Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at
the Grey Room at HK's facility in Ashburn, Virginia,
where we are going to take a look at a bunch of
interesting HK firearms. In particular today
we're taking a look at the VP70.
We have both a VP70Z, the civilian version,
and much cooler, a VP70M, the military version.
Now ... the elephant in the room here is this big stock hanging off the back of it.
In classic tradition this is not just a shoulder stock,
but also a holster for the gun, we'll take a look at that up close in a minute.
And what this does is convert a semi-auto pistol into a 3-round burst firing
machine pistol / personal defence weapon / submachine gun type of piece.
It is I think unique
in that the burst mechanism is actually physically built into the stock itself.
If you take the stock off you no longer have a machine pistol capability.
It is semi-automatic only unless you add the stock,
which of course gives you a substantial added controllability factor
from having this third point of contact to control the gun.
And the rate of fire that this gives you is a pretty blistering 2,200 rounds per minute.
... We'll touch on why they chose that rate of fire in a minute.
But a few other things to mention about the VP70 - there are several,
this is a pistol that broke ground in a number of different areas.
It was for one thing a particularly high capacity pistol for its time,
and even stands up today with an 18 round magazine capacity.
Now a lot of that is because, or is required, or certainly a very good idea,
because of this 3-round burst mechanism.
If every trigger pull fires 3 rounds, you need a pretty large magazine
or else it's going to run empty pretty darn quickly.
So in burst mode this gives you six trigger pulls, and that's a start.
And certainly 18 rounds in 1973 when this thing first went into production
was pretty phenomenally high.
This is also the first polymer-framed service pistol to ever be produced.
The Glock of course would take that concept and really run with it,
but it would do that about 10 years later.
The VP70 was really the very first in that field, maybe even a bit ahead of its time.
There is of course an aluminium chassis moulded into that polymer, just as we see done today.
This was also a double-action only striker-fired automatic pistol,
and while ... that's certainly not a first of its kind, it was unusual for the time.
So beyond that it's simple blowback,
unlike most guns of this type it doesn't have a locked breech.
It relies on the weight of the slide, the force in the spring,
and interestingly very deep rifling that actually allows some gas blow-by when you fire
to help moderate the pressure of 9x19 ammunition.
So all these things put together make for a very economical and fast pistol to produce.
Because the firing mechanism it has very few moving parts.
The polymer frame makes it easy to mould and manufacture in large quantities.
The slide is actually made from sheet metal with a couple of welded in blocks.
This did in fact ... take its ideas largely from the Mauser [VP - Volkspistole] of World War Two.
... Of course the VP70 ... being named the same way is not, it turns out, a coincidence.
So the primary designer of this gun was a guy named Alex Seidel,
who was an engineer, formerly of Mauser and one of the founding members of H&K.
All of whom, by the way, were ex-Mauser employees.
And he really did take that concept from the end of World War Two
of the stamped sheet-metal striker-fired Volkspistole, and reinvigorate it for the Cold War.
The idea was if Germany got overrun by the Soviet Union
in a massive attack through the Fulda Gap,
they would need something that was cheap and easy to produce,
and something that could be kind of a stay behind, resistance, guerrilla sort of firearm.
And that apparently really was the concept behind the VP70.
Now, it was offered to the German military when it was first introduced.
The German military never did actually adopt it.
However, they did make a little more than 3,000 of the VP70Ms.
They then transitioned it into civilian production as a semi-auto only pistol,
and produced even more of those, ... 23,369, so like 23,500 of the semi-auto guns as well.
And we actually see those in the United States fairly commonly,
they were sold over here, as well as in Germany and other places.
So let's go ahead and take a look up close at this guy,
and I'll show you how this actually works with this burst-firing mechanism.
Alright, a couple of things to point out first.
We'll start over here, the military guns are marked VP70M.
The civilian ones VP70Z, the "Z" is for "Zivil", or civilian.
You'll notice on the back of the 70Z frames you just have a solid frame,
where on the back of the military version we have these cutouts for the stock to attach.
And by the way, this particular Z is one of about 400 that were made for the Italian market in 9x21.
Italy prohibited civilian possession or use of military cartridges,
and thus on the Italian ... civilian pistol market
9mm has been replaced by the 9x21 cartridge to get around that restriction.
Also point out the civilian pistol has a cross-bolt safety here on the trigger guard.
The military version does not, you can see the button there, but this is non-functional.
On the military version the very heavy-double action only trigger
is considered sufficient safety all by itself.
On our holster stock here we have a selector lever for ... 3-shot bursts and semi-auto.
And what that does is lift up this little shark-fin looking lever.
We'll take a closer look at that in just a moment.
First, I'm going to go ahead and pop that open,
and drop our pistol right into it.
This takes you right back to the days of the teens and '20s when like every new military pistol
could be acquired with a shoulder stock / holster.
Now this attaches to a belt using a round peg that drops into either side of the holster.
This and a sling were offered with the gun in its military state,
although I don't have one here to show you.
Basically strap this plate onto your belt, or drop leg I suppose,
and then the stock just slides onto it right there
so that you can pull the stock off to use it as a shoulder stock if you want to.
This guy slides right on there.
To take it off, you actually have to have it in single shot position,
hold the lug back, and the stock just slides right off.
This lug here has a little locking pin.
Now to disassemble the pistol itself,
pull this locking block down, slide comes back, up, and off.
Take the mag out, and that's all there is to it. It is a very simple gun to disassemble.
Inside here we have our striker system.
So the striker is grabbed right there,
and I can't really pull it back because it's got a very strong spring.
There is also a spring preventing it from travelling forward.
So you can see there when I push it forward the firing pin protrudes.
This is ... the normal at rest position of the striker.
So that return spring on it
has enough force to prevent this from firing if it is, say, dropped on its muzzle.
And then when you fire, the reason that this thing has such a long and atrocious trigger pull
is that it has to fully cock the striker back about a centimetre.
So about four tenths of an inch.
Then it releases it, that gives the striker enough power to set off a cartridge and fire.
If we look at the civilian semi-auto only version here, it's very easy to see how that works.
This silver bit right here grabs the striker,
and when I pulled the trigger back it's going to pull the striker back,
until right there at the end of travel it's going to drop, right there.
That dropping releases the striker, which then snaps forward and fires.
And ... if I continue to hold down the trigger,
because this is still dropped down it doesn't re-engage the striker,
and so it kind of acts as its own disconnector.
... Because the striker rests at its forward position,
there's no way that this thing can fire a second shot
unless I release the trigger to bring this sear forward
to where the striker is now resting again, and pull it again.
So that's the semi-auto version, it's very simple.
HK ... was at the time very proud that it only has like four moving parts in it.
Really good design. There's our ejector, not a whole lot else here that we need to talk about.
In the military pattern there are a couple of extra pieces here.
But when I just have the pistol they don't do anything, so this works the same way.
We've got our sear catch right there, and it's going to pull the striker back,
drop down, release the striker, and fire.
However, if you'll notice we have this little finger that now protrudes out the back of the pistol,
and we have these two additional sear catches right here.
Note also that there is this little round plunger in the bottom of the back of the pistol frame.
Note that none of these parts exist on the civilian guns.
So the civilian version is very much a semi-auto,
the design has been changed substantially to make it semi-auto only.
In addition to the other bits on the stock, we have this little plunger right here.
And when I put the selector switch into 3-round burst,
that plunger pushes forward, and it is going to push that little round peg in.
So if I go ahead and fit the stock on,
then I switch this into 3-round burst mode this lever lifts up.
You can't really see it, but that plunger is pushing its counterpart in the pistol in.
And now the functionality changes.
Now when I pull the trigger these two rear catches lift up,
and what that does is it means that when ... this main trigger-based one drops,
these two are actually going to catch the striker and hold it.
Now this is going to operate a little bit differently.
First off, I've put the slide on here without its spring to show you that every time it cycles
it's going to depress that little triangular lever.
That is an important element of the burst ... mechanism.
In fact this is basically the burst counter.
Now with the slide back off, things are going to work a bit differently.
So these two catches are lifted up,
but the striker's forward because the pistol hasn't fired yet.
So when I pull the trigger the first time it's going to hold the striker back here,
and release it as with a semi-auto shot.
The slide will come back, it is going to depress this, you can hear it click there.
Then when the slide comes forward there are a pair of
angled surfaces in the bottom of the slide that are going to push this down.
And it'll go down, it's not going to lock down,
it'll drop down long enough to release the slide, and then come back up.
So slide goes forward, this fires shot number two.
Now, ... when the slide cycles back ... it'll be ejecting case number two right now,
it's going to trip that again. You can hear it click again.
Now when I push this down, it stays down.
... This is now firing shot number three, and that's the last shot that we want in our burst.
So the slide's going to cycle backward.
It'll hit this, but this doesn't do anything now, its role is done.
Since I'm still holding the trigger down,
you can now see that all three of these catch surfaces remain in the downward position.
So the striker is not going to be re-cocked,
and it's not going to fire again until I release the trigger
when all of these come back up.
So, shot number one
that goes down, that's shot number two.
That goes down again. Now this goes down and stays down, that's shot number three.
And by the way, if you do manage to release the trigger before you've fired all 3 rounds,
the act of releasing the trigger resets all of this.
So you don't have to worry about the counter
firing once and twice, and then on the next burst only firing one round.
It will always fire a 3 round burst, regardless of the trigger position on the previous burst.
I mentioned the two surfaces in the slide that drop that auto-sear, they are here and here. So.
When those go forward you can see how these two surfaces are lined up with these two.
And those are angled at the back right there, these are angled at the front,
so you get a nice smooth disengagement which releases the striker.
So production began on the VP70 in 1973,
and as I said, about 3,200, in fact 3,221 of these pistols were manufactured.
They started at serial number 500 and they went to 3,731.
You can see this one's at the tail end of production.
Now the German military did not adopt this pistol.
Exactly who they were making them for is unclear, HK was privately owned at that point
and records are a bit unavailable of exactly what their motive was.
But as a privately owned company, certainly they had every right to manufacture
a whole bunch of these anticipating a military contract
either with Germany, or potentially with some other country.
The civilian copies came afterwards. Those start at serial number 70,000.
And they made a total of 23,689 of them.
The one other thing I should point out here is the design of the sights,
because while the rear sight is pretty typical, just an open notch, the front sight is unusual.
The VP70 front sight uses basically two polished ramps and a dark space in between them
to give the illusion of a ... normal front post.
So when you look at this thing, you can kind of see there
that that dark space in the centre kind of becomes its own front sight.
It is really interesting how this actually works in practice.
It doesn't show up all that well here on camera because of focal length issues,
but right there you can kind of see it better.
What looks like a black post in the middle there is actually a shadow.
With that all said, I think it is time for us to head to the range
and actually try this out, primarily in burst mode.
[ Stay tuned for tomorrow's video at the range! ]