Parts Kit Review 2 1945 StG44 MP44

hey everyone Craig with war trophies here back with another World War two parts kit for you this time we have a real Sturm Guevara 44 a lot of times when people use that name they apply it to everything that was made during World War two whether that be the MP 43 mp44 or actual Sturm drivers this time we have a real stg44 mark kit and that means it was made during the last few months of the war when they changed the stamps and here's what we're looking at now sometimes these were stamped MP 43 or MP 44 and then the STG was stamped over top of that that's not the case here this kit only ever said stg44 and we'll get into the other markings on it in a bit alright now when I got this thing it was absolutely totally complete including the sling I took it off because we're gonna take this thing apart and check all the individual pieces out and it's just going to be in the way so let me set that off to the side here and we'll get right into it now the stg44 mark guns obviously everybody knows the parts that are identical to anything else in the series meaning that there's nothing different on this gun except for that stamp so it's going to disassemble the exact same way and I'll do that for you now okay here's what we're looking at we have it all blown apart and this is the really cool thing about this kit every time you look at a number you see the same thing this is a numbers-matching kit so this is 2 773 AJ now the AJ some people don't know that's called the block and what they did when they got to the first 10,000th gun meaning they went 9999 the next gun normally would have been 10,000 but what they did to say space and to make it overly complicated which is the German way they started back over with one and that gun would have been 1a and when they got to 9999 a it went to 1b and it just kept going until they actually ran out enough letters in the alphabet and they started back again with 1a a so when they got up to AJ they were late in the war and it was time to start with the stg44 stamp so let's grab a couple other pieces with the number on it here we have our standard gas piston operating rod bolt carrier but we have that familiar to 773 now on some of the parts you won't have the letters so here we just have the numbers - 773 we look at our bolt our bolt uses the electric pencil it's not stamped it's actually kind of engraved but it does have the AJ this bolt also has an M and an acceptance stamp I don't know that I've ever found out what the M means a lot of the bolts have that you can see this one is a late bolt with the cut and this firing pin is the 4-sided type notice the finish on these things this is what I would call bear it may have a clear finish on it but there's no bluing on the gas piston which is normal and the caulking handle I don't see any remains of finish on it either so this is how this was originally it's probably bear as hard as this metal is I wouldn't be surprised that it's bear and there's no deterioration big piece up here here you can see the two seven seven three AJ the AJ is a little hard to see because of that spot weld and then 45 any stg44 mark gun is definitely definitely going to be 45 and then we have another two seven seven three on our trigger housing with no AJ just to 773 now this one this parts kit has a loose ejector pin and I'm hesitant to do anything with it for right now I know where it's at it's not going anywhere I just I'm going to make sure I don't lose it and maybe someday I'll fix it but for right now I'm just going to leave it the way I found it some of the cool features on this gun are what I would call very very late features and I'll show you one of those here on the stock stock looks normal it's laminated it has the trap for the tools and the manual but on the back we see this one has no ribs totally smooth now just for comparison we'll look at a earlier stock design this is actually a late stock believe it or not this is from Sauer and they never switched over to the standard style stock they used the mp40 three style stock throughout the war and they're characterized by a really weird orange kind of funky color but that is original that hasn't been redone so this is a normal stock with the ribs on the back and this is our late style another part to this stock that's different is right here at first glance you don't notice anything but again we go back to our Sauer stock and you can see that we have a raised portion right here that raised portion matched the shape of the stamping but you can see it took an awful lot of work to make that so this entire piece of wood would have been this thick and then they would have taken that amount of material off on both sides that's a lot of time and a lot of effort it's not necessary at all all you need is this right here and stock works just like any other additionally on the stock I thought for the longest time that they weren't marked and as I collected more parts kits I discovered that they were and right here we have an acceptance stamp and then we have an FX Oh for hey no other than that we have stock metal that doesn't appear to be marked in any way some of these trap doors will say jvd but I'm not seeing anything on this one the metal is not marked beyond the serial number and it looks completely standard there's nothing different about this stamping back here take a look at our handguard again then it's a standard piece really hard to tell if it has any type of a finish on it beyond maybe a clear now hand guards were made differently probably depending on the original stamping dies some of them have five holes this one has four on each row except for back here so sometimes you'll find five in each row sometimes it'll alternate and this one's kind of strange because it's got four four four four and then five and this one's marked a QR like most of the ones you'll come across one thing we didn't look at on the bolt carrier I didn't point out the fxo for Haenel looks like we have a blued pin for our plunger not quite sure how they'd have done that the plunger itself is not finished seems to be the exact same as everything else here not a lot of wear on these pieces you can tell this gun was used but doesn't look like it was used very much this rifle has the late style barrel now you can find these barrels on MP 43 s or MP 44 s or most of the stg44 s produced in this style will have the late barrel you can find them with the muzzle nut and the standard front sight but the majority are going to be in this configuration now what we're looking at here and let me get this out of the background don't get messed up here we can see that the front sight is different from normal we only have one pin there's no reason to have a second pin because there's no plunger for the muzzle nut now interestingly this front sight is a different diameter so you can't use this sight on a standard barrel unfortunately when they simplified it they weren't really thinking about standardizing the site itself and when they made the site different they had to make the barrels different one other really neat thing about this kit is the trigger housing and get it up in front of a camera here it looks the same as the other ones but you'll notice the pins are different this one looks kind of mashed or squashed but they're made with a three punch deal and that is totally different from our standard setup which would be like this a normal pin that's just pressed on both sides and you can see that while it is just that normal kind of pin we have that it's almost like a washer underneath with the three pressings so after I discovered that I got to investigating and discovered this what is up with that I had never seen one of these before I got this kit and what we're looking at here is this part of the stamping and that looks completely different from what we would consider to be a normal mp44 trigger housing and anytime I see this design I've seen only two of these by the way anytime I see this part of the different style stamping I see these different pins okay the only other trigger housing like this that I've seen was on a very late 1945 Sauer parts kit it was also matching that's where I got this stock from unfortunately that parts kit was built into a post sample the guy did not like this orange stock didn't care that it was original to the gun believe it or not and just wanted me to put a brand new stock on it then also kept his American parts count up you know whether he needed to do that for a machine gun or not I really don't care but I think I would have kept this with a gun at least okay now the grips we would probably assume that a very late stg44 mark gun would have the plastic grips or bakelite this one does not this one had standard wood grips nothing different about these no markings somebody got a little crazy tightening it at some point and squashed that thank goodness it didn't break these Griffen that's what we're looking at there now one thing that I missed you guys might have actually seen it in the video there was one more serialized part for this part skit and that's the rear sight usually there's the last two digits of the serial number so we see a seven three and I have seen several parts kits that have this one or two numbers off so they probably had everything stamped or a few parts stamped with the numbers ahead of time and then just grabbed the wrong thing and now we'll check out the codes on the bottom this is a Mauser receiver with the late Mauser byf stamp then we have our Haenel ffff XO stamp and all the Eagles and Waffen amps this has a three on it that's probably the shift or some type of other code we've never been able to figure out what that would be another late feature I'd like to point out or these spot-welds you don't see these on normal mp44 is usually there's very faint spot welds and not that many of them so that's a different feature to Garrard one that's it on this kit appreciate you tuning in again love these mp40 fours and stg44 Xand mp40 threes and everything else associated with the Sturm Tavares I will have several more of these matching-number mp44 kits for you I know everybody loves to see that kind of stuff and I like to share my things and let everybody see them so let me know if they have any requests I do have several other World War two parts kits that I'd like to feature just don't know what I want to do first but again thanks for tuning in see ya

Channel: Craig_S

Views: 5,741

Rating: 4.9058824 out of 5

Keywords: StG44, Sturmgewehr, 44, MP44, MP43, MP43/1, MKb42, WWII, World, War, II, German, Axis, Fallschirmjager

Id: 1Jj1Z-Sd_-s

Length: 16min 34sec (994 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 25 2017