Wieger 942: East Germany Makes a 5.56mm AK
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- Опубликовано: 5 окт 2024
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East Germany purchased a license for production of the AK-74 in 1981, but that license was for domestic use only. There was an apparent market for export production AKs in the western 5.56mm cartridge, and so the East Germans developed their own new rifle to fill that demand and bring in some much-desired hard currency. That new project would be designated the 940 series of rifles, with fixed-stock 941, folding stock 942 (the subject of this video), compact carbine 943, squad automatic 944, and designated marksman's 945. Development began in 1985 and the first prototypes were ready in 1988. The plan was to make 100,000 rifles the first year and 200,000 per year thereafter, but the fall of the Berlin Wall ended those (very optimistic) plans.
In total, it appears that about 10,000 of the Wieger (named after the town of Weiss, where they were manufactured) rifles were made. These consisted of about 7500 model 941 rifles for India and about 2000 folding-stocked 942 rifles for Peru. The last ones were sold in 1992, and they are quite scarce to find today.
Interestingly, there is a batch of clones in the United States. The InterOrdnance company produced reproduction Wieger furniture, and installed it on a version of the Cugir SAR-3 5.56mm AK rifles made specifically for this purpose. Those are a bit scarce, but can still be found in the US.
Many thanks to the Royal Armouries for allowing me to film and disassemble this rifle! The NFC collection there - perhaps the best military small arms collection in Western Europe - is available by appointment to researchers:
royalarmouries...
You can browse the various Armouries collections online here:
royalarmouries...
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Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! shop.forgottenw...
No way! Finally! I can't believe that we can now see a Wieger 940 series rifle not as B&W photos, color photos, or photos of clones.
Colour film definitely brings the black out of the gun. You don't get that depth of black in black and white photos.
@aarongreen121 No you don't, just infinate shades of grey 😁👍
@@aarongreen121 sadly, Ian's dark tablecloth backdrop does not help much to differentiate this Wieger AK system type firearm. But I'm not complaining, because this rifle is so rare, here in the (collective) "West"...
Last time I saw one of these was in an old issue of SGN, the print & photo quality was pretty terrible; it was such a tease....
@@williestyle35 The rifle is rare in the collective "East" too. It's just rare worldwide.
Why does it look so much as a 2000's villian island guards weapon?)
Excellent!!
Villain island guard haha I know exactly what you mean
Every rifle came with a black knit turtle neck and a black knit beanie. The Henchmaxxing starter kit.
Sometims with a Black, green or white balaclava or some times with a M91 camo-helmet with a flak vest
Because, East Germans ;)
Those Wieger mags are the best 5.56 AK mags you can get. They were an absolute pain to get, but absolutely worth it.
Say what you want about stuff produced in the former GDR..but that shits lasts forever
@@NashmanNash Pretty much all Combloc military stuff is rugged and built to last. I have some raindrop NVA pouches that look pretty much the same as when I got them 30 years ago-and I used them a fair bit. Maybe not as hard as actual military use but still, they hold up really well.
According to the German Wikipedia page on the rifle, the Peruvian contract was actually about 58000 rifles and the Indian one about 35000, with interest in a potential purchase of millions of guns expressed. However, the export contracts were cancelled after Germany reunified. The complete number of guns was never delivered and the German government had to pay penal damages.
... pay "penal" damages... I would guess this wasn't totally the word you thought you wanted to use. ..
@williestyle35
As in "penalty ". He used the correct word. You must be thinking of "penile".
I prefer penile.
58 and 0 thousandths rifles wow that's a lot, only 23 less for the other contract 😮. Not sure adding the .000 is necessary though I'm sure they only ordered full rifles! 😅
@@sunny3545 Germany uses periods instead of commas to denote thousands places, and commas to denote decimals, exactly the opposite of how numbers are written in the US. For example, 58.000 in Germany would be written as 58,000 in America.
I worked in a Bundeswehr armory where we had like 12 of the 942s and two 941s in the foreign weapons section. Most of them were missing their trapdoor in the grips, all of them had neither a cleaning rod or the cleaning kit in them. The 942s had a slightly different flash hider though, a little bit tapered towards the muzzle with threads on the inside for a blank firing adapter. The 941s had a very interesting stock, kind of like a straight rpk - buttstock but a little wider, hollow and made from the same plastic as the handguard and grip.
Danke, sehr interessant!
Glück Ab! FSLK 200
That front grip reminds me of the SIG 540 family.
I instantly thought the same, all plastic too without any metal
..yeah, nan...thought so too...
Exactly my first thought too when I saw this. Perhaps those East Germans thinking "SIG copied & improved Kalashnikov mechanism, why don't we borrow its front handguard?"
I absolutely love that the cleaning rod is concealed inside the handguard. That kind of goofy stuff has always interested me
Now the real question is would you love that concealed cleaning rod nearly as much when four-dozen Bologna Bobs lose the fuckers and you have to crack each individual handguard open to check?
Those plastic retaining clips for the rod look like they are guaranteed to break.
In practice it just makes the gun heavier for no benefit. If you need a cleaning rod/kit, you have time to grab it from a vest pocket.
Well, now we need to see you make and use one in Fallout 4.
"Esoteric Kalashnikovs": I can see sir that you're a cultured gentleman of wealth and taste...
Brandon herrera is a lot of things but is definitely not a cultured gentleman. Although he does have a great number of esoteric kalashnikovs
the moment you see the the gloves, you know it is a super rare firearm :D
still, as a east german it warms my heart to see one of the wiegers featured here
greetings from Dresden (please do more east german stuff)
Yeah Ian doesn’t glove up very often😂
Mhm Dresden (or Suhl) has every variant. They should invite ian to have a look.
The gloves aren't really an indicator of anything. He follows whatever standards are in place where he is filming
@@torchedmonkee Yes, Royal Armouries uses gloves (or at least Jonathan Ferguson does in his vids) so Ian follows the lead.
@@wraithcadmus i believe its a requirement to wear gloves when handling any of the exhibits, I think Ian mentioned it in one of his older videos.
From German class, I remember a tip for figuring out how to remember how to pronounce "ie" and "ei". Just remember "Bier" und "Wein".
jup, it's pronounced "weeger"
@@seltsch "Veeger". 😁
At 6:00 he used it right. Maybe some1 told him the correct spelling during the video shoots.
I'll add some context:
The GDR AK clones were high quality and so sought after, that potential buyers preferred them to ones made in Tula or Izhevsk (USSR factories). Thus, moscow intervened.
But the GDR was (especially during the 1980s) chronically broke. So, in order to cash in foreign currency, Wiesa made NATO calibre AKs.
The whole kahoot was supervised and coordinated by the GDR's infamous Stasi intelligence agency, subdivision export and embargo circumvention (KoKo).
After the fall of the Berlin wall, those actions were shut down and shushed.
Yet, the towns Suhl, Zella-Mehlis, and Wiesa are still centres of German gunsmithing tradition.
Looks like a hybrid between AK-74 and the Sig 550
'Can't help but feel the 'look' was on purpose.
[There's something amusing about the thought of E. Germany trying to compete with Sig in the export market.]
Yea considering both of those are AK actions it's not surprising that it falls somewhere in the middle of the two aesthetically. The Sig tries to hide its roots until you take it apart, while this one it's very clear it's an AK, but at the end of the day both of them are long stroke gas pistons of very similar designs, with bolts that look virtually identical apart from minor changes to make them fit in their respective guns.
@@LRK-GT [Why would that be?]
Really cool looking AK, can’t imagine the stock is overly comfortable though
Well said, those style of stock are notoriously uncomfortable and no bueno, they work but not anyone’s first choice…
Zip-ties and some wrappings of cloth would make a bit better+ obligatory duct tape.
Wrapped mine with leather strips and its just as comfortable and sturdy as the standard wood or polymer stocks. Course, I dont jump out of choppers or crawl through the mud with mine… much…😅
The grip is comfortable, but large (long).
Gorilla tape
looks like it would be more conmfortable in the shoulder than most wire frame stocks for AK's.....just a shame the cheek weld sucks.
Some of them ended up in armouries of the Bundeswehr. We used them in military training with blanks to simulate combat situations with new recruits. Nice to see it here. And yes, taking the plastic front grip apart is tedious and getting it back together is even worse.
'Vee-ger' because the I is before the E. If it was Weiger then it would be 'Vi-ger' as was pronounced in the beginning of the video (weirdly it is pronounced correctly once in the middle of the video). ruclips.net/video/-2n4m-UxPSk/видео.html Video on the gun from a Museum of Military History Dresden historian. It is a portmanteau of Wiesa - 'Vee-za' not 'Vi-sa' from the video, and Germany.
Beat me to it. Danke.
Beat me to it too. Ordnung MUSS sein.
Wigger 😁
Ist doch egal, die Amis haben ja noch nicht mal Englisch gemeistert :)
Germans trying not write 500 word essay to correct someones pronunciation challenge (98% will fail)
Those black specks behind Ian had me cleaning my phone screen for 5 min!! 😂
East German guns are so interesting
In Dresden, in Germany, you can take a look at a rifle at the Militär Historisches Museum. They have the fixed stock version of this rifle in their exhibition.
And the folding stock variant as well.
there are also some floating around in the arms rooms of some companys in the Bundeswehr
The guy behind the Company Warsaw Wood has this exact rifle furniture you can purchase and add to your already existing AKM Type rifle. It will require some work (mainly the Gasblock) but it is possible. This was this guys favorite rifle variant so he made reproductions using stronger materials.
The Wieger 942 is one of the most unique copies of the AK-47 i've ever seen, it's a demonstration of the German engineering skills for the export market. It doesn't matter what assault rifle is developed and produced, the AK-type assault rifles always come in all kinds of flavours whether the're exact copies of the AK-47 or brand new ones with a few key differences. Thank you for showing it to us Ian.
OMG I thought I'd never see one of these. The only images of those on the internet are some low-res scans of old black and white photos.
They're probably scans from an old issue of Shotgun News, which is where I first saw one years ago. SGN wasn't a magazine known for high quality printing & photography (except for the featured cover-gun).
Warsaw Wood Co makes a reproduction furniture set nowadays that's much higher quality than the old IO stuff, for anyone that's looking.
IIRC, don't they also make the FSB as well? Or was that somebody else?
@@LAHFaust JMac Custom makes the FSB. They no longer market it as a East German clone, but that's what it is.
Doesn't take much to make higher quality anything than IO has or ever will make.
@@Razgriz85 that's true. The Warsaw stuff is high quality though, not just better than IO
While India and Peru ordered those rifles, to my knowledge the contracts were cancelled by the government after unification and the guns were never delivered. Also the construction plans seem to have vanished.
that has to be one of the nicest looking, well made AKs I've seen.
at the weapons museum in Suhl i got the impression they where developed and produced in situ... they got a cut-away model on display as well to explain how AKs funktion... most of the guns on display there are from the 1800s
East German AKs are some of the most interesting AK variants.
Yep, Germans gotta German
Hands down one of the sleekest looking AKs out there.
It has some second cousins - Valmet, Galil and LEW R4/5/6.
Looks like the front half of a Sig with an AK receiver.
Big time
I can see one upside to the cleaning rod being under the handguards. If PVT Snuffy has to take the handguards off to even pretend to clean his rifle, it provides a higher probability he slaps some oil.on the gas tube and outside of the barrel to inhibit rust - whether PVT Snuffy does it in his own or because his sergeant yells at him because he sees a spot of orange while he's walking past.
I just really like seeing a folding stock gun that carries a full cleaning kit (including oil) "on board". Even if the troops don't carry a separate cleaning kit in rheir ruck (the way we did in my units, just because it was easier than fooling with the butttrap latch on an M16), it increases the odds that cleaning in the field will actually happen if the cleaning kit is integral to the rifle.
Additionally you’d have to be in some crazy shit to be cleaning the interior of your barrel on the daily
@@joshuabrown7815 Ah i see you have never met o bored east german NCO before. can't have the recruits just siting arround cant we.
Can we for a moment appreciate Ian even matching the color of his gloves to the color of the gun.
Those are pretty standard “shop gloves” to keep oil, cosmoline, ATF, etc. off your hands or in this case your skin oils off the guns.
You go ahead, you don't need my permission.
Ive been waiting for this wieger is one of my fav very obscure and proprietary ak variants
Finally, waiting for a Wieger video for years!
Looks like the AK model from Goldeneye N64.
Ahhh you mean the black pencil crayon of death.
Dope to hear a gun I own being talked about on here. I've got one of the 7.62x39 STG2000c's I wish I could track down a 2003c
Inter-Ordnance did a great job having Cugir make the Wieger clones using mostly existing Romanian parts. Like the front sight is from their AKS74U variant.
After I-O dropped the project, they were imported for years by M+M as the M10.
let him show us its features! (deep german laughter)
I was active duty Air Force and we had the M16 Rifle with the triangular Hand guards they could be a pain at time to put on like anything else mechanical you get the technique down after awhile.
I think putting the cleaning rod under the hand guards is a good idea considering the design they went with.
"and that's because the handguard is included in the handguard as a segmented three piece rod"
Also, you may have missed that the last three digits of the serial number were also included on the selector lever.
Ian, you have a pretty good grip on foreign languages like French and German. But I am surprised that you still do the 'IE' mistake which is not pronounced English as 'I' but like the IE e.g. 'Siegfried'.
Surprisingly you got it once perfect @ 5:57 .Besides that another excellent video, danke.
Egon Krenz: ja, ja, we have Beryl at home..
Beryl at home:
Plus front handguard design from SIG...
What a gorgeous rifle.
I like the handguard design. Looks reminds me a bit of the H&K G3 and the SIG SG550. The stock, though, looks rather uncomfy.
I saw this gun in the video game WARNO recently. I thought it was an East German clone of a HKG3 that took AK mags. (For some reason the game uses a HKG3A4 for the weapons silhouette on the Units card.) So It's good to find out what this gun actually is.
There was cooperation btw the RO arms industry and DDR's. And actually it is possible that DDR licensed the Wieger to RO (probably for the Securitate troops). In the early 2000s as RO was preparing to join NATO a local version of the Wieger was touted as the new NATO standard 5.56 rifle of the Armed forces. Nothing came of this project.
Ian should definitely pay a visit to the Gun museum in Suhl, Thuringia Germany. To my knowledge they do have the entire Wieger (including this one) production on display. Well and lots of ohter stuff.
Not anymore. It was a special exhibition from Rigo Herold which no longer exists. The Weapons shown there were the ones from Dresden, Koblenz, and Bundeswehr Archives.
@@janvanahn too bad. I'm going to Suhl for a hike this WE and maybe i have a look what they have nowadays.
Thanks for this Video. I have build a Airsoft Version of the 943, based on a LCT AIMS. But ich have never see this Rifle in disasampled condition. Greetings from Saxony.
This was awesome to see! You could just about convince somebody this was the missing link between an AK in 5.56, and the SIG SG 500 series of rifles.
This gun is dope! I've been waiting for this one Ian
I remember bout 40 years back, you could find those online.
That handguard is giving me some serious SIG 550 vibes.
Excellent watch choice.
I love my Romy STG-2000C 7.62x39, and it's crazy how close they recreated the original after watching this video. Breaks down the exact same way.
Never heard of these. Fascinating.
Thanks!
*Wieger*
_'ie'_ like in Diesel or Krieg
not _'ei'_ like in Einstein
I was thinking the same thing though I don't speak German.
@@ElitePraetorianGuard same here. Just didn't wanna say it wrong...
I think Ian pronounced it the correct way once in the video.
@@georgegordonbrown9522no he did not. I am german and beleve me, he pronounced it wrong.
@@Bate-on4be Hör dir vielleicht nochmal die Stelle zwischen 5:55 und 6:05. Ich habe selber gestaunt.
I wonder if they would draw straws on who had to take their hand guards off so the whole squad could share one cleaning rod. 😆
@Olfan
10 minutes ago
Nobody ever used the finicky cleaning rods in the hand guard, we had proper kit in the gun lockers that was used religiously.
"We have AK 101 at home"
AK 101 at home:
I love the look of that rifle
Dang I would absolutely love to have one of those
Really gorgeous rifle. Its like and AK and a AR15 had a Child, with only the eyes of the AR, and full body of AK
In the 2000's I bought a semi auto, 7.63X39 model Nothing special stood out , beyond the "squishy" plastic hand guard.
They may have done the civilian hand guards different, I would have remembered THAT PITA. LOL
That front end needs to make a comeback, minus the cleaning rod BS
so we not gonna talk about the blueprints from them still missing? after the wall nobody knew were the plans went west germany took em but after that they just gone
Whoever was running the factories… I wonder if they’re still alive today, and if they know what happened to the blueprints and the tooling.
I´ve waited almost 10 years for this vid! Thanks a lot Ian. Greetz from east germany.
P.S.: pls pronounce it "weega"
Reunification might've stopped production of the rifle, but it's sort of a wasted opportunity. Having an AK-pattern rifle in 5.56x45, mm in the 90s would've been quite useful. A bit like it went with the Galil, which also pairs a really good rifle with a really good cartridge.
However, "reunification" was treated by West German companies as an opportunity to mow down their eastern competitors.H&K could not afford for the arms industry of the former GDR to take over the role of the main supplier of small arms to the Bundeswehr...
Apparently the only DDR forces that were equipped with it were a Stasi detachment in 1989, and of course the Stasi would be the last military force to officially use a sturmgewehr.
Well,the "regular" AKs were also called MPi..so Maschinenpistole aka. sub machine gun
Thanks Ian! BTW in German, the general rule for the pronunciation of EI or IE is... If it's spelled 'ei' it's pronounced with a long I, like pie. If it's spelled 'ie' then it's pronounced with a long E, like tree.
I wonder if Brandon Herrera jumps for joy when Ian posts an unusual ak
For everyone who want´s to discuss this gun with a German:
Wei and Wie doesn´t matter to you, in German it matters very much.
Wie=Wee
Wei=Why pronounciation wise.
As a Dutch person who studied German this annoyed me, later on, he pronounced it the correct way.
As in good old German Bier (=beer) and almost equally as good German Wein (=wine). Quite easy, once you keep that in mind.
Some of the best AKs. V-ger. Nobody that has only parts can do it justice in the states.
Lots of fine details. The regular stocked 941 would be nice to see at a range with some high speed footage.
I remember these from my draft service in the Bundeswehr 2009-2010. I served in a recognizance squadron of the airforce (AG51I) Our armory had a few of those for the "baddie" actors in field exercises.
Hey, would you be will to do a video on the Zastava 5.56 AK? I can't remember the model name, but apparently they actually did fairly well with exports?
Zastava did make alright enough AK variants. Could have sworn that Forgotten Weapons did at least one video talking about them, iirc. ..
Ian did a video a few years ago on the Zastava M90 that is currently available on the commercial market.
Cool! Thanks. 😎
I wonder how likely it would have been in another world to have the newly unified Germany just adopt this or something like it.
Would have solved a ton of problems, since they were eagerly looking for a cheap way to replace the G3 with something in a smaller caliber, preferably 5.56, that wasn't as expensive as the G11. However, the idea of replacing the beloved G3 with the symbol of the Warsaw Pact at the very moment of triumph over the Eastern Bloc would have required a pragmatism that was not in vogue in these symbolic times. The fact that every idea from the GDR, no matter how good it was, was fundamentally disparaged at that time and that many innovative companies were sold off for a symbolic DM is unfortunately a sad chapter in the history of Germany's transition.
Good morning Ian! You pronounce it Weeger like written with a double ee.😉
As someone who does US payroll accounting, 940 through 945 have a different expected context to me. (Form 942 is not used these days but previously existed.)
Gotta say that’s the most neat looking Ak clone ever just perfection idk about the handgaurd tho in terms of of use
isn't the "ie" in German pronounced "ee"? "ei" in German would be the "aye" sound, at least, that's what I learned in German class. I see another comment about this too, but I'll leave mine for added emphasis.
Being from Germany and originaly from the east Part. Wiesa is not so far from my home town and it is pronounced "W-I-S-A with a long "I" and not "ei"...but that is just beside.
Very cool, that you covered this gun. I had only seen an article in a german gun magazine ("Visier") years ago and the story behind the rifle is even more a polit thriller. The export contracts were made with the GDR, which was resolved 1991 and "West" Germany canceled the contract, because H&K and the other west gun producers had no intention to loose profit. The contract with India was not fullfilled (although the guns were in the warehouses) and Germany had to pay contract fines. They than sold them for a bargain to Turkey and they than vanished from there in shady places.
The plans and tools were than put away officialy and than vanished as well. Nobody knows where the stuff went. (Very suspious!) It was a good example how West Germany treated the new "colonies". Technical stuff, ideas and productions were shut down, because they came from "the wrong side ", even and especially if they worked, because if they could potentialy rival a west german product, it had to close. Non-rival products are still in production.
Except for the stock, it looks decent.
The 5 piece is not a rate reducer but an anti bounce devise...Kalashnikov himself verified this decades ago to Peter G Kokalis...Get it right....
Im half asleep and i thought it said Wigger
Now replace the w with n..
man, youtube comments really are the lowest of low brow humor.
This is Ian McCollum Gun Jesus at the Royal Armouries in the UK which houses a collection of thousands of iconic weapons from throughout history.
you can just hear the museum curator screaming: He got in here again, get the hose!!
Weiger 942 the feature are fantastic
The first time I read about these I was intrigued. There is just something about those Wiegers, the design, the backstory...
I've wanted to see something like this for so long!
It’s pretty much the east german counterpart to the HK33 if you stretch it a bit as both the Weiger 940 and HK33 are 5.56 versions of popular cold war rifles made for export purposes.
So Ian pronounces Wieger with a "v" like a German but he pronounces Walther with a "w"
Yeah I love the man, but he kills me with the foreign pronunciations. It's a bottomless pit trying to emulate them all, just say it like the American you are. (Like I don't even think it is possible to pronounce "Koch" correctly in English but if you say it like a German it will sound ridiculous to English-speakers. So we get some form of "Koke", "Kotch", or "Kock".)
And we now have a whole generation of folks who are uncertain about how to pronounce "Garand". It was never something anyone worried about pre-FW but now every time I say it out loud somebody gives me the "AKSHULLY..."
Huh, I guess it bugs me more than I realized.
Tomorrow on brandon herrera... Shooting a Weiger 941!! Joking about the Garand Thumb STG44 Bent Barrel gun that ran in conjunction with Ians history recap.
Always loved the hand guard on these and wish it was standard issue as a natural progression of the platform.
Nice lines.....except the stock. But that could be fixed with a cheek rest fitted to it somehow
nice finally a video on these very cool
What a shame we never got these. Other than the folding buttstock and the lack of heat shields in the handguard this looks like an interesting product. Eastern Sig 550 series guns.
There's 2 heat vents on the top of the handguard
@@Gameprojordan Will they be sufficient, though. the M16A2 has vents all along the top and bottom, but it still has heatshields.
Cool, good information Ian, thanks for the presentation
Anytime I see a rifle like that with such a basic stock, it reminds me of that draw-the-horse meme.
The production quality is astounding.
Germans gotta German - tho, your observation is correct.
'(;
There are some documentaries about it. Worth watching.
Been waiting for this one a long time!
Yes yes the mythical stg 940
Wow! A full length handguard on an AK, all the way to the sight / gas block!
That looks surprisingly similar to the INSAS rifle produced in India. Wonder if it was the base design. Great video of a rare item.