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.
And today we're taking a look at the VHS-1.
I want to throw in a bit of an editorial element here: rifle design, firearms design, is difficult.
It takes practice, it takes time, it takes experience.
And one of the things that impressed me about the VHS-2 rifles is that,
while people may not have been very familiar with HS Produkt as a company,
there was a substantial developmental track record that led to the VHS-2.
It wasn't a rifle that was created out of thin air in its current form.
And so we've been looking at all of the sequence of rifles that would lead up to that point.
If you haven't seen those other videos, I would encourage you to go back and look at them.
Because at every step along the way you can see
the experience of HS Produkt's engineers and designers improving.
The very first gun was a bullpup conversion of a Zastava M70 AK,
and it was, shall we say, not very practical.
And now we've got to the point of the VHS-1, where we have
a rifle that is capable of proper, true modern military service.
And it is a rifle that was adopted by more than one military force.
It was not yet perfected, because there were a number of improvements
that would come out of this to ... create the VHS-2.
But what we have here is a pretty darn mature rifle.
So if we go back a little bit, development of this began in 1997 or 1998.
And at that point it was two rifles being developed in parallel.
Our previous video in this series looked at the other one,
which had a lot of influences from the IMI Tavor.
This one remains heavily influenced,
especially in the layout and the ergonomics, by the French FAMAS.
However, the operating system is a long-stroke gas piston instead of a lever delay like the FAMAS.
So let's take a closer look at how this actually functions.
Because it is, while not the final iteration of the VHS,
it is a pretty darn good rifle on its own.
Alright, let's start by looking at a few of the markings here.
This is a VHS-D1. There were two models that were actually produced,
the D1 has essentially a 20 inch barrel, that's 500mm.
The K1 is the short-barrelled version, that's a 16.1 inch barrel, or 410mm.
And then calibre 5.56, and a serial number.
Up here we have the HS Produkt logo.
And then on the right side again: HS Produkt, "Made in Croatia".
Bullpups were a popular style of military rifle at this point.
And another thing that was popular was the integrated optic.
So ... these are being ... developed right at that time
when optics are starting to become more commonly issued.
But they're not detachable optics, you have systems like the G36 and the Steyr AUG
that have integrated optics in their carry handles.
And HS Produkt went ahead and did develop that exact same sort of thing.
So we have a version of the VHS-1 with iron sights (again very FAMAS like), on the carry handle there.
And there's a version where there is an integrated 1.5x power optic built in.
This has a couple of lens covers built into it ... to protect it like that.
We have a battery right here ...
because there is an on/off button for an illuminated reticle.
These are your elevation and windage adjustments. There you go.
And there is a set of very simple backup iron sights on top of the integrated optic.
Now the standard version of the rifle has iron sights that are a virtual clone of the FAMASes.
So you've got two flip-down aperture sizes here.
You can take them both down and you have a gigantic ghost ring for use at night.
So we have elevation adjustment right there.
That's actually ... a little bit simpler probably than the FAMAS system.
And it runs from 100 to 400, instead of 100, 300 and 500 metres.
The front sight is also very similar to the FAMAS.
Not quite identical, you've got a little bit more of a shark fin effect
going on there with the VHS-1 front sight.
And then it's not present on this rifle, but originally you would have a night sight
that slid up and down on this dovetailed rail, so you could slide it up for use at night.
The VHS magazine is a proprietary design,
although it looks very much like a G36 magazine, capacity is 30 rounds, totally normal.
And you'll notice it has locking studs and notches here
so that multiple magazines can be locked together to ... jungle clip essentially.
One of the limitations of the system is that it only has a right-side ejection port.
So we've got our magazine well back there.
The magazine release button is a paddle on the back.
Push that in ... and pull the magazine out.
The charging handle is very FAMAS like, it is completely ambidextrous.
So you pull the charging handle out to either side, also much like the G36.
And the rifle will lock open on an empty magazine.
And then one of the neat elements that I'm actually now kind of surprised I haven't seen elsewhere,
is the bolt release is located here on the pistol grip.
... Frankly, just like a pistol slide release.
So for a right hander, and that's the only way you're going to be shooting this rifle anyway,
the bolt release is right under your thumb.
And there it goes.
The safety remains FAMAS like. So the safe position
is with the safety rotated right in front of the trigger. That's pretty self-explanatory.
And then if you roll it out to the left, that is full-auto.
And if you rotate it around out the right, you have semi-auto. Again, just like a FAMAS.
The difference is the FAMAS had a selector back here
to allow you to go between real full-auto and limited 3 round burst.
And the VHS-1 does not have a burst system, which frankly is no loss to anybody
because that's really not all that necessary.
We have a gas regulator at the front here, it's two positions.
It's just on or off, the off is used for rifle grenades.
You can see, again like the FAMAS, you have corrugations there
for a grenade launcher range lug, which isn't on this rifle.
And then the muzzle device is set up to support rifle grenades.
Disassembly is, well, much the same as the VHS-2 that would come later.
We'll start by pulling this pin out.
That then allows me to pull this down ... and out.
It's got a little hook here that holds ... into the top of the receiver,
and that has the captive mainspring.
With the buttstock off, we can now take out ...
the bolt carrier and operating rod. This is one permanently attached piece.
So it looks like a long-stroke gas piston system,
this is actually just a very long op rod attached to the bolt carrier.
We'll get to the actual gas piston in a moment. ...
But we have a multi-lug AR-18 style bolt.
So in some ways you could compare this to something like a Daewoo.
Very standard sort of cam pin, cam arrangement. That's the pin that holds the firing pin in place.
So if I push that pin out, pull it out there. Then the firing pin is going to come out then.
Cam pin comes out, and then ...
the bolt comes out.
So nothing particularly out of the ordinary there.
We can also remove the handguard by popping out this front pin.
And the handguard just slides off the front of the rifle, nothing really going on there either.
Inside here you can now see the actual gas piston.
So if we push that in and rotate it to the disassembly position.
Pull this out. So there's your multi-part gas piston.
That's the piston itself ...
with ... a couple of gas sealing rings on it, that's an interesting addition.
That sits inside this guy, which is the cylinder side.
There is your gas port.
So in the functional position the gas port is pointing down to link up with the barrel.
When you rotate it 180 degrees to the off position, there's no hole there.
And then that is simply the spring that pushes the piston back into the cylinder after firing.
So when you do fire, this piston is going to poke backwards like so.
It's going to hit the front face of the operating rod here.
In fact you can see that ring on the front face of the op rod where it has been doing that.
And that's going to push the whole bolt carrier assembly backwards to cycle.
The VHS-2 would take this sort of modular, pin-removal style of disassembly a bit further.
But on the VHS-1 here the remainder of disassembly can only be done ... by removing screws.
So the handguard assembly comes off with 3 screws.
The magazine well assembly is also removable using 2 screws, there and there.
So I'm going to go ahead and leave those in place,
because that's not part of the standard field stripping procedure.
And there you go, that is the HS Produkt VHS-1 rifle all field stripped.
The final development of the VHS-1 here took place between 2003 and 2005.
It was formally announced in public at a military expo in Zagreb in the summer of 2005.
The Croatian military did a bunch of testing on it,
did a significant endurance test, came away satisfied, adopted the rifle.
And the first deliveries were made to them in 2007.
In total about 20,000 of these rifles were manufactured,
which is not a Mauser K98k or a Kalashnikov, but that's nothing to sneer at.
Especially for a company's first mass-produced rifle.
In addition to the Croatian army, it was adopted by a few other countries.
So the first export contract actually, interestingly, went to Kurdistan.
They would then also be sold to the rest of the formal Iraqi government.
The Iraqi army used these guns, it still has a bunch of these guns.
And there are a number of lessons that would be taken from this to integrate into the VHS-2.
So in particular, the biggest shortcoming of the VHS-1 is that it is not an ambidextrous rifle.
... You cannot switch shoulders on it, effectively it only has right-hand ejection.
And ... at the time that this was developed that was seen as an acceptable compromise,
because there weren't that many ... shooters who needed to shoot left-handed.
And if you looked at the other countries in the world that were operating bullpup rifles
basically none of them could be swapped shoulder to shoulder either.
Most of them could be adapted, you could set the gun up for a left-hander,
but you couldn't hot-swap it from one shoulder to the other.
... The examples here being the FAMAS, the British L85 and the Steyr AUG.
... The AUG and the FAMAS you can switch to left-handed,
but once you're switched to left-handed, you can't then just swap the gun
back on your right shoulder without a little bit of mechanical work.
... At any rate, the point I'm getting at is this was seen as an acceptable compromise.
However, as the rifles went into production,
and as the engineers at HS Produkt continued to look at the gun
trying to figure out how they can improve it,
they started to come up with ways where they could make it
both swappable from left and right ejection.
But also hot-swappable from shoulder to shoulder even without changing the ejection system.
And so that, combined with a few other ergonomic improvements
(which it pains me a bit to say, but largely involves getting rid of the elements from the FAMAS),
that is what would lead to the VHS-2.
So if you're interested in the VHS-2, which you should be - it's a pretty cool rifle,
I already have a couple of videos out there on it.
One of them on the French army trials examples of the VHS, that would be the VHS-2F.
And also one on the Springfield Hellion,
which is the semi-automatic civilian version that is available in the United States.
So I'd like to give a big thanks to HS Produkt for giving me access to
all of their cool prototypes here that I can film and show to you guys.
Hopefully you enjoyed this one, and the rest of the series.
Thanks for watching.