Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company where we are finally taking a close look and doing a proper historical and teardown video on an m/31 Suomi submachine gun. We've looked at a bunch of other varieties of this. In fact we've looked at almost every version of this up close, except this one. And I also actually had the chance to do some shooting with a couple of these in Finland, but didn't have the opportunity at that time to do a full-on proper video. That just keeps going and going and going too. This was designed by Aimo
Johannes Lahti, and he was born in 1896, (and eventually passed
away in 1970 for what it's worth), but I think he was absolutely a gun guy at heart. And of course got into the world of arms
design and was responsible for a number of guns ... in addition to this one. Although I would
argue that this is probably his best piece of work. Now Lahti did something that would
probably sound familiar to some of us watching today which is apparently
when he got his first job as a young man, the first thing he did with his first
pay check was go out and buy an old surplus Russian Berdan
rifle and start tinkering with it. That kind of illustrates the level of
interest he had in firearms and firearms design. Well, he did his military service
in Finland in 1918 and 1919 and shortly after that he would end up enlisting,
or going to work for the Finnish Army, beyond just ... doing his conscripted service. And he
ended up as, not surprisingly, a gunsmith or armourer. Now at this point he started tinkering
around with designs for a submachine gun. And his first ones weren't all that great,
his very first version was actually in .32 ACP. Not so good, no one was really interested in that,
but he did a follow-up version in 7.65mm Parabellum, which was a cartridge that the Finns
were using in small numbers at that point, and that started to look interesting. Now the
Finnish Defence Forces weren't really into it yet, but clearly there was some promise because
Lahti ended up leaving the military and, along with three members of his regiment, ... they
formed a company. Basically a machine gun company, to allow Lahti to continued developing
this gun. Because they were confident that this would be a good product, that they
could interest both the Finnish military and also other countries for export sales of this gun. Now by late 1924 the Finnish Defence Forces
were in fact getting interested, and Lahti continued to improve the gun, tinker with it, make
modifications, make it a little better, incrementally better and better and better. And by 1926 he had a version that
he was actually able to start selling in small numbers. At the time it was just the Lahti submachine gun. It was retroactively named the m/26 to
distinguish it from the guns that would come later. The m/26 looks a lot like this with two differences: it has a safety ... rotary lever here on the side of the stock, and more distinctively, it uses this almost half circle stick magazine. And that's because of the 7.65mm cartridge which is a bottlenecked cartridge,
so you ended up with this curved mag, and it came out of here and it came
like way up almost back up to the barrel. There are very few of those around,
in fact unfortunately for the Finns, all the ones that survived in Finnish inventory in
the late 1950s were actually surplused and sold. So fortunately they weren't scrapped, they do exist in
the hands of museums and private collections today. But anyway, we're talking about the m/31. This m/26, was ... popular enough to start
bringing a little bit of money into the company, and certainly enough to motivate Lahti to
keep working and make the gun even better. And the real thing that would drive the
breakthrough here, he made a few improvements to the feeding system and the mechanism,
and he rechambered the gun for 9mm Parabellum. And by 1931 he had this, and this was
really definitely now an interesting thing. The Finnish Defence Forces were
interested, but they didn't have a factory, so they didn't have any way to really, like,
license production of this thing to make it, and Lahti's own company didn't have a
factory. It was basically just a workshop and allowing him to get the gun up and running.
There was this problem of how do we actually make a lot of these, now that
people maybe want to buy a lot of them? And this was an issue until, as such things often
work out, a personal connection solved the issue. The president of the Tikkakoski Iron and
Wood Industry Company Limited, which was obviously an industrial company in Finland,
he happened to know Lahti personally. And he thought this gun had real
potential as well, and so he and Lahti came ... to an agreement, or he and Lahti's company came
to an agreement, to get exclusive license to produce it. And ... that's where you have the origin of
Tikkakoski, or the company we now know as Tikka in Finland making guns. They started with these guys. So with Tikkakoski having the industrial capacity
to start making guns, Lahti started selling them. Not in particularly large numbers, the
Finnish Defence Forces bought a couple hundred, there was the potential for a big contract
with Bulgaria which seems to have fizzled. They like three times they tried to sell guns
to Bulgaria, and it just never worked out. But they sold some to Estonia, they ended up selling
them to a bunch of Eastern European countries, as well as some Western European countries,
Scandinavian countries. The Swedes bought them, the Danes were interested later on, they sold
licenses for these to a couple other countries. The Swiss, the Danes and the Swedes all actually
licensed production and made their own versions. You know, we actually have videos on all of those,
either already posted or coming. So if you're interested in the other versions of the Suomi, we'll have links
to at least one of those at the very end of this video. But the real breakthrough for these would
come with the beginning of the Winter War, when the Finnish Defence Forces kind of went,
"Wow, we need a whole lot more guns, and these submachine guns are
really pretty awesome." So, production would really kick up in 1941,
and by the end of World War Two, (or the end of the Continuation War for the Finns
in 1944), 56,847 of these guns had been made. So at this point let's take a look
at how this thing actually works. There are a lot of people out there apparently who
think that the Soviets copied this for the PPSh-41, and they didn't. So let me show you that. At its core what we have here is an open bolt,
simple blowback, 9mm Parabellum submachine gun. Mechanically there's not really a whole lot unique, you know, majorly unique about this gun.
However there are some interesting details, and what's particularly neat to me is how
well all of these details actually go together, and the end result is a really fantastic gun. So, first thing I want to touch on
is something that shouldn't be there. And that is this ejection port cover thing. That
is not standard to the gun, that's not a military thing. That must have been added by some prior
owner, I assume here in the US at some point. So you'll see it on there because it's on this particular
gun, but this is not a standard part of the design. Now with that out of the way, I want to
talk about, first off, the charging handle. So it sticks out the side here and a lot
of people are going to think this is kind of reminiscent of the AR-15 charging
handle. Which it sort of is, and in fact it's there for kind of the same reason that
the AR charging handle is in that location. Normally on a submachine gun you would expect to
have a bolt handle on one side or other of the receiver. That's easier to use, this is not a particularly
ergonomic design for this charging handle. However in exchange for dealing with it
kind of being annoying to use, the benefit is that you don't have an open slot on either side of
the receiver. So there's no opening for dirt to get into, or mud (or snow in the case of Finland). You don't have to deal with dust
covers to try and close off that hole. This really does simplify a lot of things
about the gun, and if you're willing to accept the ergonomics penalty here,
you get a nice payoff for it. Now I want to talk about the feeding
devices for a moment. The most appropriate magazine to use in this thing is
this one, this is a 70 or 71 round drum, depending on how full you want to load it. And these were actually not designed by
Lahti himself, these were designed by one of the engineers, or one of the partners in
his company, a guy named Koskinen ... And they were introduced in 1936, and this is
by far the best magazine developed for the gun. These are very reliable, this drum was actually
copied by the Soviets for the Papasha 41 [PPSh-41], so they did use it there, they didn't copy
the gun, but they did copy the magazine. Now initially Lahti had designed
a 25 round box magazine for these, which wasn't actually reliable
unless you downloaded it to 20 rounds. And he designed a 40 round drum
that was a little smaller than this. And one of the problems with his 40 round drum is that
you actually had to load it standing the bullets on their tips. So if you're familiar with this guy, to
load this you ... take the the back cover off, and then you set cartridges in here
and they're sitting bullets pointing up. So ... you have to be a little careful doing it because,
you know, if you slip or tilt this a little too much, the whole stack of cartridges will fall over, and
then you're screwed, and you have to start over. Well, imagine on Lahti's original 40
round drum, it was far, far worse because you are actually putting the cartridges in bullet
tip first, so they're were gonna be a lot less stable. That drum proved, in addition to being
really tricky to load, it wasn't all that reliable. And so when Koskinen came up with this drum design,
that really was a great match for this submachine gun. Now they also at that time introduced, or shortly
later ... in 1940, they introduced a quad-stack, 50 round box magazine, typically called a
coffin mag. Sorry, I don't have one here to show you. The idea, I think, was to have something
that was, well, it was cheaper to manufacture was really the big deal for the Finnish military. It was
more difficult to load, you had to use a loading tool to actually load those, but that and this drum
were the magazines that were actually used by the Finnish military in the
Winter War and the Continuation War. Those 50 round mags would be made until 1943,
these drums would continue to be issued or manufactured through the end of the Continuation War. And then in the '50s, afterwards, after the war was over, the Finns actually adopted a new style
of magazine that fixed a lot of issues. They licensed it from the Swedes, it was a magazine
for the Carl Gustav. It is a double stack, double feed 36 round box magazine. It was easy
to load in a double feed magazine, it was very reliable, it had half the capacity of one
of these, but it made up for that in a lot of other ways. Being a simple double stack box mag it
was also a lot more convenient to carry. So, you can use those magazines in these guns,
but they didn't exist during World War Two. Now when Tikkakoski started manufacturing
these they were doing so as a private company, and the Finnish government, or Finnish military, was only
one of what they hoped would be a lot of different clients. And so like you might expect of a commercial
company, they actually offered this thing with all sorts of cool extra features and options. ... You could get a vertical front grip on these,
you could get an integrated folding bipod on them, I'm sure you could get bayonet mounts on them
if you wanted. Well, the Finnish Defence Forces, ... being notoriously short of funds, as the Finnish military
often is, opted to get just the very simplest version. And that ended up being basically what
everyone else did. So only a very small number of those fancy guns were ever actually made,
and a smaller number of them exist today. What the Finns went for was, well, this configuration. It is a heavy gun, this weighs in
at 4.7 kilos, that's like 10.5 pounds. That's the first thing you notice when you pick it up. And it runs really quite fast, this has a rate of
fire of something like 900 rounds per minute. You really want that drum magazine to be able
to utilise this effectively. I can't imagine trying to actually be combat effective with a 900 round per minute
rate of fire, and those early 20 round box magazines. That just wouldn't work well. These are renowned for being quite accurate, they have a
rear notch rifle style of sight that's adjustable out to 500 metres. And a bunch of the ... famous Finnish snipers
of the Winter War, or the Continuation War, did a lot of their work with these submachine
guns, and they put them to really good use. Now let's do some disassembly.
We'll start at the front here. Lahti gave this gun a quick
detachable [barrel] and barrel shroud, I think largely because early in
his development with some of the predecessors to this gun, they had
trouble with barrels getting corroded. Which may have been an issue of humidity and corrosive ammunition, and not good cleaning practices. May have had something to do with the the
type of material they were using for the barrels. But that made it ... maybe not imperative, but
really helpful to be able to easily change the barrel. So on these, all you have to do is rotate that lug down, and then the barrel shroud rotates and comes off. It's just held on
by a set of interrupted lugs there. And ... pull it out here there we go, and the barrel
comes out. Presto, easy to swap it. Now to take out the bolt we have to unscrew
this end cap, which actually is going to require pulling this charging handle back.
That little lug there actually locks into that little slot on the bottom of the cap. The main spring is compressed here, so this is going to want
to jump out of the gun as soon as I unscrew it all the way. Hold some pressure on this, we're almost there. There it goes, and boing. And you saw
one of the problems with this gun there. You can see the recoil spring
from this one is kind of a little kinky. That's kind of normal for these Suomis, because
the guide rod is a lot shorter than the recoil spring, and it's a small diameter recoil spring. So, the solution a lot of other designers in other
countries would later come up with to this problem, (the problem namely being trying to put this into the gun, and not have it do that is tricky), what most people would end up
doing is make a spring that was the same diameter as the receiver tube,
so that it didn't have any place to go. This gun, you know, development pretty much
ended in 1931, so they didn't have a chance to do that. Now we can just drop the bolt out. And then lastly, if we take this screw out, that comes out, we can then pull the stock off of the receiver. So there's the whole thing disassembled, really pretty easy, you know, a good design from that point of view.
This was a somewhat expensive gun to manufacture. Not as bad as some, but certainly not as cheap
as, say, the stamped guns that would come later. There are a couple of things to point
out here. One is the muzzle on this. Throughout the gun's service, there had been
some complaints about muzzle climb, which I think to me is really much more
indicative of inexperienced shooters, because ... if you know how to control a submachine
gun, this thing has very little muzzle climb. But the Finnish Defence Forces took this
under consideration, and Tikkakoski did as well. And so in '42 they added about a 2 inch
long, about a 50mm long, muzzle brake onto the end of the barrel shroud. It had, I
believe, 10 holes located in three rows on the top. And the idea was it would redirect some
gas upward to help control muzzle climb. Now Aimo Lahti was kind of vocally against
this thing. He did not like it, his concern was that it would actually accumulate snow, and then
ice, and could actually cause bore obstructions. And while that doesn't appear to have happened
very much, I think he was actually probably right. At any rate, that led to there being two
different variants of the gun in Finnish service. One with just this sort of slant end to the
shroud, and one with a muzzle brake on it. I also want to point out the receiver end
cap has these five holes on the bottom and a bunch of holes on the inside, this is actually venting. The receiver tube is not a stamped tube, it's
actually a very finely machined component. And in theory the bolt is pretty closely fitted into the
receiver tube and these vent holes are actually there to make sure that you have a way for the pneumatic
pressure behind the bolt to vent out of the gun, so that you don't have compressed air building up behind
the bolt and impacting the rate of fire or the reliability. While this looks like a simple tubular receiver from the
outside, once you take the stock off you can see that it's not. It has this rectangular section on the
bottom with a fire control group that drops in. It occurs to me I never did actually mention the controls.
We have a magazine release here, really quite simple. There is a lug on the back of the drums,
on all of the magazines, that's going to slide up right there, locks the mag in place. The Soviets didn't do a very good job
of QC when they were making these, and these weren't really
interchangeable drums on the Papasha. They are interchangeable drums on the
Suomi, and they're really very high-quality drums as well. These are great magazines. The selector lever on here is this
guy, so all the way forward is full-auto, it does have a semi-auto setting in the middle, and if you push it all the way
into the trigger guard, that is safe. The only markings that we have on here are on
the rear sight. Patent 1932 there on the right side. And Suomi flanked by ... that triangle in a circle is the Tikkakoski
company logo, and of course Tikkakoski below that. And actually, I suppose, there is also a serial number.
So this is actually a really pretty early gun, 3,900. This would have been one
produced in 1941, at the latest. Not a whole lot going on mechanically on
the bolt, this is basically just a monolithic bolt. Fixed firing pin on the front with an extractor. We have a sear back here
which is where the bolt is held, and you pull the trigger to release to go forward. In an interesting bit of dual-purpose design, the
trigger does also lock the bolt in the forward position. So if you're not holding the trigger
back the bolt can't travel rearward, and that acts as an additional safety in the gun,
ensuring that if you just drop the thing on its buttstock, the bolt can't bounce backward
enough to pick up a cartridge and fire. You have to be holding the trigger
for that to happen. So, I suppose, there is the possibility if you drop
the thing hard enough to actually have enough momentum to pull the
trigger at the same time, maybe it could. But the trigger spring in this guy is
pretty stiff and I don't see that happening. Certainly there is no real documentation in the record, no documentation of complaints of
that being an issue with the Suomi. So, Aimo Lahti did a good job on the basic
fundamental design elements of this gun. These guns would remain in Finnish service
for really quite a long time. They were only surplused actually fairly recently, and in fact if
you're in the United States you may recognise these. We have a semi-auto version that came on the
market several years ago (... maybe 10 years ago now), and there were, and to some extent still are,
a lot of parts kits available. And that's because a large bulk of the surplused Finnish guns in the '90s
were actually cut into parts kits and exported into the US. So some of those were rebuilt into semi-autos. Unfortunately, to me at least, the semi-auto
version of this thing is really pretty terrible. With a 16 inch barrel on it to not
be an NFA item, and semi-auto only, and the extra springs put in to make it
semi-auto, ... it's really not a good gun. Not once you've gotten a chance to shoot a
proper, live, full-auto Suomi submachine gun. So, I really do think these are one of the standout
submachine guns of the Second World War. They may not look like it, and when
you first pick one up, boy is it heavy. But when you actually get to shooting with them, they
are just marvelously controllable and accurate guns. And I can absolutely see why the Finns were
so happy with them, and used them for so long. And I think I can see why some
other countries really enjoyed being able to use them and
manufacture them on license as well, so. Not necessarily the most popular gun
of the war, not one that we necessarily associate with World War Two, because it was really
primarily used just between the Finns and the Soviets. The Germans did acquire some of these, but kind of in that melange of, like, SS weapons where they
kind of took a little bit of everything that was available. So, primarily the Finns fighting the Soviets with these. Anyway, if you would like to see detailed
pictures, description, value estimate, this is a transferable full-auto submachine gun
registered with the NFA here in the United States, you can see a bunch more information on it
through Rock Island Auction's catalogue page. If you take a look at the description text below,
that will take you to Forgotten Weapons, my website, and you can link there to the catalogue
page on this guy if you'd like to see more. Thanks for watching.
Ian is the best. I think he is in AZ most of the time, and I live there. Would be cool to run into him.
/r/forgottenweapons
/u/forgottenweapons
He has also done videos in the past on the PPD-40 and the PPSh-41 of similar fame. Highly recommended if you're a big WW2 nerd!
That title confusion for when you're also subscribed to /r/ForgottenWeapons.
While we're on the topic, is it worth to do a parts kit build on one of these?
I have a mildly interesting story that is tangentially related to this video. I’m using a throwaway because there are no other people who could tell this story and I’d prefer my post history remain private.
So I live in Arizona and shoot the 2-gun match that Ian has been known to frequent. I usually decide what gear I'm going to bring earlier in the week and get it all staged so that on Saturday mornings I can sleep in a bit more and just grab my gear and go.
For the match this past Saturday (yesterday, as I type this) I decided to bring my semi-auto Suomi. It's not a common gun, I've never shot it at a match before or even seen one at a match before so I'll get lots of gun-hipster points for bringing it. Now imagine my surprise when I'm browsing the internet on Friday (the day before the match) and this video pops up.
As I'm watching the video I have a decision to make. Do I still bring my Suomi and risk looking like a stalkery fan-boy or do I switch out all my gear and bring something else. I hadn't shot my Suomi in years and I was really looking forward to it.
Then, near the end of the video, he talks about how terrible the semi-auto versions are and I think "Great! Now that he is on record as really disliking the semi-auto versions I can bring mine without looking creepy." Besides, the match is usually pretty big what are the odds that I get squaded with Ian anyway?
I get squaded with him.
The squad gets to the first stage and I'm pretty far down the shooting order and Ian is called up to shoot the stage. As he's shooting the first stage of the day his rifle shits the bed and hard. This is not good situation to be in. It’s a hot and humid day and there are two basic choices anyone would have in this situation: spend the day struggling to just get your rifle working and be absolutely miserable or just go home and feel like you just wasted a day.
That’s when I offered him a third option. Borrow my semi-auto Suomi and shoot the match with it. He accepted and shot a few stages with it. The semi-auto Suomi shoot pretty well (relatively speaking). As of the time I’m typing this the scores have not yet been posted but I’m fairly sure he did better with it than I did, so that’s mildly annoying.
Anyway, that’s the mildly interesting story I have that is tangentially related to this video. Hope you guys enjoyed it.
I really enjoy his videos. I like Hickock45 too, but he does tend to ramble on. "Gun Jesus" is much more informative, and very to-the-point. I never feel like skipping ahead in his videos.