Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today
at the Royal Army Museum in Brussels, part of
Belgium's War Heritage Institute, taking a look at
some of the interesting and historically relevant
firearms from their reference collection.
Today we have a pair of Vigneron submachine guns.
A little while ago I did a video on the M2 Vigneron, and I thought this would be a really good
opportunity to show you the differences between the M1 and the M2 models.
So the Vigneron was first adopted into Belgian military service in 1953.
And within the first year about 21,300 were made of the M1 pattern.
1954, they then adopt three separate ... modifications to the gun that make it into the M2 pattern.
So let's take a look at what those three changes were.
So the most distinctive element of the M1 to M2 change
was the addition of a big front sight protector on the M2.
You can see here how sort of, not quite sure I would say flimsy,
but how small and potentially ... damaged that front sight blade is.
And that quickly became recognised as a problem and so they added this protector.
And the way they did that is simply to crimp it into the front slot
in the muzzle compensator there. So that's number one.
Number two is a change to the rear sight.
Originally these guns were equipped with rear aperture sights,
but the M2 went with an open notch instead.
Essentially just cutting off the top half of that original rear aperture sight.
The rear aperture on a submachine gun is of debatable utility.
If the gun starts moving at all it can be very difficult to maintain
a sight picture through an aperture on a gun like this.
And you also have potential issues in low light of having a hard time picking up a target.
And it's easier to do that with an open notch sight, so there really are arguments both ways
and in this case they decided to go with the open notch as the standard.
And number three was the locking tab for the dust cover here.
That dust cover pops open when the gun is being fired.
And the tab that holds it shut on the M1 was just a very simple narrow square tab
that came down here and locked underneath a little latch in this reinforcing side plate.
Well, the problem was this was a bit too fragile and easy to snap off or come out.
And so the M2 pattern replaced it with a much larger plate here
that was riveted in place. So that's number three.
I suppose actually the final change would be to point out that the M1s were all marked M1.
The actual production M2s, like you saw in my previous video, were marked M2.
When they ... went to this update, they retrofitted most of the M1s out there to the M2 pattern.
And when they did so they would over-stamp a "2" like you see right here.
So this would have obviously originally been made as an M1.
You can see the "M1", but the serial number is well under the 21,300 original M1 production.
Also worth pointing out while we're here, A.B.L. is a Belgian Army property mark.
And that stands for
So this ... can be read as French and Dutch, both official languages in Belgium.
You'll also find a couple of other potential markings here,
the one that we used in a previous video was F.P. and that's
You'll also find a C.B. for
as well as a couple of other much scarcer ones.
Total production of the Vigneron was about 100,000 guns.
So a lot of these were originally M1s,
but of course most of the M1s were retrofitted to the new M2 standard.
If you're interested in the Vigneron, I would say definitely check out
my previous video on the M2 and also the video we have of the M2 out at the range.
These are cool guns to see actually shooting, they are guns that are very rare in the US.
So a big thanks to the Belgian Army Museum for the opportunity
to pull these two out of their reference collection to show to you guys.
They have fantastic [displays] here, ... extensive galleries of uniforms,
small arms, heavy arms, vehicles, all sorts of cool stuff here at the museum on public display.
If you are ever in Brussels and have the opportunity,
I would highly recommend taking the time to come check it out.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.