Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company
taking a look at the very first Czech Army official pistol.
So Czechoslovakia gained its independence after World War One,
and they set about wanting to really standardise
and improve their military hardware.
When it came to pistols they had kind of a smattering of old
Austro-Hungarian equipment. They had Rast & Gasser revolvers.
They had some, you know, some old 1907 Roth-Steyr pistols, probably some Steyr-Hahn pistols.
And they wanted something standardised: basic, simple, cheap, easy to afford.
And so they turned to a weapons factory called Zbrojovka Praga in Prague.
This was a company that originally had made sporting guns and hunting rifles. And in 1918, right at the end of the war,
... that company got a new employee. And that would be Václav Holek, who is one of the two Holek brothers
... probably the most notable and famous of Czech arms designers.
Václav would go on to design the ZB-26 machine gun, one of the best light machine guns ever made.
Well, in 1918 he shows up at the Praga factory and two pistols result.
One is a 1921 pattern little .25 ACP folding trigger gun, which is pretty interesting and cool,
and which I also have a video on. So I'll link to that at the end if you'd like to take a look at it.
And the other is this, the Model of 1919.
This is sometimes referred to as a Model 1921 and there's no actual designation marked on it anywhere.
But the first orders for it did in fact come in 1919, so that's the designation I'm going to use.
This was intended for sale to basically everybody, the army and the police,
and they were also sold on the commercial market as well, so.
While in kind of size and form, it's very similar to the FN 1910, it differs substantially on the inside.
So let's take a look.
One Praga Model of 1919. Not exactly a particularly handy pistol, like,
they had some work to do, some learning to do on pistol ergonomics here.
This back strap is not really all that well designed, it's a little clunky in form factor.
You can see the similarity to the FN 1910. Almost exactly the same size, they're both .32 ACP, they're both blowback.
The 1919 has a 7 round magazine to it. And like I said, it's very different on the inside.
Before I go further, I will point out that apparently some of the early guns actually had two magazine catches,
so that you could do that sort of British style thing where you have the magazine inserted,
but not high enough to actually chamber a cartridge. This particular example doesn't, so.
We have some very simple markings here on the left side of the slide. Zbrojovka Praga, Praha. So Prague.
And then we have a military acceptance proof mark there on the front, dated 1922.
The other side just has the serial number, once on the slide and once on the frame.
Now the style of proof marks would change a couple times over the years that these were in production.
And the early guns (you saw this one's 10,000 - so relatively late),
the early guns actually had a slide legend up here that was written in a kind of fancy script font.
We've got this kind of cool top mounted ejection port, and we actually have relatively large sights on this thing.
Which is an interesting change of pace from what you would normally get.
Now to disassemble this. Obviously we got our safety back here. I'm going to open the slide up,
and, there we go, lock the safety. That locks the slide back.
You can see the grooves on the barrel like an FN 1910,
what I'm going to do here is rotate the barrel, that is going to disengage its locking lugs from the frame.
On a typical pistol, like an FN 1910, doing this would allow the slide to come forward under spring tension.
However, Holek (let's undo the safety),
Holek has an interesting cool little feature in here, namely
when you do this the recoil spring is ... compressed, but it's locked inside the front of the slide.
And so you don't have to worry about trying to recompress the spring to reassemble the gun.
Or potentially losing the spring. That's pretty cool.
Now I could rotate the barrel and pull the barrel out the back and get the spring.
But I don't need to, so I'm going to take advantage of this feature and leave it alone.
The other really cool thing that we have in the slide is this breech block which just drops right out.
It's got two little lugs that lock it in place.
And this gives us the bolt face, the extractor, the firing pin and its spring all in one convenient little package.
Serial numbered to match the gun. And any sort of assembly that you need to do or maintenance,
all you have to do is worry about this. You don't have to try and deal with the entire slide.
Taking off the grips so you can see what's underneath here, we have a pretty simple sort of system.
This has a shrouded hammer back here. And the way the safety works is also actually kind of neat.
When you rotate this up it actually grabs the hammer and just holds it in place.
So you can pull the trigger all you want, but the hammer is not going to go anywhere.
I can rotate that down and then
gently drop the hammer
and you can see when I rotate the safety
it comes up into position where it would catch in this semicircular cutout and hold the hammer in place.
The fire control group is pretty basic and standard. We have this vertical bar, that's the out of battery safety.
So the little point up there drops into this little notch in the slide when the slide is fully in battery.
So if the slide is not in battery, this gets pushed down. And then the trigger doesn't do anything.
When it is in battery the trigger will press back onto that, which will drop the hammer, right there.
You can see in the back here we have a coil spring, that's the hammer spring.
And then this little flat spring is just the return spring on
this guy. So that's all there is.
(Get back in there.) ...
Two last things to point out here. One, we have some sort of rack mark or unit mark on the back strap of the gun.
It's not that uncommon to find these with Czech unit marks, Czechoslovakian unit marks, although usually
they're up here and usually they'll have a little more information to them than just 11.
So I'm not sure exactly what that designates.
The other interesting thing is ... I mean, these were used by the military, and they were used all the way up until World War Two.
This one in particular actually has capture papers from a US serviceman in World War Two who
captured it as a trophy and brought it back to the US.
Initial ... military orders for these pistols were in 1919, there was then a big follow up order in 1921.
And pistols continued to be produced for several more years. This is a 1922 date as you saw, I've seen some '23s as well.
Ultimately in 1926 the factory went out of business. They were foreclosed on
and shut down. It sounds like basically due to incompetent management.
Holek would move to the ZB factory, as I said,
where he would work on his machine guns and would go on to have a very successful career.
But there are only really two notable pistols that came out of this Prague factory.
There's this one and that little one-handed folding trigger design.
So for folks who are interested in the Czech military I think this is a pretty cool pistol.
Really kind of a little-known under-the-radar example of the very first actual formal Czech Army pistol.
So very cool to get a chance to take a look at this one here.
If you'd like to know more about it, you can take a look at it on Rock Island's auction catalogue.
You can also check out their Instagram page and YouTube channel, I have links to both of those in the description text below.
Thanks for watching.