Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are going to take a look at the HSc.
But not the regular HSc that went into production.
When Alex Seidel was tasked with creating the gun that would become
the HSc, it was originally envisioned as a two part project
with kind of a family of pistols, where you would have both
a pocket pistol for commercial sale and police, that
would be unlocked breech and in, say, .32 calibre.
And then you would have a large frame version that would have a locked breech.
They learned from the 1909 attempts to do the same sort of thing, and the locked-breech version would be more for military sales.
But they wanted the two guns to both share as many features and commonalities as possible.
Parts possibly, but definitely things like handling and design characteristics,
so that they could have one basic set of engineering for two pistols.
Now, as we know, the HSc would go on to be a quite successful pistol, with well over a quarter-million produced.
But that's a subject for a separate video. In fact, I've already done that video.
So if you haven't seen it, definitely you should go back and check it out after you're done with this one.
What we're looking at today is the ill-fated attempt to ... build the locked-breech version.
So this whole project started about 1934 with Alex Seidel. And the blowback part is simple enough.
But when you get into, "Well OK, how are we gonna design a new locked-breech pistol?"
OK, you could start all from scratch or you could do what Seidel did, which is take a look at what patents Mauser already has
for locked-breech pistols. And what he came across was, "Aha, we have this pistol that Josef Nickl designed back in 1915."
Which would be this guy, we'll take a look at this up close in just a minute. But
it's a rotating-barrel, locked-breech 9mm, and it actually worked pretty well.
Weren't able to put it into production at the time for a variety of reasons, a combination of
Mauser first getting an order for a lot of military contract C96 pistols that took up their production capacity.
And by the time they were done with that, by the time this pistol was really ready for military trials,
it was like 1917 and Germany was no longer really in any condition to be adopting a brand new military pistol.
So Nickl would kind of get a little discouraged by this, and he would end up taking this to Czechoslovakia
where it was produced by Brno as the CZ 24 and then the CZ 27.
Substantially changed from this 1915 iteration. So,
we'll take this out of the picture for the moment, but Mauser still owns that patent.
And so ... Seidel is able to take that patent and, presto, we'll combine that with his own lockwork
that he developed for the HSc, and frame assembly, all the rest of the design elements of the gun.
And there we have a locked-breech version of the HSc.
So the system that Seidel used as his mechanical basis for the locking breech mechanism was this,
the 1915/1922 pattern of Nickl 9mm locked-breech pistols.
These have rotating barrels very much like a Steyr-Hahn.
If we look at that up close, you can see that rotate as I start to open the slide.
So the barrel is pretty shiny, it's a little hard to see, but as I pull the ... slide back you can see the barrel rotating there.
And it does the same when the slide goes forward to lock.
If we take apart the Nickl pistol and Seidel's first locked breech pistol,
what we'll find is that the mechanical systems are effectively identical.
Not quite to the [point] of actually interchangeable parts, but darn close.
We have Nickl's gun up here and we have Seidel's down here. So in both cases
our recoil spring actually runs through the middle of a cam block
which will serve to force the barrel to rotate when the slide starts moving.
Got the same thing down here. Seidel fully enclosed his recoil spring, which is a nice improvement.
We then have barrel bushings in each which I've already taken out, and then we have a barrel
that has two primary locking lugs and one rotating cam.
So here's Seidel's,
and here's Nickl's, so you can see the similarity there.
Seidel literally just took this patent, which Mauser already controlled, and dropped it straight in
to combine it with his fire control mechanism and the rest of his pistol design.
If we look at the inside of the frame, what you'll see here is a fire control group
that works exactly the same as the standard HSc that went into production later on.
However, this is manufactured a little bit differently. Certainly as a first prototype all of these parts are milled,
where they would be stamped by the latter end of HSc production.
So the long lever here looks a little different than the HSc, but it actually functions exactly the same way
and ... does the same thing. So it is the magazine safety, that hook locks the trigger.
We have a tab in here that is activated by the insertion of the magazine.
So this ledge right back here will be pushed up by the feed lip of the magazine, right there.
That separates this hook which allows the trigger to function, so that's the magazine safety.
And then we also have the slide lock functionality at the back end.
The one thing I will point out is that while the disassembly mechanism from the user's perspective is identical,
you push down on that lever. What it's actually mechanically doing is slightly different.
In the HSc it's pulling a plunger down, in this gun it's actually rotating that locking wedge.
So very similar, but slightly different parts.
The other elements of the gun aside from the breech mechanism, locked versus unlocked, were kept extremely similar.
So you can see the takedown latches, here and here,
as I pointed out the locked breech gun actually technically works a little bit differently,
but from the user perspective is the same.
You can see the hammer mechanisms are the same, they both have that cool shrouded set up.
Now the hammer spur on the pocket gun is a little bit larger. On the 9mm it's just a thin tab, but fundamentally the same.
You can see that the sights are the same there.
The magazine releases are the same, effectively, accounting for the difference in magazine size.
You'll notice that the 9mm gun, the locked- breech gun, has a lanyard ring on the back here,
as one would want for a military service pistol.
But as you would not need on a civilian pocket gun.
The markings on both guns are hand engraved.
This one's a little harder to read but still there. So this is Pistol Calibre 9mm, which is 9mm Parabellum.
This one's kind of cool in that it does also have a Mauser banner carved into the grips.
Obviously hand carved grips on both of these.
Now one place that they do differ is in the safety. So this one has a safety pointing forward,
this one, the 9mm, has a safety pointing backward. This is actually the original design.
So these guns are both in the same serial number range. This one is number V 1001.
Where our blowback gun here is number 1008.
When they started this was the design of the safety, and frankly from a modern sensibility it makes more sense.
You can just flip that down into the fire position and you're ready to go.
However within just a couple of prototype guns, they decided to flip that around to the style that you have here.
You push this one forward to disengage the safety and be ready to fire,
and then you can fairly easily flip it down to put on the safety.
So aside from the safety, and of course the fundamentally different operating systems,
really I think Seidel did a really cool job creating two different pistols in the same basic family.
Even some of the little aesthetic features, like the web on the front of the trigger guard, is nicely copied over in both designs.
You can clearly see the similarities even though they're significantly different in size. ...
So what is the problem? This seems like a pretty nice pistol and yet obviously it didn't go anywhere,
because no one out there has heard of HScs in 9mm with locked breeches.
Well, the problem would be that by I think it was 1936, when the German military came out with
their list of requirements for a new ... military pistol to replace the Luger,
Mauser hadn't quite predicted everything right and the military specifically required an exposed barrel.
If you think about the gun that was ultimately adopted, the Walther P38, it's got an exposed barrel, as did the Luger.
Well, this doesn't.
So the rotating barrel version of the locked-breech HSc pistol was not quite the only version that was tested.
[Mauser] was looking to sell this commercially if possible, and so they did also actually
develop a few variations on it using different styles of locked-breech mechanism.
And this would go on to become the HSv, or hammer, self cocking, experimental variation.
And I have a separate video on the two different types of HSvs, the commercial type
push button magazine, enclosed barrel. And also the version that would compete for German military trials in 1936, 1937,
which had an exposed barrel as per German military requirements.
Now, if you want to know more about the HSv I already have a video on that,
I would encourage you to check that out. I have it linked at the end of this video.
But as for the HSc in it's locked-breech guise,
it would ultimately end up going nowhere, largely because the P38 contract went to Walther
for, well, the new German military pistol contract went to Walther as the P38.
War broke out, there wasn't a lot of excess capacity for Mauser to be continuing to develop civilian or export model pistols.
And by the time the war ended, well, after the war they weren't allowed to make military-style pistols,
and this project pretty much died on the vine.
For them however, the real success was in the blowback version, the pocket version of the HSc.
So obviously the rotating barrel guns are extremely rare.
This is the earliest known one, it is serial number 1001, the very first one made.
Very cool for us to get a chance to take a look at it today. Hopefully you enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.