Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I'm out here today with a Walther MPL.
This is kind of an odd beast in that it's a submachine gun
(it's actually a very well made submachine gun) by a very well known company, Walther.
These were ... designed in the late 1950s into the early 1960s.
They were manufactured actually for about 20 years from the early '60s to the early '80s.
However, for some reason that I haven't really quite figured out, they never caught on.
There were a couple batches of these sold. ... Some German police units had them,
the Mexican Navy bought them, but not a whole lot else beyond that.
Which is a bit odd, because they're actually a really good submachine gun, remarkably so.
So these look pretty stereotypically German. We have a sheet metal gun for all practical purposes,
all the major assemblies here are stamped. So relatively cheap to make.
What ... looks very sci-fi-ish with this large assembly above the barrel is actually a channel
where the majority of the weight of the bolt is actually riding here up above the barrel.
That allows the bolt itself to be fairly short, and to have an overall short receiver
compared to a lot of other tube guns basically, where the bolt has to travel quite a ways back as it cycles.
These use standard 9mm cartridges.
They use actually a rather difficult to find proprietary double-stack magazine, 32 rounds.
And you know what, they're just really smooth and nice to fire.
I should also point out they have two different sets of sights
We'll take a closer look at that when we disassemble this,
but running right over the top of the gun you have what you might call a set of gutter sights,
and then you also have a little aperture sight here and a hooded post.
So ... in theory for a precise shot you line up the aperture,
and for quick and dirty shooting up close you just use this big kind of open notched gutter thing on top.
I've found out here today that the peep sights are pretty easy to use, but it does restrict your vision of the target a bit.
I really like the gutter sight idea, but in this particular gun I find it a little difficult to work with.
Now that might be something that I could get over if I practiced with this a bunch,
or it might just not be the best executed way to do this sort of design, so.
One other element to notice, this is a three position fire selector.
We have safe, and then full, ... and then all the way over is semi-auto.
So start with semi-auto, and then we'll do a couple bursts and see what it's like.
The wire stock is not the most comfortable thing. It does have a little bit of a kind of a rubberised coating on it.
If I were going to shoot one of these a lot I'd probably wrap some paracord or something on that,
just to make it a little bit more comfortable on the cheek.
But it's certainly better than some wire stocks. Now full-auto.
It just sits there right on target.
And I'm out of ammo.
Extremely comfortable gun. You know what, it's really weird to shoot this
and try and figure out why these didn't become a little more popular.
I've heard some other folks suggest that these are just as nice to shoot as an MP5.
And you know what, I can see that.
I'd love to have one of these, it's kind of weird there are so few of them out there.
So let's go ahead and head inside, and take this apart and take a look at how the mechanics actually work.
It's an open bolt sub gun, but it does have a few elements that are a little different from the typical.
Alright, so here is our MPL. First off, to unfold the stock all you do is pull it out.
It does lock open, so to fold it back you have to depress this button, and then
just fold it back in place, pretty simple there.
Now what makes this gun technically kind of interesting is the way that the bolt is built.
It's sort of got a telescoping bolt, or it sort of has the same idea.
One thing that the Czechs came up with in 1948 with their CZ 23 through 26 series of guns,
was this idea of having a very short bolt back here,
but then having ... most of the mass of the bolt actually telescoped out in front.
This allowed for a very short travel in the receiver and made for a nice compact gun.
Well, the Walther MP doesn't quite do that but it comes close, it actually puts the vast majority of the bolt weight
up here in this travelling area above the barrel.
So the barrel's down here, right there, and then this area is where most of the mass of the bolt reciprocates.
So we can have a fairly short bolt back here.
I should point out this is an all-stamped gun. It does have a ventilated metal handguard.
It was pretty hot out today when we were shooting this, and I was happy to see that this actually didn't get particularly hot.
Now we didn't do a whole bunch of mag dumps and that would've heated it up,
but there's enough space between where the barrel is actually in contact with the receiver
that this doesn't overheat all that quickly.
Our magazine release is very simple. Push button paddle type mag release, easy to work with.
Our safety is a little bit unusual for sub guns. It's a three position safety, so we have safe,
D is for rapid fire, full-auto, and then E is for single fire or semi-auto.
Now disassembly is pretty simple. We have one captive pin here,
push that through, pull it out, and then
we can split the upper assembly off of the gun.
Now we can bring out the bolt and the recoil spring.
The recoil spring itself is captive on a guide rod.
It's sort of halfway tensioned into the bolt assembly, so it stays in place, but just pull it out.
And then this is our bolt. So the bolt face is down here along with the extractor, fixed firing pin. It is an open bolt gun.
And then this top assembly is basically just mass.
You can see the majority of it is just a rough cast finish. And then it's got two bearing surfaces,
one at the front one at the back, that are machined to a very nice smooth finish.
So ... these two surfaces ride inside this upper receiver area.
Pretty simple.
Put that back in.
Now in the upper receiver we have this large area up top for the bolt mass.
We have the chamber right here and the barrel.
We can easily remove the barrel by pushing this button in,
and then unscrewing this. This is almost identical in concept to how the Uzi retains its barrel.
Once the keeper nut is off, the barrel just pulls right out.
It is keyed here at the front so that you can only put it in in the right configuration,
Which ensures that your extractor cutout and your feed ramp are in the right position.
That's it. Fairly long barrel for ... the overall size of the gun. It's about a 10.25 inch barrel
Pretty good.
... A couple other features to notice here. One is that this charging handle can be depressed, it's spring-loaded.
Under normal functioning the charging handle ... is not reciprocating.
So use it to charge the weapon. It's spring-loaded on its own, comes back to the front, and it doesn't move while you're firing.
Alright, so if you need to actually grab the bolt and physically push it forward,
you can push the charging handle in and there is a little stud that comes out right in there.
See it right there.
So that stud allows you to push the charging handle knob in,
and actually then you can apply force forward or backward to the bolt.
So helpful in clearing malfunctions should you get them.
A little hard to demonstrate when we have a recoil spring pushing the bolt forward in the first place.
Now one other unique element to this gun is its sights.
(Are it's sights.)
So on the back here we have this kind of interesting rear sight assembly
that has a big wide open sort of gutter sight notch,
and below that, right there, it actually has a little aperture sight.
When we look at the front sight you can see we have a post,
and then we have another sort of gutter sight type opening on the top of the sight hood.
The idea here is you can actually line up the top of both sights for very quick,
almost instinctive close range shooting.
And when you want to make an actual precision shot, that's when you use the aperture and the front post.
Kind of a clever system. I'm curious how effective it would be with practice.
I did a little bit of shooting with it, I liked the system. I had a little trouble making
reasonable hits with the gutter sights. Maybe that's just something to live with and accept.
Anyway, ... the lower assembly is pretty simple. We have all of our fire control components down here.
Being an open bolt sub gun this just has a very simple sear-type fire control group.
It does have two more captive pins here that are used to retain all of the fire control parts.
So you can pop these two pins and all the guts come out,
That's pretty much it. There is one other neat mechanism. I want to point out this,
which is a secondary safety sort of sear. Not necessarily in the same sense as you think of a safety sear in other guns.
But let me put this back together and show you what that sear does.
Alright, gun's back assembled. Now the classic negligent discharge or accidental discharge
mechanism on an open bolt submachine gun is the idea that you would have a loaded magazine in the gun,
and then you leave the bolt closed. And this is a very safe configuration in theory
because of course the chamber is empty, there's no way anything can get in there.
However, if you drop the gun on its buttstock
the bolt is very heavy and inertia will tend to pull the bolt back a little bit.
And if it's a heavy enough gun and you drop it from a high enough distance and it hits right on the buttstock,
what can happen is the bolt comes far enough back, like this,
that it passes the magazine and then it comes all the way forward. So it would do something like that,
and fire a round, because of course it's an open bolt gun. So as soon as a round goes into the chamber it's going to fire.
That's typically how accidents happen with submachine guns.
Well, Walther put in an extra secondary sear so that as soon as the bolt hits this position,
and you can hear it just click there, ... right
right there.
The bolt locks in place, the trigger does nothing at this point.
That is just a safety to ensure that if you drop the gun hard enough for the bolt to come this far back,
it gets grabbed and locked there. And in order to fire the gun
you have to pull the ... bolt all the way back to its proper position, and then pull the trigger.
Very clever little safety, avoids what is by far the most common safety issue on a submachine gun like this.
So thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
... I've had some people asking me to do a video on a Walther MPL or MPK for a while,
and it was really cool to actually get a chance to handle one.
So thanks to Alex at The Firearm Blog for providing the gun, really appreciate it.
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Thanks for watching,
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