Steyr 1912 Disassembly

hi there thanks for tuning in to another video episode on Forgotten weapons comm I'm here and today we have a 19-12 stai romantic pistol to take a look at these were often referred to as a steyr con Mahon is German for hammer that's to distinguish them from the 1907 Roth's tyre which is a striker-fired pistol so this was the new and up-to-date design and incorporates a number of interesting features from different gun designers of the early 1900s so the first thing that makes this a particularly unique pistol is the fact that it has a blind magazine the magazine is integral to the frame of the gun there is no magazine release because can't take out in this respect it's rather similar to the early Bergman or Mauser broom-handle Mauser handguns where the magazine is not removable another interesting feature predominant feature on the star is its method of operation the star uses a rotating barrel assembly to lock you can see the barrel terms of about 45 degrees when the slide retracts there are two sets of locking lugs cut into the barrel one to make that rotation and the other to actually lock the barrel in place on the slides fully forward so as always to begin disassembly the star first going to check to ensure that it's unloaded which it is now the first step in actual disassembly is to remove this cross pin this this is the piece that holds the slide into the barrel it has a little spring-loaded lever here this is actually very similar to an early black-powder revolver where there's a cross pin holding the in that case the cylinder in place so we push that out comes out entirely and now the whole thing pretty much comes apart when we pull the slide back there we go we have the inside of the slide and the barrel so you can see here on this will be the bottom of the barrel we have one large curved lug and this dictates the rotation this square lug axes stop so that when the barrel has rotated this full amount and then push backwards this lug stops it ends its travel and then these two smaller lugs on the top of the barrel actually lock it into the slide so the slide is locked when it fires now if you've taken a part of bunch of pistols you may have noticed that something seems a little odd here namely that the recoil spring is nowhere to be seen that's one of the other interesting features of the 1912 steyr the recoil spring is housed down here inside the frame of the gun and what activates it or what impinges on it is actually this cross pin so if you look at the the spring down here when I push on the cross pin that moves the recoil spring so this allows me to take off slide and not have and still have a captive request spring now they're interesting and unusual element to the Steyr The Grapes take this cross pin out of the bottom and we'll show you how the grips come in place these are actually dovetail directly into the frame of the gun so I'm not a huge mechanical thing but interesting not many other pistols use the mechanism like that for the grips so we're most browning based pistols have a pin retaining the barrel to the frame and then a front barrel bushing the Steyr simply has these two recesses four lugs and a circular support at the front for the barrel so the barrel sits in like this and that is its range of travel so you can see this lug rights in this open area and when the barrel is fully forward or fully back this lug stops it and then this channel engages with this lug can controls the rotation so this is ready to fire and then upon firing the barrel and slide traveled this distance backwards together and then the rear lug stops the barrel and the slide continues backward on its under inertia these two lugs at the top are locked into the slide so as it first moves those slowly rotate to unlock and right at the same time that the barrel stops traveling the locking lugs are completely disengaged allowing the slide to move freely one interesting aspect here again another one the slide release here on the left side of the receiver not only engages the slide stop but if you look right here what X as basically a left-side feed lip on the magazine is pulled down and retracted when you engage the slide stop that as we'll show you in just a minute is how the magazine release works let's go ahead and reassemble the starter and take a look at a few of the elements of its operation start with our grip panels threaded pin at the bottom that holds these in place it takes a little bit of finesse until you get used to it to reassemble the piece the front of the slide has two lugs here that travel in this channel and we want to drop them in right here where they can engage into the frame same thing with the rear there are two lugs at the back of the slide and these travel in a similar channel on the side of the gun put the slide in right there and the first bit of travel you have to manually pull the hammer down a little bit so it doesn't press on the slide now get you forward to this point this is where the magazine catch engages we want to depress the magazine catch that allows us to pull the slide the rest of the way forward now the last element is to replace this cross pin which will engage the recoil spring slide that in there we go so I mentioned that there is an issue when you when you have a blind magazine that only loads to the top what do you do if you want to unload it of course you have the option of manually ejecting and manually chambering and injecting every cartridge individually well that's not particularly safe and it's kind of clumsy so what the designers did with the Steyr is you open up the slide and lock the slide open using the safety catch this is very similar to a Browning and then when you engage the slide stop what it does is release the the one little feed lip that's holding the rounds in place and they all eject that's a quick and easy way to empty a magazine so the Steiner 19:12 was developed in the austro-hungarian Empire right at the the end of the Golden Age of early automatic pistols obviously second decade of 1900s a lot of the interesting designs had already been made people were starting to focus down on what made a real effective semi-auto pistol so some of the neat obscured different ideas that may not have worked so well but are novel to us now we're starting to disappear this gun was a commercial success there were about 250 thousand of them mate between 1911 and 1918 they were adopted by the austro-hungarian Empire also by Romania and Chile as well as commercial sales in addition the German army ordered or adopted a small quantity of these two 9-millimeter Luger occasionally see those for sale until the date one was manufactured they're marked steyr and the date this is a 1918 example and then you'll find they all have a four digit serial number followed by a letter that started out as zero zero zero one through nine nine nine nine when they hit that point and go back to one and put in a prefix a letter prefix a this happens to be a very late example 7,000 X so this was one of the last Stiers manufactured caliber of the 1912 was nine-millimeter steyr this is a 23 millimeter long cartridge a little bit less potent a little bit less muzzle velocity than a 9 millimeter Luger but still a fairly powerful handgun cartridge for its day this wasn't a slouch the lock-up on the 1912 is a very strong mechanism that allowed them to do this and it also allowed the 9 millimeter Luger conversions later on so we will be taking this out to the range do some shooting with it initial impressions as with share these with most people who handled 1912 the grip angle is a little different than we're used to if you hold a regular grip on it you'll find yourself aiming way low so take a little bit of getting used to that but for a right-hander which is of course the majority of military shooters the safety and the slide release are in a nice convenient position the trigger is not too shabby overall these were a well thought out military gun a lot of them were used in the First World War and they were able to survive the poor conditions of trench warfare so never there says a lot about them at any rate we'll see what we think when we get one of these out to the range so stay tuned thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 95,490

Keywords: Steyr, Steyr-Hahn, Steyr 1912, disassembly, Forgotten Weapons

Id: nUILA4SoVvc

Length: 11min 42sec (702 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 14 2011