[ Miniature Taiwanese Sten ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today
at Morphy's with a really cool story,
and a really cool, tiny Chinese Sten gun.
This was produced in 1954 in Taiwan.
And I think there's a fascinating story behind it,
but this gun is way too small for you to see anything back there.
So let's bring the camera up close and I will tell you how this came to be,
and why it's more interesting, to me at least, than your typical miniature firearm.
Normally when you see a miniature gun it means it's a hobbyist's sort of project.
It's something that a very dedicated, skilled craftsman
spent a lot of time producing, like a model maker.
This however is a little bit different.
You may notice there are a couple of differences, especially right in here,
between this ... and a small version of a regular production Sten gun.
Sten guns have a curved ... fire control housing here,
and they also have a selector lever,
because a Sten gun can be set to semi or full-auto mode. ...
Normally when you see a miniature gun like this, it's something that was created by a hobbyist,
a dedicated craftsman, who spends a lot of time making this very minute, cool, fun little model
of, frankly, it could be a machine gun, it could be a ship, it could be any number of things.
This however is a bit different: this, and it's cool that we have the story from the
(unfortunately now deceased), but the guy who originally brought it into the US.
He was a US Army officer who was stationed in Taiwan after 1949.
And he was hired on as a consultant by the 44th Arsenal
to help them prepare to manufacture a copy of the Sten gun.
Now the 44th Arsenal, and by the way,
this is actually the symbol of the 44th Chinese Arsenal.
A little bit crudely engraved there, but that's the correct symbol.
And this is dated 1954, so we're definitely talking post-Chinese Civil War here.
The 44th Arsenal was actually set up in 1936 outside of Nanjing,
and it was originally a repair depot.
The facility had to move a couple of times just within the first few years of being set up
because of Japanese incursion.
It moved to Hunan, and then eventually ended up in Hangzhou,
and stayed there for a number of years.
And it's there that it was basically upgraded from a repair depot to a full-on arsenal.
They did start production of a copy of the Smith & Wesson revolver in .32-20.
But this was an arsenal that was controlled by the Nationalists,
and so as Communist victory gets closer and closer,
the arsenal is actually evacuated once again.
And in 1948 it's moved off to the island of Taiwan, and re-setup outside of Taipei.
And it would remain there pretty much permanently, that's where the arsenal ended up.
And that is why there was an American Ordnance officer who was involved.
This wasn't on mainland China, this was on Taiwan,
which of course after 1949 Taiwan was the [refuge] of the Nationalist government.
It set up its own independent state there.
And obviously needed to ... manufacture small arms.
And one of the things they were looking at doing was making Sten guns.
Now, the reason that I know this is more than just a hobbyist production,
aside from the arsenal mark and the date,
and the fact that we know it actually came back with this American officer.
He said they made half a dozen small-scale copies like this,
and he simply smuggled one of them back to the US when he came home.
And then registered it in the 1968 amnesty,
because this is a fully-functional, full-auto submachine gun.
It's chambered for .32 ACP, so ... obviously you can see it is a scaled-down Sten.
The magazine is not quite as scaled down as the rest of the gun,
because they used an existing magazine
in order to ensure that this would be a fully functional gun.
It's easier to make the rest of the gun work
than to try and come up with your own unique small scale magazine
and small scale cartridges as well. So .32 ACP works quite nicely here.
Anyway, ... there are actually some surviving Taiwanese-manufactured Sten guns.
The Royal Armouries in the UK actually has one,
it has exactly this same flat sort of triangular fire control housing, and no selector switch.
So this is full-auto only, and
it actually works, this thing is so cool.
And not just does it work, but this is
like a scale example of all of the features and the proper construction of a Sten gun.
So we can go ahead and take the magazine out.
This probably holds 10 rounds, maybe 8 rounds, somewhere in there.
And you'll notice in fact that they've put reinforcing plates around the top of the magazine
just like a Sten gun magazine.
The magazine housing actually rotates just like a Sten gun would.
So you can rotate this down into the bottom position,
and that was done for transportation and storage.
So ... the magazine housing when it sticks out the side it really gets in the way,
and it's bulky and awkward, so for storage you can do that.
And that's something that standard Sten guns do.
But we'll put that back in position.
We can go ahead and take the barrel nut off.
I'm going to hold this open so I don't put too much wear on those ratchets.
There we go, so we've got the barrel nut and handguard.
And then we've got the barrel itself. This is clearly a Chinese-made barrel.
I don't know that I can get a good camera angle in there.
But the rifling is essentially they took a cutter and cut rifling grooves down into the barrel,
where we would normally expect the narrow lands to stick up into the barrel.
Well, it's a lot easier to take a cutter and cut those narrow ... grooves instead,
and that's what was done on this.
We can then take the stock off.
And then ... so this wasn't quite reassembled correctly the last time,
but this is the little locking collar, which wasn't rotated into the locking position.
And we then can pull the charging handle back.
There's the charging handle.
Here is the bolt assembly.
Its rear end cap comes off.
The bolt itself is a tiny little Sten gun bolt, fixed firing pin.
Like, all of the exact mechanical features that you would have on a full-size Sten.
This was manufactured, not as a hobbyist's model,
but this was manufactured as an example of how a real Sten gun works.
Now a Sten gun is not that big to begin with, and pretty simple.
Why exactly they decided to make miniatures as this sort of demonstration, I'm not really sure.
Unfortunately the officer who brought this back into the US is long since deceased.
He was a mid-level officer in the 1950s, so he would have been extremely old today, so we can't ask him.
But even underneath here, it's manufactured the same way that a real Sten gun would be.
We've got a trigger and sear down in there.
The whole thing has been nickelled, obviously.
It's got the ... sights just as they would be, dovetailed into the front.
And a little aperture sight on the rear collar here.
This thing is just so cool.
And there you go, one fully ... disassembled, little, tiny, Taiwanese copy of a Sten gun.
Hopefully, one of these days I will be able to get my hands on
one of the full-size proper versions of these, perhaps the one at the Royal Armouries.
It's unlikely that any of those actually exist here in the United States.
1954 puts this just too late to have been captured and brought home by soldiers from the Korean War.
If there are any in the US, they would have come back from Vietnam,
and I'm kind of dubious that any ... substantial number of them would have been used in Vietnam
and found their way into the US.
So for folks who are interested in Chinese,
and especially post-1949 Chinese Taiwanese small arms production,
this is probably about as close as we'll get.
That said, it's really cool that this was actually registered during the amnesty,
and is, despite being tiny, this is a legal, fully-transferable, full-auto machine gun.
Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.