Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten Weapons dot com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be selling in their upcoming September of 2017 Premier auction. Today, we're going to take a look at a very, very simple submachine gun. This is a Soviet PPS-43 [Sudayev] and this particular one was actually manufactured in Moscow in 1945. It's really cool! Now, the Soviets went through a couple of different submachine gun designs during WWII [e.g "GPW"]. They started off with the Degtyaryëv PPD-40, which we actually did a video on just a couple days ago. So, if you didn't see that make sure to check that one out. the Degtyarëv/Degtyarov [Vasily Degtyaryov designed] was a good gun, but expensive. and By 1941 it had been replaced by Georgy Shpagin's PPSh-41. the PPSh was similar in concept to the PPD: he [Shpagin] used a 71 round drum magazine. It fired at a very high rate of fire. And it was a lot less expensive to manufacture--a lot faster. But it wasn't fast, and inexpensive enough. And so, in 1942 the Soviet Union started trials looking for a yet more simplified submachine gun to start production of. There were a whole bunch of entries into this competition, and the winner was Alexei Sudayev with this submachine gun. Now, Sudayev's design was in large part based on an existing design by a guy named I. Bezruchko-Vysotsky but Sudayev is the one who was largely credited with turning this into a really effective gun. It had some problems in the first--like the February of 1942 trial, but he fixed those, came back in the early summer of '42 with a gun that was almost identical to this--and that would become the PPS 42. All of these designations, by the way P P [П П ] stands for, I believe, "pistolet pulemët/pulemyot" it translates to basically "machine pistol" or "submachine gun" and then the last letter is the first initial of the designer's name. So the "sh" ["sha" Ш] was for Georgy Shpagin, and in this case, the "s" is for Sudayev, and the D in the PPD was for Degtyarëv. That's a tradition--a common element of Soviet firearms naming systems. Anyway, the PPS 42 was really pretty good. It looks... [crude] It doesn't look particularly impressive, but as a combat submachine gun it really excels, and it does that by being reliable extremely fast and easy to manufacture, and actually a lot more controllable and handy of a gun than you might expect. For one thing, the weight of this is excellent. This weighs 2.7kg, or just under 6.2-lbs. It's actually a very light gun. The [35rd] magazine is distinct. Iit's different from the PPSH-41 magazines. This cannot take a drum. In fact, one of the main limiting factors of the PPSH-41 was that drum magazine. It was not entirely reliable, and it was actually the biggest production... slowdown, or the biggest production limit, for the gun. They couldn't make the magazines fast enough, and make them reliable fast enough, to fulfill the production needs. So when Sudayev came up with this he developed a new and different box magazine for it. This is a 35 round double-stack double-feed magazine and it is a fantastic magazine. It's got a nice long magazine well here so this thing is quick and smooth and easy and locks in place, and it doesn't wobble around and it's very reliable. As with so many submachine guns, the magazine really is the fundamental core of the gun. And if the magazine doesn't work well, the gun will always have problems. The PpSh-41 is an example of that. The Sten gun is another example of that. The Sterling, on the other hand, had an excellent magazine and was a really quite excellent gun. So Sudayev definitely got off on the right foot with a really good magazine design for this gun. Now the initial production was actually done in the city of Leningrad while it was under siege (1941-44) from the Germans. This is really quite the remarkable story. In fact, it's so remarkable that apparently the Soviet Union['s leaders] kind of downplayed some of the exploits of the defenders of Leningrad because they were starting to look a little bit too heroic and too much better than some of the other Soviet folks, so ... At any rate, these were being manufactured: The initial PPS 42s-- they made about 46,500 of them, and they were punching them out in Leningrad where they would then immediately be taken to the front-lines of combat, tested out, and if there were any-- as problems developed, they were fixed, just on the ongoing production line, By the time that siege broke, the gun was really pretty well developed and it would go on to be produced in large numbers as the PPS43. Now one of the defining characteristics of this gun-- we'll take a look at this up close in just a moment --is just how simple it is to manufacture. It's virtually all made of heavy gauge metal pressings--not really stampings. They're not very complex They're more like bent metal than really truly stamped. But this was designed for industrial factories that didn't have any prior experience building firearms. You didn't need any [to build the Sudayev]. You needed pretty simple equipment. Pretty Simple workmanship, there wasn't any really skilled labor required to build PPS43 sub guns and So the Soviet Union ended up building these and the PPSh-41 simultaneously--side by side. What they decided was that while this gun was took less than half of the time and material of a [PPSh]41. it didn't necessarily make sense to interrupt the flow of completed guns by trying to retool existing PPSH-41 factories. Instead, what they did was start production of the '43 at a bunch of new factories that weren't capable of building a more complicated gun like the '41, so these guns were never quite available in as large of numbers as the '41s but the availability increased over the course of the war, and by the end of the war they really had quite a lot of these. It's really quite an excellent gun, so let's take a closer look at the the actual parts involved in this, and how it goes together and how it works. The markings on the PPS43 are all on the very top of the receiver just in front of the rear sight. On this we have a large letter C ["S"], which is actually the manufacturers code. This was a factory in Moscow the name of which eludes me, and I couldn't pronounce anyway. below that is the date 1945, and that "r"-looking letter is a cyrillic character for "g" [ge-Г] abbreviation for year ["goda"], and then below that we have a two-letter and three-digit serial number. Like everything else about this gun, the controls are quite simple: the trigger makes it fire. There is a safety here. That's engaged. That is disengaged--that makes it not fire, and your bolt handle is this flat spoon-like protrusion. That's cocked and ready to fire. There is no safety selector--there's no selector lever. This is full auto only, although It has a rate of fire of about 600 rounds per minute, which is slow enough that with a little bit of practice you can pretty easily fire single shots with it. Despite it being full auto only. That rate of fire, by the way, was one of the major improvements of this gun over the PPSh-41 and it's one of the reasons that the drums weren't entirely necessary. This is not quite half, but close to half the rate of fire of the '41 and has approximately half the magazine capacity. So you actually have about the same amount of "trigger time" per magazine with this as you did with the '41, and the lower rate of fire really does make this a bit more of a controllable gun. Despite the folding metal stock, and the kind of cheap sights, you'd think this would be a difficult gun to shoot well but it's actually a remarkably nice shooting piece. The rear sight is just a two-position notch for 100 and 200 meters really, really simple and you'll notice aside from rivets and pins ,all of these parts are just stamped metal or pressed metal. The front sight is more of the same, there's a little post threaded in there, but the rest of these pieces are either extremely simple or stamped sheet metal like those protective wings. It's a very simple sort of muzzle brake here, which is also just pressed steel. A close look at the sling attachment in the front reveals that it is in fact, just an L-Shaped piece of press metal. This whole thing is riveted and spot welded together. Even looking in here, things like the magazine release you see bent, stamped metal and spot welds. The magazine release is rather cleverly designed with a couple of big protective wings so that you don't accidentally engage it and you can easily hold the gun by the magazine well, which prevents you from putting a lot of pressure on the magazine, which could in theory potentially get it pushed out of alignment and cause malfunctions. The catch on this is this shark fin on the back. This goes in easily. It locks in place securely. That long magazine well really does its job effectively, and then, holding the gun here by the magazine well, you're not going to cause any problems, and you're not going to accidentally release the magazine. To do that grab the mag, stick your thumb in this convenient thumb- sized area, push the release in, and pull the mag out. The stock is pretty obviously a functional copy of the German MP40 stock and it actually folds over the top, instead of the bottom. So to do that you push in on this button, which allows you to fold this over the top, and then the butt plate rotates twice around and then folds over the rear sight. So, you can fire from the hip like this if you want to but it's also a very good way to make the gun a little more compact for carrying it and for transport and again notice that all of these pieces are stamped, heavy gauge sheet metal, spot-welded together. That's what made this gun so incredibly easy and quick to manufacture. In fact, I even has some statistics on the manufacturing: the PPSh-41 required 7.3 hours of machine time and 13.9 kgs. of raw material to manufacture per gun. The Sudayev--the PPS 43-- required 6.2 kgs of raw material and 2.7 hours of machine time. So between a third and a half of the the required resources for one of these as opposed to a Shpagin PPSh-41. What that meant in practical terms was for the exact same investment of time and material you could get--the Soviets were able to get--about a third of a million additional guns per year produced, and that's nothing to sneeze at. Now let's take a look at disassembly, which is quick and easy. We have a push pad [latch] at the back here. Push that in, and the gun pivots open. Once it's open like this we then have access to the bolt and the recoil spring and I can take these out by pulling the bolt slightly back and just lifting it right out of the gun. The bolt and the recoil spring separate. Notice that the entire upper receiver from here all the way to the back is one long piece of sheet metal that's wrapped around a mandrel here, punch the holes for cooling around the barrel, and that's it. The front trunnion, such as it is is... basically, this u-shaped piece of sheet metal riveted in to stabilize the bottom of this open u-shaped pressing. There's a small steel trunnion inside, which you can see right down in there and then this pin is a pin that goes through both the receiver, the trunnion, and the barrel and locks everything together in place. The trigger mechanism is very simple. When you pull the trigger this sear drops down, which allows the bolt to move forward and fire. We have one spring back here, which--which causes everything: It's the sear spring, that also acts as the spring for the take-down lever back here, and then there is a pin between this sheet metal part and then there is a pin sear itself that holds them together and causes the sear to come down. Well, that pin also extends into this safety lever right here. So, when I pull the safety back, that pin gets locked in position, and it can no longer travel down and that's what prevents the gun from firing when the safety's on. The bolt is equally simple, really. It just has a hole going through it that the recoil spring guide fits into. The bolt itself is just one large block. It has a fixed firing pin at the front, the charging handle is not a continuous piece, you can just-- you can see--there we go... you can see that little circle there: the bolt handle is added in and then fixed onto the bolt, so you turn this out of bar stock--pretty easy to do--we can do almost all of that on the lathe. In fact, here on the back you can even see this hole in the back is just a centering point for a lathe. The only reasonably complicated bit here is the extractor, which is really quite simple. It's just extractor with a plunger spring behind it. Once you have the recoil spring in place in here, this end sits up against the end of the receiver--it has a little fiber buffer pad, just to give something--if the bolt--something to impact upon. When these were being made in Leningrad This was actually a leather buffer pad, and then in a cool feature when the bolt is retracting, when it fires, that guide rod comes out of the front of the bolt here, and that spring guide rod actually doubles as the ejector. So the case is being held in the bolt face, pulled out of the chamber and then it hits the plunger right there, and that kicks it out of the gun. So a really--that's a particularly slick dual purpose part right there. Putting everything back together is no more difficult than opening up the gun, sliding the recoil spring in, dropping the bolts in and clipping the latch back. It's fully functional again. One good indicator of the quality of these things, is that the Finns decided to copy them [KP m/44--"pelti-kp"], so after capturing some of these [in the '41-'44 war] and analyzing them during the Continuation War, they decided that this was really quite a good thing here that the Soviets had going. So they made their own copy [in 9x19mm, using Suomi magazines]. They got rid of the 7.62 Tokarev cartridge, because the Finns just use 9mm Parabellum in all of their SMGs and pistols. So the finished copy actually uses Suomi M31 drums, [but] other than that the Finnish KP '44 is basically just a straight-up copy of the PPS 43. [Only used postwar by the FDF]. so... "Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery," that's a really nice thing to say when the Finns copy your submachine gun. After the war, the Soviets would use these for a number of years, but ultimately they replaced all of their [7.62x25mm] Tokarev caliber submachine guns with the [7.62x39mm] AK. The AK [Kalashnikov] was, in Soviet parlance, also a submachine gun [avtomat] and its role was the same as this this was: it was assault firepower, close range, high volume of fire ... that sort of thing. So that's why these didn't stick around in service all that long. They did see quite a bit of use in the Korean War [KPA and PLA, communist forces] and, In the 50s these would be produced by not just the Soviet Union, but also Poland and [PR] China, And then modified versions of this would be adopted as well by Hungary-- tried and didn't do very well at it--[eg the police 7.62mm 53.M SMG, which copied the stock and basic dimensions, also signts, supplanted by PPSh-41 copy 48.M] East Germany had a version of this [sic, W. Germany--experimental ERMA MP60, and Dux-53/59 some used by BGS. Wili Daugs had taken Finland's kp/44 plans with him to Spain after WWII]. North Korea had a version of this [sic, KPA used Soviet-made PPS-43s. DPRK manufactured T49 copies of PPSh-41 Shpagin]. Well, there are a couple other countries. I think [Polish wood-stocked versions appeared in 1990s Cuba]. but the most notable ones are the the Chinese and Polish versions. The Poles, by the way, had a 1953 pattern variant that actually had a wooden butt-stock instead of this folding metal butt-stock for what that's worth. Now there are a lot of parts kits for these available in the US, and there are a bunch of semi-auto versions of these being made Usually as pistols under US law, with the stocks permanently folded, And there are people who rebuild those into short barrelled rifles [SBR] in this configuration. However really, what is the coolest type to have is an original. authentic, live transferrable Soviet-made PPS43 from World War II and that's exactly what this example is. and If you'd like to have this one Take a look at the description text below. You'll find there a link to Rock Island's catalog page on this submachine gun. where you can take a look at their pictures their description their price and Value Estimates and all that good info and if you'd like to own it yourself You can place a bid on it over the phone or through their website or you can come here to Rock island and participate in the auction life, thanks for watching
They have these in 9mm, you're looking at 5-700 bucks