Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the
Cody Firearms Museum in beautiful Cody,
Wyoming, taking a look at a couple of
Winchester experimental submachine guns.
Now there's very little information on these,
but I'll go through what we do know.
So they were manufactured, ... produced, hand built,
between 1955 and 1957, as best we can tell.
The design appears to have come from A.A. Arnold, a Winchester employee at the time.
Herbert Houze, who used to be the curator of the Winchester collection,
and who has written a substantial book on Winchester Repeating Arms,
he suggests that Melvin Johnson was also involved in the design of these guns.
That seems a little dubious to me.
Johnson did in fact work for the Winchester Company, but he left in 1954.
Now, he did do some consulting for Winchester after that,
... So maybe he had a hand in these, maybe he had a hand in the initial idea.
Johnson was certainly a military arms specialist.
And ... Winchester was traditionally best known for their sporting arms,
so Johnson brought more of a military mindset to elements of the company.
And, by the way, while he worked for Winchester he was head of arms development for them.
At any rate, whoever did the actual design,
this appears to have been intended for military use throughout Western Europe.
The little bit of remaining Winchester documentation that we have
actually refers to these as the "NATO burp guns".
This is the N2 pattern, this is the N4 pattern,
there are some slight iterations between them that we'll go over in a minute.
But the basic story here is they are open-bolt, blowback, simple submachine guns.
The magazines are missing. The picture in Houze's book that I just showed you
... has a picture of one of these with an MP40 magazine,
which seems to fit. That seems to be an appropriate magazine.
OK. Anyway, let's take a closer look at what these are, how they went together.
So we've got two examples of the gun here. Exactly the same basic design,
but there are a lot of little minute changes between the two.
Overall, we've got a wooden pistol grip here,
which is basically just attached by a bolt up into the steel receiver.
Magazine well, trigger, folding stock.
And this folding stock, interestingly,
when it's locked up in front like this could absolutely work as a front grip.
The idea of assault fire is a real sort of thing, it certainly was for NATO in the '50s.
And that's an interesting design, to my mind, it does make the gun
substantially more compact than having the stock extended.
And it does actually work as a vertical front grip.
Now, ... you'd have to make sure that this latch
(which is, by the way, just a spring tension latch out here),
you'd have to make sure that was strong enough to not pop open while firing.
That would be a bad thing. But that's an interesting design element.
When it's extended like this the length of pull is pretty good.
The stock feel is not too bad, the two struts are ... decently wide enough apart
to get a cheek weld that puts your eyes over the middle of the gun.
Not too far out, not too far in.
However, it is a pretty wobbly stock design.
Now of course this is a prototype,
that's something that they could have improved over time.
And to fold it, by the way, you have a push button on this side.
Push that in, fold the stock under,
and then it just snaps right over that little deal that looks like a thumb screw.
This does not actually rotate, it's fixed in place.
As far as operation, there is a set of serrations on each side of the bolt,
and the receiver's cut open so that I can push this back by hand.
Now this has a really heavy mainspring in it.
And in fact we know that it was probably too heavy, or at least the bolt was too heavy.
When this came into the Winchester collection, it came in with a little hang tag on it
that ... gave a very brief explanation of what the gun was, and where it stood in development.
And what it basically tells us is that the gun was having both
functional issues and also ejection issues.
They deemed that the bolt assembly was too heavy, too much mass in it.
This was causing reliability issues.
It was also very difficult to actually cock the gun.
There were plans to add a cocking lever to it,
although that doesn't exist on either of these two examples.
It also had problems ejecting according to the little hang tag.
Cases were getting stuck on the firing pin actually,
or getting caught by the firing pin,
when they were trying to eject out the top of the gun.
We can look at some of the incremental differences between these two.
Of course this one's been blued. This is the N4 pattern, this is the N2 pattern.
The N4, the later gun, is pretty much all steel with the exception of an aluminium buttstock.
On the N2 there are a lot of aluminium components, so the stock, and then all of these.
You can actually kind of visibly tell - the stuff that has corrosion on it, that's steel.
These guys, this nose cap, the side plates here,
the rear assembly for the stock, those are all aluminium.
The design of the nose cap changed a bit.
You can see that this has a bunch of screwed together parts,
where on the later pattern, the later iteration,
they've moved to parts that are more cleanly fitting together.
And that fits perfectly with the general design process of how this sort of thing works.
Your first model you're going to make it as simply as possible.
You know that you're going to be changing a lot of things,
so you make it easy to assemble, disassemble,
change parts, refine the design, that sort of thing.
Once you get something that's starting to work well,
that's when you start to make it a little more elegant.
By the way, I didn't point it out but there's a magazine release
right here on the side of the gun. That's the same on both examples.
Now this one, the N4, doesn't have a recoil spring in it, so the bolt's nicely all the way back.
That gives us a chance to look at the bolt face here.
If you look down at the bottom of the bolt face, ... hopefully you can see it in there,
it is definitely set up for a single-feed magazine.
So double-stack single-feed, like the MP40 magazine that it's pictured with in Houze's book.
Not a whole lot else to say there. It has a fixed firing pin,
as one would expect from an open-bolt submachine gun.
And that's about it. You can see the guide rail, right here, that comes up to the cocking serrations.
You can see more of those design iterations here on the bottom surface of the gun.
So you can see that the trigger guard configuration changed a bit,
the width was reduced slightly here.
And just generally more elegant, more refined, production characteristics
on the blued, later, version of the gun.
So of course there are questions as to why didn't this continue?
And we can answer some of those questions perhaps knowing that these guns
were having ... functionality issues, and they weren't quite perfected.
Winchester didn't have any institutional history designing submachine guns,
and you may think, "It's an open-bolt blowback submachine gun, how hard can it be?"
Well, getting it to mostly work isn't that hard.
Getting it to be truly top of the line reliable and effective, that can be difficult.
And at this time, in the mid to late '50s, there were a lot of other submachine guns out there.
There was a lot of World War Two surplus,
and you had guns like the ... Swedish Carl Gustav, the Uzi.
There was kind of an explosion of submachine guns taking place at the time.
And on the one hand you look at that and you think,
"Why on earth would you compete? Like there's so many other great models out there."
But of course they are all brand new to the market, and there's also
potentially quite a lot of interest in good new submachine guns.
(The Sterling would be another one around this period.)
So I can understand why Winchester would first
think that this is a great market that they want to get into and exploit.
Especially if they have Johnson around, maybe to help them out with military liaising,
and his ideas on military firearms.
And then Johnson leaves, and they keep working on it, they can't quite get it right,
"And you know what? There's like a lot of really good other guns,
and maybe this isn't the best place for us to be focusing our efforts."
This is entirely speculative on my part,
but I can certainly see the situation going down that way.
So if you're interested in these,
they are actually on display here at the Cody Firearms Museum.
Or they will be, as soon as I'm done filming them.
The museum was just recently renovated and reopened.
A huge renovation to the place, all the displays changed,
and it's a tremendously excellent museum to take a look at.
So if you're in the area, I highly recommend checking it out.
These two guys are in a cabinet of experimental and prototype sorts of designs
down on the second floor. So don't miss the second floor of the museum.
Thanks for watching.