Did the AK47 Copy the STG-44?

what is up you sexy youtube mother lovers if you know anything about me or the channel you know i'm pretty partial to the ak right here we have an akm one of the most popular and iconic assault rifles of the entire world and yes i said assault rifles because this that's what this is this is an assault rifle it's a military rifle that is select fire so this is a fully automatic weapon just like god intended the ak and all of its variants is one of the best contributions mikhail kalashnikov ever offered to this world right up there with his own brand of vodka now one of the most common myths about the birth of the ak-47 and all of its variants is that it is a copy of the stg44 the german father of all assault rifles and thanks to our friends here at drive tanks we actually have one which always makes me happy this right here is a beautiful piece of history we actually shot it in our german machine guns of world war ii video you could check that out down in the description i love this thing i could kiss it i probably will i already did but if you compare the two it's not hard to see why people think that they're a carbon copy and they do have a lot in common the detachable magazines with an intermediate cartridge stamped sheet metal design long stroke piston i mean they do actually have quite a bit that makes you think these guns are pretty damn similar it also doesn't help that the ak-47 came three or four years after the stg 44 the mp44 mp40 there's so many different variants of this gun but add that on top of the fact that the designer of this gun hugo schmeiser god rest his soul uh he actually was captured by the russians and brought back to work on their weapon production so there's a lot stacking up to that whole thing about russians just pretty much stealing the stg44 slapping a new cyrillic label on it and making 100 million of them however there's a lot more to it in fact the ak-47 is pretty damn different from the stg44 when you actually break it down and look at the internal mechanisms we're going to go over that talk about why it's a little bit of a myth and uh really just get some good gun porn what the sdg 44 and a couple other weapons here today as well as making a lot of people on the internet needlessly butthurt first off time to thank the folks who allow us to take trips like this in the first place ever wonder why i'm okay leaving the shop like three weeks at a time well it's because i have simply safe simply safe is reliable effective home security that'll make sure your home or shop is safe you just order it online or over the phone it shows up right to your door and you can set it up yourself in under an hour so easy an aka guy can do it and from there your home is professionally monitored 24 7 and if anything sketchy happens they'll make sure that the police get called they've even won a bunch of awards and recalled the best home security system of 2020. having it set up at a place like the shop gives you a lot more peace of mind when you're 1500 miles away in another state for me personally it lets me know that my guys haven't burned down my shop yet which it's really nice so if any of that sounds interesting go ahead and check these guys out there's a custom link in the description and in the pin comment show them a little bit of love at least check them out we appreciate sponsors like them that allow us to do cool stuff like this anyways simply safe so first off let's start by breaking down the ak now it goes without saying these guns are already clear there's no live ammo here so we take our top cover off here and now we have our recoil spring assembly that goes into our bolt carrier here pull this out pull this up and out of the rails this gun has not been cleaned in quite some time just like god intended put this here and you have that's basically your disassembly of the gun if you want to go crazy pull up the gas tube but this is the inner workings of the gun this one is of course machine gun so i can't pull the trigger without the uh auto sear being engaged but all in all that is your ak so simple a child could use it and they do now moving on to the stg44 better not get these parts confused i mean it's a carbon copy so you know might accidentally put a bolt the wrong gun that was sarcasm so as you'll notice here the takedown is actually more like an hk so you got a pin that comes out here pull that out your stock comes off and you have a buffer spring in the back it's not a self-contained spring assembly like the ak has it's just again more like an ar buffer so you stock off here too crazy here and then you have your stg pistol again like an hk you can then take your bolt carrier assembly out we have our our bolt here and our bolt carrier with you know the long stroke piston of course we also have our lower here not sure if that's technically what it's called but we're going to call it a lower for all intents and purposes also comes down just like an hk it's kind of funky this is almost like it's having more in common with something like a g3 than it does with an ak weird yeah other than your sheet metal handguard up top this is your basic field stripping of an stg44 so one of the key differences of the sdg-44 and the ak which in my opinion is why the ak is what it is it's known for that legendary reliability is it's all in the lockup it's in the bolt and the bolt carrier assembly so the stg44 uses what's called a tilting block mechanism a tilting bolt action so when this goes back of course you have the same system where you have a gas block up here pushing gas through to a long stroke piston right here it actually pulls this up out of lockup this falls down your locking surface is actually one big lug there on the back of the bolt falls down locks up stops the bolt from being able to move backward until the bolt carrier comes picks it up and says get the hell out of there what are you doing there man of course this goes back through the gun and back forward until this is able to go back into position this also falls back down and is able to lock again think of the bolt as like wedging itself against the uh the locking logs there behind the mag well it's actually pretty [ __ ] whack to be honest so when it's in the gun it actually falls there and locks behind where the ammunition is really interesting not necessarily dissimilar to the way that the sks does things now the ak again uses a long stroke gas piston but it has a rotating bolt set up so our bolt looks a lot like this if you don't know this is what an ak bolt looks like you need to be watching the channel a little bit more not just that cursed gun image crap this right here is a two lug style so you got our lug here and a lug here and the way this works is when this is in the gun it locks right there ahead of the cartridges in the front trunnion of the gun the way that works is that when this is fully forward this bolt rides in a cam groove right there on the inside of the bolt carrier and so when this is all the way forward it cams this and turns it to where this is in full lock up until a round is fired and it pushes to where it can unlock and then carries the entire bolt back through the assembly carrying the bolt bolt carrier knowledge this seems like a really esoteric difference on the surface but in reality kalashnikov actually talks a lot in his book about the true inspiration for this style so the lock up of a firearm is that that's everything that is the gun that is what stops you from exploding and in my opinion is what the ak got extremely right it's one of my favorite things about the gun is just the way that this whole bolt carrier bolt assembly functions but he talked about his inspiration behind this and it wasn't schmeiser it was actually an american by the name of garand i really need to wash my hands i've washed my hands a little bit before i defiled this poor m1 garand but this is the famous garand so i give myself grand thumb this was the american infantry rifle during world war ii and it is a phenomenal piece of engineering apparently mikhail kalashnikov thought so too so as we take this gun apart pull the fire control group out that's not really relevant right now you'll see where you have a lot of similarities to the ak-47 so on the surface this gun does not look like an ak at all but when you rip that nice pretty furniture off you start to see that the m1 garand is basically just an ak upside down and sideways let me explain that much like our ak and our stg the garand also functioned on a long stroke piston not a lot of people know that but this is actually a gas operated gun not quite sure how they think it works but this is uh your gas block up here you've got a long stroke piston that runs back this way and works the action of your gun now you see already kind of a small similarity with the aks the recoil spring actually sits inside of the piston or the bolt carrier just like our ak here although this recoil springs a little bit bigger and on the other side but already even right there you can see a little bit of a similarity again just like the stg and the ak you've got a gas block up front that feeds gas in here operates your long stroke piston but where it really gets ak is in the bolt itself as you can see here up top this is a two lug rotating bolt design just like the ak if you really want to get esoteric about it the charging handles even look the same that one's a little bit of a stretch but it's kind of funny as you can see your piston up here a little bit longer a lot longer than the aks but it feeds all the way back it's basically just upside down and sideways and so this is what i was talking about upside down and the way the piston is on the bottom and not on the top but you can see there the way an ak bolt would rotate as it comes out of lockup the m1 grand does the exact same thing and on the underside here if you want to zoom in real quick for me the underside of this long stroke piston assembly and charging handle actually houses a cam groove and a cam lug that operates exactly the same as the ak and how it locks up and comes out of lock up so the piece in here is basically that cam right there the only difference is it's upside down and that part is what's sideways so instead of sitting at the bottom right here that's where your ammunition is so you can't do that on the ground what they did do is they put it on the side so it's basically sitting in there like this and camming it from the side of the bolt it's actually pretty clever klashnikov talked quite a bit about having samples of you know different rifles and everything that uh just gun designers for the for the red army were allowed to have access to and just see all sorts of different firearms and operating mechanisms from all over the world and gave a lot of credit to grand which i mean credit where credit's due it's a very very smart design but once you take off the pretty wood furniture like i said and actually look at the mechanisms that operate this firearm it's really not hard to see that this is for sure the grandfather of the ak-47 a little bit more gun porn there for you before i put it away so it's only now after that long-ass diatribe about the m1 garand do we actually see that the sdg-44 bolt really doesn't have a whole lot in common with the other two guns it's very clear that those are closer related than this is and that's not to say the ak couldn't have drawn any inspiration at all from the stg44 it's actually it's far from it the stg44 changed the face of warfare schmeister was again for the second time that century far ahead of his time or at least far enough ahead to be a trendsetter where everybody kind of looked at that and said yeah that's the direction we need to go all of our weapon designers need to be working on something like that the ergonomics are definitely great much more like a modern assault rifle your stock handguard pistol grip select fire i mean this was cool but the ak really isn't a modern evolution of the stg44 at least i don't think so not as much as some other firearms like for example hk33 which is what we got here and this in my opinion is far closer to the stg44 not again not quite the same with the bolt mechanism but the actual feature of the gun and everything it looks a lot more like just the final pokemon evolution of what schmeizer started have the left side charging handle like the stg44 magazine looks damn near identical pretty darn close the disassembly is exactly like the stg where you just again punch that pin here get that pin out there's your side by side like it's uh pretty close then we got our stock take that off there we go and now we can take our recoil spring assembly and our bolt and carrier out of the gun and we have our trigger group here just like the stg 44 does as well these trigger groups are actually so close that when hill and mac was doing their reproduction sdg-44 i think they were even saying that they were going to be able to use an hk trigger pack in their uh repro sdg 44 is just for ease of manufacturing and to uh allow select fire in both easier select fire conversions for sots that was there's still a couple key differences like i said it doesn't have this uh you know free loose buffer spring which realistically i don't really think was that good of an idea it clearly worked at least pretty well um i had self-contained recoil springs seem to be a lot easier you also have rollers on the bolt instead of a long stroke gas piston operation which again that's pretty huge deal but i just wanted to show you how much this had in common and just other weapon systems have in common with the stg44 i really don't think it's going too far to say that this really was the grandfather of most modern assault rifles however an ak-47 being a clone of the stg44 or a direct copy kind of one of those you know feel free to copy my homework just make sure you change just enough i don't think it really holds water in the broader context of weapon design also worth noting seriously worth noting that kalashnikov was not the golden boy of the russian army that was going it was going to be his kalashnikov machine gun that won military trials he was competing against a lot of other weapon designers like sudeyev who did the pps43 uh dagtereb with the rpd and uh you know just just so many cool russian uh weapon designers of that time that were a shoe in he was a relative nobody so if hugo schmeiser was in russia and actually helping out with the development of their new assault rifles i'd highly doubt it would be the uh lonely tank x tanker in his early 20s versus you know some of the the massive well-respected weapon designers of the time because i think it was maybe six or seven people in competition for military trials with it for what it's worth kalashnikov said that he met schmeizer i think once or twice in passing but he wasn't even in the same town schmeiser was over at a different factory helping with something or another what helping means is a little little hit or miss he was clearly a genius but some people were saying you know when he was captured by the russians and told to work on their small arms uh he was you know instrumental in setting up their their infrastructure for weapon production other people said he'd just like to pour around a lot and drink a lot of vodka which hey who doesn't i guess the long way around for this video is trying to explain the fact that when the ak-47 was being developed it wasn't a room full of stg-44s and hugo schmeiser chained to a table trying to recreate that for the russians it was a lot more to it and really i think it does kalashnikov a disservice to uh just to claim that it was a direct copy because it is so much more than that this of course coming from a massive massive ak fanboy so take that with a grain of salt if you will tldr this is brilliant but i like this i hope this was at least a little bit insightful and maybe sparked a little bit of interest in learning about the history behind these awesome awesome firearms i just want to give another shout out to drive tanks the guys over here they pretty much let us do whatever the hell we want to do as long as they know that we're we're not going to break things for the most part and they've just been really awesome hosts and letting us use these cool cool pieces of firearm history you really don't get to find many other places i'm gonna go wash my hands again because uh these guys are like me and you know sometimes machine guns go a little while without cleaning i hope you guys appreciated the video if you want to see more technical breakdown stuff like this let me know down in the comments i appreciate you guys watching the end and i will see you sexy youtube mother lovers in the next video avidazeen [Music] but there's a lot of misconceptions around the birth of this rifle one of them a myth has persisted for quite some time it's really easy to see how it got so popular is that it is a copy of the stg44 the german father of all sight assault rifles [ __ ] okay mostly in name only and there's you know story behind that about why hitler didn't exactly like these i just said the h word bye-bye monetization

Channel: Brandon Herrera

Views: 672,417

Rating: 4.9655304 out of 5

Keywords: Brandon Herrera, the AK guy, stg-44, AK-47, copy, Kalashnikov, Russian, German, gun, call of duty, world war 2, german machine guns, machine guns, drive tanks, stg, MG-42, 8mm, Garand

Id: J4l33puWET0

Length: 18min 7sec (1087 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Carch150]

Ok?

[u/AwesomeBL9]

Kinda but the M16 did the same just prior to Vietnam; the Americans needed a magazine fed, controllable rifle.

[u/0g0mogo]

Destroy enemy

Steal their rifle design

Sell it

Profit