Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today, courtesy of
Woody's Weapons and Sienna Armoury,
we are taking a look at the H&K MP7.
Specifically we have an MP7A2, and we have an A1
with some upgraded features on it as well.
Now for those of you who aren't familiar,
I'm sure there are some of you out there,
the MP7 is HK's competitor to the FN P90 for the purposes of a NATO RFP
that was put out in 1989 requesting a personal defence weapon.
... The idea was this would be a very easily transportable, lightweight,
easily controllable firearm for rear echelon troops,
who were at that point armed with 9mm pistols, or perhaps submachine guns.
The concept was they were concerned about a Soviet paratroop force
landing behind NATO lines in the nascent non-nuclear World War Three.
And Soviet troops were wearing what was at the time their current body armour,
a titanium plate with some Kevlar on it that was proof against 9mm pistol rounds.
So the idea was to develop something that was
a lightweight high-velocity armour-piercing cartridge.
And that's where we got both the 5.7x28 FN cartridge, and the 4.6x30mm HK cartridge.
Now the P90 came out right after this proposal, this RFP came out in 1990.
The MP7 didn't come out until 2002,
and it was only then that NATO actually did trials comparing the two of them.
However, since those trials, both have been adopted by a wide range of organisations.
So with that background aside, let's dive into how exactly the MP7 works
because it's significantly more complex than FN's P90.
Alright, let's start with a cartridge comparison. There's our magazine,
and here is a 5.56 NATO cartridge.
Here is the 4.6x30 HK cartridge (rolling down the table).
So ballistically ... there are a number of different loadings for it, but it is essentially
31 grains of bullet, typically armour-piercing bullet because that's what it was designed for,
travelling at about ... 2,350 to maybe 2,400 feet per second, depending on the loading.
I will point out, just for the sake of comparison, that is FN's 5.7x28mm cartridge.
Which is virtually the identical ballistics on paper,
like a 31 grain bullet at about 2,350 feet per second.
So these two are ... not identical because they do have different performance,
largely because of the different bullet diameters and constructions.
And by the way, ... the FN round here is a civilian hollow point,
but the case size is identical to the military version, so.
... These two are basically identical,
and you can see that they are both substantially smaller than even a 5.56 NATO.
I think there are a lot of fascinating comparisons that one can make between the P90 and the MP7.
And while this video is intended to focus on the MP7,
I do want to make some of these comparisons to kind of help put the MP7 in context.
So one of the things that I find really interesting is
the P90 is kind of a study in unorthodox design decisions, and the MP7 is exactly the opposite.
This is a really clever engineering attempt and success
at taking all of the existing orthodoxy of firearms controls and design,
and shrinking them into a very compact, very lightweight and controllable package.
So when it comes to the controls this all duplicates
exactly what we're used to seeing on typical ... military firearms.
Where the P90 is almost all very unusual controls.
So, what we have here is a selector lever with safe, semi, and full-automatic.
It is ambidextrous, in fact all of these controls are ambidextrous.
We have a bolt lock here, that's a manual bolt lock if you want it to be, and a bolt release.
We have a trigger with a built-in trigger safety there.
And then the one bit that is slightly unorthodox, but it is common to H&K pistols,
is the magazine release which is this lever, again ambidextrous.
If you push that lever downward it pops the magazine out.
Now the earlier patterns of the MP7, in fact from the beginning of development,
the MP7 had this integral vertical front handguard
that could be used like this, or it could be folded down like so.
This was on the original guns, and it was on the MP7A1.
The A1 introduced a number of improvements and upgrades to the design.
Just to name a few: the butt pad became a replaceable item,
instead of requiring a whole new assembly, just the butt plate.
These two holes were added,
which are storage for the two disassembly pins so that you don't lose them.
The A1 added a muzzle device, a flash hider there,
it also allows attachment of a suppressor.
The ... prototype style of MP7
had a muzzle that was basically just flush with the front of the frame here.
The A1 also added multiple stock ... length options, you can see three notches right there.
And those are the different positions to which you can extend the stock.
The original guns had only open and closed.
Now when they went from the A1 to the MP7A2 there weren't quite so many changes.
The most substantial one was they got rid of that integral vertical front grip.
It was proving to be a potentially fragile component, and not everybody wanted it.
And ... well, what they did was replace it with a Tri-Rail here.
So if you do want a front grip you can put one on, either fixed or folding, whatever you like.
You can also mount a finger stop here, should you want one.
Although there is a bit of that built into the frame of the gun itself.
That kind of makes the gun a little more user configurable
by getting rid of that built-in permanent folding front grip.
One of the other major developments as of the A2 pattern,
which by the way ... was introduced in 2014,
was they also started making them in HK's sort of coyote desert tan colour.
Which they also offer on the HK416s and a bunch of their other guns.
Now it's not exclusively in coyote, obviously this one's in black.
You can see this is an MP7A2 frame, but ... this is the primary change for the A2 pattern.
Before we take this apart, I want to show you the sights.
What I find interesting here is the sights are folding sights,
but they are set up so that even when they are folded down, they are still sights.
You can see that we have a narrow windage adjustable front post here,
very much like an AR pattern style front post when it's folded up.
When it's folded down we have essentially a pistol front sight.
And on the rear we have an aperture that folds up,
but when it's folded down you have essentially a pistol rear sight.
So even in this folded position you have iron sights should you want to use them.
And if you want better iron sights you can flip them up like that,
and have a nice windage and elevation adjustable aperture.
And of course you can also use all of this rail space to put on
whatever sort of electronic or optical sights you desire.
I guess I should also point out, operation of this, the charging handle, is located back here,
like an AR-15 charging handle.
It does lock open on an empty magazine.
This charging handle is held in place by a little bit of spring tension right there.
So you squeeze it together and then you can pull back.
You can see that at work right here, it's very simple,
it's just a polymer component that flexes in and out.
So this is one of the sort of things that there's not much room to work with here,
so if you want all sorts of functionality like bolt hold opens
and ambidextrous non-reciprocating charging handles,
you've got to figure out how to fit that all into a pretty compact space.
The stock has this latch right here.
Push that up and you can open or close the stock, nice and simple.
Now disassembly is very prototypically HK.
So we've got two push pins, pop those out.
You do want to make sure the bolt's closed when you do this, which this one is.
So pop those pins out, you can then of course store them
in the stock there so that they don't get lost.
And then ... basically the whole guts of the gun come out as a unit.
So we've got butt plate, stock rails, charging handle, recoil spring, bolt carrier, and bolt.
What that leaves in the gun which is not easily field strippable, is the barrel,
and then there is a gas block located right here.
Because this is in fact a ... short-stroke, gas-piston operated, rotating-bolt locked system.
So just like the MP5 could have been simple blowback, but wasn't,
the MP7 with its 4.6mm cartridge could absolutely be a simple blowback gun.
And in fact the P90 is.
H&K however, chose to make the MP7 a locked breech design,
well in excess of the mechanical requirements of the cartridge.
But it does allow them to lighten the weight of the operating components,
which lightens the weight of the gun overall.
And there are some potential arguments for it being softer shooting as a result.
Now to further disassemble this we have to detach
the bolt carrier from the charging handle and the spring.
And the way we do that is just to slide it back until we can lift
the charging handle up out of the bolt carrier.
Then the bolt and bolt carrier assembly come out.
The recoil spring is self-contained, right here.
Does this not look just like every other rear assembly from an HK product?
Like ... you could picture this going straight into an HK91, HK93, MP5, any of those guns.
And what we have here is essentially a very small G36.
Now some of the design has been changed, again to allow it to fit into a very compact space.
But ... the mass of the bolt carrier is up here, telescoped forward,
that gives it enough mass to cycle properly.
We have a rotating bolt, it is spring loaded here
using the same spring that is the reciprocating spring for the firing pin.
It is hammer fired, so we've got our firing pin back there.
And the way we're going to disassemble this
is first to pop this pin out, that locks the firing pin in place.
That pin has a little rubber gasket on it to give it some tension to hold it in place.
Once that pin comes out, then we can pull this open, and we can pull out the firing pin.
There is a firing pin spring in there, you can see it trying to sneak out, don't lose that.
Now that the firing pin is out, just like a G36, or frankly the entire AR family,
we can now take the cross pin out.
That is the cam pin. That forces the bolt to rotate because the pin is in this helical track.
So as the bolt moves backward it's forced to rotate and ... lock.
When it moves forward, which is to say when the bolt carrier moves back,
it forces the bolt to rotate and unlock.
And with that pin out, we can take the entire bolt out.
So, again, just like a little tiny G36.
In the US the MP7 is probably best known
as one of the weapons that was carried on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
But it has been adopted by a wide variety of other organisations.
What's interesting to me is I don't think anybody has actually adopted the MP7
for the purpose it was actually designed for, which is
arming rear echelon troops with sort of an easy shooting, lightweight backup weapon.
In this scenario it's very similar to what was intended for the M1 carbine
back in World War Two, and the M1 carbine was widely issued to truck drivers and supply clerks.
But it found this home with ... a lot of other troops
who wanted a more compact and more portable handy weapon.
And so paratroops certainly were issued M1 carbines,
but it found a lot of interest after the war with special operations type guys as well for a time.
And that's where we see the MP7 also being used is, yes, some police departments,
but largely we see it going to elite, small quantity, special operations type units
who want the controllability and the compactness.
And I'm not sure entirely what to make of that yet,
but I find it very interesting that both this and the P90 are appealing to that field,
instead of the one for which they were actually designed.
Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed this video.
I had a chance several years ago to do some shooting with an MP7 at the Grey Room with H&K,
so we aren't taking these out shooting.
But I do have a video already published on some shooting experience and thoughts on the MP7.
So I'll link to that at the end of this video, you can check that out.
Once again, thanks to Woody's Weapons and Sienna Armoury for access to these two.
And thanks for watching.