Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and thanks to my friends at Bear Arms in Scottsdale. Today we have a P8A1 to take a look at. This is the military version, in fact current military issue version for the German Bundeswehr, of the USP pistol, made by H&K [Heckler & Koch]. Now, before we take a look at what exactly makes the P8 different from the commercial USP, and what makes the P8A1, the improved version here, different than the original P8, just a little bit of background on the USP in general. This is a standard tilting barrel, Browning style of action. Which is something that a lot of companies
have been making for many, many, many decades. However, it was kind of a new thing for H&K. They started development on this in
1989, and prior to this, their pistols all had weird and interesting mechanisms to them.
They had the P7 with its gas delay system, and really innovative squeeze cocking thing.
They had the roller system in the P9 pistol. They were both expensive, they were
good pistols, but a little idiosyncratic. And HK wanted to have something that was a
little more standard, cheaper (both cheaper to buy and presumably to have a higher
profit margin within the company), and the German government was
looking for a new military pistol as well. So what made the USP a little bit different than a
lot of its competitors, a lot of the similar pistols out there on the market, is that it was
actually developed specifically for the .40 Smith & Wesson cartridge, which was
actually out when this was being put together. Most of these sorts of Browning style pistols
were designed for the 9mm Parabellum, and then when .40 Smith & Wesson came
along in the 1980s companies looked at it and realised that .40 Smith & Wesson will fit in the
same magazine size and the same frame as a 9mm. and so well, let's just take our 9mm pistol
and basically re-barrel it, build a new ... bolt and breech face to it, and we'll
just adapt it to .40 Smith & Wesson. The problem is, as much as people don't
really want to accept it, .40 Smith & Wesson is a higher pressure cartridge than 9mm,
it's a harder cartridge on a gun than 9mm is. And a lot of the conversions from 9mm to .40,
they worked, but they ... kind of sort of work. Like, they developed problems,
service life wasn't all that long. And HK, being able to go the opposite
direction had a big advantage in that area. So, by developing the USP specifically for the higher
pressure, higher power of the .40 Smith & Wesson, and then adapting it down to 9mm, they were
... able to end up with a 9mm service pistol that had an exceptional service life, very reliable, very durable, capable of running on really hot 9mm ammunition. Which is a good thing, because that's what
the German government would be using. And ... there aren't a whole lot of companies that
did it in that direction, so score one for HK on this. Now, beyond that, it's kind of a typical modern
black service pistol. What you would expect, a polymer frame, steel slide, tilting barrel
action, double stack high-capacity magazine. So at this point, let's take a closer look at this and I'll show you what differentiates
the military version from the civilian USP. So the biggest distinguishing
characteristic here is going to be that the military version
has P8 or P8A1 written all over it. We have it down here on the grips. The first version
said HK P8, this, the updated version, says P8A1. We also have that here on the slide, and
just for the record, that P8 is Pistol 8, 'Pistole 8'. P1 was the Walther, basically
a redesignated Walther P38. The P2 was the SIG 210-4,
the P3 was the Astra 300 which the German ... police actually bought in
reasonably large numbers after World War Two, the P4 was a short barreled P1,
the P5 was the Walther P5, the P6 was the SIG 225, the P7 was the H&K PSP (and by the way, ... these are German interior ministry
designations, not specifically military designations). So ... a lot of these were used by the
German police rather than the military. In particular the P5, the P6 and the P7 were
all designated and adopted simultaneously, after Police trials. And Police agencies
were given the option of picking whichever one of those three they liked,
because all three passed the trials. Anyway, the P8 is the USP here,
the P9 was the Glock 17, and then the P10 is actually
the compact version of the USP. Moving on to some of the other markings.
This is of course a German made gun, we've got our calibre designation
up there. CIP is the proof stamp. The antler here is a final acceptance
mark from the German proof house. BH is a date code, B equates to the
numeral 1, H to 7, so this is a 2017 production gun, very recent.
Got our serial number, of course. On the right side you've got H&Ks
manufacturer's mark on the frame down there, and then a lot of duplicate information up on the barrel. In a lot of European countries barrels
are controlled items, so they've got the serial number on the barrel, as well
as on the slide, and also on the frame. In the United States the frame is the controlled
part, unlike most of the rest of the world, so there is a metal insert plate with
the serial number on the frame there, as well as the import mark because
these weren't brought in by HK directly, they were brought in by a third-party
importer, and that had to be marked on there. Now, really the main difference between
this and a standard USP is the safety. So the USP, first off, had a pretty cool safety system,
where you could get, like, 10 different versions of it. All with just a single plate on the inside that they would
change out to change the function of the safety lever. There were both right-hand and
left-hand versions, this is a right-handed one, but you would have a variety of systems. You could have a safe position, a fire position,
and a decocker. So you could cock the pistol, but then put it in safe and carry it,
so-called cocked and locked. Or decock the gun and carry it in the
fire position, but with the hammer down, so that requires a double
action trigger pull to fire. Then there were also versions that didn't have
the decocker, there were versions that didn't have ... where you couldn't engage the
safety when the hammer was cocked, so you can only carry it with the hammer down. There was even a version that had no safety lever at all,
that simply functioned as a double action only pistol. Now the military version here, the P8, they
actually took ... the full function safety lever, so you can carry it as you saw, cocked and
locked. However, the safe position is down and the fire position is up. And that is
something that would not be particularly popular today in most markets, because ... normally
what you're looking for is a gun that is kind of ergonomically friendly to work with
the shooter. And what you want is to go from safe to fire, a natural down
stroke of the thumb in the, you know, you can do that in the process of getting a
proper shooting grip when you draw the gun. This is backwards. On this, you're
gonna draw the gun with the safety down, and then you're gonna have to
push it up before getting a firing grip. However, there was a good reason for that,
or at least there was a reason for that. On the P1, like this guy, the safety works
the same way, down is safe and up is fire. Now on this it's a little easier to engage that safety as
you're drawing the gun and taking a firing grip on it. But in order to maintain the same training
standards, they wanted the safety to operate the same way on the P8 as on the P1.
And I think it's important to point out that this was the pistol that succeeded
this guy in German military service. So going into the 1980s, the German
military was basically using P38 pistols, design unchanged since about well, 1938,
and G3 rifles. And they replace those with very much more modern G36s,
and very much more modern P8s. At any rate, once you get used to the
reverse action safety, you do also have a decocker all the way down, which
then returns to the safe position. The markings, fire and safe, are on the frame,
on the standard USP they are actually marked on the back of this selector
lever here. That's a pretty minor change. And then the magazine is a little
bit different on the military guns. So the mag release on these guys is an
ambidextrous lever that you simply push down, like so. And the P8 magazine is this sort of translucent
plastic, not transparent, but you can see through it. You can see a dark section right
up here, that is a metal insert to keep the plastic from fracturing over time. And of course the reason for this is so that
you could actually see the cartridges inside. Just by looking you could tell how
much ammunition was in the magazine. Disassembly is really quite simple. It's gonna
work just like every other Browning tilting barrel gun. Pull the mag out, bring the slide back to right
about here, and then push out the slide stop pin. There we go, pull that out, and then
the slide just comes right off the front. There are no major metal inserts in
the frame, which is kind of cool. HK did that deliberately, and they spent a lot of time working on the engineering to find a
polymer material that could handle that. That prevents the metal elements
from shifting in the polymer. It also makes this definitely
more economical to manufacture. Up in the slide we can see ... One of the characteristic parts of the USP
is the recoil spring assembly. It is captive, and it's actually a two part spring. So
there's a second buffer spring down here underneath, or inside, the main recoil spring.
And that's going to help absorb the force of the slide decelerating
against the frame with every shot, and that helps contribute to the
durability and the longevity of the gun. Now, one other thing that makes the
military USP different from the commercial, is the standard cut rifling that you can see in there. Now the USP, the commercial USP,
when it was originally put into production had standard rifling like this, which was
another change from H&K's previous guns using what's called polygonal rifling. Where the
whole bore is sort of a contoured shape that twists as you go down, rather than having
a perfectly cylindrical bore with rifling cut in it (and the pros and cons of that
are a subject for a different video), but when HK started making the USP
originally, they went with traditional rifling. This caused some concern with
their commercial customer base, and so they actually pretty
quickly changed it to polygonal. However, by this point the German
government had already received it's ... first guns, of the type that had standard rifling. And they opted to stick with
that through all of their production. So, even today, all of the P8s
and P8A1s have standard rifling. Now, as for the elements that
distinguish a P8 from an 8A1. There're only three of them, aside from the markings.
The first and the most obvious are the sights, you can see these have a greenish tinge to them.
These are glow-in-the-dark night sights. They do not use tritium, very
specifically. They use a luminous paint, and that was an update from the original
just plain white dots on the P8 pistol. The finish on the slide was changed for the P8A1. It
was made a little more more durable, more resilient. They had some problems with
the finish coming off on the P8s. And then lastly, they ... beefed up a few little areas,
like the one right here on the inside of the slide. Apparently the German military was
having some trouble with slides cracking as a result of using pretty darn hot ammunition. And so, despite the .40 Smith & Wesson genesis of the design, they were still having a few issues with
them over the lifespan of the pistols. So HK did a ... little bit of additional
engineering, found where the major stress points were ... in the slide and beefed up those specific points. So the exterior profile of the slide is identical, they just added a little bit of material in a couple little places inside. And that is what made it into the P8A1. By the way, while I've got this apart,
I should point this out to you. This little plate back here, that silver plate
with the hook, that's called the detent plate. And that is the part that is changed out to
change the various functions of the safety lever. So there are a number of different configurations
of that plate and that acts as the interface between the lever itself and the actual
internals of the fire control mechanism. Interestingly while H&K sells this gun
internationally, there very few of them in the United States, because H&K
has decided, for whatever reason (... honestly, probably good commercial
instinct that the military version of the safety isn't really going to be a popular
option here in the United States), HK has decided not to commercially
export the P8 or P8A1 into the US. So what you end up with is a
relatively hard to find pistol. ... I mean, only maybe a couple hundred of these
came into the US, all through third-party importers. So they're they're pretty cool examples to
have today, if you're interested in collecting military-style firearms. Because, of course,
this is the German military version of the USP. So again, a big thanks to Bear Arms in Scottsdale
for providing the gun here for today's video. Hopefully you guys enjoyed it. Thanks for watching.
