I met up with the guys at Rifle Dynamics to help film some of their guns in slow motion. They wanted some engineering studies done to better understand their products and needed a slow-motion camera. One of the guns they wanted to look at more closely was their Sturmgewehr 44. In this SlowMo STG44 study we can see gun has a few problems.

SlowMo @ TFB:

SlowMo STG44

Kyle of Rifle Dynamics helped pull the trigger on the SlowMo STG44.

Rifle Dynamics has two STG44s. These were once police-possessed STG44s that were cut up. Rifle Dynamics re-welded them back together again and one of them was having a litany of issues.

The better of the two STG44s

So Kyle grabbed the problem STG44 so I could film it with the Chronos 1.4. He said it had ejection and feeding problems. He thinks it might be the odd magazines with mixed new and old parts. So I decided to film the action at 4k frames per second.

After the first round was fired, the bolt extracted and ejected the case just fine but when the bolt went to feed the next round, it just stopped for a moment. Almost like when a round is fed poorly and it gets stuck on the feed ramp or some part of the chamber. But that isn’t what happened. The momentum took over and stripped the round out of the magazine and fed it into the chamber to be fired.

In the next iteration of mag dumping the slowmo STG44, I pulled back a bit to see more of the gun. I caught some very weak ejection. Watching it in slow motion reminded me of my friend Kevin when we tried to diagnose his failure to eject in his Krink. Here the brass is bouncing around and hitting the insides of the ejection port and ebbing away its kinetic energy to leave the ejection port. In the screen below, the round almost caused a stove pipe but the bolt pushed it out of the way.

Then after two more successful ejections, the gun jams with a failure to eject. It looks like the extractor is letting go too early.

We continued to shoot after we cleared the malfunction and I saved the slowmo STG44 footage. This time I pulled in tight again to get in close on the ejection port. You can see another problem, swollen primers.

Sure enough, the extractor let go of the brass too early so the brass just bounces around inside and doesn’t leave causing a double feed.

In another slowmo STG44 shot, this time with the better working STG44, I captured a minor explosion coming out of the ejection port.

Later that night, Kyle shot the STG44 again under night vision. This was the better STG44 but the magazine was acting up again.

Here is the video of the slowmo STG44 footage captured by my Chronos 1.4 and some normal footage captured by my iPhone at the end.

Big thanks to Rifle Dynamics for inviting me out to the range. I love filming firearms in slow motion especially when it comes to helping to diagnose malfunctions. With this footage, they have a better idea of what might be causing the malfunctions and can address them.