BXP: Blowback eXperimental Parabellum

hi guys thanks for tuning into another video in forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian McCallum and today we are taking a look at a selection of south african 9-millimeter carbines well these two are carbines and this one is actually a submachine gun this this is called the B XP or blowback experimental Parabellum and it was designed by a South African guy by the name of Anthony speak now peak was was basically a farmer here in South Africa and in the late 1970s he ordered an LDP carbine what later would become known as a commando from Rhodesia and paid for it and his gun showed up in the mail and the South African custom service seized it and decided that it was a machine gun and it was not legally able to be brought into the country however they did let him take a look at it and being an engineer he sort of guy he he was able to come up with a way to modify the gun so that it would meet South African semi-automatic only standards and it worked really well and the guns importer then hired him to do that same conversion to their whole shipment of LDP later commando guns this got piqued basically involved in firearms design he would go on to work for a company called milk or formed in 1980 doing firearms design and he came up with the bxp carbine it looked at the the commando and decided this really isn't all that complicated I think I can do something that's just as good in fact I think I can do something that's better so milkor developed this as both a semi-automatic and a fully automatic firearm unlike many of the guns of this type milkor actually sold these two elements of the South African military and the South African national security services so some of the police forces had them I think the prison guards had them as well as selling them as semi-automatic weapons on the commercial market as self-defense guns so there's a substantial difference between the mechanics of the semi autos and the full autos the semi autos are hammer fired from a closed bolt the full auto version is open bolt and fires from a fixed firing pin but they look virtually identical on the outside the gun went through a number of different owners and iterations so it was produced at milk or from 1984 until 1991 milk or then sold the whole package to a company called supreme technologies they didn't really make any changes to the gun but they manufactured it for a couple more years until 1993 it was then sold to a company called true cito who did pretty much the same thing now after milk or nobody else made full auto versions everyone else was just for the semi-auto commercial market and these did really quite well on the semi-auto commercial market they're still relatively common here in South Africa and they're well thought of they're a bunch of hips at guys who actually use these with optical sights for sporting competition anyway true cito manufactured basically the same thing didn't make any substantial changes to it although they did it start to experiment with things like polymer magazines for the guns we'll look at that in a moment after true cito the package went to a guy named Gary Barnes he started having to make some changes this is pretty much one group of components that along with the Tech Data these the parts are all sold and transferred as a unit from one owner to another to another this one here is a Gary Barnes gun by this point some of the parts are running out so we'll look at this when we take a closer look at that gun ultimately when Barnes was sick of dealing with it he sold the whole thing to true Velo which is a more substantial arms manufacturing company here they were many that the last guns were manufactured in about 2010 the whole thing I believe is still owned by true Bello but they don't manufacture them anymore at the markets pretty well saturated for something like this so that's the basic history of the bxp let me go ahead and pull one of these apart and we'll see how they work and look at a couple of the changes between the different versions so there are basically no markings on these things they don't say bxp anywhere really the only thing you're going to find on them is a serial number the style of the number will change depending on who made it and when full out over semi-auto on this one it's just a simple RS a republic of south africa 1505 then for controls we have a selector switch here on the right or on the left side the single red dot is for semi-auto the green dot is for safe note that when you put it into safe it's going to push this lever up into the receiver and it's going to drop this pin down behind the trigger that prevents the trigger from being pressed pretty simple safety really the only distinguishing external characteristic of the full auto open bolt version is the safety lever because it also has this two red dot position all the way down there which is full auto the magazine release is mounted in the heel push that in pull the mag out these use magazines that are based on the Walther mpk and PL series so they're trapezoidal in profile these are marked as 30 round magazines actually that one doesn't have the marking this one has the 30 round marking for comparison's sake here is a standard Walther MP magazine notice interestingly it's actually marked 32 and the last witness hole is a little bit lower than the 30 on the bxp mag and then in addition that bxp has a retention catch slot right here or on the Walther it's up on the top so these magazines will fit interchangeably in both guns but they won't lock interchangeably the folding stock is actually quite nicely done here there's a little spring plunger and see it right there that locks this into the trigger guard so that it doesn't flop around when you don't want it to to deploy the stock you pull that back and then just pivot it up that allows the stock to open up like this and then on the back we have a big spring-loaded catch right there that this is going to snap into that's quite stiff this snaps in with a pair of pins locking the butt plate in position so this whole thing is is really quite a sturdy stock it doesn't have a really good cheek weld because of this flat rib but the but plates nice and wide it as far as a cheap folding submachine gun style of stock goes it's really pretty nice there is a bit of a variety of muzzle devices on these guns some have flash hiders some have just compensators so in this case our semi-auto carbine has the flash hider our full auto has a compensator which should actually be helpful on the full auto version you can see the front sight here is an offset pin so you adjust your windage by rotating this slightly side-to-side effect you can see this one's offset a little to the left this one's pretty much dead center the exact style of the rear sight varies a bit over time but they all function the same way they all have a little notch and in this case a V above it so the notches would be probably closer range that V is going to have a little bit higher elevation but take your pick whichever style a sight you prefer in order to close the stock by the way you just push this button in and that allows the stock to drop down now as production got later and later and this this whole gun package went through more and more owners part started to run out so you'll start to see changes in style on some of the later guns so this one is a Gary Barnes gun he decided to change the stock up and this isn't actually a dowel stock this is a cast aluminum stock specifically based on the Galil but manufactured independently and it is on a pivoting trunnion there so all you have to do to unfold it is just lift it out and then it snaps into place and in order to fold it you have to push the button in note that there's still a hole here for the pin that would have attached the original top folding or under folding stock and you can see some little changes here Barnes had to start making his own muzzle devices because he ran out of existing ones so you can see that the whole pattern is a little bit different and the front of the gun is also simplified so on this the muzzle device is held in place by a set screw right there which believes actually missing on this gun the originals they had a spring-loaded detent in the front so you'd have to push that button in and then you could unscrew the muzzle kind of like an Uzi in fact there are a substantial number of bits kind of like an Uzi so let me show you the inside disassembly is really quite slick just push this button in at the back that's directly connected to the recoil spring and then the back end of the gun pivots open all sticky there we go so this opens up and then we can pull out the whole bolt assembly pull it back to this point then you can lift out the charging handle note that this charging handle is molded plastic by the time Barnes was doing guns he ran out of those as well and has milled aluminum charging handles instead but back to our gun here this is the whole self-contained bolt assembly that comes out very much easy like it has a telescoping bolt so the barrel comes all the way back to here there is an ejector pin right there so when the gun cycles the ejector pin pushes out it's a nice heavy stout bolt these guns were quite reliable they have a good reputation and you can see why this is a good proven design keep in mind this is hammer fired as well so on semi-automatic goosies you'll typically have a striker fired design where they cut the back of the bolt off and treat it separately control it separately on this you actually have a firing pin right there and when the hammer hits it it protrudes forward it is a short enough firing pin that you actually have to hit it fast enough for it to fly forward free of the bolt and then it will retract back in under spring pressure so when I push it it doesn't quite come all the way out and on the receiver of these semi-autos you'll see there is a hammer back here you have some of the infrastructure for the full auto firing it's in the front but on the semi-auto guns they don't actually have those components so when I pull the trigger hammer comes forward that's going to fire the gun we have a disconnect err here that prevents it from firing info this forces the hammer to reset with each shot we have the return spring assembly for the trigger right there nice little compact self-contained gun it's really exactly what you would want for this sort of firearm inexpensive but reliable and durable looking at the inside of the full auto version you can see that the hammer is gone never installed and instead we have a couple of sear catches in the front so when you pull the trigger that drops down and releases the bolt so in order to do that you need a totally different design of old and you can see that's what we have here on the front so first off the firing pin is a fixed solid nub on the breech face no need to have anything you know it doesn't move whenever it's an open bolt gun so when it closes it fires and then there are these couple of hooks on the front end of the bolt and these two are what the sear catches on so when you pull the trigger sear pulls off of these and allows the bolt to go forward and then this is a safety catch safety sear so that if the bolt bounces backwards for example if you drop the gun on its on the butt plate this will catch the bolt and hold it in place before it has a chance to move far enough to strip a cartridge out of the magazine or if it does have if it does strip a cartridge this will catch it before it can fire if it doesn't go far enough to catch the main sear anyway that's a pretty standard sort of safety mechanism and that's how it's built in to this guy we also have a couple of cutouts in the sides of the bolts this is for that little tab on the safety mechanism when you put this into into the safe position it pushes that tab up that locks into the bolt and prevents it from moving as well as preventing the trigger from being pulled so all in all while this looks like a very crude gun you know it looks as crude as many of the other South African and Rhodesian domestic submachine gun looking pieces it actually has all of the sophisticated elements where they're important which is pretty cool I don't have enough time or enough discrete examples of the guns to go through all of the changes that were but as this as the gun as the bxp went through all of its different owners and manufacturers everyone kind of added some little thing that they tried or experimented with one of the more substantial ones was true cito which experimented with making a polymer magazine for the gun I don't think it worked out all that well magazines are hard to do and apparently they had trouble with the feed lips cracking as you might expect for a new polymer unreinforced magazine but we have a body here a mag body from one of those true seto polymer ones as an example and then by the time we get to Gary Barnes things have really gotten fairly crude so the nice molded grip panels are gone replaced by these very simplistic ones the muzzle device is being manufactured new we've got the aluminum charging handle on here and if you just look at the manufacturing on for example the lowers it's gotten a lot simpler and a lot less nice so just the general fit and the fit the finish the the quality of the work was degrading on on these end end of the production run sort of guns we can see that more clearly looking at the inside so for example in order to make sure that the gun locked up nice and solid on these barns guns this this rear lip is just hammered down until it's snug against the top of the recoil buffer there on the earlier guns that was done by a round tab on this buffer and that no longer exists on this one barns also changed the style of the safety you know another example if he ran out of original production parts and so his safety here isn't quite as nicely made or as clean as the original ones going back to milk or no selector markings on it at all it's just that semi and that safe in addition to these patterns of guns there are a couple more so some of the manufacturers did periodically manufacture these without stocks without a stock they are legally classified as a handgun in South Africa which makes them a little bit easier to to own then a semi-automatic rifle so you'll find them without stocks there were also some made with long barrels I believe some with fixed wooden stocks so you know the whole variety of configurations that you might might consider you'll probably find some of the companies manufactured suppressors specifically to go on these a lot of accessories like that but these three are pretty good pretty good set showing the bxp alright let's see how the bxp runs in full auto that's not bad alright so a couple interest a couple observations about this it is really cool that this runs reliably and effectively that's for not to denigrate the South African arms community but for the the small production independent guys having something like this actually function is a really good first step unfortunately the stock is not very good the sights are and not very good but it actually works which is nice the rate of fire is not bad you have long enough with the magazines to actually shoot a good number of bursts that's it's a low enough rate of fire it does bounce around you know this isn't a ZK 383 or a suomi but overall not bad okay there is one other thing we definitely have to try I only have a few rounds left but let's give this a shot this is just because you guys always insist woof that blows a lot of gas back into my face when I do that and is really quite unpleasant this is much better so that is the bxp probably the most common of these guns still in existence still in use today very cool to get a chance to take a look at these in particular the full-auto one those are quite scarce to find in South Africa the vast majority that were made and certainly the ones that are still available on the commercial civilian market are the semi-auto ones so hopefully you guys enjoyed the video stay tuned tomorrow for more cool forgotten weapons and thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 299,547

Rating: 4.9730844 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, andries piek, milkor, south africa, sa, south african, uzi, kommando, ldp, smg, carbine, 9mm, semiauto, full auto, submachine gun, parabellum, bxp, ipsc, rhodesia, rhodesian, truvelo, tressitu, gary barnes

Id: 5fxE97lDkT4

Length: 19min 6sec (1146 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 18 2019