[ Prototype Hungarian 33M Rifle ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today visiting
Mr Joschi Schuy, the author of
a couple of fantastic books on Austrian pistols.
And we're taking a look at some really interesting,
in this case Hungarian, firearms out of his collection.
This is a Hungarian Model 33M.
And it represents the transition from the ... Steyr M95 pattern, the Hungarian 31M rifles.
Of course when Hungary separated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire
after World War One they adopted their own set of designations.
So what had been the Austro-Hungarian M95 became the Hungarian M31.
And then in 1935 they adopted a fundamentally different rifle, the 35M.
Now what happened here, the reason for the change, is during World War One
Hungarian forces had found that in cold weather the M95 pattern rifles,
the Mannlicher straight pulls, could become really difficult to operate.
The lubricating grease that they had in the guns would get really hard and stiff in cold weather,
and the M95 ... it's a gun that requires a little bit of force to open in the best of conditions.
And you put that in the cold with gummed up grease, it could get almost impossible.
And so the Hungarian Army decided that it wanted a turn-bolt rifle instead of a straight pull.
Specifically they wanted to combine a Mannlicher-Schönauer turn-bolt action
with the same magazine and loading system that they'd had on the M95.
So that was continuing to use the M95, the Mannlicher, 5 round en bloc clips.
At this point the rifle was chambered for the 8x56 rimmed Mannlicher cartridge,
the same cartridge they would go on to use through World War Two.
And the idea was, "Well, let's combine a turn-bolt with our existing ammunition and magazine systems."
The result was the 33M, this was the first trials pattern.
The program obviously was developed in 1933, there were 50 of these rifles ordered,
and they were delivered in January of 1935 and put into trials.
So let's take a look at what they had for the 33M.
This rifle has a gorgeous deep blue finish,
but if you look at this you will recognise a number of elements.
So of course it is a manual turn-bolt action,
but we have the familiar cocking piece from the M95 system,
but combined with a Mauser-style flag safety.
And of course the protruding single-stack magazine with a hole in the bottom.
So this feeds using the same 5 round en bloc clips.
You simply open the bolt, drop the clip in here, the whole thing clicks in.
And when you load the final cartridge, the empty clip falls out of the bottom of the magazine.
This is a little bit different from the M95 magazine, it's a little fancier,
the manufacturing is a little more complex.
This by the way is the plunger, there's a coil spring in here
that provides tension to the [follower] spring right there. ...
The bolt handle is hollow for weight reduction.
It's got some nice checkering on the safety as well as the cocking piece.
So this rifle was actually the subject of two patents by none other than Rudolf von Frommer.
One of them is a mechanism in the front that prevents you
from cocking the rifle without the bolt head, it's kind of a redundant patent.
Not that hugely important of a feature, like it's kind of a self-solving problem.
The more interesting patent to me is one on the sliding metal pieces here in the dust cover.
You'll notice of course with a turn-bolt system you have to have space
to ... lift the bolt handle to unlock the action.
And this dust cover completely seals off any opening like that.
Well, it does that by having a couple of interlocking metal pieces
that overlap and slide together, so that you can open the action like so.
That patent was filed in ... Hungary in 1933 and Austria in 1934.
The only place that the designation of the rifle is actually marked is here on top of the butt plate.
And there's another really cool fancy element here, notice there's a little hole with a button.
Push down on that button, it's a little tight on this one.
And I can actually pivot the butt plate down.
And inside we find a really fancy cleaning kit.
If we pull this out.
Check that thing out, that's really cool. There is a specially shaped oil bottle,
with little brackets to hold a three-piece segmented cleaning rod.
This unscrews, ...
unscrews a lot.
And you have (I won't pull it out here to get the bristles all bent up),
but you have an oiler brush in there, in your oil ... reservoir.
And then that just slides right back into the buttstock, and we can ...
close that back up.
The rear sight is a tangent sight graduated out to 2,000 metres.
Interestingly, they put the serial number on the underside of the rear sight.
This particular gun is serial number 34.
And they actually put that serial number in kind of weird places.
It's here on the front of the barrel band.
It's also here on the front of the end cap and the stacking rod.
And on the front of the front sight cover.
And it's actually on the inside of the butt plate, I'll leave you to believe me on that one.
This was designed with a nice fully protected barleycorn-style front sight,
and the exact same sort of stacking rod that was on the M95 rifles and carbines.
And then it adopts the basically the ... conversion that was made to a lot of the M95 carbines,
giving them sling swivels on both the side and the bottom of the rifle.
So we have a dual sling-swivel set up on the front here.
And then there's a sling swivel on the bottom on the back.
And then for the side sling swivel they inlet it into the side of the stock.
Which is much more comfortable than the way the M95 carbines did it
which was to put a big protruding sling swivel right here
where if you are left handed it is right under your grip and really annoying.
Also worth pointing out that this has the split stock.
That would be used, not exactly the same, but the same concept that would be used on the 35M.
Now I want to show you this incredibly minute, fragile, dust cover assembly.
To take the bolt out, this (well, we have to open it first) this is our bolt release.
You just hold that up and the bolt comes right out the back of the gun.
In order to take the dust cover off, we are just going to pull the striker back.
Lock it out to the side, and then
I can rotate this down.
Now we've got our two little metal pieces here.
This one (let's see, let's lift this up) this one slides off that way.
And then this one slides off the front.
And in order to guide this, there are two little just minuscule tabs on that.
Oh, and of course more serial numbers.
You can only imagine how quickly these pieces will be bent, broken and lost,
probably all simultaneously, by troops in the field.
But when it is put together, it is that overlap of these pieces going that way
and those two going that way, that lock it around the bolt.
And then it can slide open and shut ...
(there we go) like that.
There were a couple of problems that were found in the trials of this rifle.
In general it worked extremely well, possibly almost too well when we look at the differences
between this and what was adopted shortly hereafter as the 35M.
The couple of specific problems, one was this handguard that only goes halfway down the barrel.
Apparently when you did a bunch of shooting and then went to attach a bayonet,
you'd burn your hand on the barrel.
And you're holding the barrel out here and trying to put on a bayonet.
That was a problem and so the 35M actually has a handguard
that runs the whole length, all the way out to the nose cap, to fix that.
Apparently the other problem was the company manufacturing these
wanted to buy a lot of its material from
foreign sources outside Hungary, the steel, the wood, that sort of thing.
And the Hungarian Defence Ministry really wasn't a big fan.
They wanted all this stuff to be sourced from within Hungary
for economic reasons and for reasons of military self-sufficiency.
I don't have any details on how that was cleared up for the 35M, but one can presume that it was.
Now the more fundamental problem is this rifle is loaded with really fancy little features.
Things that were both too fragile and too expensive to put into the full production gun
that they wanted to buy like 100,000 examples of.
And so what we'll see with the 35M is the same basic system,
a Mannlicher-Schönauer turn-bolt action,
the M95 pattern magazine and clip, but dramatically simplified.
The folding butt plate thing, gone.
The really fancy oiler bottle and integrated cleaning rod holder in the buttstock, gone.
The dust cover, gone.
... Some of the fanciness in the front sight, some of the really detailed elements,
the fancy shaping of the front of the magazine,
all of that was significantly simplified to reduce the cost of what would be the 35M.
So I do have a video on the 35M,
if you're interested in that I will link to it at the end of this video.
I think they are a pretty cool rifle, this combination of the Mannlicher en bloc clip
with the really quite potent 8x56 ammunition and a turn-bolt action.
So, the 35M would serve Hungarian forces through much of World War Two.
It would also serve as the basis for the 43M
and ... essentially the German production version of the 43M
where they took the same rifle and converted it to a Mauser magazine in 7.92x57mm.
So the basis for a whole series of interesting guns.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. A big thanks to Mr Schuy for access
to this probably one of a kind surviving example of a 33M.
If you are interested in particular in ... Austrian and Austro-Hungarian automatic pistols
and early mechanical pistols, it's really interesting stuff,
I strongly suggest checking out his books. They are in German,
but even if you don't speak German, well worth it to flip through and admire.
Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.