Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are coming
to the conclusion of our ongoing series
on Croatian semi-auto pistols.
So today we have the HS 2000 from IM Metal,
which became, over the course of this
pistol's production, became HS Produkt.
And there was actually a surprising amount of variation
in the HS 2000, especially at the very beginning of its development.
So we've got a couple of different iterative versions that we're going to take a look at.
But to recap a little bit, when we left this story last we were talking about the HS-95,
which is ... essentially a modified copy of the Zastava CZ 99.
This is a pistol that was adopted by the Croatian military
kind of because they were stuck with PHPs and wanted something better.
The HS-95 is a pistol that was never really adopted by Croatian police forces.
Those police forces still had a bunch of guns like CZ 75s that they were quite happy with.
And the police were in a position where they actually used their handguns
much more than the military did, and they were a little more
demanding about what they were willing to adopt.
Well, IM Metal really would like to get its pistols fully into Croatian national service.
And they recognised that there are some problems with the HS-95.
It's an investment cast frame, they've had some trouble with the frames cracking.
They've had some trouble with some other parts breakage.
They're figuring out how to make pistols, but this clearly isn't the best one.
And at this point it's like 1998,
and the way of the future is going to be polymer-framed service pistols.
And so IM Metal decides it needs to develop a polymer-framed pistol.
So they go to a number of other authorities in Croatia.
They talked to some of the military departments, they talked to the Technical University in Croatia,
Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture School that they talked to.
They get all the experts in the country together to figure out,
"How do we build a polymer-framed pistol?"
Or rather, a polymer frame, because they had the top end of the gun pretty well figured out.
It was this polymer frame that they had no experience with,
and that's what they needed to do, and they successfully do this.
By 1999 they've got the first guns basically prototyped out,
they are starting to develop what would be the HS 2000.
So as it was initially developed this was a pistol that was intended for Croatian military,
Croatian police, and hopefully export commercial sales.
It is a pretty standard gun by the standards of the day,
pretty typical gun by the standards of the day. It is a Browning tilting barrel system,
locked breech, 9mm Parabellum, striker fired, polymer framed.
So let's take a look at these up close and see how they started it,
how it adapted to be imported into the US, and how it ultimately reached its final development.
This is one of the very first iterations of the HS 2000.
In fact it's so early that it doesn't actually say HS 2000 on it anywhere.
This is the version of the pistol that was made for domestic sale in Croatia.
For sale to the police, sale to the military, sale to anyone else
... who they could interest in buying a pistol.
So note that it has slide serrations top and bottom at the rear.
We have no texturing on the grip panels themselves. It is marked HS 2000 on the frame here.
(I should have said - it doesn't have any slide markings up here.)
There is surface texturing on the front and back of the grip, but not on the sides.
As far as safety mechanisms go we have a grip safety only.
And that does lock the slide, so I can't actually open it any further than this
unless I have depressed the [safety]. It of course also blocks the trigger.
There is no trigger safety on here, it wasn't deemed necessary at that point.
The only other control there is a magazine release, which is ambidextrous.
We have a 15 round magazine. There were also 10 round versions of this magazine made
when these were imported into the US, but this is the original 15 rounder.
The sights are pretty simple, just a rear square aperture.
Note the white centred line on the rear sight.
The rear sight is adjustable for windage in its dovetail there.
The front sight is actually integrally milled into the slide and not adjustable in any way.
Now to disassemble this we're going to lock the slide open,
which of course requires depressing the grip safety. ...
Then I can take the disassembly lever, lift it up like that.
Drop the slide down, pull the trigger to release the striker,
and the slide comes off the front of the frame.
The mechanics here on the slide are pretty basic,
HS had a really good grasp of how to do this from all of their work on the HS-95s.
We have a nested ... recoil spring setup, and that is captive which is nice.
The barrel just slides out the back.
We talked about this on the HS-95 video, but you can see here
that the barrel and the ... barrel extension are separate parts.
That is because at this point IM Metal as a company
still didn't have its own barrel making infrastructure, so they were buying barrels
from I believe Lothar Walther,
and then threading them into their own barrel extensions.
This button here is a safety. So if that button is up the striker can't go forward,
firing pin can't protrude out the front, can't fire.
When you pull the trigger, three things actually happen here.
One is this disconnector goes forward, we'll talk about that in a moment.
One is this finger lifts up and this sear drops down.
So this sear is what has been holding ... the striker back.
So when the sear drops, the striker is going to come forward.
This finger lifting up ... is going to push the safety plunger here up.
Which is going to allow the striker to go forward ...
and then the firing pin protrudes and the pistol fires.
And once the striker comes back this is pushed back down by its spring,
returning to a safe condition.
Coming back to this guy, this is the disconnector.
So once you pull the trigger, when the slide starts moving it's going to pop this down,
which means that the ... trigger is not going to reset
until you release the trigger. So that's the semi-auto disconnector.
One of the cool features about the HS 2000s is that the frames
are actually marked with the date of manufacture on the inside.
So once you take the slide off you can see that round stamping there.
(Get a little light on it to help a little bit.)
In the centre of that stamp is the number 99,
and that is the year, so this is a 1999 production.
And that arrow is pointing at 5, that's the fifth month,
this is a May of 1999 production frame.
So that's just a really cool data point that you can get on HS 2000s.
And I should mention we have a serial number tag,
a metal tag embedded in the polymer frame down here as well.
So there's your serial number, and there's your date of production.
With the pistol in production, IM Metal is very interested in finding export customers.
They want to sell as many of these pistols as they can to as many people as possible.
And in the year 2000 they sign a deal with Intrac of Knoxville, Tennessee,
to sell 10,000 HS 2000 pistols to the United States.
So these all get exported to the US, and this brings up a couple of quick problems.
So in its original ... configuration the HS 2000 actually didn't meet US import requirements.
... It's a somewhat complicated system, but you have to get a number of points
on a handgun design for it to be importable into the US.
And you get points for things like safety features, size, more weight.
It makes a gun easier to import, but largely safety features.
And the original HS 2000 didn't have enough points.
So they made a couple of changes to the gun to make it importable.
... One distinctive feature which isn't really directly related to import safety,
is the addition of a trigger safety here.
So you'll notice on the first ones there is no trigger safety.
This is what we would call the first generation, the export model of HS 2000,
that has a trigger safety in it.
It has a loaded chamber indicator,
which you can see is not present on the earlier slide - that gives it more points.
And we have this thumb depression in the grip, which also did not exist prior.
This legally counts as a target thumb rest,
and that gives the gun more points to make it importable.
We are also going to see a number of changes to the markings.
So on the slide we now have Intrac, that's required, you have to have the importer.
The country of origin is marked there, "Made in Croatia", serial number is now on the slide.
And on the other side we now have the model, HS 2000.
The manufacturer, which is IM Metal, and the calibre. These are all US import requirements.
The serial number remains ... on an embedded metal tag in the frame.
So these are being imported during the assault weapons ban in the US.
So you'll note we have a magazine here that is marked at 4, 7 and 10 rounds.
It's a limited 10 round capacity magazine to meet US laws.
There are a couple of other rather subtle changes that we can see on the inside of the guns.
So this is the very first frame, note that it has these full length rails.
They're not really acting on the slide,
but they're sort of acting as a dust cover behind the slide.
So the slide ... sits down like that.
And you can see these rails extend up behind the slide itself.
Well, the problem was those are really kind of fragile and they tended to break off.
So on the first gen export guns they just milled those down.
Get rid of them, they're unnecessary, they don't really protect from anything,
and they do break, so those were got rid of.
So if we take this apart and take a quick look at the production date stamp on this one,
this ... looks like May of 2000, so just about a year later.
The sights have also been changed a bit. We still have this same square notch,
but now instead of a white stripe we have two white dots.
The front sight is still a single white dot,
but it is now windage adjustable, so it's dovetailed into the slide.
Even as this export contract was being produced,
changes and improvements were being made to the design.
This is a constant development cycle on a fairly fast time frame.
So we now have what is usually called by collectors ... a second generation gun,
but it's really just sort of a late variant on this.
And there were a number of distinctive features added though to the frame.
So first off we have grip texturing here, it's not a Grip Zone yet,
but we have textured panels on the sides of the grip.
And, more substantially, we have an accessory rail added to the front.
So the first generation does not have it, the second generation does.
The slide serrations would also undergo a number of sequential changes here.
So on the early gun we have narrow serrations on top and bottom.
The second generation, we have wider serrations and only on the top.
That's a pretty nitpicky thing, but they were making a number of changes
in this area trying to figure out what would work best.
And then we come to a third generation of the pistols.
Again, the mechanics are exactly the same as before,
we're just looking at a few iterative changes in some of the external features.
So the distinctive element of the third generation
is the fact that it now has front slide serrations.
In addition, the company has now renamed itself from IM Metal to HS Produkt.
So ... where the guns were originally marked IM Metal, they're now not marked at all.
It's just HS 2000 and the calibre.
And if we take a look at our polymer-moulded date code
here on the third generation gun, it is September of 2000.
Interestingly, at some point between March and June of 2000
you will start seeing serial numbers on the inside of this metal tag
as well as on the outside.
And what happened here is they started producing frames
faster than they could actually produce pistols.
So they would put a factory sequential serial number on the inside of the frame.
And then when the gun actually went to assembly,
the assembly production serial number was put on the outside of the frame.
And this number will match the slide and the barrel.
So basically the inside number is a ... factory control number
to keep tabs on the frame before it's actually been assembled into a gun.
I should also point out here, these pistols were imported by Sarco.
And so they've all been kind of crudely marked with Sarco's name, location,
and the country of origin. And the reason for that is the original Intrac export contract guns
had all of that information marked on the slides.
These guns came in much more recently and they were imported as I think, surplus police pistols.
And so they weren't originally marked with any of that American specific information,
so they had to be hand marked instead when they actually came in.
Now all of this development that you've seen here, all the different generations
and variations of these pistols have taken place over the course of literally only about a year.
The ... final third generation of the HS 2000 is in production by the fall of 2000.
What would happen to this gun is in 2001 they were approached by Springfield Armoury.
Springfield Armoury, a US company, was looking for a modern pistol to market.
And ... it's an interesting story. One of their sales guys actually ran into
an IM Metal (at the time) sales guy at a conference,
they were both bored out of their minds and started talking.
And it turns out one needed a pistol, and one needed a market.
Kind of actually a little similar to the story of John Browning and FN.
But in 2002 HS Produkt (now) signs a contract with Springfield,
and that begins the massive production explosion of these pistols,
now under the name XD for eXtreme Duty.
And since that contract was signed and imports into the US started,
there have been a proliferation of different models of the XD
in a variety of calibres, sizes, configurations,
to a grand total of something on the order of 6 million pistols produced.
And this became a massive windfall for HS Produkt in Croatia.
It allowed them to massively expand their manufacturing facilities,
they today have a huge plant in Croatia.
And it frankly allowed them to have the working capital
to do things like develop the VHS-2 rifle program for the Croatian military.
Which is now also since started being imported into the US as the Springfield Hellion.
Their cooperation with Springfield
has been immensely profitable and successful for both entities.
So I'd like to give a big thanks to HS Produkt.
This particular video is being filmed here in the US, but the rest of this series
was all done at HS Produkt with the generous support of ... them providing me
some of the early versions of their pistols, some of their prototype pistols, to take a look at.
It's pretty cool, a lot of companies don't really like having their
wordy, not so successful, early stuff shown in public and discussed.
And HS was more than happy for me to show you guys
all sorts of unsuccessful guns that they worked on
that were the lead up to their final and very successful designs.
So hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.