Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today in
Toronto, Canada at Movie Armaments Group,
taking a look at their CETME Modelo A rifle.
This is, well, it is a Spanish service rifle that came before the CETME Modelos B and C
(kind of makes sense there), which were the standard- issue Spanish army rifles for several decades.
And perhaps historically of more importance, this is a developmental
iteration towards the HK G3 rifle, which became adopted by a whole mess of people.
So, this was designed by a group of German ex-Mauser engineers.
... Well, during World War Two Mauser had kind of unintentionally discovered and then
developed the roller delayed blowback mechanism. And they put it together as the Sturmgewehr 45,
which was ... basically only getting through prototype stage when World War Two ended.
A handful of parts kits for these guns were captured by the Allies. They were studied fairly intensively,
and the engineers who were familiar with this system, right after the war ended up working in France.
They were then basically recruited by the Spanish government to help develop
a new rifle for the Spanish military. And that's where we start approaching this guy.
So the team was led by an engineer by the name of Ludwig Vorgrimler,
and in 1950 he put together what was called the Modelo 2. The Spanish actually had
... two different groups of Germans, in fact, designing potential rifles for them,
and they ended up with the Modelo 1 and the Modelo 2.
And between 1950 and '52 these two rifles competed against each other.
The Modelo 2 would eventually develop into this one. In 1952 it was chosen over the Modelo 1.
And at that point the Spanish military competition, well really stops being a competition,
and it turns into a development program to turn the ... Modelo 2 into a rifle that's suitable for the army at large.
Now one of the problems that they had encountered at the very beginning is that
this roller delayed blowback system had been developed around the 8mm Kurz cartridge,
which is obviously an intermediate cartridge, very similar to 7.62x39.
And what the Spanish wanted was this really quite interesting and unique cartridge that ended up being a
7.92x41mm CETME cartridge. I actually have an entire separate video on that cartridge itself,
and so rather than delve into it here, I will suggest that you check out that video if you haven't before.
That'll be linked at the end of this one.
That's what the Modelo 2 was designed around. By the time they got to this guy,
however, we're getting into the mid- 1950s, and now NATO is becoming a thing.
The 7.62 NATO cartridge was standardised in early 1954, and the Spanish
are really looking at this with a fair amount of interest. Like, they kind of want to
... standardise with NATO, but it might be difficult. This rifle really isn't designed for it.
... The NATO cartridge is much more powerful than the 7.92 CETME round.
So they develop an intermediate, and the intermediate ... cartridge is coupled with this rifle.
Which is really starting to look like a G3, or a CETME that we're familiar with today.
So the problem they had is if you chambered this rifle for 7.62 NATO it would work,
but it didn't delay the bolt long enough. Like, the bolt would open under very high pressure,
the bolt velocity would be way too high. You'd get a couple hundred rounds through the gun
and then it would basically batter itself to death. You'd crack receivers, crack parts, rollers.
And so their first attempt to fix this problem was actually just to download the ammunition.
Standard 7.62 NATO ... the round they were working with was a 144 grain bullet at 2,800 feet per second.
That's 9.3 grams at like 850 metres per second. In order to accommodate this rifle,
they downloaded that cartridge to a 107 grain bullet, 7.3 grams, at just 2,500 feet per second,
760 ... metres per second. And with that lighter cartridge this worked OK.
And so they actually went ahead and built a substantial number of these.
I believe the CETME Modelo B also used that cartridge.
But that gave them other problems, like they weren't NATO standard for one thing, and they were using
7.62 NATO machine guns, and the light ammo wouldn't work properly in the machine guns.
So they're ending up with two separate cartridges that look the same, but
... they can't be interchanged in the rifles and machine guns.
So this would ultimately lead to the adoption of the CETME Modelo C in 7.62 NATO, solve all the problems.
Anyway, that's the whole story. What we want to look at today is specifically the Model A.
So it has a number of features that are substantially different from the later patterns.
Including, most interestingly, the fact that it fires from an open bolt in full-auto. So let's take a look at that.
There are not a whole lot of markings on this thing. On the left side of the receiver
we have Fusil Automático CETME. CETME by the way stands for
Centro de Estudios Tecnicos de Materiales Especiales. So the Centre for Technical Studies of Special Materials.
Which is some, you know, big long fancy way of saying gun development.
Serial number here is A, which indicates the Modelo A, and 4197. They made several thousand of these.
There is in fact a particularly interesting story about these
relating to French Marine Commandos who ended up using them in North Africa,
and if you want to see that whole story I actually have a blog post about it, so I'll post a link to that in the video description.
You should check it out if you're curious about some real-world use of the Modelo A.
We have a three-position fire selector
(we'll flip it over to this side where you can see the actual lever), T is Tiro, which is shoot,
that's semi-auto. S is the safe position and R is Rápido, probably, or Repetición,
full-auto. So semi, safe, full. And, well, let's come back to this in just a moment.
Unlike the later patterns of CETME, the Modelo A has a tangent leaf rear sight
(I apologise that it's a really grimy tangent rear leaf sight),
but that goes from 200 metres out to a 1,000 metres. This would of course be replaced
on the later patterns with the rotating aperture type sight that we're used to on CETMEs.
The front sight is just a basic hooded post.
The muzzle device is a combination. It's a brake and it's also set up for rifle grenades.
Like, everything military at this period was designed for rifle grenades.
There really is no handguard on here, instead you just have bipod legs.
And in this way, it's kind of like several of the patterns of heavy barrelled FAL,
where when you fold the bipod up, presto, there's your handguard. Be careful not to grip it
weirdly and accidentally touch the barrel and burn the crap out of yourself.
And then these snap down, so there's a little spring clip here that snaps over the barrel
to lock the bipod legs in place.
When you fold these down you can pivot the gun back and forth. You can't push into the bipod,
because it will collapse, but you can pull back against the bipod, because it does lock up here in this position.
There is also a folding carry handle which a lot of people don't like,
but was also again popular on a lot of rifles of this period.
The buttstock I find rather interesting. It actually has a rubber pad on it.
It has a sling cut-out that is perfectly World War Two German in nature.
And then the shape of this buttstock is actually different a bit than the later CETMEs and G3s.
It's a little bit shorter, has a little more pronounced of a hump here,
and it is very reminiscent of the Sturmgewehr.
Unfortunately, I don't have a magazine for this rifle, but it would have been the steel CETME pattern,
with a gentle continuous curve.
... The CETME Modelo A used the same magazine as the B and the C, so it's the magazine you're used to seeing.
The release on this is a button only, they had not yet developed the paddle
magazine [release] that people are more used to seeing on the HK.
Now disassembly is going to work just the same way as HK rifles.
We're going to push out the two pins at the back,
pop those guys out. Note that there are no holes in the buttstock to hold those pins in.
We can then pull the rear end off of the gun, and I forgot to unclip the sling.
(Take the sling off of its hook there.)
Now I can put the buttstock off, along with its very long recoil spring.
There's that, and its very long recoil spring.
The grip assembly now pivots down, there's a third pin here that I can
take out to remove the entire grip assembly.
Alright that pin out, we can take off the grip assembly, and then we can take out the bolt.
The charging handle on the Modelo A is a bit different in style than the later HKs and CETMEs.
It does work the same way, when you open the handle like this, that gives you the
extra leverage to cam open and unlock the bolt and then it just cycles backwards,
and drop the bolt out the back now. Note that there is a little ball detent there
and that charging handle snaps into place on it.
Now we pull out our bolt and carrier out the back.
And then we have our bare receiver, barrel and bipod assembly.
The bolt carrier here is very similar to a standard HK91.
The details of these change, the exact dimensions change,
but the concept did not. So there's your anti-bounce lever.
The one thing that's really different here is that there is a sear engagement surface right there.
And if we take a look at the fire control group, we will see this big ol' piece
that has no position being in an HK fire control group.
So if I'm in semi-auto mode, this thing has no purpose.
In fact, ... in semi-auto mode it's pulled down out of the way.
This is actually the full-auto sear,
so in semi-auto this is dropped down so it doesn't catch on the bolt carrier. Instead you have just
a hammer. When you pull the trigger, hammer goes forward, etc. Reset it,
bolt goes forward, trips the disconnector and you're ready to fire again.
In safe, the sear comes up so it will lock the bolt in the rearward position if it's back there,
and trigger's locked, does nothing. Then the neat one is in full-auto. If I pull the trigger
it's going to do two things, it's going release the hammer, right there,
and it's also dropping this sear down. So if I hold the ... trigger down in full-auto,
this releases so this doesn't hold onto the bolt, the hammer gets re-cocked,
bolt comes back, bolt goes forward, bolt trips the disconnecter here by riding over it. Ow.
(That's a little rough on the fingers), and the hammer immediately drops again.
Until such time as I release the trigger, when this comes up, and it's going to catch the bolt
in the rearward position by locking against this surface right here.
So, you can see this in operation. I have the rifle set to semi-auto.
Rack it, fire.
Rack it, fire. Closed bolt of course.
In safe, I got nothing.
And then when I go to the full-auto position when I rack it,
it actually locks in the open position. When I fire,
bolt slams home. If I hold the trigger here and use the charging handle to cycle the gun,
it will continue to cycle until I release the trigger, and then it locks open once more.
That prevents any possibility of a cook-off because you don't have a round sitting in the chamber,
in potentially a very hot barrel after you've been firing full-auto.
And it theoretically enhances the cooling capability of the gun by allowing air to flow through the barrel.
So that is a really neat feature, and that would be dropped on later patterns of the CETME.
They decided to simplify it and just go with a closed bolt ... all the time design.
So there you have the elusive CETME Modelo A completely field stripped.
I probably don't need to tell you this, but CETME Modelo A rifles are really quite scarce today,
especially in the United States, since they're all machine guns.
There are some rebuilds around, ... a few of these trickled through here and there
but they're really quite difficult to find. So it's really cool that Movie Armaments Group
happens to have this one, and they let me get my grubby hands on it,
and tear it apart, and show it to you guys. Hopefully you enjoyed the video.
A big thanks to MAG for the opportunity, and thanks for watching.