Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today in Karlovac, Croatia,
visiting the HS Produkt factory, and we're taking a look
at some of the early guns that led to the development
of what eventually became the HS-9,
or the Springfield XD pistols.
Now in our last video in this series we took a look at Marko Vuković's Kordun pistol,
which was this really crazy flapper-locked Tokarev calibre prototype.
Which if you haven't seen that video, you should definitely check it out.
But that pistol was not adopted by the Yugoslav military.
And it led him to refine his ideas and come up with
a much more traditional, much simpler pistol, and that would be the V.M.18.
Now this is a pistol that was fundamentally based on the Walther P38.
I can certainly see how going from a really kind of
totally non-traditional flapper-locked unique design
and saying, "OK, like let's scale this back.
Let's find what's a really good pistol out there that's known to be reliable
and high quality, and use that as the basis for a design."
Well the P38, there are certainly much worse choices than a P38.
And so Vuković takes the P38 and develops it with things like
a double-stack double-feed 17 round magazine.
A nice improvement on the single-stack magazine of the P38.
Gives it a nice long barrel, and in 1987 he puts this together as the V.M.18 (VM for his own initials)
and presents it to the Yugoslav People's Army for consideration.
Again as a replacement for the M57 copy of the Tokarev.
So let's take a look at what he actually built here.
Alright, I'm going to start with a little bit of a spoiler for the next video in this series.
This is an early version of the Croatian ... PHP.
You can see that these are clearly fundamentally the same basic design,
but there are some important differences in the V.M.18.
This is marked "Made in Yugoslavija".
I was a little curious why it would say "made in" instead of the equivalent in Croatian or Serbian.
The answer is twofold. First off, if you want to sell these on the commercial market
internationally at this point, English is the language to use.
And "made in" is also quite a lot shorter
to write than the translation of that in Serbo-Croatian.
Up on the front of the slide we have the patent number here, and then "Ser 000".
This is not actually the serial number, this indicates that
this is a pistol that ... basically was presented to the Yugoslav Army,
and the concept was good enough that the ... pistol was made in a pre-series production.
That's the triple zero series, the idea being
you make something like 10 of the guns, they can then go into formal testing.
... If they are put into actual full-scale production,
that's when you have the regular serial number series.
So of the handful that were manufactured, this one is serial number 3.
Then we have the pistol designation here, which is V.M.18. Calibre 9x19.
And "AP" here I believe stands for Automatic Pistol.
Because this has a switch up on the slide.
"J" is for standard semi-auto fire, and "R" is for repetition, that is the fun switch.
And I'll show you what exactly this is doing when we take the gun apart, because it's actually really simple.
With the markings in hand, we can now move on to the mechanics.
This is a single-action/double-action system, you can ... manually cock it,
or you can use the trigger to cock it.
We have a safety lever here, that's safe, that's fire.
And then we have a slide lock and a disassembly lever.
Handily, we know the production date because it's actually marked on the top of the slide, 1987.
This copies the mechanical system of the Walther P38.
So when you fire the slide is going to move backwards.
It's a short recoil system, the barrel moves back with the slide.
And then there is a pivoting locking block on the inside that will drop down,
... and allow the slide to move independently to eject the empty cartridge, and then load a new one.
So the name of the V.M.18 comes from its capacity.
This magazine's a little worse for wear,
but this is a double-stack double-feed magazine,
kind of similar to what you would see in a Steyr GB or a lot of different submachine guns.
And because it is double-stack all the way up to the top,
it's got a little bit greater capacity than a more typical ...
single-feed magazine. You can see the difference.
This is a PHP magazine, which is fundamentally the same gun,
but constricted down to single-feed.
So you lose a couple of rounds of capacity by doing that.
Disassembly of the V.M.18 is almost, but not quite, identical to the PHP.
So first we're going to remove the magazine, and then I'm going to cock the hammer.
So like the PHP you flip the lever forward, drop the hammer,
you can then pull the slide forward.
At this point we have to pull out the recoil spring, which is a little finicky.
There we go, the recoil spring comes out.
And then the slide comes right off the front of the frame.
So we have a permanently fixed guide rod for the spring there.
That's where the spring is going to live when it's all assembled.
We have an ejector here that is simply loose inside there.
So that's going to be forced down when the slide goes forward.
But normally it's held in place by the magazine
so it doesn't go further than it needs to.
Up in the slide we have our locking block, this is identical to how a P38 works.
So when it is in battery these two lugs drop into the slide
and they lock the barrel and the slide together.
... I can disassemble this further by taking this backwards,
... rotate it 180 degrees.
There we go, we can pull the barrel assembly out.
Note that we have a seam right here, the barrel was manufactured separately
from the assembly block and they were then brazed together.
This is the pin that is going to hit on the back of the frame here.
So that when the slide and barrel move back together when they reach full travel
this pushes in, which forces the locking block down, which unlocks it.
Which then allows the slide to keep moving independently.
And lastly I'll point out that we have the full-auto switch up here.
And let me go ahead and put the gun back together
and put the grips on it, and I'll show you how that works.
I will point out that just the fact that this has wooden grip panels
is a feature distinct from the later PHPs, which used plastic grip panels.
So this is our trigger bar here, and when I pull the trigger this gets lifted up
which is going to cock the hammer and then release it.
And then ... as long as I hold the trigger this stays up. And when the slide comes back,
you can see that this lug is going to push the trigger bar down. That disconnects it.
And now I have to pull the trigger a second time in order for the hammer to cycle.
The way that the selector switch on this works is really simple,
it's just a sliding block in the slide.
So I lift it out to the side, and now this lug no longer contacts the trigger bar.
So now when I fire that, the hammer is just going to keep falling.
Following the slide, and falling, and cycling the pistol until I release the trigger.
So a really quite simple way to do full-auto.
So when the Yugoslav People's Army took a look at this, they decided that they still didn't want it.
Vuković was still swinging and missing here.
The problem was fundamentally this was just too expensive
of a pistol to interest the Yugoslav Army. They had the Tokarev, it worked OK.
If they were going to get something new, they wanted something that was equally simple and affordable.
And this wasn't. This is still a fairly early design concept from someone
who's still, while a talented engineer, new to the world of designing firearms.
So this would sit on a shelf for a couple of years until Croatia declares its independence in 1991.
And at that point, Vuković brings this design back and presents it to the newly formed
Croatian Army, and that will be the subject of our next video in this series.
It became known as the PHP, so stick around for that.
A big thanks to HS Produkt for giving me access to some of their
really cool early prototypes like this to take a look at.
Hopefully you enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.