We at Small Arms Defense Journal have always tried to have a bit of reference material in each issue, something you can save for later identification. In this issue, we’re covering Heckler and Koch’s original 5.56x45mm select fire rifle—the HK33 series. It’s comprised of the HK33 rifle, the short-barrel HK33K, the semi-auto HK93, the HK33 SG1 sniper variant, the HK53 “Submachine gun,” and the various HK13 designs.

The weapon system was meant to be the roller locking answer to the 5.56mm M16 system and was successfully sold in many countries.

In 1965-66, HK produced a promotional catalog showing all of its products. At this time, the MP5 was called the HK54. In addition to the, then, unheard of HK25 belt fed .50 BMG which looked like an HK21 with a belt of .50 hanging from it, there were HK32 variants offered in 7.62x39mm and a number of 5.56mm variations: HK33, HK33K, and the HK13. The catalog lists the HK33 with a 20-round magazine, the HK33K with a 40-round magazine, and the HK13 with a 100-round magazine. We’ve never seen this offset “drum” type HK 5.56mm in the wild. Another item of note: the HK13 was a heavy barrel gun, but the original did not have a quick-change feature; the barrels of later HK13s could be changed like the HK21/23 series belt feds.

The HK magazines are of the box shape type, curved to match the taper of the 5.56mm case, and are double column, and present to the bolt from both columns. A magazine such as a Sten (not shown) is double column and feeds from a single central position—both columns must move the rounds to the center. A magazine that feeds from dual presentation, like the HK magazines and the M16 magazine, has less resistance in feeding, and the bolt must be designed to drive the cartridge to the feed ramp from both columns. It’s a successful and reliable design.

A closer look at the original and the 1994 compliant LE markings for U.S. import. 5.56x45mm is engraved along the edge.

Over the course of 40 years, myself along with William Vallerand, Herbie Woodend, Bob Faris, and others, designed an identification system that we referred to as the “Vallerand Magazine ID System.” There were about 4000 magazines for machine guns and rifles that we photographed and measured, hoping to someday put this into a forensic system. A description of the system is available on www.smallarmsreview.com. Just search the Archives section for “Vallerand” to find a link. If you have input on this, please let us know.

According to Mec-Gar USA Vice-President David Kochol, “the magazines have the high quality and attention to detail expected of Mec-Gar magazines”, with the following attributes:

• Anti-friction coating which helps reduce malfunctions
• Body manufactured from carbon steel & heat treated for strength
• Spring manufactured from Type D music wire
• Aluminum base pad with texture to aid in removing the magazine from the pistol
• Numbered witness holes for remaining-round calculation
• 10 round magazine SKU: MGCZ7510M
• 19 round magazine SKU: MGCZ7519M

MSRP: $66.25
URL: MEC-GAR

Short and sweet this month, fellow Rafficarians. I broke my thumb firing a rifle grenade at too low an angle. Not that I haven’t fired a lot of these in the past, or because I don’t know how – simply the lower I aimed, the harder to keep sling tension. Just before touching the HEAT round off, I subconsciously noted the slack condition of the sling. Nice satisfying explosion followed by a big “Ouch.” Makes typing with this cast on a total pain, so, a shorter Raffica this month. Back in force next month.

So, kids, don’t be like your old Uncle Dan and wind up being humiliated by the constant email arrival of Mpeg loops from “friends” showing how dumb you were, or the constant questioning of, “So, how’d you break your thumb? Someone kick you in the axx?” Make sure the sling is tight.

Q– While attending a recent gun show, something in a class 3 dealer’s display caught my eye. It was an unusual “tube gun” that I had never seen before. The dealer was very busy but I did get from him that it was the only sub-gun designed and fielded in Luxembourg. Can you shed any more light on this interesting little gun?

A– It is called the Sola and was manufactured by Société Luxembourgeoise d’Arms S.A. They produced two distinct models with some slight sub-variants. The two variations of the unusual and very rare Sola Super are the standard Sola Super and the very different Sola Light. Both are “tube” guns as you noted. There are many design similarities with the Belgian Vigneron submachine gun, but the Solas are indeed their own unique designs. This was in the post World War II era and many of the submachine gun designs in the 1950s were destined for economic failure mostly due to the huge piles of surplus submachine guns that could be had for about 25 cents each in quantity.

Supposedly, there were five of the Sola Supers that were brought into the United States in 1955 for trials. I have never seen a transferable, original gun, although there are some examples in museums in the U.S. The Sola Supers were sold into North Africa, particularly Morocco, and some have been seen in South America, but there aren’t any contract records. The Sola Light was only sold to the FLN in Algeria, as far as records show. The parts kits for these were brought in by LMO in the late 1980s-early 1990. We purchased them from another contractor who was working in Morocco. There were 134 of the Sola Super kits brought in and sold, and 5 of the Sola Lights. One live Sola Super was imported. Class 2 Gunsmith Stan Andrewski built several of the Sola Lights for study and evaluation and LMO built one. It is a very interesting post-war design. The guns were inherently very accurate, and with the long receiver tubes the bolt tended to “run out” on the recoil spring, which made for a very smooth shooting cycle. Examples of this concept pre-dated the Sola of course, but the same principle can be seen on modern machine guns such as the Negev and the Ultimax. (Both of which have entirely different recoil/return systems, but still take advantage of a long spring controlled recoil stroke to achieve their smooth firing.) At some point SAR will cover these unusual Luxembourg submachine guns in depth, but at this point they are generally considered a footnote to post World War II development. Soldiers serving in North Africa should note these weapons in case they see them, like any other oddity.

Q– I have seen an odd drum in a private collection. It was very old and rusty and reminded me of the Luger snail drums, but it was rifle caliber and offset to feed from the side. It had a fold out lever for charging. Any ideas?

A– Markings would help, if you could get them. It does sound a lot like the Mondragon drum. If it is, surely the collector should know that. If it is unidentified, then let’s nail it down. I was doing a study on the Mondragons at the MOD Pattern Room and gathered some ID guide photos of both the Mondragon drum and the standard box magazine.

Soon to become General, Manuel Mondragon was an amateur firearms designer in Mexico, and when he was a younger officer he tackled the self loading rifle problem. This was in the 1890s, so you can imagine he was ahead of his time. Mexico wanted to move ahead in the arms race, but they didn’t have the industrial capacity, so Mondragon’s design went to SIG in Switzerland. We’ll get into this all deeper at another time, but the General had nailed down a basic gas port take off with a piston that had copper gas rings reminiscent of the M16 gas rings on the bolt. The bolt had seven locking lugs, which again sounds spookily familiar, but in the Mondragon there were three lugs in the front of the bolt and four lugs in the rear: the idea being to make a super tight gas seal. This is all at the beginning of gas operated self loading rifle designs, and it is still quite exciting to study in a historical sense.

The Mexicans ordered 4,000 rifles from SIG, took about ten percent and canceled the rest of the order. SIG took the hit financially on the Self Loading rifle of 1908, but during the mid World War I era, they sold the remaining stocks (re-worked into 7x57mm) of about 1,000 rifles to the German Air Force as the Self Loading Rifle 15. This is the point where the 30 round drums were added. Obviously, there is much more to the story but that is for a longer article.

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Magazines are direct descendants of a charger clip – an en bloc loading device inserted into the internal magazine together with the cartridges. If the chargers were so inserted, why not make a magazine that could be exchanged the same way? Indeed, why not, must have thought James Paris Lee, an American inventor who provided such exchangeable magazines for his prototype rifles of the 1880s.

The first country that adopted his rifle was England, but before the Lee rifle replaced the Martini-Henry as a new trademark of the Thin Red Line, the English introduced so many changes into his design that finally only two original features were left: the action cocked on closing and the exchangeable magazine. Why this was a feature the British wanted for their 1888 Lee-Metford and then Lee-Enfield rifles, nobody knows. The fact is that all through the long years when .303 Lee was the British rifle, NEVER were extra magazines given to or carried by the rank and file Tommy. Each SMLE had one exchangeable magazine in place and stripper clips with extra ammo supply to top it off. Leaving that aside, the first move was made in 1888 when the first exchangeable magazine made it to the hands of the major army.

Ever since then the magazine clips, often just called clips for short, expanded rapidly and now hardly anyone imagines an infantry firearm fed otherwise. Even the cartridge belts are now encased in small containers clipped under the gun, the magazine way. Internal magazines became a proof of obsolescence – pure and simple. When in the 1980s George Kelgren tried to sell his Grendel P-10 with an internal, stripper-filled magazine, he earned many raised eyebrows in response.

Exchangeable magazines come in various shapes, sizes and designs, which can roughly be divided into three main groups: the box magazine; the drum magazine; and the pannier magazine. There are scores of individual designs, but with a little bit of good will, each magazine can be attributed to one of the three groups.

Box Magazines

Box magazines are the most internally differentiated and the most numerous group of magazines. Generally speaking, the box magazine has cartridges laid parallel to the bore (with a few exceptions, like the Czech ZB47 or the German HK G11, where cartridges were set perpendicularly, pointing downwards, or the Belgian FN P90, where bullets are set perpendicularly, pointing sideways) and in layers of different size; mostly single row or double (staggered) row. The cartridges are pressed down between the follower and the magazine lips under the tension of the follower spring. The spring tension on the follower, a small platform pressing on the cartridges, is responsible for both retention of the rounds loaded inside the magazine, as well as for exposing them at the magazine lips, where from they are stripped by the bolt and chambered. Owing to the shape of the cartridge case, sometimes more cylindrical, or conical, the magazine box can be either straight-sided or arced (the so-called banana-clip). Pistol magazines are straight boxed, no matter how conical the cases are. With traditional materials and cutting tools it was too complicated and expensive to make a grip with a curved magazine well to suit a banana-shaped pistol magazine. But now, with all these new polymers, who knows what the future may hold? In automatic weapons it is different, because several dozens of conical cases forced the designers to curve the magazine at sometimes radical angles, including half-circular shapes, like the 20-round 8x50R French magazine for the Chauchat LMG, or the 100-round horseshoe shaped experimental AKMS magazine (fortunately never issued). Even with a radical shape like this, it is nevertheless still called a box magazine.

The fundamental difference in magazine designs is the number of the cartridges in a layer. A single row magazine has one round in a layer, and the width of the box is roughly equal to the width of the cartridge. Because of their early abundance, this type of magazine is unjustly deemed the earliest type of box magazine. In fact, the Lee magazine was of the staggered or double row type. These magazines are a little wider than a single cartridge, roughly a case-and-a-half in width. Such an arrangement enables more rounds to be packed into a lower stack: the main purpose of their existence. The name “staggered row” describes the arrangement of the cartridges more precisely than the name “double row”. The simplest rendition of this scheme is a “staggered row – two-position feed” magazine with two rows of cartridges all the way up to the feed lips. It was simple to make such a magazine, but then it necessitated some kind of ramp incorporated into the gun between the lips and the chamber to center the rounds fed from the left and right intermittingly on their way to the chamber. It was not a big problem in a bolt action rifle, due to the slow velocity of the moving parts, but in an automatic firearm problems were inevitable. Thus, single row magazines abounded in early automatic guns of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Cartridges from a single row magazine are always presented on the axis of the chamber, and there are no problems with indexing the round. It was simpler to set the cartridges in a single row and was easier to get the single row magazine working in an automatic gun. Even if it fired a rimmed-cased round, the magazine was straightforward in design and manufacture, but it had one big disadvantage: to get any sizeable capacity meant having to deal with an enormously long magazine. To ease that problem, magazines were set on top of the machine gun (Madsen) or on the side of it (Johnson LMG 1941), so that the long magazine did not stand in the way of a shooter firing it from the prone position. What was good for pistols, could not be found fit for a machine gun.

In 1916, German Hugo Schmeisser found an answer to the problem. He blended both ideas into what we now call a “staggered row-single position feed” magazine. It was a simple arrangement whereby the staggered row portion of the magazine that holds the ammunition fed to the chamber via a single row. These are connected by a so-called “Schmeisser’s Cone,” forcing the two rows of cartridges into a single one. Schmeisser’s magazine was much better than the snail drums he was forced to use with his MP18.I during 1918, but they were only introduced after World War One ended. At the same time an American, Oscar V. Payne, had at last solved the problem of a “staggered row-two position feed” magazine, designing his XX (20-round) stick magazine for the Thompson submachine gun. Both systems were then at each other’s throat for years, each with avid supporters. Another breakthrough came about after World War Two. In the late 1940s, at about the same time in Czechoslovakia and Sweden, a new type of magazine appeared: the wedge-section staggered-row. This was a development of the classic Lee’s “staggered row-two position feed”, whereby the shape of the section makes both rows converge a little so that the cartridges, despite being alternatively fed from left and right, have bullets already centered for smooth chambering without a need for feed ramp. The first wedge-sectioned magazine was introduced in 1948 simultaneously in Sweden (Carl Gustaf m/45B, or Swedish K) and Czechoslovakia (9mm vz.23/25 SMG, then converted to 7.62×25 as vz.24/26).

Another attempt at enlarging the magazine capacity was taken by Carl Schildstroem of Sweden. He designed a double compartment magazine with a single-position feed, giving, in effect, a four-row (twice the staggered row) single-position feed clip for 50 rounds. These were in fact two magazines sharing one set of magazine lips with a Schmeisser’s Cone. This magazine, called the “coffin clip” by the Finnish troops, was introduced for the Suomi SMG. It was too heavy (empty weight about 2 pounds), complicated, and failure-prone to be retained for service for any prolonged length of time. It was dropped soon after the war in favor of the wedge-shaped box. An interesting attempt at reviving the scheme was taken by the Italian company SITES for their M4 Spectre submachine gun. The M4 magazine also has a double compartment feature, but a two-position feed.

An additional novelty is a magazine for the futuristically designed FN P90 submachine gun. At first sight it looks just like a common staggered row magazine made of translucent plastic, but if you look at it closer, it is obvious that it’s single position feed lips are set perpendicular to the cartridge axis. Under the tension of the follower spring each cartridge is rotated through 90 degrees before being exposed in the feed lips for the bolt to strip and chamber. Thus, a submachine gun was designed, which is but a flat box with no projections vertical or horizontal, despite being ready to shoot with a 50 round capacity.

Drum Magazines

Another stage of magazine design evolution was the drum magazine. As the name implies, it is rounded, with cartridges set parallel to the bore, in a helical path, where a spring forces them one by one to the magazine lips. They were another way to extend the capacity of the single row magazine (which variation they really are) without growing to prohibitive size. The first were just that; a single row magazine with their bottom portion rolled. This type of drum was called the snail-drum, and the most famous of these was introduced in 1917 with the Ari-Para, or the M1917 Artilleriepistole variant of a Luger with an 8-inch barrel, tangent sight and detachable shoulder stock. A year later, the same magazine was forced upon Hugo Schmeisser for his MP18.I, becoming the soft underbelly of that weapon. Some see the origin of such a magazine in a rounded belt box with a spooled belt, attached to the machine gun’s receiver.

Another 1919 Oscar V. Payne invention, the L and C (50- and 100-round) drums for the Thompson submachine gun, gave origin to the true drum magazine and no longer had the extended box part. The magazine lips of Payne’s drum were cut in the drum’s side. The clockwork spring moves the “propeller” – a star shaped cartridge container-cum-multiple arm follower, exposing consecutive rounds in the lip’s opening. This was a complicated design, but operated much smoother than the single-follower models because each of the follower arms had to deal with just five or ten cartridges, and not the whole of the drum contents. Payne’s magazine’s most recent rendition is a 75-round drum for the Soviet RPK light machine gun, which provides sort of a missing link between the snail-drum and the Payne drum. It is a multi-follower magazine with a single file attaching part, which for manufacture convenience was shaped to represent a double-position staggered-row magazine box to fit the Kalashnikov magazine catch.

The other variation of the true drum was a design by Oskar Alfred Östmann of the Tikkakoski Oy, manufacturer of the Aimo Johannes Lahti’s Suomi submachine gun. It has a single follower, propelled by a very strong clockwork spring; necessary to overcome the weight and friction of the 70-round content of the drum. It was less complicated than Payne’s drum, but much more susceptible to dirt; increasing the friction and raising the burden on the clockwork spring even further. Despite that, it was the most widely mass-produced submachine gun magazine of the world. What, you never heard of Mr. Östmann and his magazine? What about Comrade Shpagin and his Pepesha drum? Oh, that you know? Well, that’s the same drum. The only difference was that Finns were the first, made it in 9x19mm and paid the inventor royalties, while the Soviets copied it in 7.62x25mm and never paid a dime – but that is another story.

A sub-variation of drum magazines are the double-drum magazines; also called “saddle-magazines”, a German specialty. The first such design originated for the prototype Vollmer’s machine gun from the period of the Germany’s clandestine re-armament after World War One. It was then retained for the MG13 light machine gun, the aerial MG15, and then with the MG34 general purpose machine gun. Contrary to the external appearances and what many so-called authorities state, the latter two were not interchangeable, as they were differing in the height of the magazine lips portion. Such magazines has two separate drums, feeding cartridges to the common feed box with lips on the end, placed between the drums and shaped like a staggered-row two-position feed box magazine. Then the bolt strips the cartridges from the lips, chambers them and fires in an ordinary way. Most of the German saddle-drums were attached from the top (MG 15 and 34), or from the side (MG 13). But the most recent rendition of the saddle magazine, the Betamag, or C-Mag for 100-round 5.56x45mm is attached from the bottom of the gun; their feed boxes emulating the shape of the standard AR-15/M16 or HK magazines.

Another variation of the drum magazine is the spiral magazine, which is kind of a stretched drum. The cartridges are placed along the helical path, but the rows are not wrapped one around another, like in a classical drum, but one in front of the other. This gives the extended capacity, without increasing the diameter of the drum. This could of course be so only with short, pistol rounds, and that’s why it is used mainly with submachine guns. The first spiral drum was designed for the American Calico 900 submachine gun, and the most recent rendition is the Russian magazine for the Krinkov-based Bizon-2 submachine gun.

Pannier Magazines

The last of the magazine design groups are the pannier (or disc) magazines. In these magazines the cartridges are laying flat on their side, bullets to the center, parallel to the bore. These may be set in one (Soviet DP LMG, Lewis 47 round) or multiple layers (Soviet DT tank machine gun or Lewis 96 round aerial), can have their own propelling spring (DP) or be rotated by the gun (Lewis). Most of the drums utilizes the force of gravity for presenting the cartridges at the lips and is placed on top of the weapon, but for the Soviet RPK 74 a prototype 100-round pannier was proposed, feeding cartridges from the bottom, and using the standard magazine well of the AK-weapons family.