Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today in
Karlovac, Croatia, at the HS Produkt factory
taking a look at some of the developmental pistols
in the factory's production history.
And today we have come to the point
where we're taking a look at the HS-95.
This is the pistol that followed the Croatian PHP.
If you haven't seen the previous video on the PHP, it might be worth taking a look
just to get the proper context for where this is coming from.
The PHP was successfully produced,
but it was a pistol that had a lot of technical issues and it was expensive to manufacture.
And even before production on the PHP ended in 1995,
IM Metal (the name of the factory at that point, they are now HS Produkt),
IM Metal was already working on developing something that was
newer, modern, and a lot more economical to produce.
Now that they'd got their feet wet with actual serial pistol production,
they had a much better idea of how to design a pistol for production.
And so what they did was actually look to Zastava in Serbia,
they took the CZ 99 pistol and essentially copied it,
but made it look a bit more like a SIG 229.
So they made the gun a little bit smaller and changed some of the aesthetics a bit.
Partly this was to reduce bulk and partly it was, frankly, to make it look a bit less Serbian.
Serbia was not the most popular country in the world in Croatia in 1995, weirdly.
And so the gun that comes into production is now a simple Browning tilting barrel
instead of the old P38-style pivoting locking block.
It is far simpler to take apart, it's a far more durable pistol.
And it would be really more successful in virtually all regards.
So let's take a look at what this is and how it works.
Where the PHP was a pistol with some significant character to it, for better or worse,
the HS-95 has moved squarely into the form of standard, traditional, modern, hammer-fired pistol.
Or certainly at the time in the late '90s. So.
One cool element to this is the controls are completely ambidextrous.
We have a magazine release on both sides here,
and it can be pushed either direction, doesn't matter.
The magazine is 15 rounds, double-stack single-feed.
Interestingly, it is almost exactly the same magazine body as the PHP.
However, this uses a magazine catch that is only located on the front wall of the magazine.
And that's how it's easily made ambidextrous.
The PHP has a catch on the side, so you cannot use an HS-95 magazine in a PHP,
but you actually can use a PHP magazine in an HS-95.
I don't know if that was something that was specifically useful
to the Croatian army, but it might have been.
The other control here is this single lever,
and ... the concept here is largely taken from the Walther P88.
This is a combination of de-cocker ... and also slide release.
So there you go, two functions in one lever, that's nice.
And the lever is present on both sides of the gun.
So the only thing that's not ambidextrous is this, and that's simply a takedown lever.
The gun is pretty wide and bulky in the hand,
partly because of the magazine, and partly because there are some rather thick grips on it.
The slide is shortened a bit compared to the CZ 99, it is like I said, more like a SIG P229 length.
Basic fixed sights there, nothing to move around.
Disassembly is quite nice and straightforward.
We're just going to lock the slide open, pop the disassembly lever down there,
and then the slide comes right off the frame.
Pretty much nothing out of the ordinary here.
And in the slide you've got a mainspring (not captive for what it's worth),
and a barrel, and the slide itself.
Worth pointing out here the barrel, like the PHPs, is screwed into its chamber extension.
And this is because at this point HS Produkt
still didn't have the tooling to hammer forge their own barrels.
So they were buying barrels from outside, I believe this was from Lothar Walther,
and then screwing the barrel into their own manufacture chamber area.
That process would in fact last through just the early bit of production of the HS2000,
before they were able to bring barrel manufacturing in-house.
It's actually one of the cool things about HS Produkt today is that they manufacture
essentially everything in-house from slides and frames and barrels and springs and small parts,
to even elements like having like a mini-factory within a factory
that makes all of the ... cutting tools for their machines.
Let's take a quick look at the markings. We have an HS little logo in the grip panels.
And then we have HS again up on the slide.
There is no "95" anywhere on the gun, it's just marked HS.
The serial number here is higher than actual production
because this is a military specified serial number.
Not something that was specifically assigned by the factory
to count the number of HS-95s that they made.
And on the right side the only marking we have is Calibre 9x19 on the barrel.
Production of the HS-95 would run from 1995 until 1998.
This is once again a pistol that they started working on a replacement for
very shortly after actually putting it into production.
They knew that there were still improvements that could be made.
In particular they wanted to get away from metal frames entirely,
and move to a polymer-framed design, which they would do with the follow-up HS2000.
At any rate, this was adopted by the Croatian army,
in fact it was only sold to the Croatian army.
As far as I know, there were no export contracts of the HS-95.
A total of somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 were manufactured.
Although, as you saw, the serial number isn't actually a sequential production number of HS-95.
There were a number of small incremental improvements
made during the production process, but nothing of significant substance.
So there's basically only one pattern of HS-95s.
So pretty cool to get a chance to take a look at one of these.
Because there were no export contracts, they are really quite rare to find outside of Croatia today.
So a big thanks to HS Produkt for giving me access to this one to film for you guys.
We'll have one more video in the series, and that will cover
the polymer-framed HS2000s that followed this.
Thanks for watching.