Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction House. I'm checking out some of the guns
that they are putting up for sale in their September of 2015 Premier auction.
And there's one in here that I've been waiting for a long time to get my hands on to show you guys.
That is a Gewehr 41(M). Now Germany started a production program,
or a development program, for a self-loading army rifle in about 1939.
They put out a whole list of requirements and asked for submissions
and four different companies attempted to get involved: Rheinmetall, Krieghoff, Mauser and Walther.
Now, only Mauser and Walther actually made it to the prototype stage,
and the resulting guns were the Gewehr 41(M) for Mauser and 41(W) for Walther.
Ultimately the Walther won (and you'll see why), it was eventually developed into the Gewehr 43
and hundreds of thousands of those were manufactured.
The least produced of this whole lot was the Gewehr 41(M).
Now I should start by describing the requirements that the German military,
or the German Ordnance Department, had for these rifles.
It couldn't just be: any self-loading rifle, do whatever you think is best.
Well, no, this is the German government we're talking about here.
So, they had a list of, a bunch of, specific requirements:
The gun had to be about the same size as a Kar 98k, same barrel length.
It had to have no moving parts on the top of the gun, presumably because they might catch on something.
So, if you think about a lot of our self-loading rifles they do,
like the Gewehr 43 has a big ... bolt carrier that moves back and forth.
The M1 Garand has, ... big stuff moving around.
The rifles could not have holes drilled in the barrel, for example, gas port holes.
So you couldn't use a gas piston system. And the barrel couldn't be a recoil operated gun.
So the action of the gun was kind of already narrowed down to the Bang system,
or as we in America often know it more commonly, gas trap system. We'll look at that in a moment.
And then lastly, the other major kind of goofy requirement was that should the system fail,
jam up, whatever, get dirty, you had to be able to operate the gun just like a Kar98 bolt-action.
Which is why we have this rather goofy bolt handle on the side.
Now Mauser took these requirements pretty seriously
and they created a gun that fulfilled all of these Ordinance requirements.
Walther took these requirements less seriously. They broke a number of them, just ignored them,
and frankly they came out with a gun that was a lot more effective.
And the Ordnance Department, the military, recognised that and ended up
adopting the Walther system and canning this one.
So let me bring back the camera and let's go through the operating
and disassembly process for this gun, because it is a doozy.
All in all about 15,000 of these rifles were made, that was the contract that Mauser was given,
and we're pretty sure they fulfilled it pretty completely. Now these rifles went to the Eastern Front
for use and saw very high rates of attrition there, so not very many of them survive today,
especially back here in the United States.
Now, let's start at the muzzle end and take a look at what I already referred to as the gas trap or Bang system.
Beginning of disassembly: I have to take this little detent here push it in and unthread this nose cap.
If you have a Gewehr 41 Walther this system will look very familiar to you.
The next thing we do is take off this muzzle sleeve, and the gas piston is hiding inside it.
Alright, so here are all of our gas system components.
This is the operating rod of the gun and the way this works is that the gas piston
sits here on the outside of the barrel.
It's contained within this sleeve. You can see there are a couple of holes
punctured in this sleeve as gas relief holes, so as this piston starts moving backwards
it clears these holes and the excess gas can vent. Now the way gas actually gets in there
is through the four little lobes on the inside of this muzzle cover.
So this guy, just thread it on like this,
and gas comes out the muzzle of the rifle here, and it's sort of partially trapped by this cone.
Because the entrance to the cone is restricted, some of the gas comes out
but ... some of it circles back through those lobes and hits this gas piston forcing it backwards.
When this piston goes backward it pushes on this operating rod like that. That is what cycles the gun.
So, now that we have that inspected, let's move to the action at the back.
Alright, here's where things get kind of goofy. Now, there's an action rod you can see right here,
and there's a second one on the opposite side of the rifle right there.
I'm going to reach to the front of the gun and push on that gas piston.
Now you can see the action rods coming back. So that's what actually cycles the bolt here.
Alright, now that we've seen that, let's go back to the gun in its closed ready to fire configuration,
and let's look at what we have to do to get access to it.
In order to open the bolt manually I have to lift this bolt handle,
like so, and then I can retract it backwards.
Once the gun is open, there's a bolt hold-open ... And I should say the bolt hold-open is not the follower.
Pressing down on the follower doesn't do anything.
Instead what we have to do is press down this lever, and then you can close the bolt.
Now for locking, we have a two lug, rotating bolt here.
And we have a bolt head separate from the bolt body.
So, right about here, as I continue to push the bolt forward, the bolt head is going to rotate
and you will see this cam surface drop down there ... like that.
I have just now forced the bolt lugs into their recesses up here in the front of the receiver.
The gun is now locked and I turn down the bolt handle at the back to make it ready to fire.
So, now let's take a look at the internals.
So I have the bolt partway open, I'm going to take these two knurled surfaces,
squeeze them together and lift up. This gives me access to the inside of the gun,
where I have my bolt right here.
So this is the bolt and bolt head.
When it's in firing position,
the bolt head is rotated like that, so these locking lugs engage in the top and bottom of the receiver.
We have a firing pin extension here, you'll see that in a moment.
But when the bolt is closed like this the firing pin protrudes through, ... hits the primer, fires the gun.
Now, what actually moves the bolt when I move this handle back here is ...
there's a little recess in this guide rod right there
and there's a stud on the back of the bolt right here. This stud sits in that recess and
that is how the bolt, well, how the charging handle pulls the bolt back and forth.
Get that positioned, there we go, so this wants to spring up, but ...
Now the bolt and the charging handle are locked together.
Now here's an interesting quirk of the design. My charging handle is vertical right now because it's
partially retracted. If I am going to fire the gun, I push the bolt handle all the way forward, like it is here.
The bolt handle is now all the way forward. You can see again
this is the little recess that's controlling the position of the bolt.
When I rotate this handle down I'm exposing the recoil spring.
Only when the bolt handle here is down is the recoil spring actually engaged.
So now when I fire, the bolt will travel backwards on its own against the the force of this recoil spring.
When I lift the bolt handle up ... like that,
now the recoil spring is hidden and the bolt cannot travel except by me pulling the handle.
So the the practical reason for doing this is that when I'm using the gun manually,
like it's a bolt action, I'm not fighting the recoil spring.
It also means that I have a positive way to push the bolt forward with the handle.
So it's actually kind of a system that makes sense, it's just done in an awfully complex manner.
Now lastly, let's look at the firing pin and the safety.
Put this back in, get the bolt and the charging handle to the right position, there we go, now close this.
Now I'm going to cock the rifle. Now it's ready to fire.
Now if we open this up, you can see that the firing pin extension is held back.
It's held back by this little sear. When I pull the trigger that sear drops, this goes forward and fires the rifle.
We also have a safety mechanism here on the top of the rifle.
Right now it's set to fire, I flip it over, set to safe.
That is actually a really simple safety. If I show you the inside...
When I flip the safety, I'm just rotating this piece right here
When it's on fire, I have a flat which allows the striker to go forward.
When I'm on safe I have a rounded piece which holds the striker in place and prevents it from going forward.
That's actually pretty effective, pretty simple and ... pretty reliable.
I think that actually covers pretty much all of the mechanical elements of the Gewehr 41(M).
You can see here...
You know I mentioned that the recoil spring is disabled, see there's nothing forcing the bolt forward
because the recoil spring is disabled. When I want to close it, I turn the bolt handle down.
Now it will function as a semi-automatic, as long as none of this stops working right,
that little tab doesn't snap off the bolt carrier
the gas piston system on the muzzle doesn't get carboned up (which by the way, it will).
This was the very definition of an overly complex and unreliable rifle in the field.
And the German government, the German Ordnance Department, absolutely made the right choice
in choosing the Walther version instead.
Oh, should point out: this is a 10 round magazine, it is non-detachable,
just like the Gewehr 41 Walther. It is fed through stripper clips through this guide.
The sights and the barrel hardware, the bands here, are pretty much just lifted straight from the Kar98.
Rear sight goes out to 1200. The front sight is mounted on this gas piston cover,
so you have some potential inaccuracy here if this loosens up.
These two tabs kind of lock it into place, but over time with enough wear, yeah, that'll loosen up,
and then your front sight kind of wiggles, and that's not a good thing.
I hope you guys enjoyed the video. I know I really enjoyed being able to get my hands on one of these
to disassemble and show it to you. They're ... really cool because of how
unwise of a service rifle they would have been, had they been adopted.
These are quite rare. One of the rarest of the German self-loading rifles.
And if you'd like to have this one yourself, of course it is up for sale. It's a gorgeous example.
If you take a look at the link in the description text below, that will take you to
Rock Island's catalogue page on the gun. You can take a look at their pictures,
although you've probably seen more in depth by this point in the video,
you can also see their description, their price estimates, all that sort of stuff.
You can create an account and place a bid on-line or you can come here in person
to check the gun out yourself and then participate in the auction.
Thanks for watching and good luck.