Swiss ZFK-55 Sniper Rifle to 650yds: Practical Accuracy (Feat BOTR...Zf Kar 55 Sniper with GP11ammo)

This episode was brought to you by Slate Black Industries. For M-LOK grips and accessories, visit slateblackindustries.com. Don't miss, bro. Ja, grüß euch. Michu hier. Ja, Michu. How is your grandma, ma? Ja, gut, merci. Was is los? What is going on? You only ever call when something is wrong. Ja, okay. I'm here in the Village Science Project Fair. And I'm looking at your project. And the muzzle looks like the drawing of the Fallschirmjägergewehr 42 that I showed you last month. Do you know anything about this? I do not have the slightest idea what you could possibly be talking about. Even the angles look the same. Did you file a patent with our Eidgenössisches Patent Office? Well, no. Ach, Schoolboy Arrow. So sad. Ja, aber... Stop making ugly yet functional guns from my designs! ZFK 55. The last that we're doing on the Swiss straight-pull specialty rifles. Alright, well let's start things off at 150 yards. Impact. Is it dead? Uh, yeah. Slightly off center to the right. That one was left side. Ah, you see the elevation turrets moving again. Because there's no lock, no clicks, no nothing. It's just a... The elevation on this can tend to drift, so Henry's gotta keep his eye on the elevation turret to make sure that as he's shooting, the recoil doesn't cause a shift. Alright, I'm on it. 200. Impact. Windage? Looked good to me. Impact. That's the neutralized shot. Alright, Henry. 250. Okay. Impact. How's the elevation on that? Looks good. Neutralized. So the muzzle brake on this is very effective. It is noticeably less recoiling than... Very noticeably less recoiling than both the K31 and the ZFK 3142. Alright, we're on it. 300. Okay. I have to aim at the very base of these targets, and the sighting... The sight reticle post is indeed not pointed. It is a flat post. Impact. There's a slight difference between the other guy who's shooting, eh? Oh my gosh. Well, that's unfortunate. Impact. Okay, so that one we're not counting, right? I mean, because it's... No, we won't count this. It's annoying. So what happens, right before I pulled the trigger, someone online shot the 300-yard target and spun it vertically... Horizontally. Horizontally to where it just... The target juked, Henry. Let's be honest. He got a little juked. That one was the one we killed twice. Alright, I'm on it. 350. He's learning. Impact. Tell me that guy isn't chasing me out. Impact. Nice, dude. Alright, I'm on it. 400. Alright, so... You ready? Yep. Impact. The powder burn of the GP-11. Delicious. It's got a very unique smell. Yeah. It smells like the mountains of Switzerland, and not at all like the hot lava temperature of Texas that we've decided to shoot every single one of these Swiss rifles in. Okay, what am I for? You are one more at four. The last one was good. Impact. Alright, we're on a 450 now. Just off the left edge. Good elevation. Same exact spot. Just off the left edge. Good elevation. Impact. Ready? Yep. Just off the right edge. 50. Yep. Oh, you know what just happened? Did our turrets move? The turret moved and I wasn't paying attention. Just off the right edge. Still? Alright, I'm going back to the favorite left. Ready? Yep. I missed that one. Impact. I've got to get some retraining on this scope, my friend. Just off the left edge. Impact. Right half. Upper right half, to be honest. Your elevation's been good, though, on all these other shots. Impact. Okay. Shall we try to take it a little bit further? It's up to you. I mean, it seems like the rifle is definitely capable and accurate. It's just a matter of finding out what these holds are. I'm having trouble, honestly, with this scope at that distance. I don't know. I don't have an issue. I don't have an issue when it comes down to using an iron sight and favoring left and right. I don't know. Maybe it just takes a little bit more time to learn how to use the flat-based scope because there's no tip to it, Josh. Yeah. It's like this. Got it. Well, hey, let's just go to 650. You can look. You can look. Yeah, it's like a nubbin. Yeah. Much harder to hold the wind, then. All right, well, why don't we do this, Henry? Why don't we go to 650. See if we can record a hit there because I think the rifle is capable of doing that. I think it is. Let's try to collect some hits with the five shots. 650? Yeah, let's go at 650. Oh, I could see the vapor, and then it kind of just shot away from me. Maybe bottom right corner. Nope. Impact. Okay. That was dead on. Basically, I was putting the target, if this was the post, I was putting the target right here on the edge where it was just drifting off. Nice. I feel like I need to learn how to use that type of post system more. Obviously, I'm having issues. Obviously, I'm having issues learning how the windage works with it. The other issue is that the elevation doesn't correspond to the numbers. And then the third issue is that the turret is a free-spinning turret, unless this is a broken piece, which I don't believe it is. But shall we talk about this in the analysis area? Yeah, yeah. I'd say an initial immediate thanks to Ian. Yes, huge thanks to Ian from Forgotten Weapons, hallelujah. And thanks to Ian's viewer, Jeff, who loaned us this rifle. Thanks to our friends at Edelweiss, who actually were the importers of the rifle, and sent us some GP-11 to use, which we're trying not to blow through all of the GP-11, but yes. All right, we'll see you guys in the breakdown segment. Yes. So the doctrine was to be able to engage individual targets out to 600 metres under normal lighting conditions, and in dawn and dusk conditions out to about 300 at night against illuminated targets. And of course, if at any time a high-value target presented itself, or even at longer ranges, a group target presented itself, they could have a pop-hat at them. Overall, it's rather a more DMR-type doctrine than modern sniper doctrine, and the fact that it mounts a bayonet really speaks towards that as well. They were used either by an individual or with a spotter, and the spotter having binoculars and his personal weapon, which was a K31 or a Strunger F57, depending on the era. Shooting was mostly meant to be done off the bipod, but under certain circumstances, resting or even using the sling for support were expected. And sling support with a rifle that heavy is probably a bit optimistic for any length of time, really. The rifles were not issued as personal weapons to be taken home. The Swiss Army is a militia system, and people take their personal weapon home. They were core material, they belonged to the unit, and were issued out as needed. The scope was expected to be removed during movement, even on the battlefield, and placed in its container on the belt. I think realistically, obviously they're trying to protect the scope, but putting it on and off like that all the time probably isn't practical, it's more likely to get the scope damaged or lost than just leaving it on the rifle. And if it was me, I would leave the scope on the rifle all the time, in case a target presented itself. They also have a surprisingly loose definition of an acceptable zero, so a lot of aiming off was taught, and the zero had to be quite a long way off before the scope would actually be properly re-zeroed. As for training, courses seemed to have been organised mostly on an ad-hoc basis at unit level, with shooting practice out to 500 metres, and more snipery, fieldcraft-type stuff, like distance judgement, observation, use of the landscape, and so on. Another part of the training that leads you to realise it's more DMR-type training, is that at longer ranges, which they define as from 300 out, they were trained to walk shots into the target based on watching the splash, rather than a one-shot-one-kill out to 600. And the muzzle brake is actually effective enough that you can do this. It's a really flat-shooting rifle, but the time of flight below 300 metres is too short for the rifle to have settled, so you can actually watch the impact, so you'd need a spotter to help you with that. Ultimately, the rifles were not well liked, they were not considered particularly effective, particularly for the weight, and as a result, a bit like the L86 light support weapon in British service, they were kind of treated as the crow cannon and given to the young guy to carry, because everyone else would rather carry something lighter. It was ultimately replaced by scoped 57s, which again points towards DMR-type thinking. No, you're... OK. Just let me get it set up for the camera, Henry. It's... I know it's a bipod, but... Yeah, yeah. It's not going to happen, eh? Well, fine, I'll just hold it. Thanks. Thank you. Alright, so the... Hi, guys. The... what is this one now? The ZF K55, which was... which is one of the last specialty straight-pull... Swiss straight-pulls that we were featuring. Right. So what are some of the other ones we did, in case people aren't... don't remember? So we've done the Diopter Swiss K31, the standard K31. We've also done the K31-42 sniper. Is that the one with the tiny little periscope? The little periscope that pops off the side? Yeah. I personally... that's my favorite out of all of those. I think it's cool, because, you know, the little tangent sight and everything. And then at the end we have the ZF K55. So is this basically just the same Swiss-based rifle with a different mounting and different optics? Sort of. If you look at the ejection, it's clocked off to the side, so it's about 15 degrees. Right. Base to the right. Base to the right, right. Operation-wise, it's the same. Right. But even the magazine entry and everything, you see it's off to the side, and that's to facilitate this guy. It is a QD 3.5x scope. Supposed to be bullet drop compensated to 800 meters. However, look, I don't know why it wouldn't correspond to the turrets. Yeah. And that's why I was having such a hard time with it. Whereas the ZF K42... Yeah, it did. It corresponded perfectly fine. The other thing, too, that I heard we were talking about on range is that the elevation adjustment, it's basically just a smooth wheel. For those of you who are familiar with modern optics, this feels like a parallax adjustment, as opposed to an elevation turret adjustment. It's like binoculars at the very end, the focus wheel. Yeah, it's a focus wheel. There's no click. Even the Mauser 98 snipers, the ZF 39s, they had the little dial in the front. That was to lock the elevation turret. And is that because this specific optic is actually damaged, or is that how it's designed? Do we know? I don't know. Well, that's how this particular model was. So multiple times, then, while we were shooting, there were actually times where this shifted during the shooting process and caused... We can say it caused misses, but we're not positive that that was the sheer and only cause of a miss. But we can definitely say that it played a contributing factor to misses. I would say another thing is also the post in the reticle. The center of the reticle is what Henry's referencing. It's a T-shaped reticle, but it's different than the other T-shaped reticles that you normally see. It's not a pointy tip. It's like a fence post, if you look at it. Yeah, it's a rounded nub on the top. So it's sort of like looking through the front sight of iron sights, but it's not, because... Well, even the iron sights are generally squared off. Don't you think that if this were squared off, it would still have been better than being rounded? That's the thing. I prefer the Lee-Enfield width of iron sights, not the American iron sights, because the American iron sights are too thin. I like the little bit of width, which is the standard K31 iron sights. The iron sights being squared and thick actually gives you an advantage if you're shooting at distance because you could use that to favour left or favour right. Right, because you can gauge your bracketing of the target a bit better. Yes. This I had trouble doing because it's rounded off to the side. You know, that's a very similar issue to when you're trying to shoot a dot at distance. It's not dissimilar because you've got, like, if you think about it, the dot is just rounded on the entirety of the thing, and it's hard to gauge exactly where in relation to the target you are at all the times, you know? In fact, the break took down a lot of the recoil on this compared to the other ones. So it's not, I'm not having issues with the recoil flinch. Trigger is phenomenal on this thing. The bipod is worthless for our type of shooting. We'll get into that in a bit. But the scope itself, I had trouble with. Quite frankly, I had trouble with. When we shot the FR-F1, which had its bipod positioning not dissimilar to this, it was very much toward the action area. That's for it to not affect the barrel because it's got a nice free-floated barrel. I see. And it's got a lot of traverse. Right, so I can understand why you would want something like that so that you do get an element or level of traverse. This, I mean, this feels very, very flimsy. Have you seen shooting sticks? Are you familiar with what shooting sticks are? Yeah, like the Y at the top, cross them when they open up. It's very popular for people hiking. Yes. Very popular for people who are hunting long range. And it's actually for a very similar purpose. All right, all right. Allow me to demonstrate. So if I were Swiss, which I don't look at all Swiss. Surprise. Okay, so I'm in the mountains in Switzerland. And these pesky Germans, they're coming over to the borders. Up on top of the mountains, and then they look down. Boom. And then they move. And then they come back to the farther end. Boom. And then they move. So allowing a much greater amount of elevational adjustment in a bipod system, especially before bipods were developed to have legs that kick out double their length. Yes, because let's look at this. Can you imagine if you were running around in the mountains with something like this? So if you look at the difference between these two, this is designed for shooting prone. It's not designed for shooting with high elevation or anything like that. No, in fact, we use tripods for that nowadays. Yes. So even with the legs extended, you might barely be coming close to the elevational adjustment that's provided by this. Yeah, so when you're talking about shooting with extreme LOS, you're talking about an increased mobility, shooting off of rocks, shooting off of strange objects. Sure. That is actually not a bad concept. Mm-hmm. I still wouldn't have designed it like that, but, you know, as far as a concept, you could see where they're coming. But at the least, that's what they're going for. Right. So the ZFK-55, what could we devise from the deployment of this rifle? First of all, I think the Swiss, and this is my opinion, and I feel that the Swiss had put a rifle design before they had a concrete sniper or designated marksman doctrine, and it appears that they took elements of theory from some of the other shooting nations who had, and put it into the K-31, and as a result, they made a rifle that was barely interchangeable with the K-31 in terms of parts. They had a rifle that was quite heavy for what it was designed for, and honestly, not very well-liked or very well-deployed in the military operations that they potentially would have been using it for. But it is an interesting example of weapons development regardless, and we are very appreciative of getting to take a look at such a rare example. There's only about 4,000 of these worldwide. Now, I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to Mike and Dale over in Switzerland, who helped out with the research on this video, and all parties who were contributing towards making this video possible, as it is a very interesting take on a rare example of a firearm. And as usual, we'll see you on the range. Furthermore, it's already separated into the different categories, so you can go back to your argument as quickly as possible. And whether you decide to support us via Patreon, subscription, or just a normal viewer, we thank you. 1-6, 15-9-2, 1-Victor, 2-Fax, recon 1, over.