Me too, and I thought a fully automatic straight blow back 7.62 X 39 was violently Chinese, if only it was during the period with all the warlords and infighting. You know, fully automatic c96 broomhandles and all that.
Don't forget the Star Wars verssion. It couldn''t hit the broad side of a Wookie to save it's life. It shoots around the target making cool lighting and neat sound effects.; Pew pew Pew!
So a Chinese conversion of a British gun, which was made in Canada, in a Russian caliber. Supplied as mutual aid to China, then used against the people who made it and captured in Korea?
@@tibbar20111987 back in the 70s you could buy parts kits to make your own Sten. You got all the parts including a "cut" tube, reciever demil. You just needed to find a new tube and do a little minor welding. Can't recall the exact price but it was cheap, maybe $24.95 or less. They also provided you with a paper pattern which you would wrap around the tube to indicate where the cuts and welds would be located.
"54 7,62" is Type 54, 7,62 caliber, the Chinese Tokarev ammo designation; 25-2 is the Factory/Depot designation which did the conversion; and 748 is the Serial number. Since these were converted by several facilities, there are variations. Straight mag-well versions still with Canadian imprints also exist, with modified straight mags.( saw one years ago in friend's collection. Conversion of 7,9 Brens to 7,62x39 was a post-Korean war job...for use by Min Bin ( peoples militia)...late 50s- 1960s. A lot of 7,9 weaponry was used in Korea, alongside Russian supplied 7,62x54R and 7,62x25 guns...7,62x39 was only adopted by China in 1956 ( Type 56) under the Soviet Technical Aid Program. Doc AV
"Master Yi Wan, how do I make PPS-43 even simpler and cheaper to make?" "Listen closely, Wai Di Mir. You take STEN..." "..." "...you rechamber it in 7.62 x 25..." "..." "...and you make it accept PPS-43 mags"
Yeah, because the 9mm evolved from the 30 Luger, which is virtually the same dimensionally as the 7.62x25. Not much new under the sun, plus there was no need for the Sovs to reinvent the wheel
@@troy9477 7.62x25 Tokarev is almost a copy of 7.63x25 Mauser C96 so 7.62x25 Tokarev and 9x19para are similar. In Russia we have a lot of PPSh-41 in 9x19para cause 9x19para is four times cheaper than 7.62 Tokarev.
@Alexander Yes. You can buy army surplus AKM (original 7.62x39 with a new semi-automatic trigger) and SKS if you have a license for rifled weapon or you can buy army surplus AKM and SKS in .366 (they have a new barrel 9.5x39 Paradox) if you have a license for smoothbore weapon.
They are both grandchildren of 7.65mm Borchardt, via 7.63mm Mauser and 7.65mm Parabellum. The length of the case varied between rounds but not it's diameter and headsize.
Actually, the bolt was slightly modified in the 7.62 conversions....the underside of the bolt was machined to ride over the wider feed lips of the PPS-43 mag. A 7.62 bolt will work in a 9mm gun, but an unmodified 9mm bolt wont function/feed in a 7.62 gun. You can see it 4:45 and 4:49 …..It's more noticeable when next to an unmodified 9mm bolt for reference
I was going to comment on a single feed design working with a double feed mag. Sterling/Patchett guns work with Sten mags, but that could be by design. The VC MAT49 conversion to 7.62 flattened out the internal rib in the rear of the mag. I wonder why the Chinese didn't go that route.
Or try to explain how any Ork shoota from Warhammer 40.000 works He would just sit there for a minute silently, staring at the gun, and then sigh and say "I have no clue how it works" Shoota falls apart from a single touch Credits roll: "Archmagos Ian, circa 999.M40"
i imagine that this was probably a quite effective submachine gun, like its Soviet cousins: 7.62x25 is a pretty remarkable little round, and with an extended barrel this probably could punch through a helmet pretty easy. almost like a proto-PDW of sorts, I love it.
I love the Royal Armouries, I live nearby and I've been visiting since I was a nipper, I had no idea they had all these cool firearms tucked away behind closed doors!
Most people think of 7.62x39, I myself was like "I mean it's probably not in 39, but given some of the shit I've seen it might just be" then I saw the mag and was relieved to see it wasn't.
Awesome for hump day morning while I'm drinking coffee before going out to the heat of tucson to save people whose air conditioners are broken thanks buddy
The barrel length being much longer on this gun is maybe because they repurposed PPS-43 barrels and didn't want to waste perfectly good barrels they already had or were already making?
Hi Ian, If I wasn’t mistaken, actually the mark of 54-7.62 on the mag catcher means that this gun uses type 54 7.62mm submachine gun(Chinese copy of soviet PPS43) magazine instead of 1954 as the year of conversion
@@9HoleReviews The hands of Mao will rise from the depths of hell to guide your shot if you purge enough rightists, Nationalists and anti-revolutionaries!
@Mr Brightside the Velocity in truth wouldn't hurt, in least getting it the 75 to the hundred yard range with some Effectiveness left. But you are correct with those sites hitting anything at 200 all you're doing is spraying and praying.
@Mr Brightside most smgs at the time could shoot that far they were made this way because there was a necessity for something that could hose bullets at people. Remember assault rifles weren't a thing for the majority of soldiers and 200 yards is pretty close most bolt action rifles are boringly accurate at that distance and machine guns were unwieldy and suited to suppression.
@@0neDoomedSpaceMarine heck, with those magazines and higher BC round, they were probably better weapons. Not that 'better SMG than the Sten Mk. II' was a particularly high bar to meet
A simple yet effective conversion, I could imagine the 7.62mm tokarev round would have given it some decent stopping power. So glad Ian has gotten round to doing this one. :)
Years ago 23 years actually a friend went back to England on holiday. While there he purchased a demilled Sten gun kit. $180.00 which was quite a sum at the time. He called a friend who helped supply the parts from an Ole shotgun news. They were able to track down parts and pieces to make the gun work after some rudimentary welding on the receiver ejector port. The end product looked exactly like the sten in the video. Lost touch with the old boy...he passed away during the hiatus. Wonder what his girl's thought when they found that sten amongst his belongings🤔
You'd probably have to side mount the iron sights so the magazine wouldn't block your sight picture and overall it would look terrifying, both of the people using it and the enemy going against it.
The barrel length can be a result of splitting a barrel of another gun in two making it this length for PPSten... PPSh41 had the 10,6 inch barrels and it was a result of taking a Mosin rifle barrel and cutting it in half.... looks like the same happened here :)
I live in Long Branch and have walked the old armory grounds where those guns were made. Who knew what happened to them? Thanks for filling in a really unique bit of Long Branch history.
I am always surprised at how few companys have made comercial conversions kits for 7.62x25. seems it would be an easy sell to offer a barrell, spring, mag drop in conversion for 1911 platforms or glocks or even highpoint. a highpoint carbine in 7.62 would be handy and fun
The Andrew Salmon series "To the Last Round" and "Scortched Earth, Black Snow" contain some interesting context to these guns. Apparently the Chinese intervention had a lot ammunition supply problems, because they had stockpiles of small arms from indigenous sources, France, the UK, US, Canada the Soviet Union and Japan. According to the book the army used by China had been about to invade Taiwan when Mao realized that the Korean War was going south and redirected them to intervene in Korea instead. The planned invasion of Taiwan was going to use surrendered Nationalist forces as their front line so that they could purge the army of politically unreliable soldiers and play on the loyalty of the Taiwanese defenders. As a result the army that entered North Korea used a particularly large amount of western foreign aid weapons in addition to Communist manufactured weapons. The Chinese supply lines were primarily done by people literally carrying the supplies on their backs through snow covered mountain passes, being covered by US Air force fighter-bombers, up until the Russian Air force intervened. The most notable tact taken to solve the ammo compatibility issues was to produce and issue large quantities of grenades. Chinese produced concussion grenades were not very effective though, so they didn't catch a break on that either.
I think you should consider doing regular gun reviews as well. You take it upon yourself to learn everything there is to know about the motivation, history, and purpose of every gun you review, and I admire and respect that. Your views on guns are very well rounded, and I think you would be able to succeed in the vastly flooded genre of gun reviews. Something to consider :)
This one of variants definately cannot been captured in Korea, for the magazine well is from type 54 smg, which is a copy of PPS-43. First manufactured in 1954s, which is the year after the end of the war. The Britishs probably did capture some origin stens but most of them are pretty damaged, so they use 7.62 version for replacing.
The weakness of the Sten was the double stack, single feed magazine. This conversion uses a much better double stack, double feed magazine. It was probably more reliable than the original 9mm Para Sten. Interesting that it apparently worked well with this magazine, without any modification to the bolt.
The 25-05 marking is most likely a part of 7.62x25 , then 05 072 is the magazine type used and barrel matching number. China stopped using imperial calendar system after 1949, so month is in front day and after year, like year/month/day. As a Chinese, according to my very limited knowledge, a lot of these converted guns were not serialized at all. That serial number looking mark is purely used to ID the caliber and the matching barrel. Thus, the marking should be understood like this: this gun uses Type 54 pistol(Chinese version of TT33) caliber 7.62x25 ammo compatible with type 50 submachine gun magazine (ppsh-41), barrel number 072 belongs to this receiver. This type of weapon were typically converted poorly by uneducated/undertrained gunsmiths, a lot of these makeshift guns were made by local law enforcement units to shoot supplied ammo. Fitting was so bad that parts between guns are sometimes not interchangeable at all, that’s why they had to mark the barrel in order to be able to find the right one. These guns were often made in small batch (1 to maybe 1000, depending on how many they had on hands) by armorers of a certain unit, then the idea is copied by a different unit, a lot of these guns are made in different shops with no standardized manufacturing process, quality control is also minimal. I have seen many types of misprint in terms of marking, like in this case, 05 probably should be 50. This type of manufacturing practice continued well into the late 1950s to offset the pressure during Korean War. Well made guns were sent to frontline troops, and everybody else had to make do with whatever they had.
I noticed that the magazine is double feed rather than the single feed of the regular magazine. Have they done any modification of the barrel to facilitate the double feed or is it possible to just stick a double feed mag in a sten and it works?
A Sten is literally just a pipe with a bolt in it, so it will probably fire anything as long as there is enough space for the cartridge to feed. There's nothing in the way.
@@Stoney3K So there is no need for something to guide the cartridges in to the chamber (feedramps etc.) eventhough the cartridges now feed offset from the barrel? Or is it that the cartridges are close enough to allow the tip of the bullet to guide them in the chamber?
@@mathiaslindgren9544 I do believe there's a feedramp inside but it's already tapered the right way for double feed magazines to work. And the top of the magazine feed lips is already pretty close to the center of the bolt face so there's not a lot of guiding you have to do.
Markings on the mag well: "54-7.62" - Chambered for Type 54 7.62mm pistol cartridge (There's no "Type 54 pistol cartridge" in China, but there's a Type 51 which actually is 7.62 Tokarev. The armourer who's responsible for the conversion might misunderstood something.) "25-05" - Code number for (provincial) military zone. 25 refers to Gansu provincial military zone which is attached to Lanzhou military zone, indicating the gun came from Gansu, a province in China. "072" - Serial number. I hope these would help :)
And by the way these conversions, like Bren / ZB-26 / Type 99 Nambu rechambered for 7.62x39 and Sten / M1 Thompson / M3 Grease Gun rechambered for 7.62 Tokarev, were done in the 1970s. As such there's no way for the Canadians to capture converted guns in the Korean War (But they could still capture a lot of the original, unmodified Sten guns and Bren guns). Gansu province had had 5,789 obsolete guns converted in the beginning of 1976.
I wonder if this conversion resolves one of the major Stengun issues: the awful magazine design. In the literature about his gun, this appears to be the pet peeve, even more than the famous weak recoil-spring leading to regular accidental discharges. In official weapons manuals it's always recommended to keep the magazines squeaky clean and to never-ever, while loading the magazine, pushing a cartridge between the feeding lips since they may bend, nor to give the magazine a slap after being loaded into the gun; all in order to avoid damage to the extremely fragile feeding lips. Fitting a new magazine well, as well as using the sturdier PPS 43 magazines, may have resolved at least one of the major Sten weaknesses.
The only thing stopping the 7.62 Tok from a revival as the great battlefield handgun cartridge bridging the gap between 5.7x28 and .357 SIG is: the lack of a good handgun to drive demand for it. Generous barrel length to convert all that boom to velocity, double stack, etc etc
@@arrowtt3364 It's unlikely. The communist does not use the this kind of numbering of years. They tend to use the common era year, so the marking of 54 means 1954, which makes more sense
This weapon could be something issued to Chinese volunteers Amy division 25 regiment05 from my understanding. It might be modified by the division machinery
I've fired a Bren converted to 7.62x54R by the expedient of running a 7.62x54R reamer into the original .303 British chamber. Accuracy was fine but the fired cases had an interesting double shoulder, almost invariably split just below the neck.
The bolt appears to be not quite 100% interchangeable. It looks like there were relief cuts in the bolt to clear the feed lips of a double stack double-feed magazine.
That stem bolt looks to have been killed out slightly to accommodate the duel feed magazine. Such the wider feed lips require more room than the single feed lips.
When the Palmach made Stens the biggest problem was brass for the ammunition. So they bought and imported Lipstick cases. Though barrels are the most complicated, maybe the 10 1/2 inch was what was set up for manufactuer?
For a STEN, that is a sexy configuration. With the longer barrel and the higher pressure SMG loads this is nice little set up. Sure, still a STEN, but an improved one.
Look at Ian's video "Gnome et Rhône R5: A Foiled Communist Arms Plan". This was about a French Sten manufacture. It also had unknown number separated by a dash.
@@StromBugSlayer Let us hope it's a reasonably intelligent person making a silly comment thoughtlessly instead of an idiot making a stupid one. If it's the later, you can expect an inbox full of idiocy lol.
I am a Chinese, China had remold multiple old weapons in 1960s-1670s; not only 7.62mm sten but also 7.62mmx43 ZB26 machine gun (can directly utilizing the magazine clips from type 56 rifle) etc. In that period, China need face huge military power from USSR and USA, and the strategy of defense is "people war." As a result, those remold weapons most be equipments of milita.
Maybe the reason for the longer barrel is they used surplus rifle barrels to make them? For whatever reason they had 30inch barrels lying around which were chopped in thirds to make Sten barrels. Maybe captured Arisaka barrels were used? Don't know if Arisakas had 30 inch barrels, but weren't the majority of them .312 caliber? Haven't checked the specs on Eastern stuff in awhile, but I feel this theory is as good as any.
my guess is they had pps43 barrel blanks which are about the same length and just used those to convert these guns. that's probably why they're about 10" long
Not documented evidence or anything but both the ppsh41 and pps43 had ~10" long barrels. The ppsh having a 10.6" barrel and the pps 9.6" so maybe that's why they decided on the longer barrel.
That version should be far more better than original Sten, with the problems with the original magazine solved in the process with proper attachment and double feed.
7.62x25 is my favorite caliber! It makes so much sense to put it an sten! I really wish we could have the designs to make then, this would be a great reproduction! Prolly really cheap too
