Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
taking a look at a Belgian M2 Vigneron submachine gun.
This is one of those Cold War designs that's really not so well known in the United States
despite being made in fairly, surprisingly perhaps, large numbers.
These found their way into a fair number of conflicts around the world.
In part because they were shipped to Africa in the 1950s.
And in part because Belgian forces have been involved in a lot of UN peacekeeping operations,
and this was a standard weapon for the Belgian armed forces for more than a couple of decades.
Now, the basis of this was after World War Two the Belgians, like many people,
had a lot of British ... assistance provided Sten guns.
And the Sten is fine mostly, but it's really an emergency last-ditch production sort of gun.
The Belgians understandably wanted something that was a little bit nicer to actually use.
And so a Colonel Georges Vigneron came up with this design which maintains
much of the simplicity, and the ease of manufacturing, and low cost of the Sten gun,
while being something that's really quite a lot nicer to actually use.
So let's go ahead and take a closer look at what Vigneron came up with,
and then we'll talk about how it got adopted.
So here's the whole thing to begin with.
We have actually a fair number of markings on here, so let's start with those.
The primary ones are on the magazine well here. We have "VIG", abbreviation for Vigneron,
Model M2, a serial number here.
And I believe these serial numbers restarted every year.
And then "FP", which is
This is actually a gun that was ... property of the Belgian Congo
and manufactured in 1959.
So this would have been made well after
the M2 became the standard pattern, this wasn't an M1 that was upgraded.
The grips have this mark in them and it's "CMH",
and that stands for
which is the name of the subcontracting company that made the plastic lowers.
They went ahead and put their name into the grip area.
And then we also have that
The serial number is repeated there,
or at least the last 4 numbers of it, on the bottom of the trigger guard.
There is a selector switch here on the left side of the gun, we have "S" for safe,
and then we have "A" ... there, A for auto, and "R" for repetition or semi-auto.
So this does function in all three different modes.
And it also has a grip safety built in, and if you don't depress the grip safety
you cannot open the bolt, nor can you fire the gun.
The stock takes some design cues from the Grease Gun,
it's a simple wire frame collapsing stock.
We have it locked in the storage position, the transport or carry position back here.
But then you can see there are three more notches on the stock for different lengths of pull.
So I can push this cross button in,
and then I can extend the stock out to short,
medium ... or long.
And I can also just push the button in again and remove the stock completely.
And it's fun to point out here that
the right end of the stock is actually a bit longer and has this slot in it.
That is your cleaning rod built right into
the shoulder stock, so you're never without a cleaning rod.
We have a spring-loaded dust cover here that opens automatically when you rack the bolt.
So it'll open when you open the bolt.
You can also have the gun cocked like this,
and closing the bolt will also pop the dust cover open.
It's got a little felt pad in there to keep it ... a little quiet, keep it from scratching up the gun.
And you can see that there is a dimple stamped into it, that's what actually opens this.
... Actually much like an AR-15 dust cover.
The bolt either here or on the front of the bolt, hits that dimple,
pops the ... dust cover here out from under its spring latch.
You saw that this is an M2 pattern: that differs from the M1 primarily in the sights.
So the M2 has a rear notch sight, which you can see there.
And it has a big tall front post with a protective shield around it.
Now the way they did that was to simply clamp the shield
basically into the compensator at the end of the barrel.
So you can see how that's a piece that goes on and locks into the front slot of the compensator.
Barrel fins for cooling which isn't really an important thing,
but they continued to do it on the Vignerons anyway.
Disassembly is really easy, we can start at the front.
We just have a barrel nut here.
Unscrew that and then the barrel slides out.
And the barrel nut is actually captive on the barrel.
The only way to get it off would be to remove the front sight protector, which means you can't lose it.
Back at the breech here, you can see there's basically a 360 degree feed ramp cut.
But then we have a pair of pins, here and here,
that locate the barrel in the front of the receiver.
And that ensures that your front sight is always properly
oriented upward, along with the compensator.
Just an interesting little side-note about manufacturing techniques here.
... In fact virtually all of the operations on this barrel
are done without any regard to orientation.
So ... the basic profile is turned on a lathe.
Fins are on a lathe, all of this stuff is on a lathe.
You can cut this feed ramp without caring what's pointing up.
In fact even the compensator here, the barrel is symmetrical at the front.
All they do is ... at some point in the process they just take an end mill,
and cut these three slots plus one dovetail slot for the front sight.
You cut all of those across, and it's only at that point that you've actually created
a reference point on the barrel that actually matters.
So that becomes the top.
And then the only thing left to do in production is to put these locating pins in.
Which I bet you can do in the same machining setup
that was used to cut these, so that the barrel never actually moves,
so that you know that those pins are properly aligned.
Either that or you could use the compensator cuts in your jig
to hold the part in the proper orientation to put in those pins.
Next up we take the end cap and we just unscrew it.
There's no locking or anything on this, just threads off.
The spring inside is not captive.
But it is a large diameter spring, so it doesn't kink when you try to reassemble the gun.
And one interesting little unique feature here
is that the spring drops in diameter at the end where it is set over the tail of the bolt.
... I don't think I've seen that on a spring like this before, it's a neat little feature.
The bolt is very simple, very Sten like, fixed firing pin.
It's got an extractor.
That's really it. It's got a cut for the ejector here in the bottom.
And there's just nothing else going on there, it's just a weight.
This is a plain simple blowback action.
And lastly we have a tube receiver on the top and a plastic lower.
And all you have to do to separate these is pull this back slightly, so it slides back.
This is normally prevented because this wedge, right here,
is held up into the receiver by the end cap threaded on here.
So once you've got the end cap off, then pull that back, lift it off.
And the two parts just separate.
The grip safety controls this front catch.
So when that's up, it will hold the bolt in either the open or the closed position.
So that does mean like when you disassemble the gun
you have to depress the grip safety to pull the bolt out the back,
which can be a little annoying, but that's a nice simple way to do it at least.
And then you have your sear right there.
Sear drops, gun fires, not much else going on.
And the same goes for the receiver tube, very simple.
Clearly influenced by Sten, MP40, those sorts of things.
You've got threading on the front and the back for the barrel nut and the receiver end cap.
We've got a dust cover with a captive spring right there.
The magazine release, by the way, is just like the Sten or the MP40, just a cross button.
And I should mention the magazine for a moment.
Obviously if you've seen an MP40 magazine you may think that this is identical.
They look virtually identical, they are not interchangeable.
Something that came as a bit of a surprise I think to people in the US periodically when
surplus Vigneron magazines show up and people buy them
thinking that they're a really cheap alternative for an MP40.
Or that they are MP40 mags, which they are not.
They have the same capacity, 32 rounds, but you can see on the front here that they are marked.
And this is actually an M1 magazine, but marked "VIG", Vigneron.
And like the MP40 mag, they are a double-stack single-feed magazine, also like the Sten.
So there's the Vigneron field stripped, really easy to take apart.
Worth pointing out that this is a large-scale Belgian military firearm
that was not produced by FN, ... perhaps surprisingly.
FN had a bunch of other stuff going on.
This was produced initially by a company called
There would later be a couple of other contractors.
But yeah, Belgian gun, military, not made by FN.
The design was completed in 1953, this was adopted as the Vigneron M1 (by the way)
in 1954 by all of the Belgian armed forces, the Army, the Navy and the Air Force.
A few years later they would update it to the M2 variety.
And that's what we have here, that's what the vast majority of them are.
Production switched over to the M2 pattern, and the existing M1 guns
were generally updated to M2 pattern, which I believe is predominantly better sights.
Going from an aperture and an exposed front sight, to a rear notch sight
and a ... set of protective wings around the front sight.
At any rate, at some point I'll have access to an M1 and we'll do a video on that as well.
Now the fact that these were used by the
is part of the reason that they got around ... and continue to get around today.
With the end of Belgian rule in the Belgian Congo,
the guns of the
And so you will find things still today, guns like these, FN 49s and Belgian Mausers, Hi Powers,
all of those arms floating around Africa.
In total more than 100,000 of these were manufactured.
Obviously, the Belgian Congo ceased to be a
Belgian colony not that long after these were being made.
But they stayed in European Belgian military service into the '90s.
Some of them were replaced starting in the 1970s, but generally they stuck around
until they were ultimately replaced by FNCs.
As well as some of them being replaced by FN-made Uzis at one point or another.
Anyway, they are really quite scarce in the United States
because there just weren't that many opportunities for them to come into the US.
... They weren't being sold commercially,
not a lot of opportunity for US soldiers to get access to them before 1968
when the GCA cut off the importation of foreign-made machine guns.
That said, they ... were a really quite well-liked gun in practice.
They are simple, but reliable and effective.
Really I think an interesting and under-appreciated submachine gun from the Cold War.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.