P7M7: The Mythical Lost .45 ACP H&K

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons calm I mean Colin and I'm here today at hk's gray room taking a look at a number of their very cool unusual firearms in particular today a p7 as specifically is a p7 m7 now of course all of the models of the p7 are pretty much designated for their capacity and the standard one in nine-millimeter was the p7 m8 so what holds only seven rounds well that would be the 45 caliber version they only made six 45 caliber p7 pistols and as a result they are one of the scarcest of the type to find and there are a couple interesting stories about what exactly happened with this thing so the first and the most important one is the technical side and that is that the standard operating mechanism of the p7 didn't really quite cut it for the 45 caliber version so why don't we actually just dive straight in and pull the slide off this let me show you how this was going to work compared to a standard nine-millimeter p7 all right so here's our standard p7 m13 and you know there are two unique features to the p7 one is the squeeze cocking and the other is the gas delay system and it's the gas delay system that we're looking at here today so this is a piston that sits in this chamber underneath the barrel when you fire I don't know if you can see it here there's a bleed hole when you fire gas drops or is pushed from the chamber of the pistol down into this delaying chamber which then pushes on this piston which pushes the slide forward which prevents it from opening that that in nine millimetre parabellum delays the gun long enough to have it operate safely now for the forty five this was a bit of a problem get her seven round magazine there the issue was that the 45 caliber cartridge didn't really work with this gas delay system now I'm speculating here but I think it's it was probably a combination of two things one the heavier projectile and and putting more presumably more recoil force into the slide and the other part being the lower operating pressure of the 45 caliber cartridge that gas delay system is really dependent on gas pressure and if you have a lot less gas pressure which you would it's probably just not going to work as well so HK in Germany spent a fair amount of time working on developing this and unfortunately the one we have here today is missing the relevant bits what they ended up doing was actually putting a hydraulic buffer in here instead of the gas delay system this is the same system that they would use in the p7 k3 which is the little lower caliber version of the 32 380 and 22 caliber set up for the p7 so they took that gap that hydraulic hydraulic damper basically dropped it in scaled it up dropped it into the 45 and that's what allowed this to actually operate so it is actually mechanically rather different from the standard p7 design in addition to that of course there were other tooling changes that had to be made the 45 caliber magazine is not surprisingly a lot larger than the 9 millimeter holds one less cartridge at the same time and the 45 caliber frame is also larger now it's not hugely larger you know if I just drop one of these on top of the other you don't really see it but if we look up close when I line up the back end of the frame you can see that the 45 caliber one is a little bit longer now the 45 is narrower here only because this is a double stack 9-millimeter frame this is wider than a standard single stack 9 and longer than any of the 9 millimeter frames so in addition to figuring out a different operating system HK also had to put in the tooling to make an entirely new frame for the gun this particular example is a bit unusual in that it is missing the the typical markings here where normally it would say HK p7m 745 all we have on this particular one is a serial number right there a little hard to see because of the nickel 0:02 m7 there were six of these made there 0 0 1 M 7 through 0 0 6 M 7 that serial number is repeated here on the frame and they do also have the model molded into the grips HK p 7 m 7 so the rest of the back story it was basically that because of the technical trouble getting this working just right combined with the fact that HK in Germany didn't really see that there was much market for this pistol there wasn't much demand for 45 caliber pistols in any sort of police and security force and that's what HK was really looking to market to now the counterparts in HK USA really thought that the gun would sell but they never really got the chance to find out there were several years of back and forth between the two branches of the company ultimately apparently they were they were told that yes it could be made but he'd be like 10 grand a pistol and and so just forget it and stop bothering us about this project so like I said only a total of six were made either in 1983 or 85 depending on sources the one other really cool interesting story that I know about this one in fact this one in particular is in early 86 HK actually made an attempt to have this pistol in Miami Vice of course well-known for from Michael Mann and and his knowledge of firearms and it's his use of interesting firearms and and Miami Vice really being the one thing that gave that built the market for the brand 10 pistol well there were some creative personality differences between some of the HK reps and some of the Miami Vice reps and while they did provide two 45 caliber p7 pistols to the show they ended up not actually getting used unfortunately so we missed a cool chance to see one of these on the silver screen but today this is the only one remaining in the United States and there's very little other information about it so big thanks to HK for letting me take a look at this one and bring it to you guys hopefully you enjoyed the video thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 139,367

Rating: 4.9793491 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, hk, heckler, koch, p7m7, p7, p7m13, p7m8, 45, 45 acp, 45 p7, gas delay, pistol, handgun, rare, grail, unicorn, lost, mythical, unique, miami vice, tv, prototype, hk usa, hk germany, grey room, gray room

Id: fUUotDJffjU

Length: 6min 47sec (407 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2019