Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video episode on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, and today I have a really cute little compact carbine to take a look at. This is, not surprisingly, French.
This is a Hotchkiss Universal. These were initially actually built as police carbines
and then quickly redesigned as submachine guns.
The idea here is that this is extremely compact to carry, it folds up in about 12 places.
Developed in 1949. Like I said, originally semi-automatic only, fires from a closed bolt.
... Fairly quickly after they were introduced they were slightly redesigned to be capable of full-auto fire.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that they competed against the MAT 49 for French military contracts,
but I'm not 100% sure on that. In any case they were not adopted by the French military.
Some of these were sold to Venezuela, a bunch of them ended up in Morocco.
Both well known hotbeds of high weapons technology.
Now, why don't we take a look at how you go from this to something you can actually shoot.
First step is we need to unfold the buttstock.
It is latched in right here into the magazine well, so I'm going to take this collar, slide it up, unlatch it.
This opens down. You can see on the back we have a U-shaped cutout to clear the magazine.
When this opens up it unfolds a hollow C-channel type pistol grip there.
And then we have a pin right here that runs into a hole in the back of the receiver cap,
and that's what locks it in place when the stock's open.
So open that up, pull the collar back, lock the stock in place.
That's so far, so good.
Now we have our magazine. Says 9mm Luger and it's a 32 round magazine.
Which if you just left it in the magazine well ready to use and folded it forward,
it would come out to about here and make the whole package longer.
There's a two part magazine well. Part here and part here.
And that allows the magazine to slide all the way through this down to here and be a bit more compact.
Now as you can see there's a lug on the barrel and that's going to prevent us from taking the magazine out.
This, contrary to what you might have assumed looking at it, is not the full length of the barrel.
This part here is just a trunnion built into the receiver.
The barrel is significantly longer and it ... slides in for compact storage.
I have a knob right here on this side of the gun,
when I release that knob it allows the barrel to extend to its full length.
Now I can take my magazine,
pull it up until it snaps into the magazine catch,
rotate it down
so that the inside part of the mag well latches into the outside part of the magazine well.
We do have a magazine release button here if I want to take the magazine out.
But I don't have to do that to go from the folded configuration to the ready to fire configuration.
You can leave the mag loaded. When you pull it out it'll snap in place when you get to the magazine catch.
Now,
charge the bolt, and you're actually ready to fire.
This is a really funky submachine gun to fold up like that.
It really was not used by very many people at all.
Like we said, Venezuela, Morocco, there may have been a few other small customers,
but no major use of this gun because it really is a bit on the complicated side.
The grip is kind of terrible to handle ergonomically, the buttstock is very small.
The sight aperture is tiny, this would be very difficult to use in low-light.
Other than that, you know, clearly the strong point of this gun is its ability to fold into a very small package.
And it's weird and neat, and we think it's kind of cool.
[Folding it back up.]
Alright, so let's take a look at the process required to take this thing and fold it back up.
First, we need to move the magazine.
We have a catch on the bottom of the gun, right here. Depressing that allows us to rotate the magazine well upwards
like this.
Then (and by the way this doesn't lock, this is just loose up here), then we're going to use the magazine release button.
And instead of pulling the magazine out, we're going to push it in.
It's going to slide down to this pressed-in stop on the lower receiver bin.
That puts our magazine in its storage position.
Next, we need to collapse the barrel down.
You can see there are two nice little finger grooves cut up at the muzzle here.
And we have a lever right here on the bottom. When I depress that lever,
that allows me to pull the barrel back.
... Push the lever down, pull the barrel in, and while holding the barrel compressed let go of the lever. That locks it in place.
Then lastly, we need to fold up the buttstock. So I'm going to take this collar, pull it back out.
Then this folds all the way up around,
encircles the magazine,
and this hook latches into the outer magazine well. And there we go.
This of course can be done with a fully loaded magazine,
and this gives you an extremely small, short package for a submachine gun. This is ideal for a paratrooper.
Now this looks pretty complicated. It took us a little while to get it fully figured out,
but once you're used to it, you can really unfold and be ready to go with this thing pretty quickly.
[Really? It doesn't look fast...]
Alright, let's see how fast I can do this.
Stock, barrel.
You know that's pretty quick. That's faster than I could get it reassembled.
There we go.
So I hope you guys enjoyed it. Thanks for watching,
and tune back into ForgottenWeapons.com for more information on cool French submachine guns.