Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at RIA
taking a look at an HK Model of 512 police shotgun.
Yeah, HK actually did some shotguns,
not just the CAWS, which by the way I
would love to film someday, I just have to find one.
So ... for one thing HK actually got into the
sporting arms market in the early 1970s.
They released the HK 300 in .22 Magnum,
they actually had a single-shot shotgun for a little while.
... They had more of a variety of products than you might naturally think of.
Now of course, if they're going to do shotguns,
they're already integrally tied into the police and law enforcement and military market.
And so it makes sense that they would also want to offer a police style of shotgun.
Now the problem, the hurdle to overcome here, is HK didn't really make shotguns.
They didn't really know anything about shotguns, they had no experience with shotguns.
But they did have Franchi. Franchi of course being an Italian shotgun manufacturer
that didn't have any presence outside of Italy,
except that they were partnered with HK for their export sales.
So when HK decides that, "Hey, we want a police shotgun.
We could figure out the whole learning curve of doing it ourselves,
or we could just talk to Franchi, whom we already have this great working relationship with."
That's what they did. So Franchi manufactured all the parts for these guns,
and then sent them to HK, and HK did basically the final assembly.
And this was basically for legal reasons. ...
HK had to do enough work that they could actually put their own name on the guns,
and sell them out of Germany.
Think of this as comparable to like the 922(r) stuff of
imported parts versus American-made parts in a firearm today.
Obviously that wasn't the law applying in Germany, but similar sort of idea.
So what we have is a gas-operated semi-auto riot shotgun marketed as the HK Model 512,
but originally actually designed and manufactured by Franchi.
So let's take a closer look at it.
Alright, on the side of the receiver here we have HK and their Model 512 logo,
as well as a serial number.
And the more formal marking, Heckler & Koch GmbH, Oberndorf etc. etc.
West Germany, note the time frame there.
On the opposite side, these had to be marked Franchi and Italy
when they were imported into the US because that's who actually manufactured them.
And we have a US importer's mark up there as well.
We will take a look at all of the features on here in order,
but I want to start with the coolest one, and that is the muzzle device.
This is an A&W Diverter, and
not quite all, but many of the 512s were actually equipped with these from the factory.
The Diverter is a muzzle device that's kind of like a more scientific version of a duckbill choke.
And it's designed to kind of squish a round pattern into ... actually virtually a rectangle.
... Most people think of them as a military sort of thing
to spread a round pattern into a horizontal one to allow more effective use of a lot of buckshot.
But what's interesting to me is that on the 512 these are actually oriented vertically.
So they're not creating a horizontal spread, they're creating a vertical spread.
And as noted in the manual, and this is also something that I actually
recently went out and tested in the field with a Diverter barrel,
with Number 4 buckshot, you will actually get a pattern that is
between 3 and 4 to 1 ratio in terms of height to width.
So in theory in a military guise, this allows you to hit multiple targets side by side,
or really mis-estimate the lead on a moving target and still make a hit.
The problem with that in a police/law enforcement scenario is
you generally don't want to be forced to obliterate everything in a room.
Like, what if you have a bad guy standing next to a hostage?
You don't want to hit the hostage. And even if you have a round pattern,
that round pattern is going to have some errant ... pellets at both edges
... you have to account for them.
You have to be careful that they don't hit your theoretical hostage.
Well, if you take the Diverter and orient it vertically like this,
you've now taken the edges of your pattern and brought them in substantially.
You basically have a pattern that matches the profile of a standing human.
And I hadn't even thought about that until I saw it mounted this way on the 512.
So a couple of other things to point out, we have rifle sights on the guns.
There's your rear sight which folds down if you want it to,
but kind of fairly typical for the time shotgun/rifle sight.
That Diverter, despite being an effective choke redistribution system,
can actually fire slugs. And the manual says so quite clearly.
So the idea of rifle sights does make sense on these guns.
The magazine is capable of holding 7 rounds, and that's because of this 2 round extension
that HK put on them, that's a standard factory part there.
Control-wise, we have a push button safety right here, so that red is fire,
and no red is safe.
In order to load it you have to hit the slide release here,
and then you can push the elevator in and load the magazine tube.
This is gas operated, there is an annular gas piston around the magazine tube.
That's fairly typical, fairly simple in operation.
I'm not going to take this one apart because the magazine extension is really, really tight.
And just to be honest I can't get it off, so we'll leave that alone.
There's nothing particularly exotic about the mechanical system here.
I think it's kind of cool, it's interesting to see the use of checkered wooden stocks on
... like this was a serious operator shotgun when it was manufactured.
... GSG9, they're not joking around today,
they weren't joking around in the ... late '70s, early '80s either.
Despite it being the era of things like Armson OEGs, and Qwik Points,
and giant Maglites clamped under barrels,
and, of course, nice checkered wooden forends on your riot shotguns.
There were about 1,500 of these HK 512s originally manufactured in the '70s and '80s,
and they were intended for sale to police and law enforcement, security agencies.
In particular, in Germany GSG9 purchased and used these.
Also Austria, Spain and Portugal, among others.
Most of the production went to those groups in the 1980s.
But by the late '80s or early '90s there was still a small number of them
(and I hear numbers between 250, maybe as many as 350),
still left over unsold.
And HK decided to export those to the US commercial market, where they show up periodically.
My understanding is early '90s, like 1991, that importation ceased.
Basically because all of the leftover guns had been shipped over here.
So that's how they ended up in the US.
Pretty cool I think, Franchi's a good name in shotguns.
HK had the connections to the military and law enforcement world,
and it makes sense that the two would partner up.
I particularly enjoy the fact that the Diverter has been mounted vertically.
That makes, I think, a remarkable amount of sense.
Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.