Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today by the
generous invitation of the Croatian Police Museum
outside of Zagreb, Croatia, where we are taking a look
at a bunch of the cool Croatian Homeland War firearms
that are in the Police Museum's collection.
And in particular today, we have a Crogar M91.
... The backstory to a bunch of these submachine guns is essentially
in 1990 democracy came to Croatia with the breakup of Yugoslavia.
And then in its immediate aftermath Croatia is attacked by Serbia
with the assistance of the remnants of the Yugoslav National Army.
And the Croatians at that point essentially didn't have a military force,
they had a lightly armed police force.
And so in ... 1991 there was sort of a chaotic, hectic move to acquire any and all arms possible.
And that led to the manufacture of a bunch of different versions of submachine guns,
things that could be manufactured on limited tooling with limited infrastructure.
And everybody who could make guns did.
Now this particular pattern was made by a company called SKM,
they were a small industrial manufacturing company,
they made metal roofing, they made water pumps in particular.
And when war breaks out they decide to make a submachine gun, and that becomes the Crogar M91.
So it's got a couple of really cool ... elements to it, it handles like a very well made gun.
These apparently were quite popular with the small number of people who got them.
But let's go ahead and take a closer look at how exactly this goes together,
and the different elements of other designs that went into it.
Fundamentally what we have here is an open-bolt submachine gun. Folding stock as you can see.
The magazine that was chosen for this particular one because
... they use a variety of different magazines, in this case we have a Yugoslav M56 magazine.
So double-feed double-stack, chambered for the 7.62 Tokarev cartridge.
Some of these submachine guns are in 7.62 Tokarev,
some of them are in 9 Parabellum, this one's in Tokarev.
As for markings there are not many here. So it's not actually marked Crogar anywhere.
The "Cro" part of that is for Croatia, "gar" not sure exactly what that indicates,
it probably had some relevance to the guys who were designing it.
There is a Croatian crest on the side of the gun,
and interestingly marked in English, "Product of Croatia".
That is repeated on the opposite side of the lower there.
And then we have a couple of markings on the bottom here.
91 is the year of manufacture, 1991, and this is serial number 129.
Whether these started at 1 or 100 or 101 is not clear.
There aren't really any surviving records on these guns.
The controls are an interesting combination of some previous designs
like the Yugoslav M56, and some stuff that's totally novel.
This one's pretty cool in that it's well made, it's well put together,
and it's a ... cool combination of elements.
So first off we have a bolt lock up at the front, ... in this direction the bolt will cycle.
If you rotate the bolt handle 90 degrees that actually locks the bolt in place.
So that prevents the bolt from bouncing open.
One of the typical dangerous elements of open-bolt submachine guns
is if the bolt bounces open, say if you drop it on the buttstock,
the bolt can bounce open enough to grab a cartridge and then fire it without catching the sear.
So this is a safety that prevents that from happening.
Then we have a cool linear selector switch on the back of the receiver here.
So this just slides forward to back, 0 is safe, 1 is semi and 32 is fully automatic.
Basic single trigger because you have a selector switch.
We have a folding stock where the buttstock portion is just held in place by tension.
So that snaps down to use, snaps up when you fold it.
Then this button here pushes in, allows you to fold the stock over to the side.
Notice that they put a little ... plastic pad so that it sits parallel to the receiver.
It's not going to scratch up the receiver, nice element of workmanship there.
We have this pretty cool, clearly stylised heat shield handguard.
And there's a little spring tab there that will allow us to take this off.
Normally you would do this with a cartridge, but I'm just going to use my universal disassembly pen.
So we push that tab in and pull this forward,
rotate it [180] degrees, and it will slide off the front of the gun.
The barrel is then threaded in place here.
That's really tight, I'm not going to go ahead and take the barrel off.
A fair amount of machine time went into this muzzle device, which is kind of cool.
The front sight wings there have been squished at some point,
they were not normally supposed to be clamped all the way together like that.
They are ... supposed to be a pair of parallel vertical wings protecting that front post.
And that goes along with a nice solid chunky ... rear notch sight there.
For the rest of disassembly we go to this catch here.
This is a spring-loaded catch and it's got these grasping buttons on both sides.
You pull that rearward, and it allows me to pivot the upper and lower apart.
If you look down inside there you can see there's a little spring detent, that's what I'm unlocking.
And then we have a rear end cap on the receiver that I can rotate and pull out.
This knurled ring ... just slides on like that, that allows me to pull out the rear end cap.
The recoil spring is captive like an MP40, which is pretty cool.
And then make sure the bolt is unlocked, back, the bolt handle comes out.
So a pretty typical open-bolt firing submachine gun style of design
Unfortunately this one as you can see has been deactivated, the firing pin has been ground off of it.
But typically you have your extractor, fixed firing pin.
This is open in the back because the recoil spring is going to nest in there, like so.
And a cross hole for the handle.
Note how there are essentially the equivalent of gas rings on the front and the back of the bolt,
so that the bolt is only actually travelling on
these three ... ribs on the ... back, and these three on the front.
That means there's a bit less friction, and you've got all the space in between here
and in between those raised sections for any dirt or grime
to kind of get out of the way and not impede the function of the gun.
If we take a moment to take a closer look at the fire control group,
you can see that in full-auto here pulling the trigger just drops the sear.
If I switch that forward to semi
like that, I now have the disconnector right here.
So it fires one round and then the bolt travelling over the disconnector here resets the sear.
So you have to pull the trigger a separate time for each shot.
And then if I flip this all the way forward to safe,
it simply blocks the sear from dropping all the way.
And there you go, there is one fully field-stripped Crogar M91 Croatian submachine gun.
You saw that the serial number on this one is very low,
the overall production of these was very low.
It's not ... known exactly how many were made, but
we are talking not more than a couple of hundred at most.
So this is a fairly typical pattern for these, particularly 1991 production,
indigenous Croatian submachine guns.
Not a lot would be made, they're put to use during the war.
Within a couple of years once the war is over, the Croatian military and armed forces
look to simplify and streamline and standardise their small arms.
And so guns like this cease production fairly quickly after the war.
At any rate, it was very cool to get a chance to take a look at this one.
So a big thanks to the Croatian Police Museum for giving us access to it.
If you're in Zagreb check them out, it's a small museum
but they've got a lot of really cool stuff on display.
Thanks for watching.