Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and today:
does the G36 melt when it gets hot? That's of course the very
hyperbolic version of the question. The more appropriate question to ask would be:
does the group size, does the precision, of the G36 suffer when the barrel gets hot? And more
specifically, does it suffer to an extent that would conflict with the basic stated
German Army requirements for the G36? Now, I want to preface this by saying
no matter what I tell you in this video I will get flak for it from some people. This
has become a very emotionally charged issue because there's a lot more going on here
than just the technical facts of the matter. And spoiler alert, I can clear
up a little bit of this right now, part of the reason for that is the Bundeswehr and
the German government have never actually done a formal scientific study to determine if there is a
problem, and if so, what that problem specifically is. So what they should have done was take hundreds,
if not thousands, of issue rifles with issue ammunition put them on a standardised range, fire a standardised
course of fire that involves something like: fire a test group when the rifle's cold, heat the
rifle up, fire another test group, see what happens. They've never done that. And I think in large
part this is because this conflict has become, poisoned perhaps is not too strong of a term,
by political and economic considerations both in government and in private industry, so. Let's start with where this actually
began. The news headline of course is if you put X rounds, some rounds through the G36 (this is often taken to mean, like,
"if you get in a gunfight with a G36"), it will get very hot and you will no longer be
able to hit people at any reasonable distance. This is, of course, a statement largely devoid
of specific facts that looks great as a headline, and kind of doesn't mean much
... without specifications to it. Now where this actually began is
kind of curious. It actually began as the result of a new German rifle training
program in ... late 2012 up in northern Germany, where one of the administering officers (and by
the way, we're talking 50,000 or 60,000 troops who went through this training program,
so we have a substantial volume of data that this was based on, although it
wasn't ... scientifically documented.) What happened was one of the officers overseeing
the training program came to the conclusion that when the rifles were all laid down
on a blanket or tarp at the range (you know, they're doing some administrative
stuff in between shooting) when the sun was out, the rifles would heat up, but only on one side,
and the point of impact would shift. Now, this is hypothetically, theoretically possible, the G36 has a polymer receiver with a
... steel trunnion and barrel embedded within it. Polymer is not a very efficient transmitter of heat,
this is part of the reason that we like to use it for things. If you heat up one side of a solid block of metal the other
side is going to heat up pretty efficiently at the same time. So if you were to lay a metal gun
out in the sun it tends to all get hot, and you wouldn't have a situation where one
side has differentially heated from the other. In theory, with polymer, that's possible. ... And in theory if one side gets hot and
the trunnion shifts because, you know, the polymer expands on one side
and doesn't expand on the other, OK, hypothetically we can
see a shift in point of impact. Now the question is are the conditions
sufficient to actually cause that to happen? ... How much does that polymer actually
expand or contract with variations in temperature? And, I don't know, and nobody really knows. Nobody's
done a scientific survey on this that I'm aware of outside of the original testing that was done on the G36
when it was adopted, which we'll get to in a moment. So that's where this story actually originated. And there ... was a substantial enough complaint that
the German military initiated a program to look into it. Now at the same time there are also complaints
coming in from German soldiers in Afghanistan that the guns aren't accurate, they can't hit anything
with the G36s, and they're not happy with them. Now in many ways,
not to disparage German troops, but these sound very similar to the complaints of US
troops in Korea saying that their .30 carbine rounds are deflected or stopped by
Chinese padded jackets in the winter. And in that case what
we're looking at is nonsense. What's actually happening is those
American troops aren't hitting the Chinese. Or perhaps they are hitting the Chinese,
but the Chinese guy's buddies drag him off the battlefield
and so a body is never found, and an American soldier who shoots someone
and sees nothing happen, or doesn't find a body, then just determines that, "Oh, well, I mean I obviously
hit him because I'm great, but it didn't hurt him." And some of the complaints coming out of the
Bundeswehr troops in Afghanistan are similar to that. You often have a situation, and again this
isn't studied, this is just a hypothetical here, but you often have a situation where you'll have
a group of mechanised troops are on a vehicle, they come under fire, they dump a bunch
of rounds as, like, an ambush response, while booking it to a
safe location on their APC. They get to a new location, they deploy, they set out a
security perimeter to figure out exactly what's going on. And their guns are still, by the way,
nice and toasty from a mag dump or two, and then, you know, something pops up
300 yards away. Everybody has optical sights, that guy, that target that pops up at 300 yards in World
War Two or Korea might not have even been visible. But now that everybody has magnified optics they see the
guy, and they take a potshot with a hot barrel under stress, they miss, but instead determine that, "Well,
it's not me missing, it's the gun's not good enough." Or in many of these cases there were complaints
that the 5.56 cartridge was insufficiently effective. Sounds very much like .30 carbine
not penetrating a winter jacket. Anyway, that is the origin of ... two separate,
similar and easily misconstrued situations are what led to the investigations and all of the hullabaloo
about the G36 losing accuracy when it gets hot. So, if we look at this from a factual
perspective, what we're going to see is that, first off, question: if you dump a bunch of ammo
through the G36 will its group size increase? The answer is yes, absolutely it will.
And it will on every rifle ever made to a certain degree. Now I have it on informal non-scientific basis from people who have done
some testing on small numbers of rifles side by side, that if you do a test of basically, shoot a group, dump some
ammo get the barrel hot, and then shoot another group, the G36's increase in group
size is actually quite good. Better than many other comparable
rifles, and far, far from the worst. So it's actually pretty good in that way. But you have a
situation that is very easily misinterpreted by people who either aren't really educated about what they're looking
at, or people who have an agenda and a bone to pick. So, just as a hypothetical let's say we have rifle A shoots a
1 inch group when it's cold, and a 3 inch group when it's hot. Rifle B goes from 2 inch to 4 inch.
Well one way you could report that is, "Rifle A when it got hot shot a 3 inch group, rifle B
shot a 4 inch group. Therefore rifle A is the better one." You could be still 100% perfectly accurate and say, "Rifle A's group size tripled when it got hot,
rifle B's group size doubled when it got hot." That makes rifle B sound like the better one. And these are issues that
you get into with media reports, and even in many cases like high-level bureaucratic
level officers, who are very far removed from the mechanics of firearms
technology, looking at these issues, so. Ultimately, the reality of the situation
is the G36 is a pretty darn good rifle. And if it wasn't, if this was a
legitimately serious problem, we would know about it from more sources
than just the Bundeswehr, just since about 2012. And frankly, this is what the
court system in Germany found. HK sued over this, there were allegations
that the G36 was inaccurate to a point that HK had misled the German government when the gun was
adopted, it never should have been adopted, and it should be replaced. And HK's response was,
"Our gun met all of the requirements." Every firearm design is a balance of compromises. ...
And in this case you're trading sustained fire capability, like how much energy, how much heat, can the
barrel absorb before its temperature changes enough that the group starts to get, you know, badly large,
versus weight when you're actually carrying the thing around. And the G36 made a ... compromise that is more
towards weight than it is towards sustained fire. And we can actually see some of this,
like a hint to point in this direction, is the fact that the light
machine gun version, the MG36, was not adopted by the German Army because
they didn't have sufficient sustained fire capability. They stuck with other machine
guns already in service, and are replacing them with other
different machine guns. But not the MG36. Because its steel trunnion in a polymer receiver, even though
it had a heavier trunnion and barrel than the rifle version, it wasn't sufficient to meet
German Army requirements. Now in the court case, the courts found
that HK was correct. The rifle is good, the rifle meets military specs. It did
when it was adopted, it still does today. So for many people ... that closes the book,
like that's the end of discussion, the G36 works. However, ... from an outsider's perspective
this clearly looks like something where there are political forces at
play that have a bone to pick with HK. And at the same time, HK has been far from their ... own
best ally in this, because the stereotype is kind of true. They're difficult to work with, they're not really all
that great at customer communication and support. We joke about that here in the US, but
especially when it comes to HK in Germany, they can be a kind of obtuse organisation to work with.
And ... their reactions to many aspects of this problem, this media furore and political furore
over several years didn't always help them. Even in cases where they were right,
like sometimes if you're right you need to be a little nicer to convince the
people on the other side that you are right. Anyway, clearly there are some people involved in
this politically and bureaucratically who don't like HK, and found this as an opportunity to pick and
choose the worst ways to look at some of the results and the data and the opinions,
and try to use them to hurt HK. So ultimately, while HK was found correct in
the legal system, there was also this push that the German Army is going to reject
the G36 and they're going to replace it. And there is a tender in
place to replace the G36. Now interestingly that tender should have
finished six months ago, the trials program. It hasn't, because none of the rifles in the trial have been
able to meet the accuracy requirements - when they get hot. Huh? It's almost like the new requirement is so
stringent that it is an impossible set of compromises. The gun must be this light, it must
be this accurate when it is this hot. Sometimes you put those combinations
together and the result is impossible. For example, the M14. The ... requirement for
what became the M14, was supposed to be a rifle that was like 8 pounds, was fully functional as a light
machine gun, and also sniper level accuracy at 800 yards. It was an impossible set of
requirements to put together. So at the moment, every foreign company has
bailed on that tender. You'd think companies like FN for example, or many smaller up-and-coming companies,
would jump at the chance to take advantage of HK getting kicked while it's down and trying
to get a German Army rifle contract. Like that would be a really impressive thing to
pull off, and here's a perfect opportunity to do it. In reality, there are only two companies
still involved in this German rifle trial. One of them is HK, HK has two of the rifles in
the trial. It's the 433 and a version of the 416. And then ... Haenel Merkel is the other company, and it's a
long story, the chances of them winning it I think are like zero. But if the requirements that have been set out, the new
requirements that someone wants to hold the G36 to, if they're actually possible, there would be
companies that would be jumping at the chance to meet those requirements.
And the fact is there aren't. Now, like I said I will get flack for this from all sides
because this is a very emotionally charged issue, and because there has been no actual formal scientific
study to try and understand what the problem really is. And so we're left with speculation, anecdotal evidence,
which oftentimes can look very, very convincing, even if it's not. Anecdotes are not scientific. And we're also left with, you know, political pushes,
people who are deliberately, on both sides, trying to obfuscate the issue. People who support the
G36 who are trying to prevent any investigation of it, even if that investigation might
actually vindicate it, because they're like they're worried that maybe something
would go wrong and then they'll look bad. And people on the other side who want to get rid of
the rifle and are pushing any opportunity to get rid of it. And yet there are some interesting
outcomes of this at the same time. So aside from that tender, you might note
that a lot of the recent rifles and guns that ... the German military has been adopting, some of the
latest patterns of the 416 and the MP7 are sand coloured. And a lot of people look at this and go, "Well, that's stupid,
like we're in the process of trying to get out of Afghanistan. Are we really going to do another desert thing? Like why do we
have desert camo as a standard now for new German rifles?" The answer is that may look
like desert camo, but it's not. That is a colour chosen to be less absorbent of
heat from sunlight when the rifle's sitting on one side. So, is that an abundance
of caution? Yeah, probably. Is it an acknowledgement
of a secret failure of the G36? I guess maybe, but probably not.
Like I said earlier on, ultimately I think it's very easy to go
deep down a rabbit hole on this issue, and you know, you get to the point
of conspiracy theory nitpicking like, "Well what about this? This little change to
the polymer, like that was probably done, and you know, and that resulted in this, which resulted in
that, and there was this colonel who did that with it, who's probably trying to cover something up." In reality, if you step back and look at
this ... question from the larger scale, there are a bunch of countries that have
adopted the G36. There are countries that have continued to purchase
the G36 after all of this came to light. You know those people are going to
do their due diligence and look at this, and they're gonna try and
find out if this is a problem. And if this were a problem, realistically
speaking, we would see it from more sources. We would have actual
good data to show it. It is very unfortunate that we haven't gotten that sort of
good data to show, either way, from from the German military. But I am very confident in saying the G36 is a perfectly
effective rifle within the criteria that it was designed for. Taken outside of that working
criteria, all bets are off. Yeah, it's gonna get hopelessly hot if you dump
enough ammo through it. So does any rifle. If you put 400 rounds through an M16
fast enough you'll blow the gas tube, and the gun will stop working.
That doesn't mean it's a bad rifle. That means you're using it in a way
that it wasn't designed to be used. So, hopefully that is of interest to people. Please don't send me death threats if I have said things
that don't match with your understanding of the issue. But I think I've done a pretty fair job of going over what did
happen, what didn't happen, and what the reality of the situation is. Thanks for watching.
I want to point out the specific incident that made this a national issue came from a firefight in 2010, where 3 paratroopers were killed. There’s videos of it on YouTube and yes, it includes mag dumps. I spoke with a German Army engineer (that is, engineer for the German army, not an engineer soldier) who speculated that the problem is basically doing mag dumps in a desert, when the gun was designed for single shots in Germany. That’s roughly what the courts decided on too.
The whole G36 controversy is a bit of a mess. The government essentially said to HK “These rifles suck, we don’t want them anymore.... Please give use new ones”.
I'm German and what baffles me about this thing is that we knew from the start that we would end up buying from HK again.
It's almost a bit of a proverb in Germany that whenever German authorities procure anything that the requirements get altered and altered until only HK is left.
So it really doesn't make any sense to me that some mysterious faction wanted to damage HK and therefore pushed the procurement of a new service rifle. Because it is and always has been very clear that this will ultimately mean a huge order for the ever cash-strapped HK.
I have a complete G36 kit on Tommybuilt, and can confirm POI shift. Whether that has to do with the barrel shifting in the trunnion, the trunnion shifting in the receiver, or the goofy sights, is for an engineer to determine.
Whether the amount of POI shift is a problem in a general issue weapon is for the German authorities to determine.
Cold bore, it is very similar in performance to my SLR-106.
The reality of combat is that round counts tend to be very high even for weapons that are not designed for high round counts. Machine guns are designed for high sustained fire the modern day assault rifle is not for the most part. Perhaps the M27 IAR is what the assault rifle will merge into.
Cool gun.
https://youtu.be/n2E2Vw--wAM