Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the
Shooters Outpost Museum in Hooksett, New Hampshire,
taking a look at a very rare late Cold War Finnish PDW.
This is the Jatimatic, best known probably
for showing up in a couple of Hollywood films.
It ... featured in Red Dawn, it was featured in Cobra.
And it really didn't do much other than get into a couple of movies.
This was a tremendously unsuccessful project from a military and a commercial perspective.
Now, to give you the backstory on this:
it was ... manufactured by a company called Tampereen Asepaja,
which is the Tampere Arsenal, or Tampere Armoury,
in, you guessed it, the city of Tampere in Finland.
The company actually started in the early 1920s,
originally doing basically sporterisation of military surplus rifles.
There has always been a lot of hunting culture in Finland, as well as obviously winter sports.
And by the 1970s the company was manufacturing
hunting rifles and like .22 biathlon rifles.
Now they started looking into the military market around the late '70s, early 1980s.
And in fact the company's general manager, a guy named Jali Timari,
... (j-a t-i, Jali Timari, Jati-matic, you may see where the name has come from at this point),
he was tinkering around with a semi-auto .22 Olympic-style target pistol.
And had some (presumably unanticipated) full-auto, and started thinking about it and went,
"You know what? Actually maybe we could do something with that."
And got the idea to develop essentially a PDW.
One of the interesting things about the Jatimatic is it never had a shoulder stock.
We're used to seeing sometimes stuff like this come into the US without a shoulder stock
so that it can be considered just a pistol.
Well, this is the standard production pattern of the Jatimatic.
It was intended to be a PDW,
a ... hang it from a shoulder holster under the jacket sort of thing
along the lines of say the MP5K.
So a grand total of about 400 of these were ever manufactured.
... And I should say they were manufactured from about 1982 until about 1985.
The Finnish Border Guard did test them in '83 or so, '83 and '84.
Ultimately decided that the Border Guard just didn't really need any of this.
So before I tell you what ended up happening to them,
let's go ahead and take a look at how it works, and why it's not in line with the barrel.
Alright, let's start by taking a look at the markings on here, which are on this side.
So original manufacturer was Tampereen Asepaja.
Which was not originally marked on the guns,
originally they were just "Jati SMG 9mm", and a serial number.
The markings up there, and then "Omni Ordnance",
were added when this particular one was imported into the US.
This is a dealer sample machine gun.
These were tested by a variety of like law enforcement and security agencies.
Although, to the best of my knowledge, nobody ever really bought them in any significant quantity.
There's no external manual safety that you can see,
but there is actually a safety mechanism built into the gun.
In fact there are a couple of fairly unusual elements built in here.
We'll talk about the barrel angle in just a moment, but first
in order to cock this, because you'll notice there are no cocking levers on it either,
you actually use this folding vertical front grip.
Pull that back, it's going to lock the bolt into the rearward position.
And it's in the rearward, cocked position that you have this big "Fire" marking.
That would be pretty low hanging fruit to make some sort of joke about,
like the Finnish version of "Grip Zone".
But it actually does serve a good purpose because if I let the bolt forward,
if it weren't for that marking it would be impossible to tell
from the outside if the gun were cocked or not.
Now once ... the bolt is cocked,
we actually have a safety in the form of this charging handle.
So if you note, we have a little tab protruding here.
The bolt is accessible from the underside of the receiver there.
And if the charging handle/front grip is snapped up into place,
it actually holds the bolt in the rearward position.
So that is effectively the safety.
You can only shoot it with the vertical front grip down.
This was designed to use the double-stack double-feed magazines
originally from the Swedish K, which ... were used in the Finnish Suomi submachine guns,
so they're available in Finland.
It's a reasonable choice for a Finnish-made submachine gun.
It's also a very good magazine.
These are both Jatimatic produced magazines, and they're actually aluminium.
And they were available in both 20 and 40 round capacities.
Pretty simple, that's a bit chunky and long.
And it has just a very sort of typical standard lever magazine release on the back.
For sights we have a square notch on the back,
and we have a round post for a front sight.
You can thread that in and out to adjust the elevation.
And there is also a sling ... bar attached onto the side of the front sight tower.
Now the rear sling swivel is right here at the back of the gun.
... The only form of artificial third position support for this gun would be to have a sling,
and push the gun out into the sling and use sling tension to sort of help control it.
This is also the main disassembly feature, because if we pop this down
we can then open up the whole gun and see just how simple it is inside.
So if I lift that up, that's why there's this big round thing here, it's a pivot.
I can then take the recoil spring out.
And I have to unlock the bolt,
and then I can lift the bolt out of the gun.
Notice that this is a telescoping style of bolt
... as I said, like the Uzi and the various CZ submachine guns.
This would become a very common system
for having a significant mass of the bolt (and this thing is really quite heavy)
but a relatively short gun by moving the mass out in front of the breech face.
Now this was actually manufactured in two pieces.
It looks like it was probably a casting (if we look at the underside here)
for this main bulk of the bolt, which doesn't have to do anything except have mass.
The parts that need fine machining and heat treating are the breech face.
And you can see here the breech face is a separate component
that's snapped in place with that little flat spring.
So that has a fixed firing pin, and it has the extractor on it.
Now once we've got this open, I can actually just pull the barrel right out.
There's very little to it, we've got a couple of locating ribs with flats.
But that's it, it's a barrel.
We have this stamped upper assembly,
we have a stamped upper receiver, and then a polymer lower receiver.
The Jatimatic has a progressive trigger.
So that silver bit right there is our sear.
If I line the bolt up. We know that in the cocked position that "Fire" marking is
... in the ejection port.
So you can see that the sear is holding onto the front of the machined breech face element.
And when I pull the trigger the sear drops, the bolt goes forward.
And then on its return stroke under recoil,
the bolt is going to hit that disconnector, which resets the trigger.
So if I want to fire a second shot, I have to pull the trigger again.
Now the thing with a progressive trigger is that a short trigger pull like this gives you semi auto.
And a long trigger pull, which by the way in the Jatimatic
is a very heavy trigger pull, a full length pull gives you full-auto.
So in this, ... (there we go) ... if I'm holding the trigger all the way back,
the disconnector does not actually disconnect.
And so the gun will continue to fire until I release the trigger or run out of ammunition.
That's a little tricky to see, but we have a sheet metal sort of cradle there,
that's where the barrel goes.
So the barrel sits there between these two ridges, the flat sides go on top.
So we can drop the barrel in just like that.
Now there are three separate elements of essentially muzzle-rise control
that go into the Jatimatic.
And I'm going to show you all three of them, so first let's reassemble the gun.
The ... brass-looking bit of the recoil spring goes in the front.
The rear end snaps into a little hole there.
And then we can close the top cover, lock that down.
The Jatimatic has sort of three separate elements to help control muzzle climb.
The first is that by having the barrel ... about 5 degrees elevated off the line of the receiver,
the line of recoil when you fire is coming back fairly close to directly into the shooter's hand.
If the barrel were pointed downward in line with the ... receiver
the line of recoil would be coming up here, it would be above the shooter's hand.
And it would give a little bit of moment to try and push the muzzle up when you fire.
That's number one. Number two is because the bolt is travelling essentially downwards,
because you're presumably holding the muzzle parallel to the ground,
so the bolt's travelling downwards.
If you take the bolt's actual movement and split it into horizontal and vertical vectors
at the end of travel, you'll see that you have a little bit of vertical ... force
being pushed onto the muzzle of the gun
when the bolt hits the breech face here and stops moving.
So you basically are going to be jerking the gun down just a little bit every time it fires.
And that is intended to counteract the tendency of the muzzle to climb on firing. So that's number two.
And those two, by the way, are the reason why the barrel is not parallel to the receiver.
The third one of course is that you have to use the vertical front grip to fire the gun.
I suppose ... actually you could do this.
But the gun is really encouraging you to hold onto the front grip, because it is the safety mechanism.
So if it's locked in place like this, the gun won't fire.
So those are your three elements of controlling muzzle climb on the Jatimatic.
This is important, because as I said before, it was never ... made with a shoulder stock.
The most you would ever have on this would be pushing into a shooting sling for support.
In 1986 there was a rather notable theft of about two dozen full-auto Jatimatics from the factory.
And basically if we read between the lines,
with the Finnish Border Guard having decided that they didn't need this,
the Finnish government was really not particularly interested
in these being manufactured domestically.
And so between the theft and "permit irregularities",
the company's gun manufacturing licence was pulled.
No more of the Jatimatics were manufactured at that point,
and really that was kind of the end of the line, or almost the end of the line.
In 1995, Timari, who still owned all of the IP for the gun,
and all the tooling, and all the parts, and all that stuff,
he sold everything to a new company called Golden Gun located in the Finnish city of Turku.
They essentially renamed it the GG-95 PDW,
and attempted to reintroduce it and sell them again.
And it went over as a complete flop.
There were some developmental changes that they tried making,
some differences in the polymer lowers.
... They changed the upper stampings
so that ... the top was flat parallel to the barrel.
One of the issues that this had in its limited use originally,
was that people would kind of tend to instinctively aim in line with the top of the receiver,
which is very much not exactly in line with the barrel,
and shoot substantially high as a result.
So they figured, "Well, maybe we can fix that just by changing the shape of the stamping on top."
At any rate, nobody bought GG-95s and they went out of business as well.
So there are a handful of prototype GG-95s around.
Perhaps, hopefully, someday I can get my hands on some of those and show them to you.
But for the time being this is the standard definitive Jatimatic PDW submachine gun.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.