H&K P7 Family: Pistols for Gun Cognoscenti

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm him column and I'm here today at hk's gray room in Ashburn Virginia taking a look at a bunch of their interesting historical firearms and in particular today we are going to look at the whole family of HK p 7 pistols now this actually started out as the HK PSP or a police self-loading pistol it acquired the designation p7 when it was formally adopted by the well a couple of German state police agencies in fact that's where the design originated the the German state police agencies wanted a new sidearm and they put together a they've put out a call for new pistol designs and in 1976 HK started work on this project the testing was actually done in 1978 and HK in this testing was competing against Walther Mauser and Sig Sauer and in the end this is kind of interesting contrary to a military test where the most the most common outcome of a military small-arms test is nothing gets adopted and in best case they'll pick one gun and adopt it well this was a combined test by and for state police forces but there are a whole bunch of different agencies and at the end of the test they concluded that three of the four guns submitted were actually just fine good to go which is why we ended up with the Walther p5 the Sig Sauer p6 and the HK p7 all three of these were approved and then it was left up to each individual agency to pick which one of them they might want to have now the p7 came out best in most of the tests I think it could be easily regarded as the most successful the best technological gun of that testing however it was also the most expensive and as a result it was only adopted by a couple of agencies the primary one being the Bavarian State Police a lot of the other agencies looked at the test results and concluded that some of these cheaper pistols worked just perfectly sufficiently for their needs and adopted those instead so if we look at our time line 1978 testing is concluded and a couple German agencies start adopting a gun it then goes through military testing the German military tests it in 1980 the American military actually tests it in 1981 as part of the project that would eventually adopt the beretta 92 and the Austrian military tested it in 1983 now the Austrians ended up adopting the Glock which was a domestic Austrian design but the the process of going through all of these tests and seeing what some of these military users were really looking for in a gun led to a number of design changes and that led to the p7 m 8 and the p7 m13 so let's go ahead and take a closer look we will start by looking at the mechanical aspects of the gun because those don't really change through this whole cycle and then we'll take a look at the developmental history of the gun and how it evolved from the early PSP through the final p7 m13 plan we'll start with a basic p7 here to go through some of the fundamentals of the gun these are in nine by nineteen Parabellum caliber they are single stack pistols eight round capacity that would change with the m13 but we'll get to that later they are a gas delayed blowback mechanism which is quite unusual I can't say unique there are a couple other guns on the market that do this and very interestingly I actually found a patent on this concept dating all the way back to I think it was 1910 by Oleg Craig of the Craig Jorgenson which is particularly interesting at any rate that patent was long expired by the time HK did this so it's not like they were infringing on anything and then maybe the most unusual and this as far as I can think of is a unique feature in the gun and that is the squeeze cocking system where this is the safety and it also contributes to a nice trigger pull and it's a really clever idea basically in a striker-fired pistol you have you have to pull the striker back a certain amount and then release it so that it has enough spring pressure behind it to shop forward fast enough to detonate a primer when it hits and there are a couple different ways this is done one of the tricks is you need to keep the thing safe so what you get with a gun like a Glock is the striker is automatically recog about halfway by the slide closing and then the other half of its travel is provided by the trigger so that if for some reason the striker slips when you haven't pulled the trigger and goes forward it doesn't go forward fast enough to actually fire a cartridge the problem with that is it means you have to fight the firing a striker spring to pull the striker back and that's why Glocks never have really great triggers the difference is on for example on a hammer fired gun you can wreak och the hammer it's got all of the energy it needs to wound up in there and all you have to do is pull a sear out of the way perpendicular to the spring force and then it'll slam for fire and you can get a really nice trigger pole yes the point I'm getting at what HK did on this is they have in its resting state like this the striker is all the way forward so it's it's acting just like a hammer fired gun with the hammer down there's no chance of this thing firing when it's in this in a state even if there's a cartridge in the chamber when you squeeze the front strap back like this that takes a decent amount of effort you can see that the indicator comes back when you do it this is actually retracting the striker back to its full travel so when you do this and then pull the trigger you get nice light trigger pull it's a little creepy still because it is striker fired but you get a much lighter trigger pulled in most striker fired guns and and and that's all you have to do you don't have to use the trigger to pull the striker back just to release it and then as long as I'm holding this lever down when the action cycles it once again holds the striker all the way back ready at its release point and I have another very nice trigger pull so what you get here is basically a striker fired gun with a single action trigger and they go one step farther than that the gun does of course lock open on an empty magazine like so and in order to drop the magazine they've actually built that functionality into that squeeze front strap as well so when you're reloading this gun it locks open you pull the mag out you put the mag in there's no need to have an extra control up here you'll notice there is nothing up on the slide there's no safety there's no decocker there's no bolt release or slide release because all of that is built into this front squeeze that the front strap squeeze cocking lever you may have noticed this button that's actually a disassembly button so we'll get to that in a minute so this is a pretty unorthodox system it definitely takes some getting used to and I think it's a big part of why the guns never became really super popular is this is just weird and alien to a lot of American gun owners but it has some really interesting and really cool advantages I will point out one other thing which is and this has this is something that people noticed and a lot of people I think attributed to being a design defect but this was actually done deliberately you can if you hold the trigger you can fire the gun with the front strap we can go ahead and get a closer look at exactly how that's working internally by using this cool cutaway gun with transparent grips however before we look at it up close I want to point out one other cool little engineering quirk in here namely this thing has a 110 degree grip angle which HK thinks is is ideal and certainly a lot of people find very comfortable however that grip angle isn't necessarily all that conducive to proper reliable feeding of the magazine you want the magazine as close to vertical as you can well in this thing the magazine is actually sitting at a much square angle to the gun than the grip is the grip is long enough here that they were able to design the magazine in such a way that that the magazine is actually kind of rotated around like the and so you get both the best of both you're able to get a sharper grip angle that they wanted while also having a more squared up magazine presentation all right let's take a closer look now how this actually works this silver colored piece here is the sear and that darker triangular looking piece right there is the add the the sear surface of the striker so when I squeeze the grip in I am cocking the striker all the way back when I pull the trigger it's going to drop this piece which releases the striker and goes forward now when I release the trigger so this will come back up when the gun cycles you'll notice this is the the sear is going to pop back up in line with the striker and it's going to recopy it as long as I'm holding the the front strap in and then I can fire again if I release the front strap now this goes forward to a position where it's matched up with the striker being all the way home so if I reach out the pistol now you can see the striker stays in that at rest position and it's only when I squeeze the grip it comes back and now it's in a position ready to fire and the reason that this also works the other direction is because if I hold the trigger down this will drop as soon as it reaches the end of its and travel so if I'm holding the trigger and then I squeeze the grip it's gonna pull it all the way back drop and fire so that's the striker mechanism the other interesting half of this is the gas delay system I think that is actually better explained with a complete gun than the cutaway so we'll go ahead and pull this apart it's easy enough to do you just hold the button down pull the slide back and lift it up off the front of the gun recoil spring frame note that because this is delayed blowback it's able to have a fixed barrel which is one of the things that contributes to this being a particularly accurate model pistol' and then there is a second hole beneath the barrel that hole exists for this gas piston which is pinned to the front of the slide when this thing is all assembled it lines up right about like this and this piston is in this pressurized chamber right down here there's a hole in the bottom of the barrel in fact you can see a hole there when they manufactured this they drill through the top before they put the barrel in so there's a matching hole here right in the bottom of the barrel just in front of the chamber when you fire gas in addition to pushing the bullet forward also drops into this chamber underneath the barrel pressurizes it and that pushes forward on this gas piston which in turn pushes the slide forward what you get here is basically as long as the bullets in the barrel you have a lot of gas pressure pushing forward and holding the slide closed now it will start to slowly open up but because it's opening against a lot of pressure it doesn't actually open sufficiently to cause an issue until the bullet has left the barrel and pressure in the barrel has dropped it's a really clever interesting system now it does have some downsides namely you're going to you're going to kind of create a heat sink right here that lower pressure chamber is going to get quite hot because just like the barrel it's always full of very hot very high pressure gas and it's located right here just above the trigger guard so on these guns with extended firing the trigger and the top of the trigger guard area tend to get pretty hot fairly quickly again rather like the barrel does you can see some of these features in the cutaway as well now that you know what to look for you can see there's the gas port right there note that this does also have a fluted chamber because again it's a blowback firearm those flutes help reduce help accomp accomodate for relatively high extraction pressure anyway gas goes through that port it's going to come down here into this chamber right there and you can see the front of the isten there if i flip the gun over you can see the the main body of the piston there so that is the standard PSP hk's internal designation police semi-automatic pistol which became adopted by the german government as the p7 pistol seven and this is what was adopted by most of the German police agencies as the p7 pistol went through some additional trials with other organizations namely the German American and Austrian militaries there were a couple of complaints that came up of course the heat was one and the magazine released was another and in 1981 HK released and improved or at least a modified and changed version which had called the p7 m8 now that m8 indicates that it is still a single stack magazine with an eighth round capacity and the first user to to actually trial this out was the New Jersey State Police and the big thing that they wanted was a more traditional magazine release they didn't like the heel mounted release of the standard p7 here in the US this has always been regarded kind of as a European thing that that we sort of take pride in not doing the rationalization for this is that this is typically a very secure magazine release it doesn't release accidentally and it is quite conducive to maintaining control of magazines this has always been an important thing for most military pistols where they're generally only issued with one or two magazines and you don't want to just go dropping magazines on the ground willy-nilly so HK moved the release on the m8 model - right here right behind the trigger guard where we are used to having our button magazine release however this isn't actually a button the MA maintained its ambidexterity by having this release lever on both sides and the way it works is you actually push it down like so and it releases the magazine out these magazines are not interchangeable with the p7 the standard p7 because these have a magazine catch up here where the p7 has a hole in the magazine in back there's the catch on a original early pattern p7 mag as opposed to that on the m8 now this control would be much more interesting much more appealing to a lot of us agencies and also some military agencies and this would go on to be the standard through the rest of production however I think it's worth pointing out that it does have downsides and they're exactly the downsides that HK knew about when they originally went with the he'll release there would be issues over time of these occasionally accidentally releasing if the magazine catch was bumped by something particularly when drawing or holstering the pistol it's not that difficult to bump that drop your magazine no not that it happens a lot but it is a legitimate issue in addition in order to quell some of the the problems the complaints about the guns getting too hot HK added a thicker plastic trigger and this piece of plastic at the top of the trigger guard it's really a very simple modification and it just acts as an insulator think of that as a little tiny handguard that is less less transmits less heat and doesn't get as hot as fast in order to accommodate say use of the pistol with gloves the trigger guard was also enlarged if we compare our PR standard p7 or PSP here to the m8 you can see that the trigger guard is is both dropped and down you can see the angle there and it's extended forward more so larger trigger guard makes it a little a little more awkward to carry but it does also allow you to get a gloved finger in there with a lot less chance of unintentionally pulling the trigger HK was also selling these pistols on the civilian commercial market at that time and they did offer them either in a blued or satin nickel finish the nickel was a little more expensive than to my mine well I don't really like nickel pistols I think the blue looks better by the way on the m8 they will now have grips that are marked hkp 7m8 and the slides will also be marked m8 to indicate that that model as well as the frames right down there by the way the New Jersey State Police quite liked the p7 m8 and they did go ahead and adopt it however one of the other issues that had come up through extended military and police testing was the magazine capacity there are a lot of agencies out there that didn't like the the single stack 8-round limitation now there are again rationales both ways so a single stack mag has limited capacity it's also a flatter and more concealable and more easily carried pistol so you kind of take your pick and accept the consequences smaller gun with fewer rounds or a bulkier gun with more rounds and HKS answer to this was to introduce a double stack version of the gun the p7 m13 and that's what we have here these two look virtually identical from the side but when we look at them from the bottom you can see the obvious difference the m13 with its double stack magazine is a lot wider than the p7 m8 in pretty much all other ways the m13 would remain the same as the m8 has the same heat upgrades here it maintained the exact same mechanical system the same squeeze cocking system it maintains the same magazine release as the m8 they just went to a double stack magazine interesting to note that in order to maintain the same basic slide geometry they had to continue to use a single stack or a single feed magazine so the way they did this magazine is to have it taper well before it actually gets to the very top so that in the slide portion they're dealing with the same geometry this meant that in a magazine that may be typically on other guns of the period could hold 15 rounds in the p7 this was a 13 round magazine hence the designation you can see the size difference here from the back as well slides are the same but the frame on the m13 is quite a bit wider this did mean that the slides are actually interchangeable between the m8 and the M 13 but of Cour m13 pistols are going to be marked m13 as you can see here on the slide and the frame these other marks by the way the IE is a date code this is a German proof mark as is the Eagle over N so this one is a quite early example serial number probably well prototype serial number nineteen this isn't the sort of thing you would normally find on the market for sale but we have it here because we're taking a look at these in the gray room standard markings on the other side of the slide Heckler and Koch GmbH nine by nineteen open-door FET cetera et cetera et cetera now there is one other pattern that's kind of interesting that I want to show you these are very very rare on the commercial market because they were only made for a very limited clientele of honestly of people who really didn't understand what the benefits were of the mechanical system here the idea is this gives you a remarkable level of safety in a striker-fired pistol because there's no way that this lever is going to accidentally engage this really does take a substantial amount of force to engage now it's relatively easy to hold it once you have it engaged but kind of like a double action revolver trigger this this provides plenty of mechanical safety for the gun especially combined with the actual trigger however there were some military and police clients that just had this knee-jerk reaction to we must have a manual safety and so HK did in fact obliged them and come out with a manual safety version of the p7 this is the p7 m8 s I believe there was also an M 13 version of it why not it's easy enough to add to both and it just has this additional lever for a well sliding switch to go between safe and full and that just blocks the trigger so it's really an afterthought it's completely unnecessary because of the basic working principles of the gun but for those countries the one I know of offhand was the Mexican military which bought like 3000 of these they insist on a safety so okay if you insist we'll put a safety on the gun even though it does I know people are going to bring this up so I'm going to mention it here briefly there is one other gun in the p7 standard family and that's the p7 k3 and this is basically the subcaliber h k p7 made with a variety of arrow conversion kits in 32 acp 380 and 22 rimfire however the one that they have here is missing a couple of internal parts and this is mechanically distinct from the rest of of the guns so we're going to go ahead and cover this with its complete interchangeable set of barrels and magazines in a separate video later on one of the main reasons that this wasn't more widely adopted by German police agencies was the cost of course and that's also one of the major hurdles to its widespread popularity and sale here on the United States commercial market it's interesting that these guns actually started out very competitive with some of the other pistols on the market so for example in 1986 the the dealer price on a p7 m8 was four hundred and sixty nine dollars or four hundred and fifty nine dollars the dealer price on a Beretta 92 from beretta was $4.99 so in fact at that time a p7 m13 had the exact same dealer price as a Beretta 92 really on par however over the next five to ten years HK would make kind of make some changes in how it wanted to market the pistols and there would be fairly substantial price jumps almost every year until by the early 90s a p7 was going to cost you between 800 and a thousand dollars and at that point the price is really getting to be substantially higher than some of its other competitors that was deliberate on HKS part but it's kind of part of that marketing strategy that's given HK a bit of an elitist reputation where you know they could have sold these guns cheaper or as we can see from the early pricing but they didn't want to they specifically wanted to focus on a higher-end clientele and that led to this gun being well less popular this is unfortunate because in many ways I think the p7 has a fantastic combination of technical characteristics that make it an outstanding carry pistol and there are some of these that that came back to kind of bite it because the things that make a good carry pistol don't necessarily make for a good competition pistol or a good practice and plinking pistol the big one being a heating issue so yeah p7 will over will heat up fairly quickly and they did some work to ameliorate that with the m8 913 but it kind of still remained a major you know a lasting lingering issue with the guns the thing is in a carry role or in a police role you're not really ever going to be in a situation where you're going to fire enough ammunition to actually see that problem manifest it's only an issue of I'm gonna take this too you know a big major up stick match where I'm gonna put a hundred rounds through it on every stage and yeah it's gonna be ridiculously hot by the end of every stage and uncomfortable and maybe it'll even burn my hand a bit burn the trigger finger I touched the wrong part of the gun that's the sort of thing that can really hurt the guns marketability but it's not actually a problem for the intended role so some of those issue issues certainly contributed to the p7 not not maybe getting its fair shake in the market and of course the the squeeze cocking mechanism is quite unorthodox and well the American pistol market in particular isn't necessarily very friendly to unorthodox designs like that so you have to really convince people to put in the time and practice to get used to them I actually have a friend who shoots a p7 in in to gun competition on a somewhat regular basis and it is remarkable what he can do with it it is a very fast and very accurate gun so unfortunately this is all kind of a moot point because these have been off the US market since since about 2000 all of them of course the m13 pretty much left the US market in 94 as a result of the assault weapons ban because it used a 13 round magazine the there was a p7 m10 we'll cover in a separate video in 40 Smith & Wesson that lasted a little bit into the mid 90s but not very long it was not a not a very good gun you'll you'll see that in in when we cover that particular video but what we're left with is a series of these three major models of the the HK p7 that are really connoisseur and collectors pistols today so hopefully you enjoyed this look through the whole family and how they work and how they developed I'd like to thank HK for giving me access to the great room here to bring you this nice collection of different models of p7 and definitely if you're interested stick around for we have a couple more videos coming up that will address a couple of specific outliers that weren't part of the standard production thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 443,187

Rating: 4.9688058 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, hk, h&k, p7, psp, p7m8, p7m13, heckler, koch, new jersey state police, west germany, west german, police, mag release, squeeze cocker, ccw, carry, concealed carry, police pistol, handgun, sidearm, semiauto, striker, safety mechanism, pistol safety

Id: zq7_w6FWenY

Length: 27min 37sec (1657 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 16 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/SandmanM4]

I've always wanted a P7, never had the money.

[u/Hoonin_Kyoma]

It was a well-done piece by Ian... for those of you have not had a chance to see it yet.

[u/RogueWriter]

I have a m13. Not for sale. And I've got a great place to hide it if that ever needs to happen. Best pistol I've ever owned. Build quality, fit and finish are all excellent. It's more accurate than I am, that's for sure. And it shoots amazingly. It does get hot if you shoot several magazines quickly in practice. Doesn't take too long to cool back down, so take an extra gun to the range when you're going to practice with it.

I wish they'd bring it back. Put the VP9's paddle mag release on it (the more I've used a paddle release, the more I think it's simply brilliant) and maybe a red dot cutout and drop the price point back down to something more like the original profit margin... I think it would sell here in America.