Portugal's MG-13: the M938 Light Machine Gun

I guess thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian McCallum and I'm here today at the Rock Island auction company taking a look at a few of the guns they are going to be selling in their upcoming may of 2019 premier auction specifically today we have a Portuguese contract registered and transferable mg 13 machine gun now the original development of the mg 13 and its relationship to a couple of World War one machine guns is really pretty hazy and a lot of I don't really trust a lot of the written documentation and before I talk about exactly where this gun how this gun was developed I want to do some more research so instead today we're gonna take a look at what the Germans did with it and how it actually works because there's a lot of interesting stuff on the inside of this guns now you will notice perhaps that for example this has like an mg34 style of iPod and the barrel jacket looks very much like an mg34 this is a relatively modern machine gun this was actually despite its name mg 13 it was actually adopted in 1930 or 1931 by the German military and that mg 13 name exists simply as well as distraction under the Versailles Treaty the Germans weren't allowed to be developing new machine guns and they were developing new machine guns and so they had guns like this and the mg 15 that they gave what sounded like retroactive names to so that if pressed they could maybe plausibly claim that this was actually a gun developed during World War one no no we're not developing new stuff we've already had this we just decided to make some and by the way they all must have been made by Simpson because Simpson is the only company that's allowed to make military arms under the Versailles armament limitations now this was actually manufactured by Rheinmetall in summer now but what we have here is interesting in that it is a it's a short recoil operated gun it has a tilting locking block that's a bit unusual and interesting it actually uses detachable box magazines it has a 25 round box magazine which is most typical and then they actually also made a 75 around double drum for this gun and it fires from a closed bolt which is a bit unusual the Germans adopted this in 30 or 31 and this was kind of their standard infantry light machine gun for just a couple of years until the adoption the the final development and adoption of the mg34 the mg34 would serve as an excellent general-purpose machine gun because it was belt-fed it could be set up as a heavy machine gun with a lot of sustained fire capability it had interchangeable easily interchangeable barrels and those were a couple of characteristics that the mg 13 did not have you can't change the barrel on the mg 13 but it's a much more involved process you have to pull the whole action out the back of the receiver it's not quick like the 34 is and of course the box magazines don't allow for the same sort of sustained fire that you can get with a belt-fed so if you look at historical pictures you will see a lot of these guns showing up in the interwar years and they did stay in german service in world war ii just relegated to rear-echelon sorts of use they were also sold in substantial numbers to Portugal this is actually in in addition to selling them to Portugal existing guns the Germans also manufactured guns for Portugal and this is actually a Portuguese contract Spain I believe also purchased some of these from the Germans and use them but let's go ahead and take a look at how this comes apart and how it works inside all right let's look at some interesting features here first off is starting in the back we have a stock that actually has a collapsing butt plate there so it can take up a little bit a little bit less space in storage and in addition that the only reason that's really helpful is because the stock also actually folds which is quite unusual on a light machine gun so right over here we have a lever which when I fold it when I open it out it unlocks from and unlocks that from that which allows the stock to fold and then we have a little spring-loaded detent right there the stock snaps into that and presto you have a nice much more compact gun we also have a carry handle here rotates 360 degrees around the barrel but that's how you would actually carry the thing and then when you're not using it it just falls down at the bottom out of the way the mg 13 was a select-fire gun and like the 34 that would come later your selector lever is actually built into the trigger mechanism so the top is semi-auto the bottom is fully auto these are S&A and not E&F because this is a portuguese contract gun not a German original German gun and then we have a safety lever right here so fire and safe like so now this lever is a little bit of a mystery but I think I know what it's for and I'll show you that when we do some disassembly in a moment moving around to the magazine it is side mounted and we have a release lever right here this looks very much like a fedorov mag but it is not it's also not interchangeable with the magazines in the world or one fleeter rifles for what it's worth twenty-five round capacity because this is a closed bolt gun we do also have a bolt release right there so when you've got a mag in this will lock open when it's empty like so although you can't really see it from that side and then when I push this down it'll drop the bolt like that we actually have two sets of sights this is your regular rear sight just like a Mauser and then there is also this flip up sight note that it has a notch way up here at the top that is actually there for the anti-aircraft sights this lug on the barrel is there from mounting the front anti-aircraft sight which is a round spider type sight and once that's in place it moves the line-of-sight quite high of course and at that point this acts as your rear sight you can then fold it down to protect it when you're not using it there are two iPod mounting points here one at the back and one at the front the reason for that is the front one is actually for the bipod the rear one is to put the gun on an anti-air craft Mount tripod and that's when you would be using the anti-aircraft sights that's also when you would be using the 75 round double drum I should also point out here that when you don't have a magazine in the gun you do have a spring-loaded cover that locks in place using the magazine release and that just prevents dirt from getting into the gun through there just for a reference sake there's the front sight it folds down when not in use again so it doesn't get banged on things and damaged it's a very standard German style of front sight we don't have mg 13 marked on here anywhere but we do have a really big portuguese serial number here on the right side of the receiver b-series number 661 and we have a portuguese crest just in front of the ejection port the portuguese by the way referred to this gun as the model 1938 machine gunner m9 3/8 this assembly happens in two parts we have basically we have a center receiver we have an upper top cover and we have a lower assembly and first we'll open up the upper receiver simply by pushing in this button and lifting it up and doing that we get a view of a really interesting feature here the recoil spring is actually completely housed in the top cover so this peg is connected to the recoil spring that peg drops into this hole down here which is integral to the bolt so that when the gun when the top covers down moving the bolt compresses the spring when the top cover is up you can cycle the bolt back and forth pull it out you've disconnected the mainspring completely in addition to that we have this cool interesting thing which actually allows you to adjust tension of the mainspring by screwing this knob up and down you can see that we're moving this solid silver bar and what this is actually doing is expand allowing this section of the mainspring which is what's actually used to expand and contract so we can effectively increase or decrease the spring force that is really cool that's a system that was in obviously on the maximum guns but it was a much more a much trickier system to actually adjust with this little you know you had to do it a half a rotation at a time on the outside the fusee cover this is is nicely protected inside the gun when it's closed and it's a really cool little system now I mentioned at the beginning that this is a short recoil system what we have here is our locking block right here and that's going to pivot up and down to lock the bolt and unlock our bolt is directly connected to our barrel so that's the complete distance that's the short recoil distance that the barrel travels back and then so that's in battery as this comes back it's actually pivoting this arm which is an accelerator arm so that gets pushed to here and then it it uses basically a bit of extra leverage to throw the bolt balanced so right there this lever does that throws the bolt backwards which is going to fully extract our cartridge kick out the empty case the mainspring up in the top cover here will then push it forward again and it locks in to battery now we'll go ahead and take this out so you can see how these pieces actually work by the way one of the cool things here is I can actually just lift out this accelerator arm right there so we'll take that out right now now in order to get the action out the bolt and the barrel and all those internal bits we have to take the lower off or at least we have to pivot the lower down so we have this spring-loaded button here push that in and then the lower pivots down just like say an AR or many other guns and that by the way is where this lever comes in handy this simply drops a block down that prevents the lower from moving up when we take this off in heck you'll see that clearly previous owners haven't known what to do with this because one of the parts is dinged up inside where someone was probably hammering on this so I think that little block which literally does nothing except prevent these two parts from closing together when you've got it engaged that is really a very clever tiny tiny little element in the design because what it means is I can set the gun up like this and pull the barrel out normally if you're doing something like this with a gun that's this heavy it's you're going to have to lay it down on its side and then the lowers kind of flopping in and out and you're getting dunk into the recesses here this way I can let leave it set up and I can now pull the bolt out I can pull out the barrel and the operating mechanism I can do this all while the gun is sitting stable and having done this with some other guns normally what happens here is you have to have like two hands holding this so that these parts stay apart so I can pull stuff out the back while also having a third hand to remove those parts I'm really impressed with that thing it's so simple but so very practical in the field all right now the actual locking parts our bolt has a single locking surface right here at the back it is by the way hammer fired we'll take a look at the lower the fire control group in a moment but there's a spring-loaded firing pin in there Oh handle is attached directly to the bolt as is that plug which is for the recoil spring you know that is going to slide back and forth in this barrel extension there's our ejector it's a very long bolt it's going to go all the way in like that that's fully forward and then when it's locked this bar lifts up locks against the back of the bolt prevents it from moving because this is short recoil this whole assembly is going to start going backwards when you fire when that happens this surface on the back of the locking block is going to get pushed upward specifically by this surface in the back of the lower assembly when the back end goes up the front end comes down that unlocks the bolt which can then cycle backward now when it goes forward you is there's actually one more little piece in here so the way that this works is the bolt of the locking block is being pushed upwards as the bolt as this whole assembly is going forward when the bolt is fully home this square section at the bottom those two corners are going to hit those two protrusions they're going to push this forward and allow the locking block up you can see that working here I'll use my thumb to push up on the locking block right when it gets to there it then goes against the springs this goes up and now the hole now the bolt assembly is locked in place by the way you can also remove the barrel itself there's a locking catch right here push that down and then there are a series of interrupted threads on the barrels so this is actually your barrel extension assembly with the locking blocks now the lower assembly is held in place by a pin here that has a little spring-loaded lock so I'm going to push that in and then I can pull the pin out and then we can pivot this guy there we go you can take that entirely off so there's our actual receiver now we can go ahead and take a look at the inside of the fire control system this is hammer fired so it's a closed bolt hammer fired done which is kind of cool this is actually just the pin that holds the hammer in place so we'll leave that alone we have a disconnect er right here so when this whole assembly is going forward and first off you'll note that in our locking block we have this big open hole that whoops that is there for the hammer to swing up through so when this goes all the way into battery these two surfaces at the bottom are going to hit these two disconnectors they're going to trip them forward just like that once those go forward then the hammer can fall oops except that I have it on safe there we go now it's set to fire and now hammer will go forward as long as I'm holding down the trigger this stays rearward which doesn't catch on the hammer instead the hammer is locked back only by the disconnectors so when I can't do this with two hands but what that means is then when the bolt goes into battery again it will pull these forward and the hammer will fall at that point instead of following the bolt as it goes forward now I mentioned there was a part kind of beat up in here from from this hold open lever you can see that that's the the position to actually assemble the gun and when you want it locked open let's drop it down to there and right here there is a bunch of where and that spring is a little beat up because I think someone's been trying to close the gun with this engaged or tried to pull this lever down while the guns closed and you can't do that alright well that was a lot of features to point out and here is your nicely field-stripped mg 13 so I think this is a really cool example of an inter war German light machine gun that didn't get a whole lot of usage there's a kind of a brief period in history where magazine-fed rifle caliber light machine guns were the standard and it's like late 1920s into late 1930s and that's kind of about it after that a lot of countries started going to belt-fed like machine guns and later on they would go to the old squad automatic weapons in smaller calibers but this fits into this cool cool kind of group of guns like the Seabees and Brynn's the dead key revs these guys of course the shontella row 24 29 s the NAMM booze I think that's just a really interesting group of machine guns so this is one of the scarce or of them to find if you would like to have this one yourself it is as I mentioned at the beginning it is NFA registered it is a transferable Curiel and relic gun so if you're willing to go through the NFA paperwork you can purchase it yourself and look at Rock Islands catalog page to see their their description their photos the accessories that come with it cuz there's a bunch of stuff that comes with this gun place a bid port online if you're so inclined and check out everything else they have in the sale thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 273,336

Rating: 4.9804983 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, mg13, m938, portugal, portuguese, german, interwar, weimar, dreyse, 8mm, double drum, aa sights, anti aircraft, lmg, machine gun, short recoil, accellerator, production, bipod, ww2, world war 2, light machine gun, 8mm mauser, 8x57, german mg, german machine gun, mg34, mg08, mg0815

Id: RPuxu1fG5sw

Length: 18min 10sec (1090 seconds)

Published: Thu May 02 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/BaixemImpostos]

Esse canal é muito giro.

Os revolvers são os meus favoritos.

[u/ImperadorPenedo]

Portugal fez armas?

[u/DeezersLemonade9777]

É com esta que vamos retomar Olivença?