Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the National Firearms
Centre, part of the British Royal Armouries in Leeds,
where we are taking a look at a one-of-a-kind
experimental Sterling submachine gun. So the Sterling company had been chosen to manufacture
what was at the time actually called the Patchett Machine Carbine in World War Two, late in World War Two.
This was the ... submachine gun that would replace the Sten gun in British military service.
The Sten was really an emergency, you know, we need something right now, let's build it fast sort of design.
The Patchett was a much more refined, really a quite fantastic submachine gun.
And it became known as the Sterling submachine gun because it was manufactured by the Sterling engineering company.
Well, Sterling continued to make these guns after World War Two, the British military did in fact
adopt them as an overall replacement for the Sten as the L2 submachine gun in a variety of marks.
And they made a lot of sales to international customers, especially in the Middle East and the Far East.
A lot of people bought Sterling submachine guns, they had an excellent reputation.
However, by the 1960s Sterling was starting to get a bit worried about some of its competition.
In particular when the MP5 came out. This
you know, some of the other guns on the market that were for sale internationally, things like the Uzi,
Sterling had had co-existed reasonably well with the Uzi. But the MP5 was looking like it
may have been in a position to take over a lot of their customers that the Uzi hadn't really appealed to.
So in 1965 Sterling's chief design engineer, a guy named Frank Waters, who was also the
designer behind the SAR 80 and SAR 87 rifles, he came up with this concept.
And the idea was to have a submachine gun that would be cheaper and easier to produce.
Basically a stamped submachine gun instead of using as many of the more complex milled and forged parts of the Sterling.
They made one in ... approximately 1965. It is this one, they designated it the S11.
And, well, let's take a close look at it.
So the fundamental idea here was to do a stamped receiver gun.
So the base of of the S11 is square steel tubing. Now there are a number of
unusual elements to this, starting with the fact that the sights are offset to the left.
And, in fact, the barrel is actually offset to the left of the receiver for, as best as I can tell, no particular reason.
There doesn't seem to be any necessity for having this not all centre line, and yet they offset it.
I will point out on the Sterling the sights are right down the middle. So,
I guess they had to do that to clear the charging handle, but there would have been a lot of ways
that they could make a charging handle that wasn't interrupting the sight picture.
So the markings are a little bit difficult to read here on the magazine well,
because, well, they're stamped ... they're finished over in this stereotypical Sterling black crackle finish.
But what we have there is: Sterling SMG, 9mm, S11, which was their designation
(where exactly that came from, I don't know), and then serial number is EXP 001.
In terms of parts interchangeability, there are only two elements of the S11 that are interchangeable
with the original Sterling, that would be the internal trigger components and the magazine.
This does use a side mounted magazine like the Sterling, and this is an excellent magazine.
They were very wise not to get rid of that. Magazine release
is right here on the back of the magazine well.
Push that in and pull the magazine out, it's a little bit stiff.
When folded up, the stock looks like a standard Sterling stock. However, it's actually not.
It uses a different style of design with two pivoting legs,
and to my mind this is actually a better stock than the original Sterling.
It's easier to extend and to retract, and it's a very stable stock.
This actually wasn't Frank Water's design however. This was taken from one of George Lanchester's
prototype lightweight Lanchester submachine guns from about 1942.
Lanchester had been working at Sterling because Sterling was making the Lanchester submachine guns.
And so his prototype lightweight guns were in the possession of the Sterling company in the '60s, when this was made.
If you're interested in seeing more about those lightweight experimental Lanchesters,
I have a previous video on those that you can take a look at, and you can see this stock in there as well.
There's a selector lever on the side, just like a Sterling.
It's not marked, this is a prototype gun so that's not particularly surprising.
But rearward is safe, the middle position here is semi-auto, and the front position is full-auto.
That is combined with a grip safety as well.
The grip itself is a bit awkward. It's very square to use,
I would have preferred it to be a little bit more rounded, especially at the top.
And there's no particular reason that it has to be squared up, because
there's no mechanism down in here except for that guy.
Looking at it in a little more detail. The rear sight is a two-position rear aperture, flip between the two positions.
See the two detent holes right there to lock them in place.
And then the front sight has a couple of decent protective wings.
You can adjust it for elevation by screwing that front post in and out,
and then you adjust it for windage by screwing it side to side just a little bit.
Which will technically affect your elevation, but presumably not enough to make a difference.
One kind of neat aspect to the design is that it's actually made with two separate bayonet lugs, because
Sterling, presumably, figured that there were two different options that its customers might want to use.
So there is on the one hand the Number 5 rifle bayonet, which has a large ring to go around
the jungle carbine, the Number 5 flash hider. And that can mount here on the side,
right up in there,
there we go.
And you can see that this step on the muzzle nut is designed to fit that Number 5 rifle bayonet loop.
Or, you might have the ... small muzzle ring style of bayonet for the L1A1, the FAL.
Well if you wanted to use those, there's a bayonet lug on the bottom and
a muzzle ring lug right there, and this guy
can mount on right down there.
This one's really stiff to take on and off, so I'm going to leave it off because
we need to disassemble this submachine gun now.
Sorry, one last thing to point out. We do have a charging handle up here, and it is a ratcheting style
of charging handle. So if you pull it back partway and then slip and let go, it will ... hold the bolt
... partway open. That prevents you from accidentally firing the gun.
The best analog to this is the Uzi, which originally did not have a system like this, had a bunch of
negligent discharge, or accidental discharge, problems and they ... retrofitted on this style of
ratcheting charging handle to prevent further problems.
So, disassembly here is also actually kind of Uzi-like, we have a spring-loaded catch on the back.
Pull this back, and then we can actually take the whole top cover off,
like so.
So there's our ratcheting spring- loaded charging handle on the bottom.
And then we have a big recoil spring that's just kind of squished down in there.
To take the bolt out what we need to do is pull the bolt all the way back past the ejector, and then lift it out,
you have to hold the grip safety down to do that.
There we go.
There's the bolt, note that it is asymmetrical in both dimensions
because the barrel is offset to one side. There's our recoil spring.
From the top it is very obvious that the barrel is not
centred in the gun, which I still don't really understand why they would have done that.
To remove the barrel we have to unscrew this barrel nut.
There's a button there which you would expect to push inward to release tension on the barrel lugs,
instead you actually have
this little piece in here. And what you do is pull it towards the side of the receiver,
that actually rotates this little button, which disengages it from
the barrel threads. And it's actually kind of not tight enough to begin with, so
on this one it's not 100% functional. But at any rate, then you can unscrew the barrel nut,
And then you can take the barrel out. Or so you would think, except that it runs into the ejector bar.
And that's gonna stop us up there, so we actually have to take the ejector out as well, in order to take the barrel out.
So, we will get in there,
unscrew that,
there we go.
Then our ejector plate just kind of falls out, along with its screw.
And now we can slide the barrel out
the back of the action.
So there's the whole thing actually disassembled,
and I think you can probably see some of the issues that came up here.
... To be honest, it's not a particularly well designed gun. In fact Sterling would...
Well, we'll touch on exactly what happened with this in just a moment, but instead of producing this
(spoiler alert), Sterling would go on instead to, in light of the declining submachine gun market,
redesign some of its guns into semi- automatic civilian carbines and civilian pistols
like the Mark 7 and the Mark 8 Sterlings. And they would focus on those instead. But,
this is what ... Frank Waters, their chief engineer, came up with before they decided to take that route.
Ultimately when they went to actually do testing on this gun, it had a number of serious issues.
It had some trigger issues, presumably failures to fire, I believe, or possibly reset.
It also had problems with the top cover coming loose during firing.
Apparently these issues were sort of interrelated, and they spent some time trying to
really nail down what the root cause of the problems was.
They weren't ever able to really actually identify the root problem.
And they didn't spend all that much time on it, because what they had recognised is that
... while this was a cheaper gun to mass-produce than the standard Sterling,
you can't do that until you've paid all of the cost to actually tool up to mass produce it.
And they estimated something like a million pounds would have been required to tool up for production of this.
And that just didn't make economic sense. They were seeing, in addition to increased competition,
they were also ... starting to see a decrease in the market for submachine guns in general.
And they looked at the numbers and realised it would actually be a lot more effective to maintain the tooling
they already had (which was already long paid for), to manufacture the Sterling.
Even if that gun was more expensive per unit, once you tried to amortise in all of the extra tooling cost for a new design,
they didn't think they would be able to get enough sales for this to make it worthwhile.
On top of that, with the problems it had, the handling is not great, the design is ... not great.
This is in no way as slick and efficient of a submachine gun as the Sterling.
In fact, it's documented that at one of their internal meetings at Sterling
some of the management actually referred to this as "a donkey in a thoroughbred race".
So in 1967 they shelved the project, never made more than this one specific example,
and that was the end of it. They would continue to make Sterling submachine guns,
but never did end up replacing them with anything more modern.
So, very cool to get a chance to take a look at this one.
As I said, it is a complete one-of-a-kind gun, because it's the only one they ever made.
So a big thanks to the Royal Armouries for allowing me to get access to this one.
Their collection is not open to the general public, but it is accessible by appointment to researchers.
So if you have a project that requires taking a look at some of their collection, ring them up.
There's a link to the Royal Armouries website in the video description below.
And, of course, a big thanks to my patrons who make it possible for me to travel to places like Leeds,
and bring you cool, unique guns like this one.
Thanks for watching.