Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at
the CZ factory in beautiful Uherský Brod
in the Czech Republic, taking a look at
some of the cool guns that CZ has produced.
And today we're going to take a look at the whole development history of the CZ Skorpion Evo 3.
So we've got the newest version, the early version and one of the prototypes.
Now let's start with the fact that it's called the "Skorpion Evo 3".
If you're familiar with Czech firearms, you probably recognise that
there was an earlier Skorpion, there was the vz. 61 Skorpion in .32 ACP.
This really cool little personal defence weapon/machine pistol/submachine gun thing.
Well, this you could call the Skorpion Evo 1, or first evolution.
Now, the designers kept working on that,
and it didn't really go anywhere other than the .32 version.
But in the 1990s, after the establishment of the Czech Republic,
they came back to that. They figured the Czech military was
probably going to want a submachine gun in 9mm Parabellum.
And so they brought ... back out of the archive the 9mm Parabellum version of the vz. 61.
That was originally the vz. 68, we'll have a different video on it.
But to put it in context, by the early 2000s
this is what CZ had for a modernised 9mm submachine gun.
And this thing's a little bit clunky,
and more importantly, it's really expensive to manufacture, it's complex inside.
And ... CZ submitted this to the Czech Advanced Industry Weapons Program
of the modernisation program for the Czech army.
And it became clear by 2005 or 2006 that ... it was not going to be cost effective,
it wasn't going to meet the requirements of a new Czech military submachine gun.
(Go ahead and put it down there.)
And so they had to come up with something different.
Now back as early as 2001, a Slovakian designer by the name of Jan Lucansky
had started tinkering with a submachine gun design.
Not because he expected the military was going to need it,
but, frankly, because it sounded interesting to him and he didn't have anything else to do.
And so why not build a submachine gun? Seems like a fine idea.
Well, along with a couple of partners he put together the design
of what would eventually become the Evo 3.
... He started in 2001, CZ became aware of the project in 2004 but didn't need it at that point.
Well, fast forward two years, CZ is in a position where they need
a modern submachine gun that's going to be cost effective.
And they look at Lucansky's design and go,
"Aha, that has the potential to be exactly what we need."
And so in 2007 they purchased the project from him,
and at the same time they hired Lucansky to be the design engineer.
... The design was something like 60% complete ... compared to what it eventually became
when Lucansky was brought on board at CZ to finish this project off.
And we have one of the prototypes here from very early on,
what Lucansky's gun was essentially when he came into CZ.
So we'll take a look at that in just a moment.
So the design continues.
Lucansky would actually only end up working at CZ for about two years,
and that's a story we'll get into at a later date.
But by the latter half of 2009 the gun was essentially considered finished.
Now it had gone from sort of a PDW style of gun in Lucansky's original design
to much more of a full-size military submachine gun,
now known as the Skorpion Evo 3.
So the Evo 2 was the 9mm vz. 61, and now we have the Evo 3.
It is select fire in its military configuration.
They are of course exported to the United States as semi-auto versions,
and are really quite popular as PCCs there (Pistol Calibre Carbines).
But ... the original design requirement was for a military submachine gun.
So it's select fire, including a 3 round burst mechanism in the trigger.
It fires from a closed bolt, simple blowback, simple cost-effective construction.
And really ... I would say its closest competitor in the market would be something like the HK UMP.
A modern, polymer built, blowback, cost-effective submachine gun.
So now let's take a look at how it actually works, starting with the first prototype.
Here we have Lucansky's ... definitely not his very first, but one of Lucansky's early prototypes.
And what's interesting is this is sized really sort of as a PDW,
but it is almost identical internally to the final finished version of the Skorpion.
So we've got our magazine here, which we can put off to the side.
And then a side-folding stock that just locks out, and that's just tensioned.
Pull it in and it'll fold.
... Oh, I should point out, we have a selector switch here.
This is single, full and safe.
The original prototypes didn't have a 3 round burst option,
that is something that was required by the Czech military.
We have a charging handle up front, rather like an MP5.
So we can lock it open. And the charging handle can actually be swapped from side to side.
This is not quite 100% ambidextrous, but this is close to a fully ambidextrous gun.
Disassembly is one pin right here, again just like the final Skorpion.
Pull that out, and then we can lift the fire control group out as a unit.
Then we can let the bolt forward.
And to remove the bolt you're actually going to grab it, pull it back, and lift it out of the gun.
(So, let's see if I can get this on camera.)
There we go, that lifts out.
We've got a recoil spring locked in place, right there.
This is hammer fired ... so we have a firing pin right there.
Open pocket in the bolt to allow the hammer through.
This lug acts to hit the ... auto trip in the fire control group.
And I'm pretty sure that this also acts as an out of battery safety.
Because if the bolt is not fully forward, and I'm hypothesising here,
but I bet if the bolt's not fully forward and the hammer drops
it will hit this lug and not hit the firing pin.
So that's a nice safety element in the design.
And then that's more or less it. The pistol grip is held in place here
with a bolt through there and a dovetail block.
So you can open that bolt, take the grip off.
A little interesting that the rails on the front of this prototype are very, very close together.
I'm kind of dubious whether you could fit most accessories on here
because they'd interfere with the other rails.
And then very thin plastic walls.
... Frankly, this makes me a little bit nervous to have apart,
because these are really thin and flexible.
But this is like the proof of concept style of prototype.
Oh, and sights. We've got a notch sight and two different sizes of aperture.
But the very, very short stock makes those sights almost useless.
It's really hard to get a sight picture through them.
This looks like it ought to telescope,
but as far as I can tell it doesn't, I didn't want to really force it.
But this is ... the mechanism that CZ would use for the Evo 3, but it's not quite the form factor.
CZ needed a submachine gun for the military.
So not something this small, something full size.
And this is what they came up with.
Now, we have a 30 round double-stack magazine.
The original magazines were this semi-translucent blue ... polymer, ...
kind of reminiscent of the early magazines for the CZ Bren rifles.
It is interesting that the early polymers here had a tendency to crack
in the feed lips, they were a little bit fragile. This would be improved later on.
Controls on the Skorpion 3 are a little bit more
completely ambidextrous than on Lucansky's prototypes.
We have a selector lever here that goes from safe, semi, 3 round burst and full-auto.
And it's duplicated on the other side.
The bolt release is not ambidextrous,
but what's interesting is that, even though it's only on one side,
it is actually ambidextrous [functionally].
So if you're left-handed, you can actually hit the bolt release
(there we go), you can actually use it very easily with an index finger.
And if you're right-handed, you can very easily use it when you load a new magazine.
So that control almost doesn't need to be duplicated.
The magazine release is down here, and is present again on both sides,
operated by the index finger.
The HK style charging handle is still in use.
So pull that back to cycle.
It will lock open on an empty magazine like so.
And you can also manually lock it open by rotating it up, again like an HK.
And you can take the charging handle out by removing this pin, and swap it to the other side.
Much like the Bren 2 the stock is both telescoping and folding.
We've got a big button here, and that folds over to the side.
It makes it really quite compact for transportation.
In theory ... there's no reason you can't shoot it with the stock folded
if you wanted to or needed to.
Disassembly is done exactly the same way as the prototypes.
So you need to have the bolt all the way in the rear.
And then we push out this one pin.
That is captive, that'll stay there.
And then I can lift out ...
(there we go) I can lift out the fire control group, the trigger mechanism and the magazine well.
Note how similar these two really are.
We have our ejectors, hammers.
The exact configuration of the parts in here has changed,
so the parts aren't strictly interchangeable.
And the biggest difference of course is that the production Evo 3
has a 3 round burst in it, where the prototypes did not.
Probably not something Lucansky really wanted to have to spend time designing.
The difference in length here is simply due to this sort of styling
that rolls this into the front end of the gun, which wasn't necessary on the original.
But if we look at these from the bottom, you can see that the magazine wells
are essentially in the exact same place.
The bolt is going to come out of the production gun exactly the same way as the prototype.
Just pull it back against the recoil spring, lower it down, and pull it out of the gun.
Again the two parts are extremely similar.
Slight changes to the ... design of the fire control group
mean that we don't have this lug on the final production gun.
But ... they're both hammer fired, both essentially identical in profile.
I can take the stock off by pushing this button in,
sliding the stock assembly off the top of the receiver.
Again, very much like the Bren stocks.
And that leaves me with a polymer receiver.
The pistol grip that is once again held in place on ... this dovetail block with a single bolt.
So that pistol grip can be replaced if one desires.
And then we have a barrel with CZ's style of [flash hider] up there at the front.
It is interesting to note that despite the difference in overall size,
... the actual receiver length from this tiny PDW prototype
to the full size production Evo 3 is almost identical.
There's maybe half an inch, maybe a centimetre of difference.
If we look at the bolts ...
you can see just a tiny slight difference in the length of the recoil springs.
Now before too long there were a number of changes
and improvements that were made to the gun.
Nothing really fundamental, but a lot of little details, and this is the Evo 3 A1.
So our very first pattern was the "CZ Scorpion A", A for automatic.
There was also, by the way, the "Scorpion S", that is the semi-auto version.
There are a number of internal changes to the Scorpion S to maintain it as a semi-automatic only,
and prevent parts interchangeability with the automatic versions.
That's a subject for a separate video.
Once we get to the final product-improved version we now have "Scorpion Evo 3"
(it's now fundamentally in the name of the gun), "A1".
So on the first version the sights were actually outsourced to Italy.
We have an aperture sight there, windage and elevation adjustable.
And then a pretty simple front sight, non-adjustable,
all of your adjustment is done on the rear sight.
And this is basically a blade, but with a white dot for a front sight.
For the improved version CZ made their own rear sights.
They now have ... a choice of four different aperture sizes.
We have windage adjustment here on the rear.
But the elevation adjustment is done on the front sight
in a pretty typical military-pattern way.
You have a locking pin that's spring loaded,
you push that down, and you can thread this in and out to change your zero.
So our early gun here is actually still technically a prototype.
This is one of CZ's prototype-style serial numbers.
And on some of these early ones the ... trigger assembly is actually marked "Designed by Laugo."
Laugo Arms was Lucansky's company, ... that's where he came from when he got hired by CZ.
You may recognise them from the Laugo Alien pistol that Lucansky designed after leaving CZ.
And we also have a "Made in Czech Republic" marking up on the top of the receiver.
The current production guns have got rid of the "Designed by Laugo."
They do have a "Warning read manual" note there.
This particular one was manufactured in 2018.
Still has "Made in Czech Republic."
So a couple of other variations.
On our early gun we have a pretty low profile selector switch here.
That has been enlarged on the A1 to stick out more for better grip on both sides.
The early guns have this square block on the magazine catch.
That was actually removed on the A1. I suspect it tended to catch on things,
and the magazine catch is really, to my mind, big enough like this as it is.
CZ started adding a hand stop as a factory option, they make these themselves.
And that's just handy ... (I just made a funny there) ... that's handy
to prevent your finger of course from getting in front of the muzzle
because the muzzle is just barely longer than the handguard.
And perhaps the most significant change is the introduction of a new magazine.
So instead of the original ... translucent blue,
we now have a black polymer magazine that is much more damage resistant and stronger.
It doesn't tend to crack up here in the feed lips any more.
It also has a pair of viewing windows in it.
You can't really see anything through these in this view,
but when there are cartridges inside ... they are pretty obvious.
And so those are on both sides, and you have
capacity markings on here in increments of five, so 15, 20, 25 and 30.
On the very early Scorpions your sling attachments were a metal bracket right here.
And then what is actually basically a sling slot on the back of the receiver.
That was not particularly well received or useful.
It did also have a sling bracket here, although this is polymer
and it had a tendency to crack because it was relatively thin.
So the A1 version got rid of that kind of weird flat bracket altogether,
and made this one significantly wider, about twice the width.
So that's now your single rear sling connection, and of course it's ambidextrous.
So there's one over here, as well as one of the front mounting points.
The design of the charging handle has also changed, this is really a very subtle thing.
So we have the early one here that is a little bit more sharp and hooked.
And that was replaced with a kind of slightly more squared off version.
I assume this again had a tendency to catch on things
and so they modified it just a little bit.
On the early guns there was a mechanism for locking the stock in place,
which is basically a polymer lug here that snapped into this recess in the receiver.
And well, this one it doesn't really work anymore,
which may be an indicator of why they changed that as well.
And on the A1 they actually went to a magnet.
So there's a little magnet in the stock there,
which connects to the serial number plate in the receiver,
and holds it in place.
That's a really good application for a magnet.
... Not much force is required.
There's no button or anything that you have to push to unlock the stock.
Just pull it gently away from the receiver, and it opens up.
Now I've never actually fired one of these in its full-auto submachine gun form,
and I'm really kind of curious how it handles.
So tomorrow we're going to take this guy out to the range and do some shooting with it.
So stick around for tomorrow's video. Hopefully you enjoyed this one.
A big thanks to CZ for giving me access to take a look at not just the current version,
but the really cool, really early developmental prototypes.
If you enjoy this sort of thing, you'll probably enjoy CZ's own social media.
I've got links to all of their connections down in the description below, so check those out.
And thanks for watching.