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 taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be selling in their upcoming September of 2017 Premiere auction. And today we're looking at another submachine gun, and this is a very scarce one. This is an Italian TZ-45, and this is basically the Italian version of a last-ditch wartime submachine gun design. As the name implies these were developed and manufactured in 1945, basically right at the end of World War Two. They only manufactured about 6,000 of them, this particular one is number 2,790. And it's a pretty simple design, it pretty much worked. Interestingly after the war these would actually
go into production in Burma, of all places. They would be adopted as the standard Burmese submachine gun, as the BA-52,
with a couple cosmetic changes. So the designers were able to actually
probably get more monetary, or more commercial, success with them in
Burma than they were in Italy during the war. Now the name TZ-45 is of course 1945
plus the initials of the two designers. Now pretty much all of the literature out there
says that this was Toni and Zorzoli Giandoso. However, I think, I have reason to suspect
that Giandoso was actually the name of the factory that produced these and that Toni
and Zorzoli were the first names of the designers, but they were not in fact brothers named Giandoso. I believe Toni was a Colonel in the
Italian military and Zorzoli was a ... weapons designer who was
responsible for the mechanics of the gun. At any rate, I don't have firm proof, but I
wanted to put that out there because I suspect the typical documented story is
actually not correct in this case. Now, this is a simple blowback submachine gun. There's only really one thing unique and special about it, and that is the grip safety. The TZ-45
was the first submachine gun out there to actually use a device like this as a
secondary safety. So it has a standard fire control safety up, well,
back here at the trigger group. But in order to fire the gun, or to even just manually cycle
the bolt, you have to have the grip safety depressed. So let's take a closer look at that. A few basic specifications about the TZ-45.
It's actually a relatively light submachine gun, I don't know if it really comes across on the camera, but it's
a fairly small gun. The receiver tube is small in diameter. Everything about it is just a little bit petite, and it comes
in at just about 7 pounds, just a hair over 7 pounds, that's 3.2 kilograms, so a comfortable gun to carry. Perhaps not the most comfortable to shoot
with this stock, but we'll get to that in a moment. Rate of fire was about 550 rounds per
minute, which is pretty typical, standard, neither particularly fast nor particularly slow. And the
magazines that it used were 20 and 40 round magazines, this is 9mm Parabellum, and these are
actually Beretta 38 family magazines, so. The guys making this one didn't make
any attempt to design their own magazine, That would have been a lot of extra work,
and it would have actually been counterproductive. So because they used Beretta magazines,
and obviously the same ammunition, these guns could be issued out to units
that also had Beretta submachine guns without really having any logistical issues with resupply. Now let's consider this grip safety,
the novel feature of this gun. Basically what you have here is an L-shaped lever with
a little round plunger that goes up into the receiver tube. It doesn't move very far, that's it. However when this lever
is up it locks the bolt in place, whether the bolt is closed or open. So in order to cycle the bolt for any
reason, you have to have this grip safety depressed. Now, a lot of people are going to look at that and
immediately decry it as the worst possible idea ever, because, and this is a justifiable concern, if you
have replaced the magazine, you put a magazine in, you are presumably holding
onto the gun by the pistol grip, you cannot now rack the bolt handle, because you have
to have a hand here before you can charge the bolt. So the reload procedure on this would be
grab your new magazine, insert it into the gun, then depress the grip safety with one hand while
reaching up with your firing hand to cycle the bolt. Now the justification for this is that it
absolutely is a very effective safety mechanism. If you want to prevent negligent discharges and
accidental shootings with an open bolt submachine gun, a bolt locking lever like this will absolutely
do the trick, and do it really well. However, it does it at the expense of combat efficiency. So things like ... reloading the gun as I just demonstrated, or clearing malfunctions, or simply
shooting from awkward positions, or should you actually want to
fire one-handed, all of those things can be severely compromised by a grip safety
like this. So it comes down to a judgment call: do you want the extra safety or do you
want the extra flexibility in shooting? And typically what designers have done
is come up with some sort of middle ground. Some alternative safety that's maybe
not quite as effective, but pretty close, that doesn't have the downsides
of a grip safety like this. Since we're here with the gun, let's take
a look at all of the rest of its features. The magazine release is located
here, just behind the grip safety. The end of the barrel is set up with this little two slot
compensator, not that different from the Beretta, the late Beretta 38 series actually, and then this
kind of goofy clown hat style of front sight post. There is a plate here under, or attached to,
the barrel shroud and that is actually the ... resting point for the front of the stock bars. So these are going to come to rest right
there, that keeps them from getting caught, bending on things, getting
hooked on stuff, anything like that. This would also act as a good support point for
the gun if you wanted to rest the gun on something and push into it to counteract recoil. That kind of does
the job of a modern vertical front grip in that regard. The rear sight ... that doesn't look original, but
it actually is. It is a little aperture sight located right about halfway back on the receiver tube.
That's something that the Burmese would change when they adopted this, they'd move the
rear sight to the very back of the receiver. And then on the front of the trigger group we
actually have our fire selector lever. This is full-auto, that is semi-auto, (you can hear
the disconnector working there), and then all the way up forward is
the safe position, locks the trigger. The stock is pretty simple, the butt plate is contoured
to fit right up against the pistol grip so that it can be stowed like this for a convenient carry. And then
you just depress these two little buttons and we can pull (there we go), pull the stock out.
Very much like a US M3 Grease Gun stock. In theory it latches in position here,
but this one doesn't really want to, so. Disassembly begins with this front pin here. You
actually have to take the trigger group and grip unit off perpendicular to the barrel, it doesn't
pivot on this pin. You take out the pin and then we press in a plunger at the back
to remove it. So we have a two-part pin here, push that through, and then I can pull out this side of the pin, and use that to push out this side of the split pin, so now it's loose there. And at the back this plunger is
actually the cap on the buffer spring inside. So we're going to push that in, pull that out, catch the recoil spring as it tries to fly out. This is not actually the correct spring for this gun. However, it originally had a recoil spring and then
also had this buffer spring (which is correct), in this end cap. And it actually
had a floating guide rod in between. So I suspect the guide rod and
spring got lost at some point and someone has adapted this from some other gun. But once those are out, we then have to
depress the grip safety in order to pull the bolt back. This is a non-reciprocating charging handle, and I'll
show you how it works as soon as I take the bolt out. So, there's the bolt. And then the charging handle just fell through. Once the bolt is out, the charging handle drops through
that round slot in the receiver, and comes out like so. There is one further element of disassembly
we can do and that is to remove the barrel. This actually has a threaded collar as a barrel
nut. So if I unthread this the barrel comes off. There is a key here to make sure that the barrel stays in the
proper orientation, but once this is off, the barrel comes out. There is your complete field-stripped TZ-45. So let's
take a look at a couple of the other features here. The barrel shroud here is kind of interesting, to me
at least, in that it is two stamped pieces that are then slid over from the front of the barrel and then
they are held in place by this, the front sling swivel, and the ... barrel nut in the back. So, that is just a neat way to do that. When it's in use, the charging handle
sits in this slot right on the side of the bolt, and it has a raised bar right here
that sits in this track. So the charging handle can come this far
back, at which point it hooks onto the bolt, this bar hits the end of that slot, and
then you can use it to cycle the bolt back. However the rest of the time it can slide forward. Even if the bolt is open the charging handle remains
shut, and acts as a little dust cover over the open slot in the side of the receiver there. If we look down the receiver tube you can see that safety plunger coming up into the receiver there. That is this plunger. There are two places where that lever can lock the
bolt: either here when the bolt's all the way forward, prevents it from coming back .... any distance at all. Or here when the bolt is cocked and ready to fire. This semi-circular cutout prevents the bolt from going
forward against that plunger, until the plunger is pulled down. And then this is the sear that actually
engages ... with the trigger mechanism. These did not see very much production.
Obviously they didn't see all that much use either. Apparently they were primarily
used in the northern parts of Italy fighting against partisans right at the end of the war. There are not a whole lot of them floating
around these days because, of course, there weren't many made in the first place, so. If you'd like to have this particular one, it is an original,
uncut, registered, transferrable submachine gun coming up for sale here at Rock Island. If
you take a look at the description text below, you'll find a link to their catalogue page on it,
which includes their pictures, their description, their price estimates and so on. So
if you decide that you just really want a last-ditch gun that's not German or Japanese, well, take a look and place a bid live here at the
auction or over the phone or through their website. Thanks for watching.
