Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today in H&K's Grey Room in
Ashburn, Virginia, taking a look at some cool historical H&K firearms.
And specifically today we're taking a look at the HK33 family.
And this, if we go by HK's designation sort of system,
is the military rifle for the 5.56 cartridge.
Now we also have an HK53 here,
using their designation system that would be a submachine gun in the 5.56 cartridge,
which is, well, we'll touch on that in a minute.
Now HK had begun looking at the 5.56x45mm intermediate cartridge as early as like 1960,
although it took a couple years before they actually got this design started. The HK33 itself originated in 1963.
It took a number of years to get ... all the kinks worked out of the design, and
that's something I think a lot of people don't fully appreciate is just how long it does take
to really make an effective and reliable firearm.
So at its heart this really is a G3 rifle scaled down to 5.56.
But it's not so simple to do that as simply taking the dimensions and scaling them down by a certain percentage.
It takes a lot of trial and experimentation to get all of the parts to actually work together.
Things like extractors don't just scale down perfectly.
Same thing goes for the roller locking system. Getting the timing and the angles just right in the locking piece
for a roller delayed gun like this that takes some engineering work, and it doesn't happen overnight.
So, one of the first trials of this system was actually a US trial.
Harrington & Richardson ... was involved in the production of a small number of these for US trials in 1965.
Those were actually designated the T223,
and some day we'll get our hands on one of those rifles and do a specific video on it.
But for now just the HK33, which did finally go on the ... commercial market for HK in 1968.
Now this would never prove to be quite as successful of a rifle as the G3 had been, or as the MP5 was.
Although all three are ... literally the same mechanism, just sized for different cartridges.
Over the course of its development it did go through a little bit of iteration.
The very first original guns were tweaked just slightly to become a second pattern, which is what we see primarily today.
And then they did a couple of different styles and barrel lengths.
Of course being an HK rifle this has some element of modularity to it.
So what we have here is the HK33, the standard rifle, which interestingly has a 390mm barrel.
If we translate that into American units, that's ... basically 15.35 inches,
which I will point out is actually below the US NFA limit for a short barreled rifle.
So when they made these in a semi-auto version, the HK93,
they actually had to make the barrels longer to make them legally compliant.
But that of course wasn't an issue for the military.
So we've got a 15.35 inch barrel on the standard rifle.
And then there is a ... HK33K, Kurz, the short version, which has the barrel cut down to 12.7 inches,
that's 320mm. And that's coupled with a collapsing buttstock, just like you see on both the G3 and the MP5.
They did also eventually come out with a factory version that has the full-length barrel but the collapsing buttstock,
that's the sort of thing you can do modularly with HK stuff very easily.
And then we have the HK 53, so let's talk about this briefly.
It is ... formerly designated as a submachine gun because of its very compact size.
This has a 211mm barrel, that's 8.3 inches. It's got the collapsing buttstock.
And probably the best way to think about this would be like the NATO western version of
the AK-74U, the "Krinkov" as it's colloquially called.
And that's why this was termed a submachine gun, not because of its cartridge because this is still in standard 5.56,
it's called a submachine gun because it's so incredibly tiny and portable and handy.
And this actually kind of ended up being one of the more popular versions of the gun.
These were adopted by some more substantial sorts of units, not full military forces,
but ... the British Royal Marines adopted these, the British SAS adopted and used the HK53.
... Where it really shines is it's a very short barrel length that's able to operate reliably
with the roller delayed system, in a way that the M16 really kind of had problems with.
The M16's (sort of) gas impingement system has trouble at very short barrel lengths.
And we see that even today, ... that being one of the main reasons for the piston driven AR type rifles.
So back in the '70s when these were available, if you wanted a very short barrelled 5.56, the HK53 was one of your very best options.
Now, let's take a minute and just pull this apart and I'll show you the internals. Although for those of you
who are familiar with the MP5 or the G3, you'll already know exactly what they're going to look like.
We'll start with the standard HK33. You can see the markings there.
Pretty basic: HK33.
Made in Germany by HK.
Also at this time HK had an office in Arlington, Virginia.
And calibre on this is listed as .223, interestingly, instead of 5.56.
The selector markings on here are numeric, so ... safe, semi, and full-auto.
You could also get these with burst fire mechanisms for the triggers.
Basically, all of HK's different trigger configurations were available on these guys. This is a safe, semi, full example.
And the reason that it says 25 on that selector is because the standard basic magazine was actually 25 rounds.
Now they did also produce a 30 round magazine.
So we've got a 30 back here, and a 25 up front. And they also made a 40 round magazine
which I don't have an example up here to show you, but it's the same thing but a little bit longer.
The rest of the controls here are identical to all the other HK rifles
as you might expect. We have a diopter style of rear sight,
settings for 100, 200, 300 and 400 metres.
The charging handle is on the top left side ... above the barrel. Again, pretty standard. Front sight is standard.
The full-size HK33 was set up to be able to use rifle grenades, the shorter versions were not.
If there is one major complaint to be had about this rifle, it would be its weight. The standard HK33, despite only having
... a 15.4 inch barrel, weighs right at about 4 kilos. So that's just under 9 pounds. It's pretty heavy for a 5.56 calibre rifle
The HK33K fixes a little bit of that, this brings the weight down to about 8 pounds, about 3.65 kilos.
Still heavy for its barrel length though.
Everything else about the 33K is identical to the standard 33, with the exception of the collapsing buttstock.
And then of course we have the 53.
So this one has a little more modern trigger group on it with the pictographic settings.
And this one also has a 3 round burst trigger in it.
And this one is an HK 53 C.
The front end is a bit different from the standard rifles.
The handguard has to be shorter because of the shorter barrel.
And because of the shorter barrel it has a much more substantial flash hider to it,
a longer open-ended four pronged flash hider to at least attempt to dispel the
giant flare of light that comes out of an 8 inch .223 barrel.
Taking this apart is very standard HK. We'll pop the pin here for the buttstock assembly.
There we go, so the stock assembly comes off.
And then pop the second pin for the fire control group.
That comes off.
And then there's a third pin at the front for the handguard,
which also comes off.
We can then ...
pop out the recoil spring,
and the bolt carrier assembly. Bolt head and bolt carrier.
So there's the whole system field stripped. This is of course the very short HK53 series gun,
but with one little exception that I'll show you in just a moment, ... all of the others are exactly the same mechanically.
That one thing that is very slightly different is actually the bolt carrier assembly.
Where on the 53 because it is so short there isn't enough space for the regular bolt carrier
and the charging handle, so they cut this tube down.
On the standard HK33 and 33K this extension runs a little bit farther forward where it is hit by the charging handle.
So other than that, absolutely no difference between these guns
So the HK33 was not adopted by the German Army
for the prime reason that it was never really under consideration by the German Army.
The German Army when this came out was still planning on having the G11.
They were pretty happy with their G3s, and the next thing they were gonna replace them with
was that caseless wonder-weapon, the G11. Well
by the time that fell apart in 1990, this was no longer really a modern weapon.
This had become obsolescent in the same way that the G3 had.
So the German military kind of bypassed this guy, and went straight from the G3 to the G36 in 5.56,
skipping the roller delayed version entirely.
This also didn't make any substantial sales, you know didn't get adopted
by any really large like mainstream western NATO sort of powers.
However, they did make a lot of smaller sales to smaller countries. A lot of the countries that
didn't have maybe the infrastructure for an army the size of what you might expect in Western Europe,
but wanted to get into a very reliable, very durable, well-made rifle in 5.56.
So some of the early customers were Thailand, and Malaysia, and Brazil.
And that would kind of set the stage for the HK33's military customer base for the rest of its service life.
These went into production in '68, they remained in production until about 2000.
So ... actually a longer production life than you might have expected.
They were licenced out to a number of countries for production as well.
And while this is the least successful commercially of the major HK platforms,
it is by no means a commercial failure. So they are pretty cool little guns.
I'd like to give a big thanks to HK for giving me access to
grab all of these different versions to show you, and hopefully you enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.