[ Semi-auto DShKM in .50 Browning ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at RIA
taking a look at a "Dushka".
This is actually a semi-auto version
of a 38/46 DShK.
A Soviet, massive, monstrous heavy machine gun.
This is basically the Soviet ... equivalent to the American Browning M2.
And like the M2 it was developed in the 1920s as primarily an anti-aircraft weapon.
When these were first conceived,
the sort of .50 calibre/.60 calibre heavy machine gun concept,
they were also intended to attack light armoured vehicles, or at the time, tanks.
But tank's armour developed rather quickly, and these guns really
quickly became ... incapable of effectively engaging a real tank.
Their mission was kind of then just modified to be well, OK, light armoured vehicles.
But really where they were most effective was in the anti-aircraft role through World War Two.
... These were used quite effectively by the Soviets for anti-aircraft use.
The American M2s you'll see often mounted all over tanks, and half-tracks, and trucks,
and that wasn't to engage guys on the ground, it was as air defence.
So, the project in the Soviet Union starts in 1925.
It is ... not until 1930 that [Vasily] Degtyarev's first prototype is completed.
He wasn't initially in the project, development went slowly,
they were having some issues, they brought in Degtyarev
because he was a quite capable machine gun designer.
He had already done the DP-27, DP-26, depending on what you call it,
that pan-fed Russian light machine gun that was very effective
and would be used through World War Two.
And when they brought him into this project
he basically just scaled that thing up to .50 calibre.
I should point out the Russians actually were willing to consider anything
from 12 to 20mm for this project.
But their first experiments were actually done using the .50 Vickers cartridge,
and so they kind of just ended up sticking with .50 cal.
They developed their own .50 calibre cartridge though
because the .50 Vickers wasn't powerful enough to do what they wanted.
And they came up with 12.7x108mm.
Which is 9mm longer than the American .50 calibre cartridge,
but operating at a slightly lower pressure.
They're effectively identical in performance.
So Degtyarev 1930 has his first gun, it's the DK, "K" for heavy machine gun, "D" for Degtyarev.
And it is actually a magazine fed gun,
it has a drum magazine mounted on top of the action.
And it wasn't really fully suitable. In particular its rate of fire was too low.
With an anti-aircraft gun you kind of want a high rate of fire
because the airplane is moving quickly,
and you want to get a high density of bullets into the area with the aircraft.
So Georgi Shpagin was brought in to work on the project as well,
and he came up with a ... belt feed mechanism for the gun.
... And at the same time they're able to speed up the rate of fire,
and it becomes a much more capable gun.
It is formally adopted in 1938,
and the first production examples are reaching troops by 1940.
By the end of the war they had made something like 8,000 of these.
So it's a beast of a gun, they made a lot of them.
And they started working on modernising it and improving it almost immediately.
This, as I said, is the 38/46, or DShKM modernised version.
They did all the developmental work for the modernisation during World War Two.
In fact, the first batch of modernised guns
was manufactured in February of 1945 before the war was even over.
It was then formally adopted in 1946 as this updated pattern.
So, they did a number of updates to it in the course of this development
which we should take a closer look at.
And we can pull this thing all apart.
There are not very many markings to show you on here, but the most important one is this one.
This was manufactured from a parts kit by Midwest Metal Creations,
and it is chambered for .50 Browning, 12.7x99, as indicated by the marking on the receiver here.
We have a couple of markings here on the safety selector lever.
That's the fire position, and that's the safe position.
The language here is Polish, this is actually a Polish parts kit.
The Dushka was manufactured under licence by a variety of Warsaw Pact nations.
Beyond that though, it's pretty much just serial numbers.
So, now let's move on to covering the elements of this that were modernised
in the 1946 modernisation program.
Starting at the muzzle we have a rather ginormous muzzle brake,
which ... doesn't look necessarily simplified.
Like, this looks like the early style of Boys anti-tank rifle brake.
However, this is significantly simplified from the early, and kind of fragile,
first pattern of muzzle device.
We have a very heavy barrel with cooling ribs in it.
And that will eventually give way to a receiver.
The barrel attachment to the receiver was changed in the modernised version.
So there is now a bolt here, and if you unscrew that bolt
you can take this locking piece out, and pull the barrel off the gun.
On the early versions it was more of a quick detach system that didn't require tools.
But I think what happened is they just didn't find themselves changing the barrel very often,
and so it made more sense to have a cheaper and more solid system.
... It's harder to take off, but that doesn't matter because you're not doing it very often.
The original DShK had a pretty distinctive, rounded, rotary feed system designed by Shpagin.
That was completely replaced on the modernised version with
a much simplified version that has this very distinctive lever.
Now if you've seen the RP-46, the belt-fed upgrade adaptation of the Degtyarev Model 27,
you'll recognise this lever, because this functions on exactly the same principle as that gun.
Namely, when the gun cycles this is the bolt handle,
or this is a nub, this is the bolt handle, but we'll get to that in a moment.
This comes back (it is the operating rod),
gets caught in this hook, and pulls this whole assembly backwards.
When the operating rod then returns forward, it pulls this with it like that.
This action is what cycles the parts inside the top cover.
So I can push this button and open this up.
So this is going to feed from the left.
This pulls a cartridge down to where it will be picked up by the bolt.
These use a ... solid belt but in segments of 10 rounds,
so there's a feed trough here to feed the empty belt out of the gun.
By the way, my understanding is in its current .50 Browning chambering
the gun still uses the original style of Dushka belts.
Now looking inside the top cover, more or less,
this is the pawl that actually pulls the belt into the gun.
So when this lever is in the forward position, this comes out of the gun.
So it comes up out of the left side of the gun.
You can see ... this whole gun is an assortment of gigantic chunks of metal doing things.
... Like the Browning is such a sophisticated, elegant design compared to this,
but these things just work.
Anyway, when this goes back (there we go), it pulls the belt in, cartridge comes with it.
And then when the operating rod goes forward again, it pushes that pawl back out.
And should you need to get further into the guts of the gun,
you can lift up the feed tray, rather like one of the German machine guns.
Now you can see the bolt here, this is our bolt handle.
In fact you can even see the locking flaps.
So this is flapper locking, just like all of the other Degtyarev designs.
When it's all the way forward it is in battery.
And when I pull it back, you can see these two locking flaps
pull out of their locking shoulders in the receiver,
and allow the bolt to cycle backwards.
This is set up as a semi-auto for closed bolt firing.
In its original form, the Dushka is an open-bolt firing gun.
So you would lock it open, pulling the trigger allows the bolt to close,
and immediately upon locking it fires.
Now you may be thinking that for such a humongous gun
with heavy parts and heavy springs and everything,
that is an awfully tiny little charging handle to try and get your hand around.
Especially if it's wet, or muddy, or cold, or all sorts of unpleasant situations.
You would be correct, because this is actually set up
so that you use an empty cartridge case as your charging handle.
This one of course is a dummy that's been converted into a bottle opener.
But this snaps in there.
It is designed for a Soviet 12.7 cartridge, the US Browning one doesn't quite fit.
But the idea is that holds securely in place on the rim of the cartridge,
and it gives you a nice long handle to use.
If you have this gun you will have some of the cartridges or the brass,
or else you don't need to be bothering to charge the gun.
And then when you're done charging it,
you don't have to have this giant charging handle sticking out the side of the gun.
So it makes the whole thing a lot cleaner,
it's really a very clever, very Soviet, sort of idea.
Just a couple of other features here. We have a set of spade grips with a trigger, right there.
We have a flip-up rear sight.
These were intended predominantly for anti-aircraft use, and for that role
they would have a big set of ring sights mounted on them, which aren't on this gun.
But for ground engagements you have just a standard notch,
and that's graduated out to 3,300 metres.
Alright, let's take this beast apart.
Step one, we have a pin here that is holding the grip assembly in place.
So this is the side that it can come out from, give it a push.
Pull that pin out.
And you already saw the grips try to come off, they drop down.
So, there's our grip assembly.
This is the semi-auto sear, which of course would not normally be on there.
Next up we have the fire control group.
This holds the sear, this has also been adapted for semi-auto.
And as a part of the conversion process, the receiver has been modified in such a way
that original full-auto parts cannot go on it.
Now the next element is to take out the internal parts,
which means I have to somehow disconnect the mainspring.
And you may be thinking there's probably some ginormous mainspring on this gun,
"I don't want to have to try and cram it back into some sort of compressed container."
And you would be right, and there is again a very clever system in place here.
The recoil spring is located inside this tube, just like the other Degtyarev designs.
And what I do is pull it out and rotate 45 degrees.
And that allows me to leave the spring in here under compression,
but remove the whole assembly from the gun for cleaning or servicing.
Let me do that one more time so you can see it up close.
There's a little locking tab, right there, that we rotate out from the barrel.
And now we can take the whole op-rod assembly off.
And, since there's no spring tension on it anymore,
(just get this out of the way),
we can pull the bolt and the op rod all, boom, out of the gun.
These dangly bits are not normally in a Dushka.
Once again, if you've seen any other Degtyarev system, be it the DP-27,
or the RPD, or perhaps a DS-39, you will immediately recognise all of these bits.
So, forward is unlocked.
When the bolt is pushed backward because it hits the barrel and stops,
the op rod keeps going forward under it.
These flaps are pushed out by this locking tab,
and they lock into recesses in the receiver, that locks the gun.
When it fires, the gas piston here gets pushed backwards,
which effectively pulls the bolt forward,
allows the flaps to retreat into the bolt, and then it can cycle.
So we can take this off.
We've got our two locking flaps.
This is the little wedge that forces them to lock and unlock.
This has also been reshaped a bit so that it ... works in semi-auto.
We have a spring-loaded firing pin.
And this element is the semi-auto striker.
So, the way that this works is ... when the action goes forward,
the bolt goes into battery and locks, but this is held by the sear in the fire control group.
And this extends back like this.
When you pull the trigger, this snaps forward, this block hits the firing pin, right here,
which protrudes out the face and fires the gun.
So that's how the semi-auto system works in that.
Just like the other Degtyarev systems, we have a gas block affixed to the barrel.
And then the gas piston here is only actually engaged for a short bit of travel,
it gets pushed right here.
Once it opens gas can vent, and it's just inertia that cycles the bolt the rest of the way rearward.
I have now reassembled the gun.
I have flipped it over upside down, and you can actually see how that whole system works.
So we've got our feed system hook here that's going to engage on the bolt handle.
I'm just going to use my hand to cycle it like that.
So the handle here came back and then forward, which dealt with feeding a round in.
And you can see that the striker is being held back.
When I pull the trigger, boing, and it fires.
Which causes it to then cycle again.
And so on and so forth until you run out of ammo.
So I wanted to show this because I think the semi-auto adaptation of it is pretty darn cool.
Soviet .50 calibre ammunition is extremely hard to come by in the United States.
... Just like there isn't much here, there isn't really anything that uses it.
There are very few live Dushka machine guns in the United States etc. etc.
So this one was barrelled in .50 Browning instead,
which makes it far more accessible to the US shooting community.
Also ... this is built from a parts kit of course.
Rebuilding it in semi-auto only means that it doesn't have the registration overhead,
as well as the fact that frankly you can't register new machine guns.
So if you want something new like this, it has to be semi-automatic only.
So, I think it's pretty cool.
It is the sort of thing that actually makes a Dushka accessible to a huge number of people,
well, to a large number of people who would be interested in having one,
where an original full-auto intact Dushka is extremely difficult to get your hands on these days.
So, there it is, I think it's pretty cool. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.