The CZ-531 was developed as a replacement for the vz.52 pistol in 1953. Even as the vz.52 was being adopted, the Czech military knew that it wasn’t a great gun, and they wanted a long-term replacement based on the TT33 Tokarev design. There were two pistols put into development for this; the CZ 531 here and the ZKP-524. This was chambered for 7.62x25mm, and like the Tokarev it has no manual safety. Testing took place in February 1954, and the gun had some issues. After about 2,000 rounds the recoil spring wore out and at 4,500 rounds the frame cracked. At 5,075 rounds a second crack developed in the frame and the testing ended. The other pistol, the ZKP-542 had a number of problems as well. The CZ-531 was the less accurate of the two, but more easily manufactured. Ultimately, the decision was that there wasn’t enough funding to replace the vz.52, and handguns were not important enough to prioritize.
Thanks to the Czech Military History Institute (VHU) for graciously giving me access to this unique prototype to film for you! If you have the opportunity, don’t miss seeing their museums in Prague:
https://www.vhu.cz/en/english-summary/
I’m enamored.
It’s a really elegant gun, with a bore axis remarkably low for an hammer-fired pistol. It seems to me way lower than that of the most known service guns of the period. 1911, Hi Power, Beretta 1951, SIG P210…
You have to arrive to the Benelli B76 to see something similar (in that case also double action)
A shame it had not been fixed.
Why? There are better hand guns for the same job available now. The tale serves to illustrate how the pistol has become almost an afterthought in modern war.
“available now” is the expression.
NOW that’s no more a viable service gun.
THEN it could have been a very good firearm, so to be NOW a bigger part of firearm’s history than being just a prototype, right with the other firearms I mentioned.
Well, this is an another example of the phenomenon: no solution is so permanent, as the temporary solution.
I would say that this is also sign of lack of coordination in area of small arms development between Soviet Union and satellite. At that time USSR already adopted 9×18 as service pistol cartridge alongside PM (Makarov) and APS (Stechkin), yet apparently information to abandon 7,62×25 use 9×18 was not broadcasted successfully to satellites. Would Czechoslovak designers be aware of that, then they might ameloriate vz.52 and make grip more compact thanks to 9×18 lesser length.
I had one of the imported surplus Vz.52s years ago. I considered it worth about what I paid for it ($90), but it was far from the miraculous piece of engineering it was reputed to be back in the 1970s.
I found its hammer-dropping “safety” somewhat unnerving, its accuracy indifferent, and its reliability questionable even with well-made 7.62 x 25mm let alone the steel-cased Red Chinese-made crap that was common at the time.
I suppose it might have better with the Czech-made “+P” ammunition intended for SMGs. But somehow that never got here along with the pistols.
I had thought it might make a good “trail gun”. I ended up falling back on my default choice for that, a medium-frame .357 Magnum revolver with a 6″ barrel. The Taurus 627 Tracker seven-shot being the latest iteration thereof.
Some things automatics just don’t do very well.
clear ether
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Many years ago, a friend of mine bought a vz.52, complete with its holster and cleaning rod. The pistol was in virtually mint/as new condition. He never used it with steel-cased Chinese ammo, only with Yugoslav and Polish (if I remember correctly) ammo, including some commercial PP boxes in-between. He experienced indifferent accuracy, with the best results coming from Yugoslav ammo (which was perhaps hotter than the Polish counterpart). After he spent his small stock of Yugo military 7.62×25 stash, he also reported frequent reliability issues. He also had to replace the firing pin at some moment…
P.S.: He also complained about the (according to him) very heavy trigger-pull.
A Tokarev in different shape made in Czech Republic which sucks!.. Interesting…
I must warn you that, during testing, some 7,62×25 cartridges with steel case and 0,66 g powder charge were fired though prototype (developed with Czechoslovak sub-machine guns in mind). These give different friction against chamber and therefore elements sustained greater forces during extracting.
“(…)like the Tokarev it has no manual safety(…)”
This sounds like potential problem for replacement of vz.52 https://modernfirearms.net/en/handguns/handguns-en/czech-republic-semi-automatic-pistols/cz-52-eng/ which sported one. Switching from older to newer would require users to unlearn safety usage. Also it is unlikely they would replace all vz.52 examples in one day, so there would be period when both were in use and during that there would be need to run different trainings for each.
>>After about 2,000 rounds the recoil spring wore out and at 4,500 rounds the frame cracked. At 5,075 rounds a second crack developed in the frame and the testing ended. <<
Putting pistols used specifically for training purposes aside, I wonder how many rounds were – on average – fired from a pistol issued during WW2? Obviously, the standard deviation was enormous, and I imagine that some of pistols were never fired (or used just once, to blow the owner's brains out) while others (like those of Katyn massacre perpetrators) had very busy times.
But perhaps some estimates do exist for frontline officer's – such as platoon or company commander – sidearms?…
Still the XM9 program of 1985 required an endurance of the gun, “on average not inferior to 5000 rounds”.
Of the guns tested, only the Beretta 92F and the H&K P7 reached 7000 rounds (end of the test) with all three samples tested without cracking a frame.
Pistol use is probably like the Powder River up in Montana in August. Average depth of a few inches, but with some few very deep holes of six feet and more. Still 5,000 rounds through an officer’s pistol seems very high indeed. I would guess the requirement is because the army envisioned the weapon staying in service for long years spread across multiple users
Today, a pistol lasting only 5000 rounds would be unacceptable. The threshold of acceptability for a service gun starts, let’s say, at 20000. But still in the ’80s it was all that was requested.
I suspect that all y’all would be shocked and dismayed to learn the primary wear factor for the average service pistol.
It sure as hell isn’t “being fired”, unless that specific pistol has the misfortune to be issued to someone like Delta Force, where they’ll actually be “shot to death”.
Average M9 pistol was probably issued as the sole pistol assigned to a company, issued to the company commander. Said commander would have to qualify annually or every two years, depending on where the unit fell on the STRAC tables. On average, said pistol might have to leave the Arms Room once, maybe twice a month for some bit of admin duty, or to serve as what amounted to a prop for the commander to wear to some training event. Since they don’t issue blanks for a pistol, most training events didn’t see them being fired, at all.
Annual qualification maybe means 30-50 rounds going through the pistol, being optimistic as hell. So, over the course of a thirty-year issue life, said commander’s sidearm might see 1,500 rounds fired through it.
So, what kills the pistols? What causes most of the wear?
Cleaning.
Usually performed by the truly inept, because few of the officers in question that are issued the things really know what they’re doing with a pistol. I had maybe one guy, over the course of a 25 year career, who I’d say was truly proficient, and he generally shot his own Colt Gold Cup National Match pistol for qualification because the one we were issued for the unit was an M1911 that had been rebuilt about six times over the course of its lifespan (which included upgrading it to M1911A1…), and while that pistol was still within specification for issue and deployment, it was better suited for use as a paperweight than a handgun. If you went to group that damn thing by putting it into a Ransom Rest, which we did, the resultant group size was roughly 1 meter at 25 feet. It was, to be quite frank about it, shot to shiite.
Many of the M1911A1 pistols I observed in service during the 1980s were just like that, and how they got that way is beyond me, because the majority of them simply did not get shot all that often.
I did, however, happen to see some of the brand-new M9 pistols over the course of their lifespan from “new, as-issued, in box” to “Yeah, this thing is trash…” because I happened to serve in the unit that got issued them, which then turned them over to a successor unit that turned them over to yet a third successor unit, meaning that I saw said pistol issued to a commander and then encountered it again some fifteen years later in the hands of one of our medics. I know that for a fact because I still had some of the inventory sheets I’d typed up, back in the day, when we first got it.
I don’t know what the actual round count was for that poor thing, but it couldn’t have been that high, being issued as it was as a sidearm in an Engineer outfit of some flavor or another over the years between “New” and “Holy f*ck, what happened to this thing…?”
I think the most stressful thing that happened to that pistol, over the course of its lifespan in the Army, was being cleaned incessantly by the inept, who’d do just about anything to get it through the Arms Room, where the Armorer almost always treated it as an afterthought, anyway.
The average pistol isn’t going to be fired all that much, but it will be cleaned to death in a few short decades that don’t see it actually used all that much. To be absolutely honest, in almost all cases, you’d really be better off issuing a “Blue Gun” replica to go out on the majority of training events, leaving the real guns in the Arms Room for the relatively few times they actually need to be shot.
I am struggling to understand why this model failed. It was not like nobody had ever developed a pistol for 7.62×25. While there are problems with the VZ-52, it did not break up on firing.
I don’t understand why this effort failed. It is not like that nobody had ever developed a pistol for 7.62×25. While the VZ52 had problems, it at least did not break apart when fired.
Two prototypes made.
Before CAD (and partly after it), if the first prototypes of a mechanical device were put into an endurance test, there were little expectations for them to pass it. It was specifically to see what part would have failed first, so to strenghten it.
Simply, at that point, the Army decided they had not that urge to replace the CZ52.
Any ’50s semiauto did break apart at relatively low round count. Maybe not at 4500, but some of them reaching 7000 was the exception, not the rule.