That whatzis, revealed.
Reader "Bystander" gets it 95% right in his response to this post, which is a continuation of this post.
This is a RPG-7 close-up view, the part in the upper left corner is the trigger group (typical silver-ish finish) with the safety in view.The metal band in the middle is one of the 2 metal rings that secures the rear sight of the RPG-7 to the launcher body. The rear sight can be seen in the lower right corner, slighly off-centered to help right handed shooters. (the RPG7 isnt ambidextrous)
The sling visible under is of the russian Canvas type and has the same rivets that AK Series weapons use. The small part visible at the lower left is probably the "rear" grip.
Yes, and no. We're not exactly sure what its designation is, actually. As we'll show in a bit, and perhaps some of you smart guys will have an answer. And the "safety" that Bystander refers to is in fact the hammer - the RPG is fired via a percussion cap.
But constructively - yes. It *is* an RPG-7.
A -7, not the much more commonly seen RPG-7V, which has provision for the optical sight. This launcher does not. The visual puzzle I posed in the first post was simply of that portion of an RPG launcher you don't normally see - the portion of the barrel that is covered by the heat shields. In yesterday's post, aside from the close-up, the only thing I did was orient the picture in a way that again, you weren't used to seeing a launcher - though many, if not most of you, have never actually seen an RPG launcher up close anyway. This example came without the wood scales that normally cover the front and rear hand-grips. For display purposes, I have a set of modified East German scales I use. The interesting aspect of that is... the grips on this version *do not* scale correctly to other RPG-7s. Both grips are slightly smaller, the front grip more so than the rear grip. And the actual structure of the foregrip is different, too.
The provenance provided with this launcher when it entered Castle stocks in the late 1990's was that it had come out of Israel and was of home-made Palestinian origin. This was plausible, as it came from the same container that held the Carl Gustav 84mm recoiless rifle in the Castle Arms Room, which, while Swedish-made, has clear Israeli markings on it. But there was no documentation to support this, just the word of the importer, repeating what I assume the Israeli brokers told him.
All of this came up recently, when a Marine Gunner dropped a note on me asking if I could give him pictures of the launcher. Among his many other duties (the Armorer worships the ground a Marine Gunner walks on) he puts together books for deploying Marines on the foreign gear they may encounter while deployed. He was looking for some decent pics of RPGs and stumbled into the Armory of Argghhh! Which had a (admittedly) crappy pic, and did I have any good ones? I didn't. So I took some for him. And we had a back and forth about the launcher - the gist of which I supply below the fold in the Flash Traffic/Extended Entry.
John,
These are fantastic.
I compared the weapon (sans furniture) with some of the photos I took at Koblinka and many of the ones from my digital library (enclosed pic) and I am still confused to some degree.
With the exception of the area near the firing pin well - and this may just be a trick of shadows versus light between the pictures - the launchers look to be the same.
--Warning Preachy Diatribe to follow-- [Note, the Armorer will *take notes* when being preached at by Marine Gunners - Gunners, not Gunnery Sergeants. *NOT* the same thing.]
The launcher in the pictures you sent may be "rough around the edges" but it is machined - and machined to at level of tolerance that I do not think the PLO of the 1980s (or any era) would have been able to replicate, at least not without some benefactor or good-neighbor support. More on that thought below.
As you know the PLO and most of its evolutionary / revolutionary clones / splinters / offshoots (Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Qassam, Fatah, Tanzim, Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, etc.) have always produced organic weapons to some extent or another. What they have all had in common is the overall "crappiness" in the realm of quality control. (Look at the present day Yassin RPG-2 clone).
The best the clandestine workshops in the Gaza Strip have been able to spew forth to date are weapons such as the al Batar RPG, Qassum and al Quds (101 & 102). These are a mix of pipes laid on sandbags (the more sandbags, the higher the elevation) usually pointed in the general direction of the nearest Jewish settlement and/or IDF soldier and fired. (When I say "fired" of course, I am using the term in the loosest definition known to mankind. Wicker fuses, Det Cord, old sweaters, road flares, Bic lighters, the "Comm wire and 9 volt battery combo", etc.will continue to ensure the weapons remain as much a threat to the users as to the intended target).
Even their BM-21 clone, the Quds-3, is not really built by them. Tehran pretty much sent an Iranian factory into Gaza in order to set up production - right under the ever watchful U.N. of course.
I believe the launcher was indeed used by the PLO and arrived to you vis-à-vis Israel as you stated - not that I doubted your word - but I would bet a month's pay it was built in Egypt or Syria for Mr. Arafat's boys club as both had reversed engineered the RPG-7 by the late 1970's. (If it was made last week I would have linked it to Iran as they produce three RPG-7 clones - a straight clone, the Sahgheh and the Sahgheh "Commando" - but I do not think Iran had sufficiently transitioned yet from the Shah's regime to the point were they could start funding every anti-Jewish / anti-Western group on the planet.)
The writing on the data plate is still kicking my butt though. I have a trigger assembly from a Yassin and the only mark on the "data plate" area is bullet ding and a crude triangle of sorts. Usually, similar weapons from the glorious sons of Allah reference one of two verses from the Koran - “Only those from the true flock of Allah are victorious”, or “Slay them wherever you catch them - or the “Shahadah”, the Islamic declaration of belief, which states, "There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is the messenger of Allah." (Don't ask me why I know this - I actually have a life and hotty wife.)
This is the offending pistol grip:
Anyway - there you have it - an RPG-7, true origin unknown, last known user... believed to be the PLO.
Update: Oh, and if anyone is concerned... the portions of the barrel that unscrew are welded together. There is a bore-diameter hole cut in the largest section of the bore (visible in the photos) and the firing pin is missing, having been removed and replaced with a fusion-welded rod that prevents a rocket from being loaded into the launcher - in other words, it has been demilled to the standards required for legal import in effect at the time of import. The Castle does *not* own an operational RPG-7 launcher. Yes, the question got asked.
6 Comments