The job of the designer is to come up with something that can be mass produced effectively and efficiently (eg, Messrs Cz, Glock and Ruger and I was going to add Sauer – but thinking of some of their rifle designs I’ll leave them out of the list of manufacturers who have very well process engineered designs*). Supposedly the problem is fixed.īeretta also reinforced the slide, this is the Brigadier slide that Wilson Combat uses on their Berettas. The Army and Beretta independently redesigned the locking block - in Beretta’s case, several times - with a view to still making them faster than machining from billet, but accounting for the stress.
When that happened you had a risk of a very energetic blowback and case-head failure.
The gun would lose one ear, then, if the broken part didn’t lodge in something, seizing the gun, it would get some more rounds off before the surviving ear, too, sheared. In my last Army unit, we had a lot of that in high round count M9s. The Beretta problems were manufacturing problems, first with heat treating causing slide splits (this is what made the SEALs go from avid supporters to active avoiders of the M92), then, after many years, a running manufacturing change produced locking blocks prone to shearing off their locking “ears.” Who knows, why and from whom emerged this legend.Īctually, no, the Beretta problem was not initially a design problem. No any other document or data on this experimental pistol are available for the time being, and no further information is known about whereness of them.” (Haditechnika magazin, 2014/2)Īccording to Péter Pap and the only known photo of the pistol, I think the Király’s KD and Walther P38 connection is simply a legend. The Király’s KD pistol was set forth by a study-aid published in 1935.
“For executing field trial of the 9 mm pistol designated as KD and designed by Pál Király, the Ministry of Defence ordered from the Danuvia Industrial and Trading Company 20 experimental pieces of this pistol. Péter Pap, who is a researcher of the hungarian Museum of Military History, investigated that in one of his articles, the Király’s KD and the Walther P38 were developed independent from each other. Unfortunately many documents were lost during WW2 and the communist era. Unfortunately Manowar’s Hungarian Weapons & History is unreliable: it’s only a starting point, nothing else. In addition, I will check out a sheet metal prototype of the locked breech model form the very beginning of the development program. In this video I will take a look at both initial “MP” pistols (the blowback and the locked breech), then the Armee Pistole (aka the AP) in its standard configuration and also a long barreled model with a shoulder stock, then the second Model MP, and finally the HP which was the commercial model of the final P38. Several of the early developmental models used shrouded hammers. The initial prototypes look externally quite similar to the final P38, although the locking system went through several changes and the controls did as well.
Walther began development of its replacement in 1932 with two different development tracks – one was a scaled-up Model PP blowback in 9x19mm and the other was the locked-breech design that would become the P38. The Walther P38 was adopted by Germany in 1938 as a replacement for the P08 Luger – not really because the Luger was a bad pistol, but because it was an expensive pistol.