Hi guys,
thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company,
taking a look at some of the firearms. So they're going to be selling in their upcoming
September of 2017 premiere auction. And today we have a very unusual and very cool early Russian submachine gun to take a look at. This is a PPD-40.
Although, it's actually got some PPD-38 parts in it, which is even more interesting.
Now PPD stands for something-something a Degtyaryev is like pistolet-pulemyot it means submachine gun,
designed by Fyodor Degtyaryev. Now, Degtyaryev is probably better known
for his light machine gun the DP-27 or DP-28.
And what's kind interesting is that Degtyaryev's first foray into the submachine gun world in
1929, involved building a gun that was basically a submachine gun version of his DP light machine gun.
It had a pan magazine on top, it had the whole back end, the buttstock and the disassembly
mechanism was all modeled exactly on the DP-27
Interesting, but he pretty quickly realized that that was not the way to make a cost-effective submachine gun. So he developed some revised
models went from us to a 22-round interestingly pan magazine on top to a 25-round curved stick magazine.
This is of course in the 7.62 Tokarev caliber,
developed by Tokarev, who is also participating in this... these series of submachine gun trials in the Soviet Union.
In 1931-1932 the Soviets test something like 14 different
submachine gun designs and most of them had various types of problems. The two that really came out on top were the
early version of this one by Degtyaryev and a similar gun by Tokarev. Now Tokarev's gun was lighter,
but Degtyaryev's gun was simpler and cheaper to manufacture,
it was considered more accurate and it was also more reliable. So, Degtyaryev's gun came out on top
and at that point
it was still... it was using a box magazine, a 25-round stick mag.
In 1934 this would actually be adopted by the Soviet Army, although
they didn't manufacture them very quickly: for the first couple years they only made a few dozen per year, by the late 1930s
they were making between one and two thousand per year. But then in 1939,
because there were some particularly dense people in the Soviet War Ministry at that point,
they actually issued in order to pull all of the submachine guns out of military service and stick them in depots, just
storage out of the way. Apparently there were some generals
who really did not like the idea of a submachine gun and wanted to stick with everyone having bolt-action Mosin-Nagant rifles. So,
well you think that your own military
commanders have some dumb ideas be happy that they aren't that dumb. Well the Soviets
fairly shortly after that got into a shooting war with the Finns. The Finns of course had M31 Suomi submachine guns, which
bear a not totally accidental
resemblance to this version of the PPD.
The Finns did extremely good work with submachine guns and that was enough to convince the
Soviet military, that this submachine gun thing it really was worth doing. So
they got jumping on trying to get submachine guns back into service.
And the first one that was put into major production was the PPD. Now this had gone through a number of iterations. Of course the 1929 model had this pan magazine,
the 1932-1934, the model that got adopted in 1934 had a stick magazine.
Now in 1938 Degtyaryev made a number of changes to the design to make it a little simpler and to address some problems, that
had come up during its early fielding with the Red Army.
One thing they wanted to do was to increase the practical rate of fire and
the way to do that was to increase the magazine size.
So in 1938 the major, the most distinctive change that Degtyaryev made
was to design a drum magazine kind of like this one except that it was equipped with a little feed tower.
So that, it could feed in the exact same way that the box magazine had.
At this point the gun still had one continuous stock across here, and so the 1934/38 guns
could use either style of magazine either this new 73-round drum or the 25-round box magazine.
In 1940 that changed again, and the tower feed-drum wasn't all that
suitable and you know that those Finns, that the Russians were fighting now, had an
extremely good drum design with their KP 31 submachine guns, the Suomi's, and so the Russians...
they probably wouldn't want to admit this, but they basically just straight-up copied this Suomi drum.
And that required a little bit of a change to the receiver design here, because the
Finnish drum, the Finnish style of drum doesn't have a tower, it has to go directly into the receiver. So the stock was split
there's now a forward section and a rear section, the drum fits in the middle.
It's now 71-round drum and it worked really quite well. This drum would go on to be used in the PPSh-41,
which the russians would make a gazillion of.
The... the PPD-40 itself was only in production basically for one year. These were manufactured in 1940.
They made a little over 81,000 of them in 1940 and then just briefly at the beginning of 1941.
This is actually 1941 gun, they made almost 6,000 in 1941.
Here we have the basic markings on the PPD, this is about all you get. We have a 1941 production date.
So the receiver on this one is really quite late,
a cyrillic double-prefix serial number at the bottom and then a little tiny stamp below that.
And if we look closer, we'll see that little tiny stamp is an SA in a box,
indicating that this was actually a Finnish capture gun, which would have been captured during the Winter war or the
continuation War and put back into Finnish service.
This sort of submachine gun would have been quite familiar to the Finns.
After all its drum magazine is basically copied from the Finnish Suomi. I should...
correct myself. I said earlier that this is the same drum as in the PPSh-41.
They are virtually identical, but there's a slight difference in the feed lips.
PPSh-41 drums can be adapted to the PPD, and I believe that's what this one is (although, I'm not 100% sure on that).
Anyway, a couple of the controls that are worth pointing out,
include the selector,
so we have a flag lever here that is a "1" for semi-auto, if we flip it over, it is a "71" for dumping the entire drum.
There is no safe version of this this is a... or a semi and full-auto selector.
The safety is located on the bolt handle it is this
tab, which you can push in to lock the bolt in position either at the front here or
at the back here. So with the bolt locked in position pulling the trigger does nothing
and that was how Degtyaryev decided to handle the safety. And this works really quite well, because
lug open like this, will the gun safe.
However one of the common safety problem on
submachine guns of this vintage is having them closed on an empty chamber with a loaded magazine
with the potential for this to bump back and chamber around and fire
unintentionally. On the PPD you can simply lock the bolt in the forward position
and you can carry it that way and have no risk of an accidental discharge.
There is a bit of a conundrum to this particular gun in it. Early
PPDs had a tangent sight like this,
but the late ones and
from the 1941 date we would expect this to be a fairly late gun.
Late ones typically had just a simpler leaf sight and I don't have a good explanation for that.
I'm not sure what led to that. However the other thing
we can see is that this gun does have some mixed parts, based on serial numbers.
So this is 153, our bolt components are going to be numbered 866.
So let's take a look inside, because there's an interesting element to the bolt.
Disassembly of course we will start by removing
magazine. So push that tab in, pull the drum out.
The drum has a very tight fit into the gun, and that's a good thing.
I think one of the reasons that the this type of drum virtually this exact drum
had reliability trouble in the PPSh submachine guns, that would follow this, was because they weren't particularly
tightly fitted or well fitted. The Suomi worked great with these drums and the PPD-40, I suspect did as well.
Because there's just no room for play when you have the drum lock in the gun.
Anyway, with the drum out, all we have to do is unscrew
the rear-end cap out of the gun.
There will be some spring pressure here at the end. So you don't want it to go flying.
However as submachine guns go, that's actually a pretty short recoil spring.
And with it out the bolt just comes right out back to the gun.
Now, I believe this is a PPD-38 bolt.
You can see its serial number there 866, which does not match the receiver of the gun.
And then we actually have the early version of the firing pin in
this bolt. So by the final large-scale production of the PPD-40,
the bolt just had a fixed firing pin. Very much like you would see on everything else contemporary by that point.
However the earlier versions of the gun had this cam, actuated firing pin. Where we have a cam right here
and while this is traveling, it's going to sit flat like this parallel or the same height as these
bearing surfaces on the bolt body. And then when the bolt hits the breech face,
that gets pushed up.
And that cam is the firing pin forward to fire the gun. The idea here was that you would not have an exposed firing pin,
when the bolt wasn't fully home and in a safe position to fire.
But it turns out that that's not really a necessary thing and it's certainly something that
takes some machine time that easy to cut out, when you decide that you just really need a lot more guns a lot more quickly.
As the Russians came to really appreciate the utility of the submachine gun
the... the PPD would show a serious flaw, namely it was too expensive and too time-consuming to
manufacture. And if the Soviets were going to be making hundreds of thousands of submachine guns,
they needed something that could be done quicker. Now, the PPD had... it was a
cool design in the first place in that it was largely made out of
drawn tube and bar stock, most of the parts on this gun could actually be manufactured on lathe,
which is going to be faster than mills.
However, they just weren't fast enough and
Shpagin came up with a design for a submachine gun, that was largely based on stamped steel components.
Not like complex German stampings, but simple rugged stampings.
And that would be adopted as the PPSh-41 and that is the reason that PPD production ended in basically the very early
weeks of 1941. That new
PPSh-41 design was a much more economical gun to make, they could crank those all of that out a lot faster.
And that would become the Soviet standard submachine gun
until 1943, when they replaced it with yet a faster and easier produced model. So,
hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. It was very cool to get to take a look at not just a Soviet sub gun,
but an early Soviet submachine gun and a Finnish capture one at that.
Very cool. If you're interested in having this one yourself for your own personal collection,
it is a fully transferable, anything registered submachine gun,
so take a look at the description text below and you'll find a link to Rock Island's catalog page on it,
where you can see their description and pictures and place a bet online over the phone or live here at the auction. Thanks for watching!