Origin of a Flare Pistol: Shpagin's SPSh-44

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm in McCallum and I'm here today at the Rock Island auction company where we are taking a look at a very common looking flare pistol you can find these sorts of things very easily on the surplus market here in the United States made by Bulgaria and Poland and Czechoslovakia however I thought it would be interesting to take a look at where this actually came from because originally this is a Russian design from World War two and not only that but it was manufactured or rather it was designed by someone whose name you might recognize Georg II semionovich boggin the same guy who developed well who had a hand in guns like the DShK and the guy who basically developed the ppsh-41 toboggan first joined the Russian army in 1916 where he was put to work as an armored after the war and after the Russian Civil War he went to work at the kagra of Arsenal which is where it was a machine gun Arsenal at the time and that was where designers like in particular deck Jeff and fedorov were both based and working so he got to start interacting with those guys and apparently developed his skills fairly quickly because by 1922 he was actually assisting in design work there at the Arsenal and of course he would go on to be one of Russia's notable firearms designers with iconic guns like the ppsh-41 so let's take a closer look let me show you what exactly he did to make a flare pistol for the Soviet Union so when the Soviet Union went into world war two they were initially using a flare pistol designed in 1930 something that actually looks quite a lot like the German flare pistols of the time a little bit longer barrel had a hexagonal chamber on it it was a nicely made and finished gun which became a problem by the middle of World War two when the Soviet Union is very seriously short on materials and manpower and factory construction time so having finished his work on the 1941 pattern submachine gun vagan was put to work developing and improved flare pistol and so his first model was actually done in 1943 and it was something like a 30% reduction Costin materials over the existing guns and it's not quite this this is the 1944 pattern which he simplified even more so the 43 one has distinctive for having kind of an angled grip and also has a trigger guard on it this the SP SH and by the way I know there are a bunch of folks watching who actually speak Russian and are consistently annoyed by the fact that I use the I say SH because in English we don't have a single letter for that sound the shoot sound which in Cyrillic does have its own single letter so in English its SH sorry about that anyway shabanam went ahead and further simplified the design to this one which is really really simple but still totally effective it does everything that it needs to so it is a single action gun have a hammer back there that you have to manually [ __ ] the lever to open the gun is this little spring-loaded piece on the bottom of the trigger so there's only one marking on this thing and that is this Arsenal stamp a star in a shield that's the stamp for the Millat Arsenal and originally swaggin was working at cover of that Factory was moved east in 1941 to make sure that it wasn't overrun by the Germans and by 43 and 44 Sheboygan was at molla much farther to the east in Russia so that's where these were produced later on they would start marking them with eighths and serial numbers but not this early in the war I guess I shouldn't say this early in the works I can't tell you for sure if this was made during the war or shortly afterwards that's the period when they were actually using wood grips a little later after the war had ended they switched to plastic grips but this is either a wartime or just shortly postwar version with those wood grip panels now mechanically it is single action and it's a break open type of system so there's a little spring-loaded lever at the bottom of the trigger push that and the barrel opens this is chambered for basically a one inch flare 25.4 millimeters which is pretty typical and standard of the time all it does is just pivot open and closed so put in a flare close the barrel it latches you can then manually [ __ ] the hammer pull the trigger and it will fire there is a bit actually it's I can show you the firing pin the firing pin is not spring-loaded when if you don't pull the trigger the hammer can't go far enough forward to hit the firing pin once you pull the trigger you take that block out of the way and then the firing pin can come forward so you have all the basic necessary safety mechanisms the gun can't fire just if you accidentally hit the hammer so that sort of thing and you'll notice here actually in order to prevent this from ever having the possibility of firing when you just close the action with a flare in it since it's not a spring-loaded firing pin the bottom lug on the barrel here actually pushes the firing pin back into the breech face when you close it so if the firing pin doesn't go back on its own that pushes it back before the action closes and so this new super simplified model would do very well for the Russians you know as little manpower as necessary for a basic utilitarian tool on the military flare pistols were important for coordinating attacks signalling locations all of that sort of stuff the design would go on to be copied by copied widely or licensed widely in Warsaw Pact after the war and that's why you see so many of them around today you just don't nearly as often see early pattern actual Russian production ones as I said at the beginning you can find this pattern of a flare pistol really quite easily in the US they're being expensive and a lot of people actually just have them for their purposes as flare pistols as signaling devices however I think it's pretty cool to see one here that's actually that actually goes back to the original roots of the design World War two or just after World War two in the Soviet Union so if you would like more information on this one you'll need to take a look at a rock island's catalog page it's in a batch of five flare pistols there you can either find their website on your own or you can go to the link in the description text below that's for weapons calm and from there you can find your way over to their catalogue page thanks for watching you

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 77,887

Rating: 4.9711623 out of 5

Keywords: shpagin's, spsh, -44, PPSh-41 submachine gun, Georgiy Semyonovich Shpagin, origin of a flare pistol, Forgotten Weapons, SPSh pattern, Molot plant, Red Army, wooden grips, Warsaw Pact region, spsh44, spsh43, osp30, flare pistol, signal pistol, shpagin, dshk, machine gun, ww2, world war, world war two, history, development, disassembly, mccollum, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, signal flare, 25mm, 1 inch flare, 25.4mm, pattern type, Forgotten Weapons merch

Id: F-hZo04UymQ

Length: 6min 59sec (419 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 07 2018