Milkor M32 and M32A1 40mm Grenade Launchers

I guess thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons calm I'm Ian McCallum and I am here today at milk or USA taking a look at a pair of 40 millimeter rotary revolvers style grenade launchers these are an M 32 and an m3 to a-1 and these were both or are were and are in use by the US military specifically the US Marine Corps now this design actually originated back in South Africa in the very early 1980s and it was the brainchild of a guy named Andres peak who if you've been watching the videos you may have recognized you may recognize from some previous videos peak got his start first converting full auto guns to semi-auto for the South African commercial market and then tried his hand at gun design which resulted in the EXP carbine and submachine gun which turned out to be very successful and very popular in South Africa the south african police forces needed a 37 millimeter riot style gun and so he threw one together in like two months called the stopper we also have a video on that if you're interested in it and coming off of that project he happened to be relaxing one evening and went and watched the dogs of war with Christopher Walken and in which there is some use of a Manville 25 millimeter gas gun in the movie it's portrayed as a grenade launcher and the Manville is it's has like a 25 round rotating cylinder for use with low pressure tear gas type riot control cartridges and he saw that and it triggered his imagination like aha you know I could do a gun like that but set up for grenades and thus was born the mg/l multiple grenade launcher this was originally developed like I said then in South Africa in 1983 it was adopted by the South Africa South African Defense Forces the SCDF as the y2 it was very successful in their use and then it started to become pretty popular internationally today they're being made not just here in the United States by milk or USA but also by a couple other companies around the world they've been sold to a lot of different country and there were some US Marines in particular who encountered these things in foreign familiarization fire and started thinking you know what we really like these two and this eventually leads in 2004 to the establishment of milk or USA which is not really a subsidiary of the original milk or which by the way is an abbreviation of military corporation with a k' Kor in Afrikaans anyway they this was a couple of businessmen who thought you know what this we can make this in the United States we want to help sell this we think this is a good product and they made a deal to license production and buy the rights for the gun in the United States at the very beginning they imported guns from South Africa and then very quickly recognized that if this was going to see any substantial sales especially sales to the US military they would have to be manufactured in the US and at that point they went about finding a partner set up their own manufacturing and these guns are now entirely 100% manufactured in the US and they've gone through a number of evolutions so what now now that brings us to the present day here with well let me back up just one bit the story of this then goes on like in 2004 they set up Melkor USA they hand over the first couple of prototype guns for testing by the US military you know five in 2006 the Marine Corps kind of bypasses the the regular procurement system with a declaration of current need and buys a couple hundred of them for use in the Middle East development continues in 2008 a u.s. SOCOM Special Operations Command bought them bought some more of them under the designation mark 14 mod 0 and by the way at that point this transition is already in the works so a lot of these a1 upgrades were in the mark 14 in 2010 the US Marine Corps formally purchased our formerly designated and then a quat started acquiring m32 a once so they signed a five-year indefinite quantity contract basically and in total something like 3000 guns were sold to the US Marine Corps they continue to use them today they're still being supported for parts they're very much part of the modern US Marine Corps squad makeup the idea here was not really to replace the m203 but rather to introduce a specific Grenadier role back into the squad and this makes you a much more effective Grenadier than a single shot 203 hanging under a rifle so let's go ahead and take a closer look at what the original m32 was and what they changed on the a1 already so the basic premise here is chambered for 40 millimeter this will take 40 millimeter low pressure or 40 by 46 millimeter grenade cartridges this one well it probably will fire medium velocity cartridges but it's not really rated for it that is something that would come in the m32 a1 so we'll touch on the improvement for that in a moment however they share all the basic all the identical operating characteristics obviously this is not a selective fire it's semi-auto it's actually really more like a double action revolver sort of with a gas assist than it is a true semi-automatic firearm so there is a safety switch safe and fire and it is ambidextrous it's on both sides so it has a very long trigger pull on it although it's actually kind of a two-stage trigger so comes back to here and then you've got a nice stop and then snap and it fires but heavy and long not necessarily a bad idea on a 40 millimeter high explosive grenade launcher now one of the other characteristics of a 40-millimeter grenade is it has a quite low muzzle velocity and thus a very rainbow-like trajectory people talk about that with firearms with 40 millimeter grenade it actually is rainbow-like and so that means that the optic has to adjust which we'll look at in a moment but it also means if you're adjusting this optic out to the you know 20 15 or 20 degree angle your cheek weld gets impossible and so this has a buttstock that can be reconfigured for high ankle shooting squeeze the two buttons in snap it into position now that looks pretty awkward for a rifle shooter but when you're trying to aim the gun at that kind of angle this works really well now along with that we of course need to adjust the optic again because of the trajectory now you need to be pretty accurate in your range estimation in order to get an appeal and accurately hit now the reticle is going to help with that a little bit we'll take a look at that in just a moment the sight itself here has range increments they're marked here you've got holes every 50 meters from point blank out to 375 and then there are actually some intermediate locks at 25 meter increments now in order to adjust this you just grab these two little spring tabs and you can adjust the sight to whatever position you want however there is a potential issue what if it's at night and you can't read those little numbers on the range scale well you can also actually click this thing up and down one at a time little pressure on just one of the two tabs push it up or down and it'll move in 25 meter increments up or down so as long as you know where the site is at some point and you can of course start it and bottom out and then click it up to 50 as long as you have a reference point you can adjust this in increments in the dark and know where you're aiming now the reticle on this is this cool four-point crosshair here where each one of those hash marks is approximately 1 meter at 100 meters so those allow you to do some kind of in the field range estimation you know if you see a person standing up you know that's approximately 2 meters so if there are 2 hash marks tall they're probably at about 100 meters if they're one hash mark all they're at about 200 meters and then there are lots of other sort of standardized objects that anyone in the military in this sort of role is going to memorize and that hat that reticle allows you to use those to figure out your Ange and I think that brings us to the front end of the gun these original early M 32s had 12-inch barrels on them they are interesting when progressively rifled that's actually fairly common for large large bore firearms because what it allows well I should say the principle of progressive rifling is that the rifling twist rate starts very slow and then increases as you get down the barrel so when the the round is on is initially accelerating out of its cartridge it's not also trying to be spun that would put a lot of torque on the projectile and potentially tear the driving band or cause other bad things to happen so instead it's allowed to build some velocity and slowly start to rotate and it's only in the last third of the barrel or so that it's spun up to full rotational velocity the one of the interesting side effects of that is it means you can't just cut the barrel down on this this was actually an issue in Carcano early Carcano rifles also had progressive twist barrels and when people sporter eyes them you lose all their accuracy well you try and sporter eyes this by cutting the front chunk of the barrel off you will lose accuracy you will also lose the ability to actually arm a grenade because the grenades are armed by number of rotations that they have gone through and it won't be spinning nearly fast enough if you cut off the front of the barrel anyway these em 32s not only had the long barrel they were also a press-fit barrel keep that in mind for when we look at the improved a1 version now how to actually open this thing up it pivots along this strut up here and we have this lever that locks the whole gun together so I can pull this forward that and then rotate in the back end open create now you can see that it says wine that's because the cylinder is spring-loaded on a regular double action revolver the cylinder is rotated using force from your finger on the trigger this however is of course a much bigger cylinder loaded with big heavy ammunition compared to a you know traditional hand revolver so there's a spring setup in there to provide the force to rotate the cylinder for you every time you pull the trigger is going to rotate one iteration this is gas operated by the way we'll look at that in just a moment but what that means is when you reload it you have to rewind the cylinder alright so rewinding this is a little bit awkward in person and it has turned out to be basically impossible to do with a camera pointing over my shoulder and the gun resting on the table so instead I'm stand up here and do it for you what we're gonna do is put our hand in here we'll put this like so and presto the cylinder is all smoothly and fully rewound now that it's rewound you can load cartridges into it snap it shut like that we have a big ol strut on the bottom that locks into place and now you're ready to actually fire now when you actually fire there's a gas piston in the gun right in here I can't take it apart however I can tell you how it works basically you have a pin that locks the cylinder into place because you really don't want this cylinder to ever be out of alignment with the barrel with an explosive warhead sitting in there so when you fire gas is going to come back tap off the barrel it's going to pop that piston which is going to release the pin and allow the cylinder to rotate the cylinder is always under spring pressure but only when that pin is released which I can do manually with this button does it then rotate to the next cylinder that also means that you can't ever accidentally partially rotate the cylinder you can't accidentally roll it back to a cartridge that's already been spun or to already been fired anything like that so the alternative to that system would be having the cylinder locking pin built into the trigger this by having it built into the gas system means that this doesn't release until the round actually fires which is potentially a lot safer than having it connect the trigger in case of anything like a hang fire that pretty well covers the whole assembly and function of the gun and that brings us now to the m32 a one the improved version that the marine corps adopted in substantial numbers so the obvious thing that they changed here was to cut the barrel down the handguard down as well this now has an 8 inch barrel on it which created zero changes in velocity or accuracy so really no good reason not to cut the barrel down what that did was remove a little bit of weight which they were then able to migrate to other parts of the gun to make it stronger because probably the most important change here is that this is now rated from medium velocity 40 millimeter grenades medium velocity grenades are substantially higher pressure higher recoil harder on the gun and longer ranged with more payload than the standard low velocity 40 by 46 so they did a number of things to the gun they also added a separate range adjustment to the site with the medium velocity grenades these can now go out to 800 meters instead of 375 so more than doubled the maximum effective range also more than doubled the actual point target accurate range of the gun it's worth pointing out that unfortunately as a part of this that little range cliquey mechanism was taken out the increased recoil of the heavier grenades was potentially causing that mechanism to cycle itself which you don't want to happen so they got rid of it now to adjust the range you squeeze both of these set up where you want and just get good and practiced if you want to use it at night the stock mechanism was changed this now has a collar that you pull back to rotate this is a stronger system and it's also a safer system for the user with this old version on the m32 it was possible to accidentally get like your finger caught in one of those little notches we have painful and bloody results if you get your finger stuck in there and then train jam the slot a stock into position the grip and buttstock were both changed not in any fundamental mechanically way just updated to more modern models both of these now include battery containers one here in the stock so you've got storage space there you've got storage space in the pistol grip you still have storage space along both sides of the buttstock more fundamentally this bottom strut on the gun was significantly strengthened to withstand the recoil from those medium velocity grenades you can pretty clearly see that here when we look at them side by side this is the original m32 this guy up here is the a1 you can see it's much beefier in here beefier in here the attachment to the front of the receiver is much larger than we have right there so that that was probably the most significant mechanical change to the gun and then lastly there are some finished surface coating improvements to the guns so on the m32 a1 the trigger has been mp3 coated along with basically all of the other moving internal parts that barrel is nitrated the trigger pull in fact on the a1 is substantially better it is lighter and it is a shorter trigger pole than on the original m32 and I suspect that will actually make a substantial difference out on the range alright well hopefully you guys enjoyed the video got a chance to take a close-up look at something good to see all that often because it really mostly is in active military service however these are grenade launchers that are being pretty widely sold to military and security agencies manufactured right here in the US by middle court USA they do have a bunch more information on these particularly the current production m32 a1 on their website so if you're interested you can check that out learn a little bit more about them and they thanks to milkor for giving me the opportunity to come here pull these part and take a look at them and also to take them out on the range so stay tuned for tomorrow thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 529,348

Rating: 4.9710245 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, grenade launcher, mgl, rotary, revolver, m32, m32a1, usmc, marines, socom, navy, 40mm, 40x46, low velocity, medium velocity, strengthened, grenadier, manville, stopper, andries piek, south africa, milkor, milkor usa, y3, ygl, multiple grenade launcher, m203, msgl

Id: BRb2iFkwDC4

Length: 17min 3sec (1023 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 05 2019