Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today, on loan from a very cool viewer,
we have a Colt-Vektor, basically a prototype pistol here.
This would go on to become the basis for the Colt ProTec line
which consisted of something like, I think, 20 pistols total
before it was ultimately cancelled and went nowhere.
So our background here is largely with the Colt Company.
In the early 1990s Colt had been looking for some new products for the handgun market
and they had two in a row that were pretty bad flops.
They had the Colt Double Eagle, which was basically a double-action 1911,
and then they had the Colt All-American 2000 which was released, actually in the mid-90s,
which was also a pretty catastrophic failure. It had a tremendous number of problems and issues.
So I've got a previous video out there on the All-American, you can check that out if you're interested in that sad story.
But what this meant was that Colt was left in the 1990s with not a whole lot of handgun products.
They thought they were going to be expanding this market with some cool new stuff,
but they were unable to. So they went out looking for something to fill that void.
They actually looked at CZ, and there was a brief actual adoption and sale of the Colt Z40,
which was actually, basically, a re-branded CZ pistol. I've got a video on those as well if you're curious about them.
And then the other thing that they looked at was Vektor in South Africa.
So this was happening in the very late 1990s, and it coincided with Vektor actually shutting down.
So pistol production at Vektor ended in 1998,
although they would continue to assemble guns with produced parts until about 2002.
The problem in South Africa for Vektor was that the end of Apartheid and the end of foreign embargoes,
meant the beginning of importation of foreign small arms and handguns.
And Vektor and the rest of the South African arms industry just really wasn't in a position to be able to compete
with foreign made guns that were a lot cheaper. ...
... Basically the market in South Africa had been artificially inflated by international embargoes
that meant that all you could get was, for the most part, South African domestic made firearms.
So, Vektor is looking for a way to survive as a company.
And they're kind of getting out of the civilian handgun, civilian rifle market.
At any rate this is when Colt comes in, and according to one of the reference books I have
(written by one of the South African shooting associations),
Colt actually was looking at purchasing Vektor as a complete company
in 1998 or 1999, although that didn't go anywhere.
I haven't been able to confirm that Colt was actually looking at buying the whole company,
but they were definitely interested in getting a pistol.
And the pistol that they were going to get was basically Vektor's SP1 or SP2, which is a Beretta-style action.
So let me show you exactly what this is up close, because it's a really cool one of a kind gun.
So the gun we have here was manufactured by Vektor in South Africa, and it was made specifically for Colt.
This was a demonstration model of the pistol that the two companies were hoping to come to an agreement on.
So we've got that pretty well spelled out on this presentation case.
And on the inside of the case, we have the pistol.
We have a magazine, pinned to 10 rounds because this is during the Assault Weapons Ban
when magazine capacities over 10 rounds couldn't be imported or produced, so 10 round mag.
And then we've got a cleaning rod with a brush and a patch jag.
Alright, let's take a closer look at the gun here.
What we have is basically a Beretta 92 that's Americanised, sort of Colt-ised, to look like a 1911.
And they did that in two ways: they made the slide look much more like a 1911,
and they made the grip look like a 1911.
So this gun is actually ... built on the Vektor SP1,
which is a modified version of the Beretta 92 made sort of under licence.
That's a topic for ... the video I have on the Vektor Beretta clones.
But with the SP1 and SP2 Vektor ... basically they closed in the slide,
and they changed the profile of a few other parts on the gun, and they mounted a frame-mounted safety.
Which I think is actually a nice improvement.
But when Vektor was approached by Colt about the possibility of
developing this pistol to sell in the United States as a Colt product,
they wanted to make it look more like a 1911 because ... that was Colt's brand recognition. That was Colt's thing.
Still is Colt's thing, really.
So, they redesigned the slide to look more like a 1911, including like the scallops out here.
And then they redesigned the frame to be straight.
Now interestingly, Beretta, a couple years later, would introduce this style of frame on the Beretta Vertec.
But as best I can tell it was actually Vektor that did it first, with this pistol.
So this particular gun was one of two that were manufactured by Vektor as basically product samples,
to see if Colt was really interested in pursuing this idea of licencing,
you know, selling a Vektor pistol under licence in the US.
So it's licenced by Colt
... It doesn't say Vektor anywhere on it, and it doesn't actually have a model designation as far as I can tell.
It's just Colt, 9mm Luger, made in South Africa.
There is a serial number on it, but it's been applied after the fact.
When this pistol was imported into the US, that's when they applied the serial number.
Apparently Colt originally sent a team over to South Africa that tinkered with this gun
and a second one that was made that was a Commander length,
a shorter barrelled version of the same thing. And apparently they really liked them.
Now my South African reference book says that the deal went no further
because Colt had been interested in buying Vektor as a company.
However, we know the deal did go further, because Colt would import a further batch of pistols
very much like this that they called the ProTec series.
Now those ProTec pistols have a slightly different configuration out at the muzzle,
they have slightly different grips, they have Colt logos in the grips instead of Vektor logos.
And they were like the pre-production series
for Colt to experiment with and see if they really actually liked the design.
You know, your first step is a one-off like this.
As long as that goes well, your second step is a limited production run to gauge interest,
to be a little more useful ... with the marketing and product development.
And the step after that would have been further production, but it never got to further production.
I can show you here, this disassembles just like a Beretta.
Take the magazine out, and then (it is double action of course),
slide this back, drop the disassembly lever down.
There is our frame. This, by the way, is an alloy frame paired with a steel slide,
so it's nice and lightweight. This gun actually handles very nicely.
I think if everything had gone better, this could have been a very interesting product for Colt.
There's the barrel assembly, and that is pure P38/Beretta 92.
Note that they did also serialise the barrel.
And I don't know if you can see it in there very well,
but this is actually made using polygonal rifling, not standard cut rifling.
Interestingly, after this project failed these pistols were just in storage with Colt.
And it appears that one of them ended up being a test-bed for the EPLS smart gun type of system.
So that's just ... interesting, there's a picture from an old magazine article showing that.
That may have been something that they were interested in developing
at the same time as the guns were released.
That's something that happened with the Colt/CZ Z40 pistols as well.
But it's an interesting little side note on what Colt was working on at the time.
The examples of these Colt-Vektor pistols that have come onto the market
are pretty much all by way of the Colt Company themselves.
They had these guns ... basically in their storage archive, reserve reference collection,
for a number of years. And then eventually actually sold a bunch of them off to employees.
So, that's how this one came to us and you'll see a few of these out on the market,
a few of the ProTec pistols as well, and that's where they came from.
Alright, so the question now is: where did this all go?
And it's a little bit vague. According to the Colt archives,
... one of these came in, 20 of the ProTec pistols came in.
10 in 9mm, and 10 in .40 Smith & Wesson.
And they were making these in two different ... slide lengths,
standard 5 inch, the equivalent to a Government model,
and 4.25 inch, the equivalent to a Commander model.
I don't know the breakdown between different lengths, but it appears that these were designated the ProTec ...
I think, I'm going out on a limb here, I think they had four designations.
The first digit defining the length, "1" being short and "2" being long,
and the second two numbers designating a calibre, either "09" for 9mm, or "40" for .40 Smith & Wesson.
So you can see a picture of a ProTec 240, which is a Government Model .40 calibre.
... Also I have pictures from another very helpful viewer of a ProTec 109, which is a short 9mm gun.
So that's why I'm extrapolating out all four model designations there.
At any rate, Colt ultimately would decide not to follow up on this, and it's not entirely clear why.
It might be that they were concerned about patent issues from Beretta, I don't know.
It might be that they just weren't able to get the support that they needed from Vektor.
If they were unable to make Vektor a good enough sort of offer,
it might not have been something that could actually keep Vektor afloat,
and Vektor may have been the reason that the whole project went away.
Or it may have been something else entirely. I just unfortunately don't know about that.
So what we do have here is, of course, this one. What I'm pretty sure is
the very first model that was made by Vektor to start the project that led to
the very short production run of ProTec pistols for Colt.
It's a fantastically cool piece, especially with its presentation case there.
A big thanks to the viewer who sent this over to me to bring to you guys. I hope you enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.
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