Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today filming in Malta through the generous invitation of AMACS, the Association of Maltese Arms Collectors and Shooters. And we've put together some guns from a number of private collections here on Malta to do some video on. And today we are going to take a look at an MKb-42(W). That's the Walther version. It was the
competitor to Haenel's prototype Sturmgewehr and, well this is the one that
didn't make it through trials. So I think by the end of this video
you'll really see why it didn't. So let's talk about first where this originally came from. So development on a short cartridge, an intermediate
style of cartridge, had been going on in Germany beginning really in the mid to almost early 1930s. There were some experimental designs, predominantly
ones by Vollmer, that didn't really lead anywhere. There wasn't a lot of military acceptance
of this idea until after World War Two started. And the contract for these guns was
actually issued in January of 1941. The German military had a number of requests
for an intermediate calibre, select fire rifle like this. And they had been working on this
actually first with the Haenel Company, and a company called GECO had been
doing most of the cartridge development. And so Haenel had a bit of an early
start on getting the gun designed and working with the cartridge, designing
the magazine and those sorts of features. Walther decided that it also wanted to get in on this,
and it thought it could enter a competitive design. What Walther had that Haenel didn't, was
good experience with stamped sheet metal. Walther had been working on a
semi-auto 8x57mm self-loading rifle. Kind of similar in concept to
some of the elements of this. In particular the main disassembly lever. In fact I have a video on one of those
Walther prototypes, the A115 design, and if you're interested in this you should
also go check out that video as well. But. Walter had experience doing this sort of sheet
metal stamping. And that was one of the main characteristics of these rifles that the German
military was looking for. They didn't have a lot of deposits of some of the trace elements necessary to
make good high-quality forged steels within Germany. And with a war going on, importing that
sort of raw material was more difficult. And what they wanted to do was come up with weapons
designs that could be made with a stamped sheet metal that required less of these
somewhat exotic alloying elements. So Walther had experience with the sheet metal,
and they thought that would make up for their late entry into the program. So they went ahead and put together this guy.
It is ... select-fire actually, semi-auto and full-auto. It uses an annular gas piston wrapped
around the barrel, which is unusual. It then has a rotating bolt which is less unusual.
But really kind of an unusual system of how this whole thing goes together. So, let's just go ahead and dig in and start
taking this apart and show you how it works. Well, we'll start with a general overview here. Not a
whole lot of controls that we need to take a look at. We have a safety selector here. So "F" for fire, "S" for safe,
well for "Sicher" and "Feuer" in German. On the other side of the gun
we have the actual selector switch, so "E" is for "Einsel Feuer", and "D" is for "Daur Feuer".
So this is full-auto, "E" is semi-auto. So you have the two ... switches or two levers, one on each
side of the gun, to split the task of safe and fire selection. We have our model designation
... on the side of the receiver there, MKb 42(W) W for Walther. That's Maschinen Karabiner. And then we have the manufacturer
marking here, "ac" was the code for Walther. It is manufactured in 1942. Serial number is 97. And then this thing is from when this was an ... early
NFA registered gun in the United States actually, before it came here to Malta. And so it
was actually registered with an IRS number. Which you will see done from time to time.
That's why you've got that, really goofy, ugly... The magazine release button is the big one on the side.
This is way too far forward to be used from a firing grip. However, the way that this
was intended to be done was, when you're holding the gun right-handed,
you grasp the magazine with your left hand, push the button, and pull the magazine out. This would continue over onto
all of the standard Sturmgewehrs. And that was how they are meant to be used. One unique feature of the Walther gun is
that it actually had a magazine hold open. So when you fired the last shot there's
a tab on the magazine follower here that will actually activate a
device and lock the bolt open. The Haenel guns and the later
Sturmgewehrs did not have this. The magazines are in fact
completely interchangeable. This is our Walther magazine,
this is our later Sturmgewehr magazine. The Walther ones added this little tab, but they have
that tab travelling in the back rib of the magazine which was already there as part
of the manufacturing process. So you can use standard magazines
in the Walther gun, and you can use Walther magazines in the standard Sturmgewehrs.
You just don't get the hold open capability. You can see the magazine markings here, "M.Kb.42". You will also find Haenel MKb-42
magazines that were made for their original early open bolt guns which
do not have the hold open feature. The rear sight tower is very much
like that of a standard Sturmgewehr. This was designed with the idea of having
the bore directly in line with the shoulder. And you can see that if we
take a longer view of the rifle. You can see that the line of the bore is coming
right in here, right through the top of the stock. And thus you need to have elevated sights
so that when you put your face on the stock, when you have a good cheek weld, the sights
will actually drop right in line with your eye. And they do that very well,
as does the Sturmgewehr. These little stamped rails or ribs on the side of the
[rear] sight tower were done for mounting a ZF-41 long eye relief optical sight, a sort of a designated
marksman's optic. The exact same scope that was used on some of the very early Sturmgewehrs,
as well the Kar98k, and in theory the Gewehr 41. In practice, they found that this
was not a suitable mounting position. In fact this one doesn't even have
(and I don't think most of the Walther guns have) a notch cut to lock the optic in place. They found when they were testing these on the
Sturmgewehrs later that you could zero the thing, and if you then dumped a magazine in
full-auto you would completely lose your zero. So it just wasn't a sturdy enough mounting point.
You will see occasional photographs of these and other guns with ZF-41s
mounted on them. They look really cool. A lot of the collectors who do have these
guns are usually quite interested in getting the scopes to mount on them
because they look awesome. But they were never really used in
combat because they just weren't practical. Front sight is hooded. You'll notice
you actually have a pretty short, for the overall length of the gun you have
a pretty short sight radius on these guys. Bayonet lug. Sling swivel. All the kind
of the standard components out here. We do have a rather interesting
design to the handguard with these ventilation slots that
are actually pointing forward. And I kind of suspect because you actually
have a gas piston operating right in here, I suspect they were trying to get
some sort of pneumatic system going, where when the gas piston went
backward it would suck air ... in these vents. And when the bolt reciprocated forward
it would push air back out to aid in cooling. I don't know how well that worked,
but I suspect that was their goal. And so they are only on the top,
they don't cover the bottom. Alright, now taking it apart. This is going to
be the fun part. We have two very German style pins here and we have actually left
them just slightly pressed in so they're a little easier for me to get out on camera.
We're going to flip this over, pull both the pins out. There's one. There's the other. Those are captive pins,
they don't have to come all the way out. Once those are out then we
can remove the trigger pack, like so. The next major step in the disassembly
procedure is to open up this disassembly plug, lock, catch, thing.
So this rotates 180 degrees. There we go. Pull that around, and it's going to drop down. This is the part that is very similar to the A115. Once that's down, then we can pull the whole upper
assembly off the gun, like so. That is going to leave us with a stamped sheet metal
receiver with a couple of heavy metal blocks built into it. Primarily this support here at the front
is to attach the front half of the gun. We also have a reinforcing
block here for the magazine well. And then on the inside, this tube is
actually the mainspring of the gun. And that whole tube reciprocates backwards. There is a little cutout in it, right up here at
the front, to give clearance for the hammer, because this is hammer fired.
We'll touch on this again in a moment. On second thoughts actually let's do that
right now before I take this apart any further. So, what we have here is our actual bolt right there which
is riding in this sort of carrier. Which is attached to this top... this is actually ... sort of the
... operating rod I suppose. ... It's not in the typical form
of a rod, but that is what it is. And then these two pins are holding in place this, which carries the bolt. You can see that tube very
clearly right here cycling backwards. And then this thing sticking out the back,
right there, that's the firing pin. So once it's closed the hammer can swing up
right into there, hit the firing pin and fire the thing. The recoil spring itself goes
back into the buttstock here. The next step is to take the bolt and barrel
assembly out of the front receiver section. That is actually held in place by the muzzle nut there. On the Sturmgewehrs the muzzle nut doesn't really
do a lot except protect the threading on the muzzle. On this it actually has a legit purpose. And what's kind of cool is we
can actually use a Luger tool to slide in here. Well, show you this from, show you this from the front.
There's a little wire spring right there, you can see it wobbling back and forth. That locks into one of these notches
and prevents this from unscrewing. So if I can use a Luger tool in there to lift that spring up out of the way, then
I can very easily unscrew the muzzle nut. And then this guy just slides off. There you go. There's the barrel assembly. This is just a very complex piece of stamping
with a couple metal bits riveted onto it, the front sight block, the bayonet lug, a stacking rod etc. Now I mentioned that this is basically the operating rod.
The way that works is because this is the gas piston itself. It's normally going to rest right up here. There are a pair of gas vents in the barrel, one on top and one on the bottom. And when you fire, gas is going to blow out of
those, it's going to fill this little section right here inside that sheet metal handguard, which is
going to force this piston puck backwards. And that impinges on this piece of moulded steel, which pushes this back and cycles the bolt.
So pull this all off now, like so. There is our op rod and bolt and the firing pin already fell out because
... this is held in place by the recoil spring. Once you take this assembly off,
the firing pin can just plop out the back. And then we have our barrel and barrel
extension, I guess you would call it, right here. This ejects out the top, so we have a
cutaway there. This guy is the ejector itself. This is the magazine hold open,
so that's what gets pushed up. This piece gets pushed up by the follower, which then
causes the bolt carrier to lock in the rearward position. We have a couple more markings on here. Pretty much what you would expect, serial
number, Waffenamt and a military proof mark. And then very interestingly, we actually have two
manufacturers codes on the barrel, "bys" and "cxm". So the "bys" is a company called Rhurstahl,
and they were a barrel maker for the Kar98k. They would eventually go on to also be a barrel
maker for the Sturmgewehrs, so their association here makes sense. They would have
made probably the barrel blank. ... Oh, and I should also point out
the Waffenamt code in there, 26, is actually the code for Mauser Borsigwalde,
which is odd, and I can't fully explain that. However, "cxm" is Gustav Genschow, or GECO, so
they were one of the companies heavily involved in the ammunition production and development, and so
perhaps this barrel went to them for chambering early on. That's the best explanation I can come up with. And now our last major component is
the op rod and bolt ... carrier assembly. So of course the handle
is permanently fixed on. We have our firing pin which
just slides in the back here. We'll go ahead and pull that out because there's nothing
holding it in, so it's just going to fall out sooner or later. This is then a rotating bolt, and we have
a cross lug, kind of like an AR-15 (sort of), that allows this to rotate and lock. Now there is also a safety
mechanism built in here. And it's going to be a lot easier for me
to show you this after it's disassembled. These look like rivets.
They are actually just sort of studs, and if I push them in I can actually push
this whole assembly out of the op rod. There we go. We have this little guy
that falls out when you do that. This is an ideal thing to have in the gun when you're
disassembling it in the Russian winter, I'm sure. Alright, so there's what we have all told. Our bolt with its cam track, and then
this is the actual camming piece. You'll notice it has a hole for the firing pin,
so the firing pin keeps it lined up. And as this travels, it is going to
require the bolt to rotate just slightly, not much, your total rotation is only
about that much which is just enough for the locking lugs here to engage and disengage. Let's see, this ... is the proper orientation
of the gun, slot for the ejector in the bottom, extractor in the very top, and
then these are your locking lugs. Now this slot on top of the bolt is where
this little spring-loaded piece goes. That is a little plunger spring
right there, it's going to sit in here, and the purpose of this piece is to
prevent the firing pin from going forward before the bolt is all the way
into the ... barrel extension. So, the way this works is a little bit complicated, basically it's going to act as a stop on this carrier. This guy, the firing pin, can only go so far into the cam
piece right there, because the diameter stops it. So for the firing pin to protrude
through the face of the bolt this cam pin has to be far enough forward
(you can just see it right in there) this cam pin has to be basically
all the way forward in its cam track, which means it has to have rotated the bolt,
so that's a good safety mechanism. The lugs have to be fully engaged before the
firing pin can come through. That all seems fine. The problem is what if, say, you run into an
obstacle before the bolt has come all the way into this section of the barrel extension? What if ... this thing rotates, the firing pin comes through
and detonates a cartridge while the bolt is back here? That would be a catastrophic failure, and that's where
this piece comes in. It prevents that from happening. So if I assemble this together. There we go. So, what we
have under normal operation, we have the little angled section,
right here, which is going to hit this corner of the barrel extension,
and that's going to cause it to go down, and only at that point can this
... carrier come through on top over it, force the bolt to rotate,
and then allow it to fire. Once this starts to come back, see right there, that pops up. The bolt is
then forced to unlock and come backwards, and here now this carrier can't go forward, because
it's being blocked by this spring-loaded piece. So, a little bit complicated to explain,
but hopefully that makes sense. Right there, once we get to this
point then this gets pushed down, and then this lug is kind
of already controlled here. And in order for the firing
pin to go forward and fire, the bolt has to be rotated
because of this cam piece. And it's locking right in there. So our last piece to take a look at is
going to be the fire control mechanism. This is kind of the classic German
self-contained removable fire control unit. It is a hammer fired gun so, ... on safe, where we have it right now, we have a little bar ... right here, that is going to prevent me
from lifting the back end of the trigger, which prevents any of the rest of this mechanism from
operating and prevents the hammer from dropping. Once I put this ... onto fire (and by the way this works much more
smoothly when it's actually in the gun, when I have the mechanism out
I kind of have to do it by hand) but once we have it on fire, you can see that this
bar is cammed backwards, like so, and now when I pull the trigger we have kind of the classic two sears right there. I'll lift that up until it drops, so. Not a whole lot to get into in the
mechanism of the firing group. Note that there is a torsion-style hammer spring there. This is all held together with little tiny clips and pins and
there is no way that I'm going to disassemble this piece. So, that's as deep as we are going to get into it today. It is interesting to note however, that the whole trigger
housing mechanism is made of stamped sheet metal. So you can see the piece here at the
front where they've taken two layers, folded them across, spot welded them together. Slap a couple of wooden grip
panels on it, and you're ready to go. One other thing actually to point out.
This guy, right here, is the full-auto trip. So if you have this set to full-auto
what's going to happen is ... it is going to hook the hammer
when the bolt cycles back, because you don't want the
hammer to just follow the bolt carrier. And then something has to push
this down, and when you do, that releases the hammer in full-auto
as long as the trigger is being held. And the thing that does that is this little
triangular protrusion on the back of the op rod. So this is going to be cycling forward here,
it's going to get to the end of travel and it's going to push that lever down,
which is going to then release the hammer once the bolt is fully in battery
and locked and ready to fire. And there you have the complete
Walther MKb-42(W) disassembled. This would be the full field disassembly.
And I think this is going to give you some notion as to part of the reason
why this didn't make it through field trials. This is a lot more complicated to take apart and, in particular, a lot more complicated
to put back together, most notably this stuff, than what Haenel had designed, which
would become the Sturmgewehr, so. In fact this is really quite a pain
in the butt to put back together, that bolt system and that
spring-loaded little safety device. One almost has to wonder if that was an
afterthought, if it wasn't in the original design, and someone realised during the early
trials that they needed a way to prevent out of battery firing beyond
what was already built into the gun. That is possible, but ... I'm speculating here,
I don't have any actual documentation to suggest it. Ultimately, when this actually got into testing ...
(Like I said, the contract was for 200 guns, it's assumed that 200 is the total production. I've never seen
any documentation of guns numbered at higher than 200. I don't think anybody else has either. There's
no definitive proof that that's exactly how many were made, but given that that's
the contract it seems like a safe assumption.) At any rate, once they went into
testing they had a number of problems. They are obviously more complex than
Haenel's gun, which ... was the MKb-42(H). They are more complex, they are more
expensive to make, they were less reliable. I have been told by people who have shot these that you get a
lot of gas blown back into your face, which isn't very pleasant. However these did have a couple of
advantages over Haenel's product, namely they ... offered closed bolt fire for semi-auto
which was, as a practical matter, more accurate. Haenel's gun, the original
MKb-42(H), was an open bolt gun. And also the fact that they were a closed bolt meant it
was less susceptible to dirt and crap getting into the gun. Haenel's gun was much more like a submachine
gun. If you ... wanted to be ready to fire you had to have the bolt locked to the rear,
because it fired from an open bolt. That gave you this big space in the
side of the gun where dirt could get in. So there are pros and cons to both of
these. However what Haenel did was they took some of the trigger elements from this,
and they got the ... message that a closed bolt gun was going to be much preferred, and they redesigned
their gun to be a closed-bolt hammer-fired system. Which became the MP43/1, because
once you were able to take Haenel's gun, which was less expensive to make, it was
... far simpler to disassemble, and more reliable. Once you took that and then also gave it a
couple of the advantages that Walther had had, then you've got the perfect gun overall. And at that point, by late [1942], the
contract for these guys was cancelled. It is possible that they didn't actually make the full 200,
but I don't know that we'll ever be able to find out for sure. But the guns that still remained
were sent back to the Walther factory, where they appear to have
stayed until the end of the war. As a result these are extremely scarce in Europe and, well
relatively speaking, more common in the United States. There is in fact a rather ... well published picture of
an American soldier standing in the Walther factory right after the end of the war, smoking and
holding and inspecting one of these rifles and you can see like 15 more of
them laying out on a workbench. So ... these guns stayed at the Walther factory until
... the Walther factory was liberated by the Americans. And thus most of them that were taken as souvenirs, were
taken by American soldiers, and ended up in the United States. Not to say that they're common in the US,
they're extremely rare guns everywhere. But it is very cool to have gotten a chance to take a
look at this one, to pull it apart, show you how it works. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. If you do appreciate seeing this sort of thing, please
do consider supporting me directly through Patreon. It is support from folks there that makes it possible for
me to travel to take up the invitations from people like the Maltese Collectors Association
to bring these to you guys. Thanks for watching. [ sub by sk cn2 ]
