ended up deciding not to adopt it.
By the way, there are a number of other improvements here.
Like this angled flat surface on the top, which is there
to reduce the possibility of spare links getting tangled up in the mechanism
which was again possible with the original style of 42 bolt.
But what this note is talking about is an additional R Type buffer,
a friction buffer that was added to the gun.
... One of the side effects of having a much heavier bolt is that when that bolt hits the end of travel
it's got a lot more momentum, and it's going to essentially kick the back of the gun harder.
And in order to prevent damage to the receiver, or the stock, or the buffer,
Rheinmetall put together a ... heavier duty buffer to complement that heavy bolt.
And this is what it looks like, and ...
yeah, I can't even push it in without pushing down on it with my body weight.
So, it is very important if you use a heavy bolt to have this buffer,
or else you will damage the gun.
Oh, and I should also point out: they finally added as a permanent standard feature
the bolt lock that was experimented with during the war in Germany
to prevent bolt bounce and out of battery discharge.
So, what we have here really is a gorgeous example
of ... essentially the fully modernised MG42.
The backstory to this particular gun is pretty cool.
It was imported by Colt ... sometime between '64 and '68, I don't know the exact year.
But it was imported for another company that had been contracted
to develop an electronic mount, a powered mount for MG42s.
And so they needed a gun to actually try fitting onto ... the mount that they were developing.
They ... may have fired it a little bit, but they didn't do any significant amount of firing with it.
Developed their mount, honestly I'm not sure if the mount ever actually came up for sale,
or if it was completed, or the contract was cancelled.
The gun ended up being sold off into the civilian market.
Because it was imported before 1968 it was a fully transferable gun.
Anyone who could pass a background check could go ahead and buy it, and someone did.
And so this got into the United States collector market
as a beautiful example of a ... Rheinmetall commercial production
post-war MG42 with the heavy bolt assembly.
Which I will point out the German army decided not to adopt,
they went with the standard light bolt and the high rate of fire.
So this makes for a really, really cool fully transferable gun in the US today.
It should have a bipod, the previous owner took the bipod off of it.
And any standard MG3 or 42 bipod will fit on there, so not a big deal there.
Unfortunately I don't have it here for the video, but it's just a detachable bipod.
Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
This was a really cool opportunity to look at a really neat piece of
post-World War Two firearms developmental history.
Thanks for watching.