Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the
Shooters Outpost Museum in Hooksett, New Hampshire,
taking a look at a Steyr MPi-81 submachine gun.
This is almost identical to the MPi-69 that preceded it,
which is in turn almost identical, practically speaking, to the Uzi.
This really is an example of Steyr in this case,
normally a pretty innovative, interesting, good firearms company,
in the late 1960s figuring,
"We don't really have any particularly fantastic ideas about how to improve something like the Uzi.
But the Austrian government wants some submachine guns,
and they'll probably buy something from us.
So let's just copy the Uzi and call it good."
And that's pretty much what they have done.
... There are a few details that are different from the Uzi.
Of course the stock is different, this uses a collapsing wire stock instead of the Uzi's
kind of intricate folding strut stock thing.
And this has a polymer lower instead of the Uzi's metal lower with polymer grips on it.
But beyond that, this is for all practical purposes an Uzi.
So let's take a look at it, and I'll show you how it's an Uzi.
Check it out, we have a telescoping-bolt submachine gun
with a relatively long barrel for its actual size.
We have the magazine located in the grip stick, we have a heel magazine release on it.
We have 25 and 32 round magazines. We have a collapsing stock.
Kind of sounds like an Uzi doesn't it?
Now I should point out these are not Uzi magazines, these are a proprietary Steyr magazine.
They are in fact the same magazine that would go on to be used
in the 9mm ... submachine gun version of the Steyr AUG later on.
It is a good magazine, like there's ... nothing at all wrong with the magazine.
We have a post front sight. Notice that that is threaded but offset.
So to adjust your windage you rotate that sight left or right a quarter turn.
To adjust your elevation you spin it completely around in half turn increments.
So both adjustments can be done on the front sight.
The rear sight is an aperture with a ... fancy little stepped conical hole there
to not give you glare in the sunlight.
There is a ... 100 metre and 200 metre aperture,
with these nice little protective wings that even those things look just like the Uzi.
Control wise we have a cross-bolt fire selector that actually has three positions.
So this is the safe position, which locks the trigger.
If I push it to the middle position,
you can see that red band has just cleared the side of the lower assembly.
And if we open the bolt
(hold this to let it down gently) but if I fire the gun in this position
with the selector halfway through, it is semi-auto only.
Now if I push the selector all the way through,
I then still have semi-auto if I want it in the form of a progressive trigger.
Note how that's still semi-auto.
But if I pull the trigger all the way back
that's just going to cycle until I'm out of ammo or I release the trigger.
So an interesting combination here.
Typically when you have a progressive trigger you don't have a dedicated semi-auto setting,
but on this particular design you do.
... You have to be a little careful to get it just in the right position,
but there is your semi-auto centre setting.
The stock is a cheap, simple, wire collapsing stock.
To adjust it you push in both of these buttons.
You'll see there are a couple of little square notches here.
There are multiple positions where it can lock in.
So we've got one there, we've got one there, number three.
That's fully extended, ... you've actually got three that it can lock into.
And then you can simply pull the stock completely out.
I've already been demonstrating this, I should have mentioned it I suppose.
The charging handle is different than the Uzi, they're both top mounted.
But on the Steyr we have this as a non-reciprocating charging handle
here on the top left side of the gun.
Now I mentioned the MPi-69, that was the first version of this.
And really the only difference between the 69 and the 81 versions
is on the 69 this had the sling swivel on it.
And I'm sure the good idea fairy showed up and someone figured,
"Well, you can be carrying the gun on the sling,
and then all you have to do to charge it
is like grab the thing and push it down into the sling.
And it'll pull back on the charging handle, cock the gun,
and you're ready to shoot at a moment's notice, like Chuck Norris."
By 1981 they realised that was in fact a terrible idea.
And so on the 81 the charging handle is just a charging handle,
and the sling bar has been moved to the front of the barrel nut.
The rear sling bar was here on the side the entire time.
Disassembly is a little bit different from the Uzi.
These are both stamped sheet metal guns, the Steyr and the Uzi.
The Uzi has a removable top cover, the Steyr has this sort of neat pivoting ... door at the back.
So make sure you have the bolt down or else
this will come flying out the back of the gun when you open it up.
But you push in on the button, pivot that up,
and then you can pull out the bolt and recoil spring assembly.
We have one main recoil spring, and then there is a secondary spring
right here at the back that just acts as a buffer at the very end of bolt travel
(... actually adds quite a lot of resistance)
so that this doesn't come slamming back into the sheet metal of the receiver.
For when it does just gently tap the receiver end, you have a rubber pad there at the end.
The bolt itself is extremely similar to the Uzi.
We have two sear notches here.
So like the Uzi this has two sears that engage at the same time on either side.
It is a telescoping bolt, which of course means that the breech face is back here,
and much of the mass of the bolt is telescoped forward.
What that does is allow you to have the necessary mass of the bolt,
because this is just simple blowback 9mm Parabellum,
but it allows you to reduce the overall length of the receiver behind the breech face.
Move that length in front of the breech face, which means you can have a longer barrel.
So the barrel comes all the way back to here, you get about a 10 inch barrel.
This has been kind of a standard system
for submachine gun design since, well basically, the Uzi.
Unfortunately I can't show you the rest of disassembly.
What you're supposed to do is push this button down,
and then you can unscrew the barrel nut, just like an Uzi.
But on this one this button and the barrel nut are jammed in place really quite tight.
I'm not sure exactly what's holding them in there, and I don't want to be the one to break anything.
So what you would do is push button, unscrew the barrel, barrel comes out the front.
And then you can slide this sheet metal box out the back of the polymer lower assembly.
Now there is a good feature here in that, as I mentioned, we have the two sear engagement points.
Now the reason for having those two sets of sear engagement points is one of safety.
A universal potential issue with open-bolt ... predominantly 9mm submachine guns
is if you drop the gun, and it lands on the butt of the gun,
the bolt will tend to bounce, and it can bounce like that.
Now on ... basically all submachine guns, if it's an open bolt gun
the bolt will lock to the rear like this ready to fire, but only if it gets far enough back.
There is a point in there where the bolt can come far enough back
to pick up a cartridge out of the magazine,
but not far enough back to be locked in place by the firing sear.
And without an additional safety mechanism,
if that happens, the gun can fire when it's dropped and the butt hits the ground.
The second set of sear notches on the Steyr stop the bolt in this position.
You can sort of see it there. This is ... just beyond the point where the bolt would pick up a cartridge.
And so if the bolt bounces back to this position
it will be caught here rather than chambering that cartridge and firing it unintentionally.
So you can sort of see that.
This is the ... safety stop on the bolt.
So it's just past the point where a cartridge would actually be picked up.
And what it means is that if the gun bounces open like this,
that second sear notch will catch
rather than the bolt chambering that one cartridge and firing it.
Now the Uzi addressed this problem
by having a ratcheting system in the top cover that did essentially the same thing.
So the markings on here are on the top of the receiver.
Steyr-Daimler-Puch (Puch, I think that's the right pronunciation) A.G.
Made in Austria, with a Steyr logo there.
We also have Gun South markings, those are from the American importer.
These were not marked MPi-69 or MPi-81,
(which by the way stands for "Maschinen Pistole" or submachine gun),
they weren't marked with that designation anywhere by Steyr.
We then have a serial number here on the receiver,
and the serial number repeated on the polymer lower.
So ultimately Steyr was correct.
The Austrian military and the Austrian police needed a submachine gun,
and they were in fact predisposed to buy it from an Austrian company.
And Steyr is probably the biggest and best known Austrian firearms manufacturer [in the '60s].
And the Austrian government didn't particularly take offence at the fact
that this is essentially just an Austrian-made Uzi.
However, it wasn't really adopted by very many people outside of Austria.
So they sold some to Argentina, to Greece, to Saudi Arabia, to Tunisia.
None of these being places you think of as really being
front runners, or huge users of military small arms.
... There was of course the update to the MPi-81 version from the 69, which makes good sense.
Like the one innovative idea on the MPi-69 turns out to have been really not a good idea at all.
A handful of these are in the US as dealer samples
because they were of interest to police and security organisations, just like the Uzi.
So some of them were imported.
As far as I know there was no significant purchase of these by any United States organisation.
So most of the ones you see here are in pretty darn nice original condition, like this one.
Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.