Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten Weapons dot com.
I'm Ian, I'm here today at the James Julia auction house
taking a look at some of the firearms coming up for sale
in their October of 2016 firearms auction.
And today we're going to take a look at a craft-made North Vietnamese pistol.
Now, most of the standard arms used by the North Vietnamese
in the Vietnam war were some actually really good condition, well made Chinese military aid
so AKs, SKSs, Tokarev pistols. Good stuff.
However, at the opposite end of that spectrum, there were indigenous, craft-made firearms.
These were situations where guys really, apparently couldn't get their hands on anything factory-produced
in China or elsewhere, and they needed firearms, and so they resorted to what they had.
And this one is really interesting because it shows both manufacturing and engineering techniques
or lack thereof, that are stereotypical of this sort of pistol, and it's a neat one to look at.
So, let's just dive straight in and take a closer look at this and pull it apart.
Alright, so I've got this Vietnamese pistol here side-by-side with a proper very nice American 1911.
And if you squint, they look pretty much the same.
So I've adjusted the camera out of focus to give you that perspective.
From here, yup, cool--you have made a 1911.
Now, when we actually look at it up close, we'll start to see some issues.
Obvious things we can start with, we know this is a copy of the 1911.
All the distinctive features: the grips, these cutouts, slide stop, magazine, safety, hammer.
This is clearly where someone gave whoever made this, we'll call him "the craftsman"
Someone gave the craftsman a 1911
Gave them this, and said "make me more of these"
And the guy said "OK, I don't really know how that works, but I see what the pieces are"
"And I can take it apart, and we'll do our best here."
So the hammer, for example, still works.
It does exactly what it's supposed to, but the profile is a bit different than the 1911
Safety: total failure. We have a complete failure on the safety
because it pivots on a pin here, and is held in place by a screw and it does not move
and it does nothing whatsoever.
But it does look like a safety, it's got that little thumb stop
maybe the guy thought that was like a thumb rest, for your hand.
The magazine catch unfortunately is missing from this pistol, we'll mention that right now
and it looks like it was made the same way as a standard 1911.
Someone has added this little aluminum plate
that simply holds the magazine in place.
So that's why that's on there, someone added that after the gun came back to the US.
Now the slide stop looks correct
but it doesn't offer you any way to hold the pistol open.
There is no slide lock on this pistol.
That is simply a pin that holds the barrel in place.
So this is a single-function piece on this gun. On a 1911, it's a multi-function piece
that also acts as a slide stop.
The serial number on this is two hundred thirty thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven.
I am extremely dubious that they ever made two hundred thousand of these.
I suspect that this is someone who looked at a 1911 and said "ah, there are six numbers stamped on the side"
"I'm not sure what they mean, but I guess they're important, so we'll stamp six numbers on the side of this one."
And that's what you get there.
Unlike some craft-made pistols, this one does actually have functional sights.
And the rear sight is pretty much just as small and useless as on an original 1911.
and if we look at the back of the slide we can see it's not very precisely manufactured
but we do have the extractor plunger, and we have a firing pin, and the firing pin even works.
If we look at the muzzle, we can see it's sort of halfway there.
It doesn't have a bushing, but it does have this textured recoil spring plug.
Although the reason that this was textured was so that you can push it in,
rotate the bushing out of the way, and remove it.
And you can't do any of this on this pistol because the front of the slide is all one piece.
Now, if you look closely, you can see that there is a seam there.
This gun is brazed together, it's not welded.
As far as I can tell, I don't think it's welded anywhere.
This is manufactured with crude tools: mill, lathe, files I suspect.
And then the pieces are actually brazed together.
So if we look down here, all this yellow color you see is brazing.
Wherever two pieces are fitted together, that's what you'll see.
You can see it here in the front strap,
the back strap has a bunch of it, they made that out of a whole bunch of different pieces
there is no grip safety, by the way.
They did put in a beaver tail.
But no functional grip safety.
No functional safety of any kind, really.
One of the worrisome features, were you actually considering shooting this,
is that when you pull the slide back, the barrel does not move.
On the 1911, the barrel is locked into the slide,
through a short-recoil tilting barrel system.
This appears to be straight blowback.
So we'll take it apart, and take a closer look, and find out if that's actually how it's put together.
Because it is a 45 caliber pistol, so if it's straight blowback, you don't want to shoot it.
Let's just put it that way.
Now, disassembly is actually like a 1911.
Because "the craftsman" presumably had a 1911 as a pattern, at least to some extent.
So I pull the slide back to match that disassembly catch,
then I can pull this pin out.
Ah, right.
I should take the magazine out as well.
Loosen that screw a bit, so we can rotate this keeper out of the way.
"The craftsman" did not have to make a magazine
because they were able to use a captured, lost, or abandoned US GI 1911 magazine.
Alright, now we've got the pin out.
The slide and barrel just slide right off the front.
That's nice and easy.
Now in order to remove the recoil spring,
it doesn't come out the front, it's got that plug, but it can't come out the front.
So what I'm going to do instead is pull it off to the side there
There's our recoil spring and guide rod.
This isn't going to come out the front either
but I do need this, which looks very much like a 1911 spring front end.
And then the barrel lifts out the back, like a 1911.
There we go!
Now, he got this much right, how bad could it be?
Well, there are no locking lugs.
They should be up on the top surface, back here.
And there's nothing. There's not a swinging link.
There's just a pin hole to hold the barrel in place in the frame.
While the slide cycles back and forth on top of it.
In fact, if we look in the barrel, it's just smoothbore, it's not even rifled.
From a manufacturing perspective, things get even more interesting here.
If you look, you can see a bit of a half moon seam right there.
The breechblock, this guy
was made as an independent part
and then the slide here was folded over
and you can see they brazed it together here
It's folded over, and then the breechblock is put into it as a separate piece.
Now the firing pin does actually work.
Just enough on this gun works, that I think if you'd actually try loading and firing it,
it would go so far as to detonate a cartridge, and then who knows what would happen at that point.
But I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be good.
We have the same type of ad-hoc manufacture on the frame.
Where you can see the trigger group is built on a pair of plates here
that are mounted inside the main frame plates.
Again, we have more evidence of brazing.
Lots of multiple parts put together up here.
This block is also a separate block
made and then dropped into the frame, and brazed in place.
So this is a combination of good and bad.
On the one hand, dear lord you do not want to pull the trigger on this thing
because who knows what's going to happen when you do.
On the other hand,
the people who built this gun did so with a minimum of tooling
and knowledge and understanding.
And yet, they were able to put together a remarkably good product.
As bad as it is, the vast majority of people couldn't do anything nearly this effective.
Certainly not in the circumstances in which this gun would have actually been made
in the jungle, or in a small shop
in North Vietnam.
Now, I took the left grip off because I was curious about this, and I saw something underneath it.
And this is another really interesting element here.
And it's a perfect example of someone who copies something but doesn't understand what it does.
This is a system which is supposed to be a safety mechanism.
You'll see this on a lot of Spanish guns.
What happens here is this piece rotates up and down
and that rounded top section fits
in a recess in the slide right there
Now, the idea is that if this piece is not pushed up, the gun won't fire.
And if the slide isn't all the way in battery there isn't a cutout, so the base of the slide will push this down.
Thus, rendering it impossible to fire out of battery, and safe.
Now on this gun, if we put the slide on
we can see that this does work.
So this piece goes up into that little recess
and then if the slide moves back a little bit, the bar comes down.
The problem is, whoever built this, they figured that out
but they didn't understand what was supposed to happen in the trigger mechanism.
Because on this gun, the trigger will run just fine no matter where this piece is.
So I can push it all the way up
the gun will fire
I can push it all the way down
and the gun will fire.
I guess I can push it down far enough to have an effect
Yeah, that's what it's supposed to do, to push the trigger bar out of alignment with the sear back here.
However, the execution on this pistol is such that nothing will ever push it this far down.
So it does nothing.
What's also interesting about this is you don't actually have this system on the 1911.
If we look at the bottom of a 1911 slide
we have a cutout here, but that's for the manual safety.
There is no safety cutout like this.
The reason is, the 1911 didn't use this, but all of the Spanish Eibar pistols did.
This was a very typical system on blowback .32s.
So clearly whoever was building this gun also had access or experience
or some sort of understanding of Spanish pistol design.
Or maybe it could be other than Spanish, but Spanish is where you would see this the most.
But despite knowing what it was there, and knowing to add it
they didn't know how to actually make it do what it was supposed to do.
Thanks for watching, guys!
I hope you enjoyed the video.
I really like looking at these, I guess you'd say counterfeit.
But copied with the best intentions in mind, I suppose.
These firearms I find very interesting, just looking at how people try to make them
when they don't have a factory at hand, but they're trying to make the equivalent of a factory-made pistol.
If you'd like to own this one yourself, I would strongly recommend against firing it.
But it's a really cool addition to a 1911 collection, or a Vietnam war collection.
Take a look at the description text below
You'll find a link there to the James Julia auction catalog page on this pistol
You can take a look at their pictures and description
and if you're interested in it, place a bid over the phone, or live here at the auction.
Thanks for watching.