Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I am Ian McCollum, and I'm up here today at Bear Arms in Scottsdale, Arizona, taking a look at an original Czech military vz.58 rifle. This is an example out of the owner here, out of his personal reference collection. And this is a rifle I've wanted to cover for a long time because, while there are a lot of semi-automatic vz.58 copies built from parts kits here in the United States, there aren't all that many original full-auto examples in the proper Czech military form. So we have one here now to take a look at. So the background on this begins basically in World
War Two the Czech military uses bolt-action rifles. And of course CZ is doing a lot of
manufacture for the Germans under occupation. When the war ends they want a semi-auto rifle
to replace their bolt actions, as do most countries, so they develop the vz.52 rifle
which is only used for a short period. It's chambered for a proprietary
Czech 7.62x45mm cartridge. I'll do a full video on one of the vz.52s in a little while. Suffice to say for now, this was
really a stepping stone sort of rifle. And what happened was in 1955 the Warsaw Pact
was formed as basically a ... counter-balance to NATO. It was the Soviet Union and a lot of related
states wanting to form their own military alliance, military partnership, and a part of that was
standardisation of arms, just like it was with NATO. And actually, kind of like NATO, the Warsaw Pact
standardised on the 7.62x39mm cartridge from the AK. And the Czechs would go ahead and use that. However, where basically all of the other
countries in the Warsaw Pact were given licence to start manufacturing
the Kalashnikov in various forms, ... if you look at Warsaw Pact AKs, production begins basically in the mid to late '50s
on pretty much all of them. Well at that point the Czechs
wanted to go their own way. And it's not entirely clear to me why
they were allowed to, but no one else. It could simply be that the communist government
in Czechoslovakia at the time was one of the stronger, more stable, of the Warsaw Pact client states and
they were seen as more militarily reliable perhaps. A lot of the manufacturing capacity of
some of the other states had been lost, basically taken over by the
Soviets during World War Two. Czechoslovakia still had factories and tooling and a
well-known, very well-respected, arms making tradition. At any rate, right about this time in
1955, a design team at the CZ factory, led by a fella by the name of Jiří Čermák, started
development of what would become this rifle. They started with, I believe, a design from Emmanuel
Holek , and developed it into something that is often confused for an AK, but is in
fact completely different from an AK. It has the same outside form, stock, pistol grip, front sight tower like so, rear sight
similar, the magazines look similar. However, in reality the operating
mechanism is completely different, and literally none of the parts
will interchange with an AK. The rifle was developed and was ready to be fielded in
1958, hence the name. Well, the name is Samopal vz.58. The vz. is an abbreviation for vzor, v-z-o-r, which
means model, Model 58 from the year it was adopted. Samopal basically means automatic, so an assault rifle, or submachine gun as this sort of thing
was sometimes designated during this period in time. There were a number of small changes that were made
to the design in just the first couple of years of production. Just basically little tweaks to make the
production tooling a little more efficient, to fix a few early minor flaws,
you always get that sort of thing. But what's kind of interesting about the vz.58
is after about 1961 nothing really changes. And production would continue until 1984
with nearly a million of these produced. So let's take a closer look at it and I will
show you how it is nothing like an AK. Then we'll talk about where it went. This doesn't come through on camera all that well,
but the vz.58 is a very svelte and very handy little rifle. It's a little bit narrower than an AK,
it is significantly lighter than an AK, like this is 1.5 pounds lighter than an AKM,
and 2.5 pounds lighter than a milled AK. It weighs in at 6.4 pounds or 2.9 kilos, unloaded,
despite the fact that it has a milled receiver. It's just a smaller, lighter, milled
receiver than a milled AK. The barrel is actually slightly shorter than an AK barrel. Just short enough to cause some issues with making
these into semi-auto rifles here in the United States, because this is a 15.35 inch barrel,
which comes out to 390mm, which is just under the legal length to be considered
a short-barrelled rifle here in the United States. So typically when these were made in the
US they were made with 16 inch barrels. Century, for example, built some of these
parts kits that didn't have barrels with them, they built them up using AK barrels with AK
thread patterns on them, which isn't quite correct. But you know, it's a difference of about 0.75 of an
inch, and it's something that's very difficult to spot unless you really know exactly what you're looking for. This has a kind of funky looking bayonet lug on it. It does by the way also have a
simple thread protector on the muzzle, you could take that off to attach a blank firing device. But we have a very simple sort
of a field knife style of bayonet, and it doesn't attach from the front,
it actually attaches from the back. So start the bayonet here, push in the little latch
button, which is right there, that's going to depress that locking stud. Put that there, and the bayonet slides on like so, and latches in place like that. So a little bit unusual. Push the button,
pull the bayonet backwards to take it off. We've got our factory markings
on the rear sight block here. "she" is a factory code for CZ,
you'll see that on the vz.52 pistols. Also on the vz.52 rifles, as well as the
machine guns that were made there. The crossed swords are a military acceptance or proof
mark. 63 there is the production date, so this is a 1963 gun. And then serial number. So pretty simple,
pretty easy to make sense of. We have a rear sight very much like an AK.
It has a battle sight position indicated by the U, and then goes from 100 out to 800 metres. The front sight is a post very much like an AK, with
half-height protective wings very much like an AK. Traditional wood furniture was used at the beginning of
production. But that changed fairly quickly to what is, I believe, wood impregnated Bakelite. Or as it's lovingly called
here in the United States, "beaver barf" furniture. So you'll find that on most
of the production guns, it was only a couple years in
when they made this change. Now there are three primary versions of the vz.58,
and none of them are mechanically different. What you have is the standard infantry
version, which has a fixed wood stock like this. You then have a version for airborne or mechanised
troops, which has a side-folding stock on it. You push this button up and you
can fold that guy around, like so. This, by the way, the stock attaches to the exact same, ... the receiver is exactly the same so you can interchange. All you have to do is unscrew this stock,
screw that stock on, and you can swap between the airborne and
the infantry versions. There's no other difference. And lastly, there was also a night vision version that had an optics
mounting rail attached here on the left side of the receiver to mount one of the really huge
first-generation infrared scopes and spotlights. So very much like ... what you
would see on a US M2 or M3 carbine, that sort of infrared night sight setup. And those also had a bipod
that clipped onto the bayonet lug. Which is kind of cool, but unfortunately
I don't have an example here to show you. Unlike the AKs combination of dust cover and
safety lever, the vz.58 just has a single lever here. So we've got number one for semi-auto. Vertical is safe, where if you're
right handed you're going to feel that interfering with your grip to know without
visual confirmation that you're on safe. And then fully forward has a
30 marking, and that is full-auto. The magazine is a nose in rock back style. And we have a magazine release right here.
And you'll notice there's a little cutout in the trigger guard to give your
finger some space to get in there to push the magazine release like that. There is also a manual bolt hold open right here. So if I pull the bolt back, I can then push this button up, and lock the bolt open. It will also lock open automatically
when the magazine is empty. And unlike, say, the bolt hold open AK mags, the bolt
will stay locked open when the magazine is removed. There is also even a charger guide, or
stripper clip guide, on the front of the bolt face. So you can reload the magazine
still in the rifle using stripper clips. The magazine itself is similar to an AK
because it has the same capacity, 30 rounds. It uses the same cartridge, so it
has to have the same curvature. However, this is made of aluminium, and is
substantially lighter than an AK magazine. You can see it's got this extra ridge at the back,
that is to hold a hold-open tab on the follower there. So that's the part that activates the
bolt hold-open and allows that to work. The feed lips here are reinforced. This is all aluminium,
but these are still pretty darn durable magazines. And again, not interchangeable at
all with the AK in either direction. Disassembly of the vz is easy and very well thought out. There's a single cross pin
here at the back of the receiver, you push that through, it is
captive so it will stay in the receiver. You do by the way have to dry fire
the gun first or have the striker down. And then you just pop this up a
little bit, and the rear cover comes out. Now there are two springs here, because this is the main
recoil spring and this is the striker or hammer spring. This has a totally different firing system than the AK. Once we have the rear cover off,
I can pull the bolt carrier to the back like so, and lift it out of the gun with the bolt. ... So this is the bolt carrier, this is the striker or hammer, this, right here, is the bolt itself. And this is our
locking wedge, probably, for lack of a better term. This locks exactly the same way as the
Walther P38 pistol, which is kind of cool. So the idea is that these two legs right here, lock into the receiver right here
and here, and I can even show you that. The bolt runs on these rails. When
it goes all the way forward into battery, this wedge drops down which locks it in place. When the bolt carrier ... is installed, there is a
wedge, a little tongue, right here that will pick up this like so when it starts to move backwards.
And that allows the bolt to cycle. So you can see here how that tongue is
going to sit just underneath the locking wedge, ... Sorry, when the bolt carrier goes backward
or the bolt goes forward, relatively speaking, when that happens the locking
wedge is lifted up and out of battery. Now, I keep saying hammer or striker, and
that's because the vz.58 has a little bit of a sort of unusual system that people refer to both ways. So what's going on here is we have this, which, (there we go), we have this, which is I think most
technically would be proper to call it a linear hammer. So the idea is if you have a striker, the striker is a single component that has the
firing pin at the end, and it's under spring pressure. What you actually have here is a very short
firing pin (there's the back of it) inside the bolt. And then you have this, which is a
hammer that will come in, hit the firing pin, and cause it to protrude when the rifle is fired. So the way this works is it has a
sear engagement surface right there, which is held by these two sear surfaces in the back. So this one is your main firing sear,
this one is your auto sear. You can see that there is an arm
extending from this one up to the front. When the fire selector is set to full-auto this sear will depress when the
bolt comes over the top of this. ... The purpose of that is to allow the bolt to come all the way
forward, lock into battery, and then it will automatically trip (hence the term auto-trip or auto-sear) it will automatically
trip this, to release the striker to fire another round. But it doesn't allow the ... linear hammer,
I should say, to simply follow the bolt forward, which can cause potentially
an out of battery firing or cause it to simply not have enough energy
and have a light strike and fail to fire. So obviously you can see there if you're familiar with
an AK firing system, this is a completely different type. This is our semi-auto disconnector right over here. So if you're in semi-auto mode,
that will trip and re-engage the firing sear when the bolt comes back,
so that it only fires once per trigger pull. You'll notice that there is no gas piston
assembly built onto this bolt carrier. That's because where the AK has a long-stroke
gas piston, the vz.58 has a short-stroke gas piston, very much like a Tokarev or a G43 rifle. So to take this apart we have another
simple cross pin on the upper handguard. We can pull that off and we have a gas piston right here. So there's a gas port in the barrel there. When gas
comes up there, it pushes this piston backwards, you can see it protruding back here. When it does that it will push the bolt carrier back. The piston only goes that far, but in doing so it gives
the bolt carrier enough energy to fully cycle and operate. If we want to remove this, we can
pull it forward and just pull it right out. There's a little return spring that's still sitting inside
here to ensure that this returns forward after each shot. This is a very well proven system. It's efficient and
elegant, and very easy to assemble and disassemble. So here's what the system looks like when the bolt is
in battery, and the hammer is cocked and ready to fire. When you pull the trigger the sear
drops, this is enabled to go forward, and it's pushed forward by the bottom
of these two springs, this guy right here. That goes forward, hits the firing pin, rifle fires. The whole assembly comes back, and when the
recoil spring, which is the top one right up here, when that pushes the bolt carrier forward, the hammer
comes ... forward until it hits the sear, then it stops. The bolt goes into battery and
the rifle is ready to fire again. So when I reassemble this, you can see that the bottom
spring goes into the hollow body of that hammer, and then all I have to do is striker's forward, that just pops
down, cross pin goes back in place. And the rifle is reassembled. There are a few advantages that
the vz.58 has over the Kalashnikov. One of them of course is the magazines
because they do lock open when empty, and stay open after you take the magazines out. The aluminium
construction of the magazines also makes them lighter while they are well enough designed to not be particularly
flimsy or ... fragile, even though they're aluminium. The gun itself is lighter, smaller,
more compact, handier than an AK. Not by a lot, but by a little bit and little bits do matter. Disassembly is very easy. The fact that we have this whole wide open
top of the action has a couple of advantages. It makes it very unlikely that you'll have an empty case get
stuck in the action, which can happen on a Kalashnikov. And in addition, because the bolt carrier is
a solid piece that covers the whole action, and the handle is attached directly
to it, there is no need for an open slot in the side of the receiver or the top
cover to allow the bolt handle to travel in. Which means you don't need to have
a dust cover connected to the safety, because there's no opening
that it needs to cover up. So from a reliability perspective, while having
this wide open may seem like a negative, when the gun is actually firing
and potentially allowing gunk in, I think it's more significant that when the
action is closed, there's no real opening for debris to get into the gun, and I would
consider that an advantage over the AK. And then just in general, the handling and the controls
and the mechanical characteristics of the gun I think make it a little bit more suitable to someone who's
used to a western or AR style of platform than an AK is. Production of the vz.58 lasted until 1984. Almost a
million of them were manufactured over that time period. They were used in Czechoslovakia, obviously, but they were also exported to a wide
variety of foreign nations as military aid during the Cold War. Everything from Cuba and Guatemala
to Tanzania, Ethiopia, basically all over the world. And so you will see vz.58 rifles as
sort of a legacy of Warsaw Pact diplomacy through the Cold War
showing up all over the place. There was never a light machine gun version
of this. If you tend to think of this as an AK, people will wonder what about the RPK version with like
a long heavy barrel and a bipod and a drum magazine? Well, the Czechs never did that because they had their own
distinct separate light machine gun and heavy machine guns. So they had the vz.52/57, which was
a light machine gun, vaguely Bren like. And then they also had the UK 59, which was ... belt-fed. I should say, the light machine gun was both
belt and magazine-fed, it's a very cool gun, and I have a video on it, which I will link
at the end of this one if you're interested. And then they also had the Model
of 1959 heavy machine gun in 7.62x54. There was no need to try and take the vz.58 and scale
it up into a support weapon. So that never happened. When Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic
and Slovakia, both militaries continued to use the vz.58. There are apparently some rumours that
some of these were produced in Slovakia. Those are all false as far as I can
tell, they were only ever made at CZ. There ... were experimental attempts, there was never any successful project
to convert this rifle to 5.45x39mm. A lot of the Warsaw Pact did not, a lot of
the countries stuck with the 7.62 cartridge until the end of the Cold War.
And Czechoslovakia was one of them. What was going on right at the end of the Cold War
was what was called the LADA project, which was ... a replacement for the vz.58, but it was basically a
version of the AK-74 instead of a modification of this guy. The LADA was a project begun in the late 1980s,
right about the time that production ended on these. It got off to a very rocky start, ended up
overlapping the breakup of the Soviet Union. It would turn into the CZ 2000 project in
5.56mm, but that also kind of went nowhere. Ultimately, this would be replaced
by the CZ BREN 805 not that long ago. So it's kind of interesting that this is a rifle
that from about 1961 on, this was its form. It wasn't ever really modernised in any substantial
way, which is a little bit unusual compared to some of the work that was done to various AK
patterns, AK variations, over the decades of their use. So, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. I would like to give a big thanks to Bear Arms for giving
me access to their reference collection to pull this out. A great little shop up in Scottsdale, and they do ... all of
my NFA work, among other things. So check them out. Thanks for watching. [ sub by sk cn2 ]
They were legal in Canada until May 1 :(
On subject of them not being modernized in substantial way, some of them were modernized with picatinny rails and used during earlier years of Czech Republic participation in ISAF Afghanistan by 601st Special Forces Group.
Also, about there not being light machine gun version, there was actually experimental project "Kleč" in 1979, of which 9 pieces were made, but according to article project failed due to low reliability, durability and poor spread and precision above 800 meters, possibly due to poorly adapted sights and gun simply being too slender.
Oh shit, he's dipping into his own supply, the buffer of videos is now gone.
Really beautiful gun, even with the Beaver Barf. Jealous he got his hands on the full-auto. Would love to shoot one. One of my "grail-guns-I-have-no-hope-of-ever-owning".
I’ve been looking forward to Ian covering these for a looong time. I’ve always been curious how the linear hammer that I had heard about works.
This looks like the gun the ak was told not to worry about.
Mine may only be a century vz.2008. but I love it.
I remember this gun mostly from Full Metal Jacket
Ian never done a Vz before? Even I have one. Can't wait to watch his take on it.