Smith & Wesson 76: American's Vietnam 9mm SMG

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian McCallum and I'm here today at the Moorthy auction house taking a look at some of the machine guns that they're going to be selling in their upcoming fall of 2018 firearms auction and today we have a Smith & Wesson Model 76 this is a gun that's really gotten a bad reputation from the several types of different clones made of it none of which are nearly as nice as the original actual gun however it's interesting that the Smith & Wesson 76 is itself a copy of an earlier different gun so this is based on the Swedish call spirita M 45 or as it's commonly called the Swedish K this the Swedish K was originally procured in limited numbers but it was procured by the US Navy for use in Vietnam it was actually issued out to seals and SOG guys who wanted a submachine gun that was plausibly deniable something that wasn't specifically tied to the United States the swedish k is a fantastic little submachine gun it has a very low rate of fire it was originally designed actually to use suomi coffin drum coffin mags and drums later updated into the m45 be to use the 36 round Swami stick mags and US Navy liked it they bought a bunch and then by 1966 when they went to go buy some more of them the Swedish government refused the sale because the United States was at war in Vietnam and policy their policy for the Swedes was we're not going to equip warring nations so if the Navy wanted more of these guns they had to find some other way to do it and what they did was turn to Smith & Wesson and in 1966 they submitted a formal request to Smith & Wesson to develop basically a copy of the Swedish ke the first prototype was put back out in January of 1967 and what Smith & Wesson came up with was this guy now it's not identical to the Swedish K they're visually fairly distinctive and there are some significant functional differences as well so let's go ahead and take a look at that fundamentally this is just a simple blowback submachine gun of pretty simple construction methods welded stamp to that sort of thing however there are a number of interesting features to it so let's take a quick perusal through the various features and the controls the magazine release is behind the mag and you actually pull it down towards the magazine so to do this you grab the mag pull the release down and the magazine comes out the magazine itself is basically a copy of the double stack 36 round Suomi stick magazine these are Smith & Wesson did make their own magazines but it's pretty easy to convert Suomi magazines to run in these guns now the Swedish version the Swedish embassy has the magazine well as a removable part and the original m 45s were set up to use suomi drums and coughin mags where once they adopted this double stack 36 round mag they produced a separate magazine well for that mag and that became the m45 be the Smith & Wesson is made only for those double stack 36 round stick mags and the magazine well is permanently welded onto the receiver tube so not removable the original Swedish guns were full auto only where the smith and wesson ones have a selector switch safe semi and full auto and they actually put that selector switch on both sides so it's pretty much an ambidextrous gun between the mag release and the safety these are not marked model 76 they just have a Smith & Wesson marking up on the receiver serial number is here behind the magazine well this one is a bit unusual a t @e number the commercial guns were in the U block I believe this would be a navy navy acquisition gun but I can't prove it looking up above that we have a pair of sling swivels one here or sling bars one on the front and one on the back behind the rear sight that sight is just a very simple non adjustable aperture and a matching wing protected non adjustable post on the front of the receiver you can see that that's actually one piece of stamped steel and they stamped out around the post and then bent it upwards stock is a flat metal bar here it attaches to the side of the grip because of this dogleg in it it is actually located centrally behind the receiver in order to fold it what you have to do is just lift the top end up against that spring and then and then it folds in like so it locks in place in the folded position in order to reopen it you just do the exact same thing lift it up slide it around lock it in position it does have this rubber coating on it so that it's not you know hot in the hot in the summer cold in the winter and if you know you have a somewhat sharp edge here and the rubber prevents that from ever being an issue the barrel can be very easily removed the barrel shroud is threaded on and it also serves as the nut to hold the barrel in place with this little spring-loaded locking tab that locks into the serrations on the barrel nut here so if I lift this down from your perspective there and then unscrew the barrel shroud that comes off and the barrel came right with it so there's our shroud there's our barrel at Runyon at the front end of the receiver tube that this slides into interestingly unlike most guns most submachine guns that have removable barrels like this the Smith 76 does not have any index on it so when you put it back in it will rotate freely and I have read that this causes some accuracy issues because it's not a hundred percent repeatable I don't I'm a little skeptical that there would be accuracy issues sufficient enough to cause a problem on a nine millimeter submachine gun with non adjustable sights to remove the bolt we're going to take off this rear end cap it is held in place with a cross pin here so we'll pull this out it has a pretty hefty spring in it so once you pull this pin out let this out gently there is an end cap that has the hole that the pin connects through and then there is a recoil spring guide inside here and the recoil spring itself once that's out and we can pull the bolt handle back to here pull the handle out and then slide the bolt out the back not a whole lot going on here that's just a big heavy submachine gun bolt fixed firing pin there are co notches front and back because the safety mechanism on this is the safety selector lever that you saw which locks the bolt in place there is no other particular safety to prevent the bolt say from bouncing backwards if the guns dropped the idea would be if you're planning on dropping a gun make sure you have the safety engaged first one curious thing to note however is this wear pattern which is kind of unusual like stripes well that comes from this other really neat feature here this isn't just a plain old stamped tube it's actually got stripes grooves on the inside look like they look like rifling they're not of course these are straight what these do is give a little bit of space where dirt or powder residue or other debris can sit in between the bolt and the receiver tube and not obstruct cycling of the gun this is the equivalent of like the sand cuts on the Israeli FAL rifles it just just gives a place for dirt to accumulate until such time as you can get around to cleaning it out and that's a really neat feature there you dome one fully field-stripped Smith & Wesson Model 76 ultimately the US Navy didn't end up acquiring all that many of the Smith & Wesson 76 --is for a couple reasons one thing would be ultimately though the wind-down of the Vietnam War and this wasn't continued in major procurement you know these were only only being procured for pretty limited uses in the first place and once the ar-15 carbines or m16 carbines guns like the xm177 t1 and e2 once those things became available that for a lot of the Special Forces guys was preferable to a submachine gun like this so not a whole lot of them were out there but they absolutely did see use with American forces in Vietnam now on and Wesson's part they would go ahead and continue to make these until 1974 for sale on the police and civilian market they made right about 6,000 of them in the you cereal block you 101 - I believe use 6100 but production ended in 74 the Navy kind of scaled these out of use in the late 1980s because once smith and wesson shut down production there was a lot less availability for things like spare parts and maintenance so the Smith 76 has really gotten a bad reputation over time because of the the numerous cloned versions of it both semi-auto and full auto that have become available over the past couple of decades in particular clones based on Sten gun tubes because of course there were Sten gun tubes available and there were various parts for 76s and people kludged them together into guns of various quality well the original Smith & Wesson guns are actually really high-quality and they're really good and I've been told by people that they're actually really Pleasant excellent guns to shoot I've never had the chance to do so yet but tomorrow we are gonna take this guy out to the range and try it out so I'm really curious to see if how it how it handles so stick around tomorrow's video will be this guy out at the range and of course if you would like to own a Smith & Wesson 76 this particular one is coming up for sale at more fees in their fall of 2018 auction there's a link in the description text below that will take you to Forgotten weapons comm and from there you can link over to Murphy's auction catalog this is of course a completely legal NFA registered full auto submachine gun it is not transferring as a CNR gun well these were manufactured between 67 and 74 if there was data available to show exactly which guns were made in which year as as each gun becomes fifty years old it becomes CNR eligible so by 2024 all of them will be this one almost certainly is a very early production but I don't have a serial number table to prove it so until 2024 it remains a non CNR gun anyway I'm rambling a bit I'm going to get this thing packed up and head over to the range so check back tomorrow for that thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 392,702

Rating: 4.972209 out of 5

Keywords: sw76, s&w 76, s&w, smith and wesson, smith, wesson, smg, subgun, submachine gun, swedish k, 9mm, suomi, clone, copy, vietnam, viet nam, us navy, seals, seal, sog, macvsog, special forces, special operations, studies observation, sweden, mccollum, forgotten weapons, history, development, disassebmly, blowback, open bolt, simple, gun

Id: ABsq8Orsjb0

Length: 11min 26sec (686 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 19 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/IGaveUp20MinutesAgo]

No. It’s an American variant of a rarely used smg. This makes it even rarer than the Swedish K

[u/WalterLotz]

It was mostly used by navy seal/macv sog units but i would really like if they just added a bunch of spec ops weapons like this or the hk33/uzi/stoner/cut down rpd

[u/lieutenantskull]

ye but the thing is

could we have more weapons for the north. right now there are ak, slightly different ak, slightly different ak, nugget, sks, svd, mat, ppsh, m1, izh, dp, rpd, bar and m1919 which seems like alot but its actually a joke compared to the south

3 of those are pretty recent additions as well

[u/Gen_GeorgePatton]

As far as I'm aware they were only used by Navy seals and in small numbers.

[u/ArisakaType99]

This is pretty much a special forces only gun, we only got regular Army and Marines in the game.

[u/Rob_Cartman]

Copy of a relevant comment I posted yesterday. "Ive been thinking about that (special forces class) for a while. I would like a special forces class with a high level restriction (~level 70). If you pick the special forces class you automatically get locked in to the special forces squad (like pilots). They should have access to special weapons like the Mk 22 ‘Hush puppy’, High Standard HDM, mac 10, Stoner 63, Carl Gustav m/45 (Swedish K)/SW m76, Uzi, Sten/Sterling, full auto Remington Model 1100, Riot control grenades and M203."

[u/CapitalistSam]

Yes please, US needs smg that has bigger rpm than the greasegun

[u/lptomtom]

Just noticed the typo in the original video's name, it should probably read "America's Vietnam 9mm SMG"

[u/corporalgrif]

Supposedly the ARVN used these late war, might be an interesting replacement for the thompson in late war.