Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at HK's Grey Room in Ashburn, Virginia, taking a look at some cool aspects of HK's firearms development history. And specifically today we're taking a look at the G36. And this would really be a pretty revolutionary departure for HK from its entire previous history of rifle type products, because, for once, this is not a roller-delayed action. The G36 originated basically in the flaming
demise of the HK G11, the caseless ammunition, multi-shot burst, very futuristic looking rifle that
was on the verge of adoption in like 1989, 1990, when the whole project was then cancelled
as a result of German reunification. And the costs that were associated with that, and the lack of maybe so much of a need
for a really cutting edge new military rifle. However, that left the German Army, the Bundeswehr, still
using the G3 rifle which was at this point 40 plus years old. And they really did need to modernise it.
Maybe not so much because they anticipated a large-scale major war coming,
but because they really needed to have a little more ammunition compatibility
with all the rest of their allies. By this point, by the 1990s,
almost everyone has adopted 5.56, but the Germans hadn't, they
still had those old 7.62mm G3s. So at this point, by 1993, the German
military put out a request for a new rifle. They didn't really have the money available
for a whole new development program, that money had kind of gone
into the G11 which went nowhere. ... Interestingly at this time they did
have the option of adopting the AK-74, because when East and West Germany
reunified the new combined nation acquired East Germany's
massive stockpiles of AK-74s. But adopting that rifle wasn't seen as being a politically
realistic option, so they needed something new in 5.56. Now, without the money for a development program what they did
instead was look at other rifle options that were currently available. Now HK knew that something like this was coming, and
even if it wasn't going to be with the German government, they wanted to have the opportunity to be selling
a modern 5.56 rifle to the world military market. They had tried with the G41 in the '70s and '80s,
and that rifle hadn't really gone anywhere. It was more of an upgrade than a whole new system. So HK had been ... developing what it called
the HK50, which was a project to develop a new short-stroke gas piston, rotating bolt rifle.
Basically a technological derivative of the AR-18, one of many technological derivatives of
the AR-18 that we see in military service today. When the German Army came looking for new potential
rifles, the HK50 was one of their prime contenders. Another actually was the Steyr AUG. They tested these two rifles against each other,
and in 1995 they formally chose the HK50 to become adopted as the German Gewehr 36. And that is what we have here. So let's go
ahead and take a look at how it works. ... Actually to be technically specific, what we have
here is a G36E, the export version, with its optic. And we have a cutaway, transparent receiver, standard
German Army G36 with its very much different optic. We're going to go ahead and start with this one,
which is actually technically the export version. It's also technically the machine gun version, so you
can see this is marked HK MG36E, the E is for export. And the MG36 was a version that was
intended to be adopted by the Bundeswehr as a ... squad support weapon using, instead
of the standard 30 round box magazine, a Beta C-Mag 100 round double drum
and a slightly heavier profile barrel. Now the Bundeswehr in testing found that the
additional weight to the barrel was so minor that it really didn't actually justify
having a different pattern of rifle. And so they went ahead and just decided that
the support weapon would be a standard rifle with a bipod mounted to it
and that drum magazine. So the MG36 never got adopted in German service,
never really sold very well as far as I know. So it's interesting that we actually
have an export E pattern MG36 here. Now the German military pattern is a three position
trigger, S, E and F. Safe, single-shot and full-auto. On the export versions you can get
different sorts of trigger options. This particular one also has
a two-round burst built into it. The controls on the G36 are completely
ambidextrous, which is pretty cool. The charging handle is integral to the bolt
carrier, we'll see this when we pull it out. And it just has a spring-loaded
handle that you can pull to either side. The magazine release is an AK
sort of type of paddle down here. This uses its own proprietary 30 round, translucent
magazine, so you can see how much ammunition is left in it. Typically these actually have lugs on them to
allow multiple magazines to be ... clipped together. So the mag release is also ambidextrous,
the safety selector is ambidextrous, you already saw it on the other side. The only thing that can't be changed is the
ejection port, which is only on the right side. But has a case deflector there to make sure that cases
don't come straight back enough to hit the shooter. The standard buttstock for the G36 is a side folding
type. Push in the button and then that unlocks it. One neat feature here is that this little hook
on top of the case deflector is the latch that locks the stock in place. So one
part there serving multiple functions. And to open it you just pop it off that hook. There was a lot of fibre reinforced polymer
that went into the manufacture of these guns. In fact, the majority of the parts are polymer, with the
exception of the barrel and the actual working bits. One other thing we should point out here before we
move along to disassembly is the optics package. This is a removable rail that on the export
version has a 1.5x power magnified optic. Pretty basic sort of thing. You can see
from the screws here this can be removed, replaced with other types of optic. It does, interestingly, also have a
set of attachment points up on top for some other specialised accessories. This is actually a Bundeswehr night-vision optic.
And what's cool about this is you can see that it takes in light here, and it actually
kind of periscopes it down to right here. This mounts into the carry handle, lock that in place, (get this all the way down, there we go), that goes up there. And that now acts as a
night-vision ... image intensifier for your optic. While this may not be a standard
HK roller-delayed locking system, it does use the HK pattern or style of a number
of basic pushpins to disassemble the gun. So there's one here which holds
the back of the trigger assembly. There's one here that holds the front of the trigger assembly
and the magazine well (which is a removable element). And there's one here that
holds on the front handguard. So I can pop those out. There are actually holes in
the stock to retain them, so you don't lose the pins. One of the interesting elements here is, unlike the
earlier G3 and G33 series, the stock does not come off. You instead fold the stock to the side
and you can then pull out the internal parts. So we've got all three pins out now, which means I can
go ahead and pull out the fire control group and pistol grip. These are mostly polymer fire control parts,
there's a little metal insert in the face of the hammer to give it some wear resistance. But other than
that, like the Steyr AUG, all plastic parts in there. We can slide off the magazine well, they
... later made M16 pattern magazine wells. So you can use M16 magazines on an
export gun if you want it configured that way. The handguard just slides
off the front once we unpin it. I will point out the bipod here
is attached to the handguard, and this is a free-floated handguard. So you're not going
to lose your zero by shooting the rifle off the bipod. These bipod legs you just pull out to
extend them, they do have a little bit of pivot. And then there's a locking catch on each leg
that you have to depress in order to fold them. So this is the MG version and you can see that
the barrel gets a bit heavier behind the gas block. This is not all that much heavier of a barrel, so
I can certainly understand why the Bundeswehr decided that this wasn't worth having
a separate version of the gun for. The bipod can attach to any standard rifle handguard,
so ... that's pretty interchangeable and universal. Now to get the internal parts
out we just fold the stock, and then, right here, we can pull out what is basically a rear cap for the ... socket in
there, and also the fixed ... and captive recoil spring. Then just push the bolt carrier out the back. And that's basically it. So the bolt carrier here, like
I said earlier, has the charging handle built into it. We have a multi-lug rotating bolt. This is very much the AR-18 in
concept. A short-stroke gas piston that's going to impact
the bolt carrier right there. There is our gas piston. This is basically
identical to the G43 from World War Two, which is basically identical
to the Soviet Tokarev system. So when this goes back, it pushes right there, which
hits the bolt carrier and causes the rifle to cycle. When you fire, this whole thing only reciprocates
about 6mm, so about a quarter of an inch. And when that piston strikes the bolt carrier it forces it backward with enough velocity that even
though it's only a short little bit of acceleration, it's enough energy to ... cycle the whole rifle. I don't have a bayonet handy to show
you, but one of the neat anecdotes here, well, I mentioned that when Germany reunified, the new ... unified Germany had a massive
supply of AK-74s of East German production. They also had AK-74 bayonets. And while it
wasn't politically viable to adopt the 74 as a rifle, there was nothing really so bad about using the bayonets.
So because they had so many, and it's just a knife, rather than design any sort of new bayonet to fit the G36,
they just designed the G36 to accept an AK-74 bayonet. So pretty much the whole body
assembly of the rifle here is polymer. The barrel comes back to a trunnion that is
moulded into this part of the polymer body. That is the focus of the current hullabaloo about
whether or not this rifle is actually combat effective. Without having gone through
all of the details of that story, I'm going to hypothesise that I think the
rifle is probably pretty darn good as is, and the problems it has come from being pushed
beyond its legitimate, expected performance envelope. So you can see the bolt right here, it's cam
pin, we've got our charging handle right here. And you can see when the gas piston
strikes the bolt carrier and pushes it back, what it is going to do (just like the AR-18),
this is going to cycle backwards just slightly, It's going to start forcing this cam pin
down, which forces the bolt to unlock. Note right back here we are re-cocking the
hammer with the back end of the bolt carrier. Once the bolt head is fully rotated and unlocked, it's
then going to travel backwards, extract the empty case. We have recocked the hammer back here. It's going to come all the way back to this position. So I'm
gonna start coming forward again, pick up a new cartridge, push it into the chamber. and once the bolt hits the chamber there, it of
course stops, but the bolt carrier keeps moving, which is going to rotate this
cam pin back up, force the bolt ... to rotate and lock into position. And re-trip the auto-sear right here,
and make this ready to fire again. You can see exactly how the gas piston system works
here. So gas comes vented up from the barrel there, it's going to push on the front here, which is
going to push this whole piston backwards. It's under enough spring pressure that
I can't just poke it back with my thumb. And then as soon as it's travelled far enough this pin is fully pulled out of this hole, which allows
the gas pressure to then vent out the front of the gun once it's moved enough to cycle the rifle. Where the export guns had a single 1.5x magnification optic,
the Bundeswehr optic is this interesting multifunction device. It actually has a laser over on this side. It has a red dot optic on top, and [has] no
battery power, it's powered just by ambient light. And it has a 3x power magnified optic down here. If we look at the front of this you can see this is the
red dot, this is the magnified optic, and that is the laser. And then if we look at the back here, you've got your
two viewing ports for magnified and non-magnified, battery for the laser, an on/off switch for the laser. And then we have this hood on top for the red dot
to allow you to adjust how much light is getting in. So if ... the dot's too bright or too
dim, you can adjust it that way. This optic is kind of an interesting concept.
It's definitely a compromise in a lot of ways, But it doesn't suffer, to me at least, and granted this is of
course someone with no combat experience with the rifle and in fact, basically no range
time experience with this optic, it seems to be a better compromise than some of the other
stacked optics out there because it was all built as one unit. So you have to lift your head and
your cheek weld a bit for the red dot, But it's a little bit more like ... that kind of interesting
Leupold Prismatic sight that was out briefly, (or probably still is available
but never became very popular), where you pull your eye down a little
bit and you've got a magnified view, you bring your eye up a little bit
and you've got a faster red dot. It's an interesting concept. It's obviously
worked out well enough for the Bundeswehr because this is still their standard optic on the rifles.
So yeah, a neat and ... unorthodox solution there. Overall what HK produced with the G36
is really a remarkably efficient, ergonomic, economical, it's a simple rifle, it
handles nicely. It's really very, very nice. Which to be honest, is kind of what you would expect
from one of the last of the main military pattern 5.56 rifles. They had a lot of examples
to look at in the design for this, and so it shouldn't come as that much of a
surprise, especially with a company like HK, that the final design they
came up with was quite good. Now there are a couple other versions, There
is a ... K and a C, two various shortened versions. With special forces use today, some of the
shortened versions have replaced these sorts of standardised fixed optics with Picatinny rail, so that
users have a choice for all manner of aftermarket optics. As well as quad rails, or under-
mounted rails, on the front end. A lot of that sort of modern tactical
modularity has been built into the gun. But as ... with many other militaries where the special forces
sorts of operators get a lot of added modularity and new stuff, while the standard army retains the basic pattern
of rifle, that's still true with the Bundeswehr as well. So the rifle with the dual optic,
but otherwise in this configuration, ... has remained the standard
equipment for the German Army. Today the G36 has wound up
being a pretty darn successful rifle. In addition to being adopted as
the standard German military rifle, and selling something like
176,000 of them to the Bundeswehr, the rifle was also adopted fairly early on, in 1998,
by the Spanish military to replace all of their rather unsuccessful and unreliable CETME-L
rifles. So it got those two major contracts. And then it's also been adopted by a large number of
smaller defence and security forces. Everything from the London police to I think there are some police
departments in America that actually use these. The US Capitol Police actually use the G36. And then a whole slew of special forces and
police and military organisations around the world. So it has been quite successful for HK. Now just fairly recently there has been some
dispute, some scandal, surrounding the G36 and its performance ... basically
when subjected to extreme heat loads. We will leave a discussion of that for a future video
where we can properly dig into all those details. But hopefully you guys enjoyed and appreciated getting
this chance to take a look at the actual, legitimate, original G36. Not a converted SL8 like we normally see
in the US, but ... in HK's own Grey Room here, taking a look at their standard examples.
A big thanks to HK for giving me this access, and thank you guys for watching.
Whatever happened to the HK233? It was announced a year or two ago, as I understand it, as an improved G36 that would solve the heat-related accuracy problems HK never admitted the G36 had, but since then they no longer seem to be advertising it on their website (though the page is still hosted there). I was sort of excited to see what happened with this as a fan of the G36, I wonder is they canned it in favour of the HK433, which as I understand it, is basically the same operating system with an alloy receiver and more traditionally "HK" controls.