Swiss Tankbuchse 41 Semiauto Antitank Rifle

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian McCallum I currently have a backpack full of 24 millimeter Swiss tank dukes of 41 magazines because we have a tank Bewkes of 41 so I'm here at the morphe auction house today because they are going to be selling this in their upcoming fall of 2018 firearms auction these things are really scarce in the US I think there's only one other one extant in the US and this one's in great condition but the question is what the heck is a tank Buicks f41 well development to this actually started when the Swiss government bought a batch of 1939 pattern tanks from Czechoslovakia and the problem was these tanks were nominally armed with 20 millimeter cannons in the Swiss figured that's cool and all but we want a gun in our tanks that's better than the guns that everyone else hasn't their tanks so they sent a request down to the the factory at vafan fabric burn to say we want a bigger better gun and the director of the factory was one Adolf Fuhrer whose name you will recognize if you've been watching forgotten weapons because we have videos on a bunch of his other stuff and if you do recognize his name you already know how this thing works because Adolf fur never met a toggle lock he didn't like at any rate what he designed is a toggle locked action based on the Swiss LMG 25 like machine gun except this one is chambered for the 24 by a hundred and thirty nine millimeter cartridge so here's the actual breech action of this thing and is a gigantic toggle lock we have a charging handle that slides off the side here and pivots around that's cool because that gives you a bunch of leverage which you're going to need to cycle this thing manually that's a big problem when you get to a gun this big if you remember guns like the lucky in poultry 20 millimeter have things like crank handles and chains to help you get some mechanical advantage to pull the bolt back well this is a short recoil operated toggle locked gun which means in addition to pulling the toggle open you also have to pull the barrel back against its recoil spring that's hefty so fur actually had some fur was a clever designer he was no idea he may have been a little obsessed with toggle locking but what he did on this gun is design this cool system where you have a six round box magazine in here by the way and this is our dummy cartridge ouch that's 24 by 138 millimeter and the way this thing worked is when you fired the sixth round it would come back lock open and actually automatically eject the magazine and and stay locked open so that all you had to do was put a new loaded magazine in the gun you didn't have to manipulate this charging handle every time you ran a six round magazine empty that's that's good thinking at the beginning I mentioned that this was designed for use in a swiss light tank and you might have noticed that this is not a light tank well in addition to mounting it in the tanks which by the way are slightly different configuration than this in order to make them fit well they basically rotated the gun 90 degrees in the tank and the magazine came in the top but in addition to that they realized no this would make a pretty nice anti-tank gun for the infantry so they set them up with these wheeled mounts also with support bipod or tripod legs here on both sides and they transport these things around behind bicycles which is a very Swiss sort of thing to do they ended up actually also mounting these on patrol boats for Lake patrol duty and of course they use them in fortresses because Switzerland has nothing if not a lot of fortresses they they went into production they were adopted in 1941 a grand total of 3,600 or just under 36 hundred of these were manufactured by 1945 and they really were a significant part of the Swiss armament during World War two however being part of the Swiss armament during World War two they were never actually used in combat so they they were there to provide a deterrent and a defense and I suppose they did that successfully along with the rest of Switzerland's defenses there you have the actual of receiver markings right on the side vafan fabric burn this particular one is serial number 29 43 and it's numbered all over the place like you might expect there is a safety switch on it right there to actually aim and fire this it was equipped with a 2.2 power optical telescopic sight which unfortunately we don't have on this particular one so there was a bad cut there were also iron sights and if you've ever fired a Swiss k31 rifle or any of the schmidt Rubens you'll recognize that sight right away because that is basically the sight off of a seven-five swiss bolt-action rifle and the front sight there off the rifle to go with it the trigger is located right in front of the right hand grasping handle so currently we don't have a magazine in so the trigger is locked like pull that pushes the bar forward which runs a mechanical linkage and fires the gun however you wouldn't fire it from this position where it's locked into the tripod to properly set this up for use requires more than one or two guys to do it right this thing originally we had a seven-man crew and all of those guys by the way we're carrying backpacks full of magazines but this whole thing the the gun itself weighs just weighs just under 80 kilos I think it's 73 kilos which is gonna be something like 160 pounds for just the gun not counting the carriage so I'll show you what you would normally do but I can't really set this thing up by myself so let's let's get started though because we can make it look pretty cool anyway first of all you need to rotate this thing off its wheels well it can be fired from the wheeled mount we want it to be sitting on these feet not on the rolling bits so basically what I need to do is to press this lever that allows this whole wheel and leg assembly to slide out this way which then allows me to rotate it and I want to get this indicator notch to line up with one of these four numbers which indicate various Heights for this thing to sit on its tripod assembly this indicator latch of course is for the wheels now once I've rotated that around the wheels are actually quick-detach we've got these handles which you can pull up and allow the wheel to come off but that takes like two guys holding the gun and two guys pulling the wheels off and I'm one guy so that's not happening however I can give you a bit of an idea how this thing works if I depress this lever then there we go you can see how this comes out at this point the gear teeth are still engaged so it doesn't rotate and I'm not going to pull it out any further or else the whole thing will flop down because again I'm one guy and I don't have someone else holding the gun up once you get it in the right position then there we go then it goes right back into place alright but I can still show you the really cool part which is this thing is all locked in place on its transit assembly it's not supposed to move well if I want to be shooting German tanks with this thing I need it to be flexible and move it's not an artillery piece that you zero in and then fire with a lanyard so in order to do that we're gonna put on the shoulder stock we have a lever back here it allows me to oh yes now we have a free traversing gun in that cool we can take the shoulder stock and open it up right there slide it in snap that on this is a little bit muzzle heavy unless you have a magazine in it in which case it balances out just beautifully so this is going to rest over my right shoulder and then I'm looking right down the sights hand on the trigger here and six rounds semi-automatic fire I think it's got a pretty beastly muzzle brake on it and this is actually a pretty darn effective piece this fires a 225 gram projectile at between 860 and 900 meters per second that's basically a 3500 grain projectile at 2,800 22950 feet per second they had two different loadings of this they actually had a high-explosive round and they also had an armor-piercing round what they did because this was primarily supposed to be an anti-tank gun they had six round magazines of armor-piercing your high explosive ammunition that the gun crew was carrying which by the way was about 25% of the total loadout they carry like 40 rounds of aichi and 120 rounds of armour piercing the éhe stuff was actually carried in a different mag it only held five rounds and that was to help distinguish between the two so that you didn't accidentally mix them up and fire the wrong type of ammo at whatever your target was so that's a that's a lot of boom from this thing this would do this would go through thirty six millimeters of a perpendicular armor at five hundred meters that's that's pretty substantial and just take a look at the muzzle break on that sucker that's a big muzzle break so these were scrapped by the Swiss fairly shortly after World War two apparently there was an attempt to sell a bunch of them to I think Ethiopia that didn't really go anywhere and they ended up pulling them out of service they they remained in the fortress mounts longest but here in the United States they are as I said at the beginning of this video ridiculously rare and there are really cool really cool piece of legally registered NFA destructive device military history you know for the shooter this thing is a live gun a 24 millimeter is small enough that it's not outlandish to make ammunition for if you're if you're active in that sort of thing is certainly not a 75 millimeter howitzer this is the sort of thing that while big is actually suitable so if you'd like to get into that yourself and you know invite me to come shoot it with you perhaps take a look at the description text below the video you'll find a link there to Murphy's catalog page as I'm sorry you won't because YouTube doesn't allow links to any place that sells firearms so instead you'll find a link to forgotten weapons comm and from that link you will find another link where you can get to Murphy's catalog page on this that's got their pictures which includes like a whole list of of all the accoutrements that come with this there's a bunch of stuff you may have seen the muzzle cover that was on the gun at the beginning of the video and many backpacks you can equip all of your friends with the backpack full of magazines for this to help you carry the gear anyway that their price estimate their description and all that sort of good stuff now if you do decide to try and make it yours best of luck and thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 741,121

Rating: 4.9387374 out of 5

Keywords: tb41, tankbuchse, 1941, tb 41, 41, 24mm, antitank, at rifle, tank, patrol boat, carriage, cannon, semiauto, furrer, adolph furrer, swiss, switzerland, semiautomatic, wheeled, infantry, fortress, fortress mount, mg11, lmg25, mp41, bern, waffenfabrik bern, forgotten weapons, mccollum, history, development, disassebmly, huge, large, giant, nfa, destructive device, registered, tripod, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv

Id: T6FHJmBa_jQ

Length: 11min 28sec (688 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 29 2018