Benelli B76 Family: Italian Inertial Locking Autopistols

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian McCallum and today we're gonna take a look at an underappreciated and obscure Italian basically 1980s service pistol this is the Benelli b76 it is one of a whole family of similar pistols that were manufacturing and I really think it's kind of an underappreciated gun it's really a quite nice gun and it's fantastically weird mechanically this is an inertial locked pistol which is basically the closest thing that we have to actual magic so we're gonna take this apart and I'm going to show you exactly how it works and the misconceptions people call this lever delayed it's not we'll get to that in a moment first off history of this thing it was the patent was actually applied for in Italy in 1972 and in the United States in 1973 it was granted in the US in 1975 the guns went into production in 1976 hence the b76 designation and this was basically an attempt for a police-style sidearm now it was a little hampered at the time by being a single stack gun which also means it actually feels great in the hand but it only holds eight rounds it was manufactured in both nine millimetre parabellum and 765 Parabellum in Italy of course you couldn't own what was considered a military caliber and so the typical civilian caliber was 765 para bellum that's 765 by 21 it is basically nine-millimeter necked down to seven point six five millimeter and lengthened just slightly so you have the be 76 in both of those calibers and then they also came out with a be 77 the next year which was the same looking gun but actually mechanically totally different the 77 was a simple blowback piece slightly smaller frame and chambered for 32 acp that one did particularly poorly on the market they then also introduced to the B 78 which was actually I'm sorry the B 78 is the designation for the gun in 765 Parabellum then they had sport models of both where they added the features that you see here nicer finish to them they extended the from 4 inches to 5 and a half inches they hung a muzzle weight on it to give you a little bit better better balance for competition bull's eye shooting adjustable rear sight and this rather big kind of 80s style target grip it's got finger grooves on this side it's a right-handed only grip unfortunately but they came out with app that was the sport version and you could get both the 78 and the 80 in sport then they also had the mp3s version and that's what we have here and this thing is incredibly rare they made less than 500 of them total in both calibers I say both calibers the other caliber you could get this in besides 9 Parabellum was actually 32 Smith & Wesson long which is gonna sound really obscure to people who aren't familiar with bullseye pistol shooting because the 32 Smith & Wesson long is actually a remarkably accurate caliber and has become very popular with rapid-fire bullseye shooting and so it's actually despite the sound it's a remarkably appropriate caliber for them to have offered the really high-end version of the gun in now the difference between the sport model and the mp3s was actually not that significant it was just a single action only trigger where the standard models and the sport models have double action single action triggers the mp3s is single action only now they did also come out with a B 82 which was a blowback the the larger frame but blowback in 9 by 18 ultra so now you've got the confluence of like three different weird 1980s things you've got a Benelli inertial locked auto loader in 9 by 18 ultra which was an attempt to have a more powerful blowback you know a more powerful cartridge but still just barely capable of being handled by a blowback action there were a number of pistols that were chambered for this cartridge around this time period none of them did all that well and it faded fairly quickly into obscurity anyway so you've got like 6 different versions or 8 different versions of the the Benelli d76 system in general in total I'll tell you what we'll get to the what ended up happening to these guns in a moment first let's take this one apart because it is totally alien to what you would expect to see inside an automatic pistol here's the basic gun this is the standard b76 this one is a really gnarly ratty example covered in corrosion because I found it at a pawn shop and haven't taken the time to seriously clean it up yet but that aside I think this thing looks really super cool that's probably the least important actual factor for a pistol but I thought I'd throw it in there all of our controls are here on the left side of the gun the safety is actually a vertically traveling block down is fire and you just slide it straight up there's a white dot covered in grit in there up is safe and in that position the hammer is locked the slide is locked the trigger is locked nothing's happening as long as that Safety's on with the safety off you have an external hammer here this does have a double action trigger so we can fire it in single you can also fire it in double interestingly what you have no way to do is decock the thing there is there is no decocker so if it's cocked and you would like to carry it with a double action first trigger pull which is like the natural reason to have a double action trigger your only option is to very carefully let the hammer down manually while pulling the trigger which is not exactly a safe option especially if you're considering this is an issue weapon for say a whole Police Department sooner or later someone will shoot themselves or the wall trying to do that the magazine release is also a bit odd in operating direction in that you put you don't push it in you actually push it forward so push that guy forward like so and then you can pull out the magazine we have an 8 round capacity magazine the magazines are identical in both calibers in 9 by 19 and 765 para bellum the b77 magazines in 32 ACP look pretty much the same but they've got actually a big spacer at the back because the 32 ACP cartridge is so much shorter one other control here is the slide lock slight release so this will lock open when it's empty and then that's your slide release the sights are a little bit unusual they're not bad but instead of having three dots you actually have three vertical lines again that one's all covered in gunk and worn off and ugly but so your sight picture is to line up three vertical lines it's not terrible but it's it's a little different than what we might expect normally before we take it apart I do need to show you the mp3s up close it comes in this awesomely 1980s leather covered case and le a couple of locking catches on the front I got a little compartment here with some cleaning supplies and spare magazine it is interesting to note the magazines for the mp3s are not the same as the magazines for the standard pistol there's a blocking bar right there and this groove in the back of the magazine actually comes in deep enough to stop the follower at this point so you can actually well you can load eight rounds in the standard magazine you can only load five in the mp3s and that would of course have to do with its intended use for bullseye competition where five round magazines are kind of the standard as for the gun itself they gave it a nicer finish of course my beat-up standard model is nothing to really compare to but there's a very nice glossy blue finish on this guy all the controls are the same but of course you can see that it has this target grip on it here and it is not a double action trigger single action only there is a muzzle weight that has been added to the end and that just hangs off on the end of the barrel so if I [ __ ] the hammer and then pull the slide back you can see it's just just kind of hanging off the end there it does have a couple little tongue and groove sort of made up surfaces down here on the bottom and it's held on simply through tension so if when you'll see this when we disassemble the gun but the slide actually comes off the front so if you want to disassemble a sport or an mp3s you have to take this muscle weight off if you do that do be careful when you reattach it not to put on too much tension you would think this would be a problem because the front sights on there but apparently it it isn't that's stable enough that it doesn't cause accuracy Wow problems the rear sight is fully adjustable you'll notice they don't have that three line thing going on here you just have a screw for elevation there and a little-bitty screw to adjust windage there so you've got a nice square rear notch with a white dot in the front now for disassembly first step is removed magazine which I've already done if we lock the slide back with the slide stop it's not actually quite all the way back and the first step in disassembly is to go all the way back and then lock it in place with a safety like that then you're going to come back here and you have to take these two little tabs and flip them backwards so I'm going to use a pin to do this so there's that one there's that one and then we have to push the firing pin in you can see it there we need to do is push it in and then we can drop this firing pin sort of locking block down theory this might have had something to do with why this pistol didn't get adopted anywhere there we go nope almost there okay there we go now that is going to drop out the bottom of the slide this is actually an important functional piece we'll get to this in a moment and now the slide just comes right off the front so there it goes and there is nothing inside that slide instead we have a fixed barrel we have a recoil spring sitting here in the front let's go pull a captive recoil spring out and then our bolt that is not how pistols are currently made so that's our bolt this is the the flapper that is often said to be a let part of a levered delay system which it's not will disassemble it a little further first this firing pin will come out if you rotate it to the right position there's a flat on it right there so we got the firing pin once the firing pin is out then the firing pin spring will come out behind it and then I can slide this thing off the side and that is fully disassembled all right so here's the whole thing field-stripped it's a little finicky to get this rear block out once you've done that the whole thing comes apart very easily and the way this thing actually works is through an inertial locking system which as I mentioned before is really the closest thing that our modern firearms technology has to true magic now it's interesting that the only other really the only other inertial locked guns out there on the market of today and at this time frame were in fact Benelli shotguns now they weren't the only ones most notably the Sjogren's Scandinavian shotgun made in the first few years of the 1900s used in inertial locking system but aside from those and these Bonelli's that's pretty much it these systems can be really tricky to try and understand and this is no exception so here's what's going on this surface right here is actually a locking shoulder this pistol has a tilting bolt very much like well you might think of it like a foul so when the bolt sitting here in its well at rest position it's actually locked it can't move backwards until the back end of the bolt lifts up just slightly like that and then it can travel so when it goes into battery you'll see that it drops this right here is the locking surface on the bolt that drops into that locking recess in the frame right there now notice that there is this little angled plug at the top of the bolt and we have a matching says for it here in the top of the slide so with the slide on you can see right now the bolt is locked in place and in battery and if I start pulling the slide back the groove on the top of the slide is going to catch the plug on the top of the bolt lift the bolt up and cycle it backwards so inertia is the concept that an object at rest will tend to stay at rest so when you fire a pistol like this the parts are going to start moving backwards under recoil but not immediately they have to first overcome the inertia of each of the individual components but that's not the only force that's actually going on when you fire in addition when when you fire the gun the bullet goes forward pressure attempts to push backward or does push backward on the bolt face here so there are two separate forces that are working against each other at the moment of firing or for the few moments after firing the bolts getting pushed backwards slide represented by this rear locking piece here the slide is tending to stay in place and the two of them acting together cause this little flapper to lift up that flapper is going to push on the top of the slide because that's what's directly above it by pushing on the top of the slide it's pushing the bolt down holding it into its locking recess in the frame so for this moment as long as there is inertia on the slide the pistol will stay locked now in the micro seconds following firing that inertia is going to be overcome and the slides going to start to retract backwards like this that allows this flapper to drop down and then as soon as the slide starts moving it's going to pick up this tab lift it lift it there we go this is a little tricky so I've also got the firing pin sitting in there anyway it's going to lift up the locking book the bolt and start to cycle it backwards like that so that is why I can certainly see why people consider this a lever delayed gun because the opening is delayed and this sort of well this does kind of act as a lever however technically speaking levered blowback implies basically a multiplication of an acceleration of force so the lever causes one piece to go slower and another piece simultaneously to go faster and that's not what's going on in here this isn't so much a lever as it is like a locking wedge that acts for only a very brief period before becoming disconnected disengaged and allowing the bolt to lift up so this is in fact an inertia Li locked pistol because at the moment of firing it is truly locked all the parts are in such configuration that the bolt cannot go backwards and it's only after forces start to work themselves out that it can cycle it's really a brilliant mechanism it's extremely cool from an engineering standpoint and it seems to actually work really quite well I think it's just the fact that it is so weirdly close to magic that and it doesn't necessarily give us that much in the way of an improvement over some of the other systems out there so a Nellie's really the only company that's ever put this system to use all right a couple last things to add in first off the chamber is fluted to aid with extraction you can see the flutes they don't run very far back but they are there at the case mouth that's to help with extraction for this inertial system and there is actually a loaded chamber indicator right in here if I cycle the slide back you can see that little red mark in theory when you have a cartridge loaded that will lift up and it'll be visible but as others have noted it's kind of only visible if you're looking down the muzzle of the gun so maybe of marginal utility this is marked Syal incorporated of New York New York they were the importer for Benelli and then on the other side we have Benelli army SP a the company out of Urbino Italy the model which is b76 and of course the serial number on both the slide and the frame and then we also have the serial number on the barrel as well as a caliber marking on the p3s we don't have a caliber marking on the barrel instead we have it here on the slide nine para along with the model designation mp3s and then all the same information in total production of these guns with something less than ten thousand I've been unable to find any solid numbers on them just spiking basically speculative estimates as far as the mp3s guns you're talking less than 500 total made most of those in 32 Smith & Wesson long because if you are that high-end bullseye shooter you're gonna be more interested in that cartridge than in nine Parabellum so there are only three four examples I think known of the the nine millimetre parabellum ones in the country here this one has been graciously and generously loaned to me by Todd thank you very much Todd I appreciate it and so I think at this point you know these went out of production in 1990 like I said they were never they just never managed to get popular I think people don't really think of Benelli as a handgun company these were developed right around the time period when people are really starting to popularize double stack magazines in police service pistols and there are a few issues with these you know the safety is not particularly ergonomic to use all of these factors being unfortunate I think because it's a very comfortable gun I think it looks really nice and well I think the last thing left to do is actually to take these out to the range and see if that mp3s really does give a benefit at least give a benefit to me over shooting the standard model so we're gonna go ahead and do that tomorrow in the meantime stick around hope you enjoyed the video thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 244,784

Rating: 4.9741902 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, b80, b82, mp3s, 9mm, 7.65 para, 32 s&w, wadcutter, sport, competition, bullseye, pistol, handgun, service pistol, benelli, benelli armi, cased, unicorn, rare, inertial lock, shotgun, sjogren, 32acp, blowback, lever delayed, benelli b76, scarce, unique, unusual, weird, space magic, italy, italian, b76

Id: pf9_NPdNvA0

Length: 19min 45sec (1185 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2019