Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today by the gracious invitation of the French Gendarmerie at the Central Ballistic Lab of the <i>Gendarmerie Nationale</i>, taking a look at some of their
particularly interesting and rare firearms. And today we are taking a look at the Makarov PB. This is specifically the silenced
version of the Russian Makarov pistol. And they did a whole lot of things to change
it from the standard version of the gun. In fact, ultimately there are virtually no parts that interchange
between this and a regular Makarov. The ammunition does, the magazines do, and maybe a few little tiny parts
like the hammer and the extractor. But in general not only do the
working parts not interchange, they've actually had to fundamentally change
some of the working mechanism of the gun. Because for example, ... if you're familiar with the Makarov you'll know
that there is a recoil spring around the barrel. Well, how do you put
a recoil around the barrel when you've got an integral
silencer around the barrel already? Now this was developed
at the Tula Arsenal, it was put into production in 1967,
so kind of height of the Cold War. This is the covert wet-work
pistol for the Soviet Union. And it would remain in
production until the 1980s and then, even more interestingly, went
back into production at Izhevsk circa 2000. And I'm honestly not sure if
it's still in production or not. We don't know the total
production numbers, ... countries aren't usually hugely keen to publish
a lot of information about this sort of gun. But what I can show you
is a complete tear down of how this works, because I think
inside it is fascinating mechanically. Alright, so fundamentally everything on this
is going to work pretty much like a Makarov. We have a two-part silencer, so there is an initial expansion chamber here and
then you have a section with baffles here. And they come apart separately,
which we'll take a look at in a moment. This is still a double-action
single-action pistol. It uses the standard Makarov safety
system. So I can cock it and fire it. If I cock it and click up
the safety, that de-cocks it. You can keep it safe, or you can just de-cock
it and then put it back into the fire position. The slide of course locks open when it's empty,
and we have a slide-release button right there. Standard Makarov magazine,
holds 8 rounds of 9x18mm. And we will drop the slide like so. Now the keen-eyed among, you may
have spotted this magazine release button. But that is not a magazine
release, that is a grip release. Because, as I said in the beginning, how do you
put a recoil spring around an integral suppressor? You can't, instead they
moved the recoil spring. So if I push that button down it allows
me to pull the grip off the back of the gun. And ... that right there is the
new mainspring for the pistol. And it operates through this lever. So when the slide cycles, this lever is
going to cam back and forth like that. And the lug here at the back of that lever
is going to be pushing down on that spring. This mechanism is actually
very similar to some of the Webley semi-automatic pistols
that worked this way. You'll see Webleys that have a
little naked barrel out in the front, and they don't have a recoil spring
behind the bolt, they have a system like this. Now usually the mainspring is attached
to the frame of the pistol, not to the grip. I think the grip was done here so that
they didn't have to make as many changes to the frame of the gun that was already
developed and already in production. So we can just take that lever off. Now let's go ahead and take off
the front end of the suppressor. There is a little spring catch here
on the bottom, so if I pull that back. I can rotate ... the suppressor 90 degrees. We'll just get that lug on the side there,
it has a set of interrupted threads that lock it into the
rear half of the suppressor. There is a spring-loaded
detent in the front here. If I push that down I can push
the baffle stack out the front. There's a little alignment lug there. Push that in ... there we go,
now we can pull that out. Very simple baffles. This is very
similar to what would be used later on on the VSS and the AS Val. And then this is just a hollow tube. Again,
there's the detent, that's the alignment lug. And then you've got this alignment
lug to put it back onto the gun. Next up, we have the
back half of the suppressor. This ... still has a takedown like a Makarov
where we pull the trigger guard out. But now what we are doing is there's that little tiny lug on the top there,
which is not in a regular Makarov. That is actually locking this piece
in place, so I can rotate that. I can take the rear half
of the suppressor off. This has different
silencer components in it. We have a rear plug sort
of baffle at the back. We then have a rolled up
section of wire mesh wrapped in another piece of
wire to keep it contained. And then we have the
front plug, not really a baffle, but that's got the interrupted
lugs to lock into that guy. And then this is also a hollow tube. And having gone that far we can then pull
the slide back, kind of like a regular Makarov, lift it up, pull it off the barrel. And we're left with the
totally stripped frame. There are 8 gigantic holes in the barrel
here and those ... have two purposes. One of them is to vent gas into this wire mesh,
that's sort of the first stage of suppression. ... You'll notice the mesh is located
over all of these holes, right there. That mesh will slow and cool
the expanding gas out of the barrel to help quiet it down, reduce
its pressure, reduce its energy. These holes will also reduce the velocity
of the cartridge by not a lot, but a little bit. ... 9mm Makarov is not really a
supersonic cartridge to begin with, but it's kind of in that questionable transonic
range of 1,100 feet per second or so. And these holes reduce the
velocity to something like 950. And at 950 you really don't have any concerns
that weird environmental conditions or the occasional hot-loaded
round will go transonic. So this effectively reduces the
cartridge to being guaranteed subsonic. The rest of this is pretty standard. The slide is a little bit of a different shape,
but the internal mechanism here is all the same, the safety, the firing pin,
the hammer, all of that. The trigger mechanism here
is essentially ... all the same. We have this additional plate and that's
the little catch that holds the grip on. Everything else back here is pretty
normal: this is your hammer spring, that's your mag catch spring, and you can
remove them (which I'm not going to do today). You can see however that little lug for
aligning the back end of the suppressor. One other element that differs
substantially from the regular Makarov is the use of significantly
improved sights. So we have really large
front and rear sights. This is not a pistol that's intended for use at
long range, and you can see those white dots. Now when this is assembled, your sight picture lines up just like
regular sights, front post in rear notch. But that also gives you basically
a figure 8 of the two white dots, and so those allow you to
use the sights in very low light. I'm not sure if they were luminous,
I would kind of assume that they were intended to
be some type of luminous. But even just as white dots, they
are going to be much more visible in low light than a plain
black post and notch sight. Alright, so there's the whole
PB Makarov field stripped. Now Phil Dater, one of the legends
of silencer development and testing, actually did some very formalised
scientific testing on the Makarov [PB]. And what he found was it had
an average of 127.5 dB when fired, that's a 31.4 decibel reduction
from the Makarov ... unsuppressed. It's a remarkably effective suppressor. So he was getting 158 to 159
unsuppressed, 127.5 suppressed. Along with a remarkably small
"first round pop" of just 1.5 dB. So there's not a lot of high tech
going in here, but you do have a pretty large volume of suppressor for the
relatively small cartridge that's being used. And then the combination
here of the wire mesh and the baffles was able to
do a pretty good job with it. It's been really fun looking at
a wide variety of integrally silenced military-style pistols in the last year or so,
so hopefully you guys enjoyed this video. If you liked the Makarov, you'll
definitely be interested I think in some of the other ones that
I've got videos on, like the Welrod, like the Polish PT-83, like the American
Hush Puppies and many others. So check out the other
videos I have on the subject. I'd like to give a big thanks to the <i>
Gendarmerie Nationale</i> for giving me access to this very cool piece in
their collection to take a look at. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.
