South African Kommando: The "Rhuzi"

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian McCallum and today we're taking a look at a Rhodesian and South African submachine gun except it's actually semi-automatic only and this particular one was made in South Africa but these are also made simultaneously in Rhodesia so the gun was originally the idea of a guy named Alex do Potosi who was a Rhodesian and he put together one of these basically in his shed in his backyard he these have this nice plastic molded lower assembly the first one he made out of basically epoxy putty kind of cool and made the gun in the early 1970s and actually took it to Ian Smith the president of Rhodesia at the time to try and get interest from the Army in it Smith deferred him off referred him to an engineering company and he ended up working with a company called La Costa engineering and also eventually a financier by the name of Porter and so these original guns in Rhodesia were marked with the initials LDP for La Costa due Plessy and Porter the three guys the three organizations and people who are involved in their manufacture this is a pretty typical sort of organization you have one guy who designs the gun one company that makes it and one guy or company who finances it that's what happened here the guns went into production in 1975 and by 1976 they were starting to export them into South Africa however in order to legally sell this in South Africa it had to have a few changes and before we go into those changes I think it's important to point out that this is a semi-auto only gun a lot of people look at a gun like this and expect oh it's a submachine gun because it absolutely looks like a submachine gun however the gun laws in wrote both Rhodesia and South Africa at the time were not very permissive of ownership of machine guns at all so guns like this were often open bolt this one is an open bolt firing gun but there were semi-automatic only and this was produced as basically a self-defense sort of weapon aimed more at women than at men the idea is typically the the man running around a farm or family would have a full-size rifle something like an FAL and this was a much more comfortable gun for a woman to use and shoot and having a stock more or less a stock and a longer barrel and longer sights and handling like a submachine gun made them more easily shootable more accurately shootable than pistols and this whole thing carries around in this little bag so despite you know it is larger than a pistol but it's still not very big and the idea was you actually had this sling on the bag and if you wanted you could take it off the bag and clip it onto the gun and carry it that way I guess before we take it apart there are a couple of things to look at on the outside we have the stock in the folded configuration here and when it's folded it's just kind of held in place by a couple of screws here these this this pair of screws actually holds some internal parts in place as well so to deploy the stock pop it over those screws and then we can fold it out around the magazine and then there's a latch back here and that's the reason for this extra loop on the stock is that loop snaps into a latch there and that locks the gun nice and securely in place this was actually one of the changes that was made to the South African production version of the gun the model name is molded into that plastic front handguard there commando you can tell some of the other versions this is where LDP would be marked on the Rhodesian versions the later load Rhodesian version after it was no longer no longer being made by LDP they had a metal plate here that said I believe commando arms company or arms manufacturer like that there is a serial number both on the bolt and on the barrel and this one actually starts with 78 which on a lot of the South African guns like this is the date so this is a 1978 production gun we have the serial number 12 82 and then this is a South African proof mark that serial number is repeated up on the top of the receiver tube right there there is safety here on the side of the gun just rotate this pin back and forth forward as fire and back is safe the magazine release is a little bit awkward it's this latch the reason it's down here is because this uses a straight standard unmodified Guzzi magazine in fact one of the nicknames for this gun was the rewsey r hu Zi the Rhodesian newsy name a colloquial name that a lot of people gave it LDP what apparently LDP was mistaken by some people for meaning land defense pistol and by others as meaning lots of dead people actually stood for the guys the three guys names and then the only other control on there is the bolt handle as I said this fires from an open bolt so it locks open like so now let's go ahead and take it apart now there's nothing holding this rear end cap on it's just threaded in place so I can unscrew that this rear end cap also holds a metal plate right here firmly onto the receiver tube that metal plate is connected to the lower assembly so this cap not just retains the bolt and the mainspring but it also solidly locks the lower to the upper now normally you would expect this thing to go flying off when it's unscrewed but that doesn't happen because on the commando there is actually a second plug at the back of the recoil spring and it's got this little detent on it that locks the plug into the receiver tube so in order to remove the spring I have to push that down which I may need it tool for I'll go back to a universal disassembly tool here push that in there we go now I can pull out the bolt assembly and pull this back to right here and then the charging handle comes out pretty typical now that is a typical so here this to me is like the most interesting mechanical element of the commando and it's the fact that the bolt is in two pieces so when the gun is firing it's in this configuration very much like the other telescoping machine submachine gun bolts out there especially for example the Czech guns the Czech model 23 24 25 26 however this would be a relatively complicated part to manufacture if you separate it into two pieces like this you're left with two parts that are both very easy to manufacture you know the vast majority of this can be done on a lathe you know turn the inside turn the outside and then you've just got a hold of drill mill that out cut that sear notch same thing on this you know all the major elements of this can be turned on the lathe you put it together and it works exactly like a telescoping bolt especially and you've got your charging handle it holds these two pieces together here but much easier to manufacture so that's really cool because this fires from an open bolt it's able to use a fixed firing pin and then the ejector on the commando is a separate rod so there's a hole in the front of the bolt face right here and the mainspring has what appears to be a guide rod in it this is actually the ejector pin so this rod runs inside the bolt itself and when the bolt cycles backward that rod pokes out through the breech face and that's what kicks the empty cases out now we can take the front end apart by unscrewing this retaining nut so that comes off and then the barrel gets tapped back into the breech it doesn't want to we'll give it a little encouragement here with a hammer there we go we can drop the barrel out the back very simple barrel note that there's no feed ramp on the barrel and then the receiver tube slides off of the lower assembly there's basically nothing to the receiver tube here the sights are a round aperture in the back and the simple round post with a couple of protective Wings in the front those are both mounted on the receiver and then everything else of note is contained inside this lower housing first off we have this piece which is actually the feed ramp which pushes into position when you insert a magazine so that slides up that acts as a feed ramp so you don't need one on the barrel which means the barrel is easier to fabricate it also means you don't have to pay attention to what orientation the barrel is in when you install it in the gun it's completely symmetrical put it in however and that feed ramp will do the job and then being semi-automatic only you need some sort of disconnect err and that is this so when I pull the trigger this is the main sear it hooks on to this front flat section of the barrel or of the bolt pull the trigger sear drops the bolts going to go forward it's going to push this lever down that's going to depress this which we'll get to in just a moment and when this disconnect er goes all the way down there you know it's going to pop the sear back up so that the bolt will come back lock open and only fire semi-automatic now one of the problems with this gun originally is when it was the first model made in Rhodesia didn't have this extra safety catch and what they found could happen and this was this is one of those things that the South African government insisted on changing in order to make it legally saleable in South Africa if you had really underpowered ammunition it was possible for the gun to fire the bolt to cycle back far enough to pick up a cartridge because remember the sear is at the front but it's the bolt face is actually much farther back he could cycle far enough to pick up a car not far enough to catch on the sear and then come back forward and fire and it could double and triple and and and fire in bursts unintentionally if you had weak ammo so this hook catches the bolt as soon as it's gone far enough back to pick up a cartridge the front of the bolt is behind this tab and if the bolt isn't in the correct position this will catch it and stop it when you fire normally this drops that guy down once these started being sold in South Africa they actually fairly quickly came up with or they they got a request for licensed production in South Africa from a company called Maxim Parabellum and LDP worked out a deal LDP continued to make guns in Rhodesia and Maxim Parabellum started up production in South Africa and there are a number there like four or five different iterations of the Rhodesian version of the gun that's pretty much just one version of the South African one which is this the most notable differences between the two are the Rhodesian guns actually had a grip safety in them which the South African does not and the Rhodesian guns had a different style of stock basically by the last iteration they had just a kind of a sheet metal snap retainer that held the stock in the open position where the road deeper the South African version here has this stock latch that you already saw so in total LDP made about a thousand of the guns LDP was actually eventually bought out by a different Rhodesian company called arms core not the same as the arms core that's currently in South Africa in total we're looking at about 10,000 of these guns were produced and they are really one of the most common of the Rhodesian South African domestic production you can call it a carbine or a semi-auto submachine gun so as far as these go there as far as this sort of gun goes these are relatively common in fact you do even see them in the United States sort of in 1980 the company made a deal with an American guy who thought he had a market for these in the US he imported I think parts for 500 binding to make them wasn't able to make them for not sure the exact reasons but ultimately I assumed it would be it cost too much there were some a bunch of other options out there on the market and the plan fell through so there aren't really any american-made commandos but you will occasionally find a set of parts for a commando in the US that's pretty cool well anyway hopefully you guys enjoyed the video hopefully you got a new appreciation for an interesting than it ought to be I think South African / Rhodesian semi-auto submachine gun thanks for watching

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Views: 370,102

Rating: 4.9687967 out of 5

Keywords: kommando, rhuzi, carbine, 9mm, south africa, rhodesia, duplessis, ldp, semiauto, smg, submachine gun, telescoping bolt, history, design, development, disassembly, forgotten weapons, mccollum, lacoste engineering, paramax, plessis, uzi, cz

Id: s25StyxK3nk

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 05 2018