Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look at the history of Elbonian small arms development.
And we have a really cool Elbonian t-shirt which I think is like entirely hidden behind the gun.
But, I'll talk more about this at the very end of the video, so stick around for that.
But first, let's take a look at this gun.
This is a Hakim light machine gun, and this is a prototype that was developed
by the Elbonian Defence Ministry in an effort to kind of undo some of their
terrible small arms procurement that had come right after World War Two.
So, like many countries, Elbonia had attempted to basically rebuild all of its small arms
with more modern equipment in the aftermath of World War Two.
There was a lot of surplus around, things could be got relatively affordably,
which was important because this is a very poor country that we are talking about.
Well, they had the bad luck to be really pretty much screwed over by a traitorous Defence Minister,
who outfitted them with an absolutely terrible assortment of small arms.
Which notably did not include a light machine gun.
This is something that should have been obvious to them at the time as being necessary.
Well, they did realise it before too much time had elapsed,
and so they started looking into ways that they could acquire
a light machine gun without having to do a whole bunch of domestic development.
Because they just didn't have the arms production and design facilities to work with that.
So, they actually partnered, interestingly, with Egypt.
Now Egypt at this point (we are talking by the way, the mid to late 1950s here),
Egypt was under the control of General Nasser, who was ... very much a Pan-Arab sort of nationalist.
And actually during this time frame put together the United Arab Republic,
which was basically an alliance of Egypt and Syria.
And this rifle actually dates just slightly before the UAR existed,
but ... I suppose we should talk a little technically here.
The Hakim actually began life as the Swedish AG-42 Ljungman rifle,
developed by Sweden in 1942, as the name implies.
And Egypt got a licence to manufacture these, and they changed the design
just a little bit. They re-chambered it for 8mm Mauser.
And Elbonia, it appears, actually helped finance the development, or at least
the Elbonian willingness to purchase a small number of these guns was part of what helped Egypt
finance the development of the gun and its initial production.
This is a very early example from like the very first year of production.
And what appears to have happened is Elbonia got their hands on a number of Hakim rifles
and then went about the process of trying to modify those into light machine guns.
So you can see what they've got out here is the front end off an MG34, and this actually came out of Israeli surplus.
So in the years after World War Two, the Israelis, frankly, did a much better job of
updating and modernising their small arms, and they ended up with a lot of German surplus MG34s,
in part through Czechoslovakia.
By way of Ethiopia, interestingly.
At any rate, the Elbonians managed to get some of Israel's surplus MG34s
once the ... Israelis were starting to get rid of a few of them.
So they took the barrel jacket from an MG34, combined it with the action from a Hakim,
and the magazines from surplus German MG13 machine guns,
in an attempt to create a standard Elbonian light machine gun.
So let's take a little bit of a closer in look at exactly how the details of all this hodgepodge worked.
Alright, I'm going to start up here. There are no distinctively Elbonian markings on this gun,
but we do have the original Egyptian markings from the Hakim.
And we have a crest there. And then that top number, which is split by that crest,
is in ... Farsi I think, that is 1956, and that's the production date of the Hakim.
Which is kind of cool in that this is like the very first year of Hakim production.
The number below that is the serial number, which is in the, it's a little hard to tell, either the 2,000s or 3,000s,
which fits for that year of production.
And then down here on the receiver
we have the name, which is Hakim, and then 7.9, which is the calibre.
The Hakim was originally made in 8mm Mauser, aka 7.92x57mm,
and the Elbonians left it in that chambering, at least for this prototype.
Had they adopted it, they might well have re-chambered it for a different cartridge
that was more ... common in their usage.
Now in its original configuration the Hakim used a 10 round magazine,
which was detachable, but intended to be reloaded by stripper clips, and this guy is your stripper clip guide.
It has this kind of interesting magazine release catch here, where
you have to flip it open like this, and then you can press the catch forward to release the magazine.
However, once the magazine's in, you can actually flip that down
and it locks the magazine in place so that you don't accidentally dislodge it.
Which is important because the Hakim was only issued with a single magazine.
Now, this doesn't really fit in the light machine gun role as envisioned by Elbonia here, because
with these 25 round box magazines you would want to be changing them.
So you'd be changing these on a quite regular basis.
They did actually use a pretty good base magazine here for this retrofit,
this is an MG13 magazine, and I suspect
that they actually have some original German markings right up here above those reinforcing ribs.
They had to make a few changes to the locking attachments both on the front and the back
to get this magazine to fit the Hakim.
But this is a high quality magazine, they're well made, they're reliable.
And if you are going to need a supply of surplus box magazines for a light machine gun
type of firearm like this, the MG13 makes a really good donor.
Now other than that, there has been no change to the rear half of the gun, the action is identical.
Up at the front here we can see the major change, however.
And that is the addition of this MG34 barrel shroud.
Now originally this was on the MG34 to protect the barrel, to offer a forward support point for the barrel,
because the MG34 barrel reciprocates when it fires,
and so you need to have something to support the barrel and guide it up at the front.
Now on the Hakim that's not necessary because the Hakim is actually a direct gas impingement gun,
and this conversion leaves that intact.
In fact I can take off the handguard and you can see the gas tube here.
This is a true ... direct gas impingement gun, meaning that gas is tapped off the barrel here,
runs through this tube, and then is simply dropped into a blind hole, right here,
on the front of the bolt carrier, thus pushing it back.
It's a very nice, simple system,
simpler in fact than the AR (commonly called direct gas impingement),
and it presumably, probably, would have worked pretty well.
The Hakim is set up with an adjustable gas regulator, and you can see
that when the Elbonians ... designed up this prototype,
they installed the barrel shroud just ahead of the gas bock,
so that they didn't have to change out anything having to do with the gas block.
That makes this a very easy adaptation to build.
However, in true Elbonian fashion, they took what was potentially a good idea,
and kind of just really didn't execute it right.
The way that ... this barrel shroud has been attached is actually by the use of a two-part sleeve
inside here, that is held in place simply with a pair of hex ... set screws there.
So if I ... loosen these up, what these are doing, these two screws are actually pushing
this half part of the inside,
they are pushing it away from the barrel into the shroud and thus tightening it down in place.
You can see the pock marks here from where these two screws were tightened down on the barrel.
Now it looks like there was an attempt to also lock this in place with a screw
coming through the adjustable gas block here, and into this spot on the shroud.
But that is missing at this point and I don't know that that would be all that secure anyway.
I can only assume that this was the early experimental version of this conversion,
because it really should have had a much heavier duty barrel to serve in a sustained fire role as a light machine gun.
So by removing these two screws from the top half of this barrel shim
I was able to completely remove the 34 shroud.
This is not the cleanest way to tighten this in,
this might have some issues when the barrel heated up under sustained fire.
This, by the way, is made of solid steel. It's rather heavy and it's certainly durable,
I am just concerned about the reliability of these two little set screws holding it in place under fire.
We can now see a better view of what's left of the original Hakim front end.
So the muzzle device is more or less still there with the venting,
but the front sight has been removed to fit into the MG34 shroud.
Unfortunately, the front sight on it is rather bent off to one side, you can see there.
We still have the original ... booster cap.
The booster itself is not necessary because, as I said, the Hakim does not have a reciprocating barrel.
The 34 would have used this to generate some pressure to help push the barrel back.
That's not going to happen on a Hakim like this, it's just going to accumulate carbon,
but not really cause any problems.
However, ... the last major shortcoming of this gun is the bipod.
Now, why the Elbonians weren't able to get MG34 bipods to go on here, I don't know.
The MG34 bipod is pretty darn good,
and what they have instead done is they fabricated this really cheesy
clumsy, and now loose and difficult to tighten,
mounting point to use a pair of RPD bipod legs on an MG34 shroud.
And this bipod is frankly terrible.
It doesn't effectively lock into place the way an MG34 bipod would have.
It is nice in that it gives a lot of mobility,
the problem is it gives this mobility whether you want the thing to be moving or not.
And it's just not a stable or secure bipod.
So, you can see how it goes in there, you put it on the top and you just spin it around the bottom.
And the problem is you've got like three different points of movement here,
and it results in it being really pretty wonky.
So, sort of works, but ... I don't know why the Israelis wouldn't give them
MG34 bipods with the shrouds.
But apparently they didn't, and that would definitely have been a shortcoming of this rifle in the field.
Now there would be a few problems with this, it never did go into service for a couple of reasons.
And frankly, one of the fundamental problems that it would have had,
if they had taken it into formal service, is the barrel profile.
We don't know who exactly the designer was in the Elbonian Defence Ministry, but
they missed the, what you would think to be fairly obvious, necessity of having a heavier profile barrel.
They left, as you saw, the original Hakim barrel in there, and that's just too light
for a gun that's expected to provide continuous supportive fire as a light machine gun.
So had this actually gone into service, that would have really, I would expect, shown up
fairly quickly as a shortcoming of the gun.
However, there was a diplomatic problem with the rifle that was even more substantial,
and probably is the real reason why this never went into service.
And that is that Nasser and the Egyptians found out that the Elbonians were also working with the Israelis.
And the Israelis and the Egyptians were, shall we say, not on particularly friendly relations in the late 1950s.
That caused the Egyptians to cut their ties to Elbonia, which cut off the supply of Hakims.
And it left the Elbonians, once again, high and dry, and still without any light machine gun in service.
So, it's really ... a shame. Poor little country just never does seem to get a break.
If anything though, they can take some pride in the fact that they really embody
what I guess is actually the Finnish virtue of 'sisu', and just always soldiering through
despite having really the worst gear out there.
Now, if you would like to express your solidarity with Elbonia,
we have a cool Elbonian t-shirt that I think is just really hilarious and cool, and I really like the design too.
So what we are doing is actually running a pre-sale on these for about 2 weeks,
and then we'll have them actually shipping out right at the end of the month.
The merch guys want to find out exactly what the demand is.
So if you are interested in an Elbonian shirt, you have them in two colours, blue like this one, and also a black.
I have a link in the description text below where you can go check them both out,
along with some high res imagery, although you can see it actually over there already.
But if you are interested, definitely head over and get yourself a t-shirt, because they're pretty cool.
And I look forward to having some more awesome Elbonian firearms coming in the future.
Thanks for watching.
[ Just to be clear, Elbonia is *not* actually a real country... ...but it's a fun way to show you this unique rifle! ]
They were badly sabotaged after World War Two by a traitorous Defence Mini ...
Ahhhh. Ahem.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]