Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten Weapons.
We have an extremely cool piece to show you today.
I'm at the Rock Island Auction House and this gun is going up
... for sale in the September 2014 premier auction.
It is one of the most desirable German machine guns out there, it is the Maschinen Karabiner 42.
These were made by the Haenel company, and this is the direct predecessor to the German Sturmgewehr.
In fact, this is the original German Sturmgewehr, it just didn't have that name yet.
This particular rifle has a ZF-41 optic on it, that was a German designated marksman optic, also very cool.
These rifles were all designed to have this optic with them, although not all of them...
in fact very few of them, were actually issued with the optics.
Now like a lot of countries, Germany was working on developing an intermediate cartridge
semi-auto combat rifle during the 1930s before World War Two broke out.
... Now in most countries that development pretty much came to a halt when war broke out
so that industry and government could focus on mass production of known good working
standard-issue firearms. In Germany a lot of that R&D continued to go on.
This design started out, like I said, in the 1930s with some small calibre research being done by the Vollmer Company.
And initially there wasn't a whole lot of army interest, but the Luftwaffe was interested.
And so it was Luftwaffe interests that really pushed this development program.
Which is a bit ironic, in fact it ended up becoming a major army project.
The Luftwaffe went on to continue to develop the FG 42,
which also was looked down upon by the Army for quite some time.
At any rate, a company called Polte developed the 8x33 cartridge. It was finalized in 1940,
it was actually formally adopted in 1941, and kind of simultaneously
Haenel was given a contract to develop a shoulder-fired combat rifle using that cartridge.
Now there isn't a lot of documentation on why Haenel was chosen, but it appears (it's a pretty good guess),
that the reason is that their head of R&D was Hugo Schmeisser
who was a very famous, very well-respected name as an arms developer in Germany.
He was responsible for Germany's first submachine gun and a whole slew of other developments.
And basically on the basis of his reputation, development of the Maschinen Karabiner, or MKb, went forward.
Now, the intention of this rifle was actually to replace the Kar98 bolt action,
and the MP40 submachine gun, and also the light machine guns in German service.
It didn't quite work out, but it turned into an extremely effective tactical weapon regardless.
The first of these was ... the first prototypes were finished in 1940 by Haenel.
They went through some testing and then they were ultimately redesigned a bit
for better efficiency of stamped components.
Haenel was great at ... firearms development, they weren't really experts in metal stamping.
So the guns went out for some outside help with the stamping work,
they came back by late 1941 in basically this configuration.
Now around the same time the Walther company also submitted a proposal for a competitive Maschinen Karabiner rifle.
They looked remarkably similar from the outside, but the Walther version operated entirely differently.
And the Walther version ultimately was found to be too complex and not reliable and it was pretty quickly dropped.
Only a couple hundred of the Walther guns were ever made.
Meanwhile the MKb(H), the MKb-42(H), 'H' of course stands for Haenel, went on into,
more or less, mass production. In total about 11,000 of these rifles were made.
Production on these was slated to start in late 1942.
Just due to wartime exigencies it ended up starting in early 1943. The German military wanted
and contracted for 10,000 a month, although that rate of production was never quite achieved.
And, in troop trials these were very popular, troops liked them.
Obviously they are a fantastic combat rifle, especially for the 1940s.
The small cartridge gives you light recoil, it's controllable in full-auto.
The limited range compared to a full-size service cartridge like 8mm Mauser,
as many countries had learned, that it really is immaterial.
The vast majority of combat is taking place at much closer ranges
and the 8mm Kurz is perfectly acceptable at those ranges.
The two things that troops didn't really like as much about this rifle, one was the muzzle flash,
and the other was simply the difficulty in shooting this prone. This does have a ... 30 round magazine
and because the 8mm Kurz is a fairly wide, squat cartridge, you have a very long magazine.
And you can see that you can't shoot this prone any lower than this magazine will allow you.
They never did make shorter magazines for combat use. So despite that, these were very popular guns
and the troops are going to find something that they don't like with with any weapon that they get.
But they were willing to overcome those problems to have the other outstanding features of the original assault rifle.
Mechanically, what makes the MKb-42(H) interesting is that it fires exclusively from an open bolt.
It doesn't have a hammer, it's a fixed firing pin gun. There is a notch cut back here as a safety.
So we can pull the bolt handle back and then lock it up into this cut-out,
very much like many open bolt submachine guns.
There was a second safety designed in addition, that's always a little bit concerning.
Too much of a bump on the back of the gun and it is possible to bounce the bolt handle out of that safety.
So there is a secondary safety, which is pushing the bolt handle in.
There's a catch on the far side of the bolt handle that locks into the receiver
when you ... push the bolt handle in.
And that can be done both when the bolt is closed and when the bolt is open.
So, that's a more secure locking system.
So the Sturmgewehr was always a constantly iterating design,
and as major changes happened the name would be revised.
This of course was basically the first version, and what they decided really ought to be changed in this rifle
was to make it, instead of an open bolt gun, allow it to fire from a closed bolt.
So they made that change which involves some fairly significant changes to the bolt and bolt carrier.
And then the name of that next design was the MP43.
That's when the name changed, due to German internal politics and Hitler's goofiness,
changed from Maschinen Karabiner to Maschinen Pistole.
But effectively, the MP43, which became the MP44, which became the StG44,
those are all the same basic action, but firing from a closed bolt instead of an open bolt.
Ultimately the MKb-42(H) was manufactured through September of 1943.
At that point production changed over to MP43 guns.
Like I said, about about 11,000 of these were manufactured. There are very few of them left in the US.
... They are of course machine guns, so they need to be registered with the NFA, this one is, obviously.
So why don't we go ahead and take a closer look at how the mechanism on this works?
First off, you'll see this has a bayonet lug which the later Sturmgewehrs did not.
In fact, not even all of the MKbs have a bayonet lug, it's kind of random which do and which don't, but this one does.
It has a threaded muzzle cover, that comes off to mount a cup grenade launcher which was made for these.
You can see there are a pair of vents here in the gas tube, kind of like an AK actually.
That allows the gas to vent once the piston is moving far enough and fast enough to cycle fully.
The handguard on the MKb, and on all the later Sturmgewehrs, is stamped sheet metal.
It works, but I'll tell you what, that gets hot reasonably fast.
Probably kind of nice on the Russian Front to warm your hand on that a little bit,
but, if you're not somewhere cold that gets uncomfortable and you kinda want a glove when you're shooting it.
Now, here are the guts of the mechanism. You can see we have a bolt carrier that operates very much like an MP44.
Obviously, ... that was developed directly from the MKb.
So, this hook right here is attached to the gas piston and it's a bolt carrier as well.
The bolt is down here on the bottom.
You can see there's a hook coming up from the bolt and a hook coming down from the bolt carrier.
When the gas piston cycles those interlock, and you can see that it is picking up the back of the bolt.
That's how this locks, as the tilting bolt drops down to lock, lifts up to unlock
and then cycles backwards.
It does also have a folding dust cover, important to keep gunk out of the mechanism.
Now the ZF-41 optic that's on here was developed as a designated marksman's scope more than anything else.
It's often called a sniper scope, but it's really not for a sniper.
It's a one-and-a-half power [1.5x] scope, has something like a 10mm objective lens to it.
It is definitely too small to be a real precision weapon.
What it's meant for doing is being able to take better shots at 100, 200, maybe 300 yard targets.
It does have a BDC on it that's graduated up to 800, but that's really very optimistic.
So you'll notice, of course, that the ZF-41 is mounted quite far forward on the gun.
Normally you would expect optics to be back here, up close to the eye.
This has a very long eye relief and deliberately, you can keep both eyes open when you're using it.
It does allow the iron sights to be used underneath, it doesn't interfere with them.
And so, for very fast shooting you would typically use the iron sights,
and then when you had a precision shot you wanted to make
you could bring your eye up to the optic here and get a little more accuracy out of it
Alright, so this optic ... is canted slightly in its mount. That's just a matter of loosening it and replacing it.
But you can see the reticle there, pretty small.
You can see we also do have the iron sights (camera doesn't want to focus on them),
but the iron sights are clearly visible underneath the optic, so you can use those for fast shooting
and this optic for precision shooting (... there are the irons).
Disassembly is done by pulling this pin. You see it's captive here. Pull that pin out.
That allows the butt-stock to come off which allows the recoil spring and
bolt to all come out the back. They are actually very simple guns to disassemble,
which is part of why they're really very effective in the field.
Now, unfortunately, because this is an auction consigned gun, we aren't able to ... disassemble that.
We have a magazine release button here.
... Magazine in.
30 round magazine.
This magazine was developed for the MKb-42 and then remained the standard magazine
for all of the Sturmgewehr series of rifles and also a number of the Volkssturm rifles.
Pretty much everything the Germans did in 8mm Kurz used the same magazine and it was the one developed for this rifle.
Now you can see most of the major components on this are stamped sheet metal.
That was one of many innovations with this design.
The receiver here in particular, the magazine well, the receiver.
There are these two vertical grooves, those are pressed in.
There is a machined trunnion inside here that holds the barrel and then these grooves, there are two on each side,
and this pin are used to permanently fix the trunnion in the stamped sheet metal receiver.
Very important that the trunnion doesn't come loose from the receiver.
We have our bolt handle here. You can see, when it's ready to fire, this little red dot.
When you push it in to lock it in place as a safety, the dot is no longer visible.
... The other side of the muzzle.
Alright guys, I appreciate you watching. I hope you enjoyed the video.
This was one of very few chances to actually see an original and gorgeous MKb-42(H) on video.
As I mentioned at the beginning, this rifle is up for auction in the September 2014 Rock Island Premiere auction.
It is lot number 1470 and, if you want this badly enough, this can be yours.
So a very cool piece of German history, take a look at the Rock Island site,
take a look at the high-res pictures of it, and if you're interested, drop a bid in. Good luck to you,
and, hopefully you will be the proud new owner of this awesome rifle.
[Thanks for watching.]