Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and you are probably familiar with
the FN P90 PDW.
What we have to take a look at today
is a gun that was very directly the inspiration
for the P90's magazine and feeding system.
This is ... a semi-automatic pistol
which was developed from a submachine gun
designed by a gentleman named John L. Hill.
Mr Hill ... actually served in the Canadian Flying Corps,
or Canadian Air Force, it wasn't the Air Force at the time, but
served in World War One as a pilot with the Canadian armed forces.
Came back from that work,
and ended up in the United States working in the oil and gas industries.
And it was just after World War Two that he got the idea for this system.
And what we have here is basically a horizontal magazine, with a rotary system that rotates
cartridges from being perpendicular to the bore
to being parallel to the bore, and feeding them into the barrel.
This is how the FN P90 runs.
Now Hill filed his first patent in 1952,
and he would continue to file a number more through the mid-1950s designing this system.
And originally he built 7 or 8 prototypes with a variety of configurations.
So different barrel lengths, some were pistols like this,
some had a variety of different types of stock.
And he was obviously pretty excited about the system.
Guns had been a long-time hobby for him, and
he thought this was a pretty darn good idea.
And he would end up showing it to both the US military and also the FBI, informally.
The military took a closer look at it.
In fact it went to Aberdeen Proving Grounds, and in 1953 they tested.
And they took a number of photographs of it as part of that testing process.
And so it's kind of cool, we actually have photographs of the original
submachine gun version of the Hill design
that ... Aberdeen Proving Grounds was taking a closer look at.
Now, no one ended up adopting this system.
In part probably because, well, World War Two had already ended.
And by the time this was getting into where the military would see it,
the Korean War was also ending,
and that's twice now we've shut down wars,
and ... we're going to scale back a bit on military development.
So Hill at some point in here, and the date's not clear,
ends up selling the patents to two guys in Texas.
One guy named Herman Munschke (whose name I'm probably mispronouncing), and a partner.
And they formed a company called H&B Enterprises, and they would go on to build
some more semi-automatic versions of Hill's pistol, and that's what we have here.
H&B Industries would make somewhere between 90 and 100 of these guns,
and a handful of them are still around today.
So let me show you how this thing works, you'll certainly recognise the P90 in it.
I will start off with the obvious question of: why the two-tone black and gold?
And the answer is: I have no idea.
Clearly someone thought that this would be a nice looking set of colours.
And well, it's a rare gun, so who am I to complain?
These Hill pattern guns were made in a variety of different configurations,
different barrel lengths, some had stocks, some didn't,
some different grip and safety configurations.
Some of them had single-stack and some of them had double-stack magazines.
This is a single-stack example.
In fact it's kind of interesting, the original Hill submachine gun
that Aberdeen Proving Grounds was photographing and testing
was actually built using an MP40 barrel. Kind of neat.
Clearly that's what Hill had around at the time.
Rather than pay to have a new barrel made,
(especially in the '50s when 9mm Parabellum was not a particularly common cartridge in the US),
well, why not get one of those old German leftover MP40 barrels and use that?
So that's exactly what he did.
There were apparently some of these made in .380,
the majority of them in 9mm Parabellum like this one.
So, let's see. A couple of markings on it.
The gun that went to Springfield had "Hill" written on the front of the receiver, this doesn't.
This is one of the later H&B Enterprises guns, as you can see there.
According to Munschke they made something like 90 or 100 of them.
I suspect they started at 1001, and just went to about 1100.
And the only other marking on there is on the barrel, which just identifies it as 9mm.
Oh, and an "H" on the charging handle here,
which is ... presumably there to stand for Hill.
These guns also had a variety of different charging handle styles.
This one is very low profile, and frankly, a little bit hard to use.
A lot of them ... stuck out from the gun more.
And this is a non-reciprocating charging handle,
so once you're actually shooting this doesn't go anywhere.
Now the magazine is the cool part here of course.
So what we do is pull this latch forward, it's just a little spring catch there,
and we can take out the magazine.
It is a single stack magazine.
The whole thing is made of clear plastic.
And in fact one of the ideas that Hill had was that this thing could be fed
from basically pre-packaged, pre-made magazines that were single use.
Of course, we've heard that before.
There is a cartridge-shaped hole in the bottom of magazine up here,
and so you can drop in cartridges (these of course are just dummy rounds).
Put a couple in there.
One of the interesting things about it is when you let this all the way forward,
you can see that the first cartridge goes past that opening.
So ammunition doesn't fall out of the magazine
when the magazine's not in the gun.
When you do put it into the gun, there's a little stopper
that is going to actually pull the follower back just slightly like so,
which allows the cartridges to line up to feed out of the ... magazine.
Now I mentioned that these were both single and double-stack magazines,
this one is single, obviously.
In its double-stack configuration you could hold about 30 or 32 rounds in a magazine this length.
Single stack you're going to get about half that, 15 or so.
Now internally this is just a simple straight-blowback, unlocked action.
It just has this interesting turntable system here.
In the originals you had a complete bolt here, with I believe a fixed firing pin.
On the semi-auto version, what they did was essentially make the striker a separate piece.
So you can see there's a striker spring here, and two main springs for the bolt on the sides.
So when you fire ... oops, when you disengage the safety.
When you fire, the striker comes forward, hits the firing pin, and fires the gun.
It's a ... way to build a semi-auto version of what was originally a submachine gun.
Now, the way the feed system works.
As the bolt cycles, when the bolt goes all the way back,
that turntable rotates to be perpendicular to the bore.
A cartridge falls out of the magazine into that, or rather, is pushed by spring force.
Note that we have this, that's essentially the feed ramp,
because that is going to sit in this cutout, right here at the front of the magazine.
It's going to push the cartridges back.
And just like that, push them down out of the magazine
every time that this turntable rotates to a position where it can accept a cartridge.
So, the turntable is like this when the bolt is fully retracted.
And then as the bolt comes forward,
it's going to rotate in line with the barrel,
which allows the bolt to then push the cartridge into the barrel
and then it's ready to fire.
After you fire, on the ejection stroke,
it's going to pull the cartridge out backwards like this.
And presumably once the ... bolt's far enough back to be free of interference with the turntable,
that's when the turntable starts rotating.
The empty case is kicked out down the pistol grip.
So that's your ejection port, it ejects out the bottom and
we've already got a pistol grip there, so let's make that the ejection port.
The safety on this example is basically just sort of a cross-bolt style of switch.
Safe on one side, and fire on the other.
Hill did experiment with a number of different safety mechanisms, or safety systems.
His original guns were full-auto only, they didn't have a semi-auto selector.
And so one of his ideas was actually for an ambidextrous safety that was set up like this,
but where you had three positions.
The centre position was safe, and pushing it to either side would change it to fire.
The idea being that whether you were left or right-handed didn't make a difference,
it was a fully-ambidextrous safety.
Now, of course, locating it behind the grip
is a little less convenient than locating it in front, but
that's how this one was done.
And of course you can see that this is a prototype style of gun
by the fact that the entire thing is held together by Allen screws.
Hex head screws, hex socket screws.
I'm not going to take this apart, I took a wrench to a couple of these and they're very tight.
And I do not want to be the guy who
actually strips out some of those screws trying to take them apart.
So, I think it's pretty clear how this works mechanically,
it's just simple blowback with a separate striker.
There are a couple of neat pros and cons to this system.
One of the downsides of course is with the ejection port being all the way down the pistol grip,
if you turn this thing upside down it does not work reliably.
They found this in testing.
Now there aren't that many places where you would actually need to shoot the thing upside down.
But one could certainly imagine at least, say, a special forces or hostage rescue team
rappelling down the side of a building upside down perhaps.
And ... legitimately using the gun upside down in that situation.
So that could be a problem.
On the other hand you have an interesting benefit that different projectile designs,
like hollow points, or even wad cutters, will run just perfectly fine in this system.
Because the feeding is based on the cartridge body,
and dropping that cartridge into the turntable here.
At which point it's directly in line with the barrel.
So you don't have to worry about, say, a traditional style of feed ramp
not working well with a bullet design.
As long as this cartridge can drop into that turntable,
the ... cartridge is going to feed just fine.
Now I know you guys are waiting for me to actually demonstrate this with these dummy rounds.
And that was my original plan, but I'm not going to, because the first time I tried it
I discovered that these dummy cartridges are just a hair longer
than this system is easily able to eject as complete cartridges.
Pulling an empty case out is not a problem.
But with these full-length dummies,
basically the cartridge is not far enough back when the turntable starts to rotate,
and the first time I loaded the dummy in there I proceeded to jam the gun up.
And it took me like 10 minutes to get it back out.
So we're not going to be doing that for you here today.
Originally, in its full-auto configuration, these fired about 500 rounds a minute.
Apparently they were fairly controllable.
That was obviously usually done with a shoulder stock,
easy to mount a shoulder stock on there.
Now when these patents were purchased by H&B Industries,
they of course made an attempt to market the gun themselves.
They're not going to buy the patents just to sit on them, or because they think they're neat.
So one of the things they did was actually take this design,
... a full-auto version of one of these guns,
to FN in Belgium to try and interest FN in perhaps producing the gun.
Apparently they were invited there ... under the auspices of Val Browning,
who was still alive at that point, and obviously a big influence on FN.
They got there in 1963, they showed the gun to some of the guys at FN.
Apparently Uziel Gal, of the Uzi and Galil, was at FN at the time.
... This would make sense, FN was in the process of tooling up to produce the Uzi under licence.
Apparently Uziel Gal thought this was a pretty neat system.
FN thought it was neat as well, they didn't end up actually putting it into production at that point.
Now H&B left one of the guns there with them
for FN to experiment with, tinker with, study, whatever they wanted to do.
This was of course patent protected in the United States as well as most of Europe.
So clearly they had an element of trust that FN wasn't just going to rip the thing off.
FN apparently returned the gun to them in 1965.
Although as an interesting side note it was
apparently confiscated by US customs during the importation process.
Probably, I suspect, because it was probably not actually registered under the NFA.
To continue on our little side track here,
there's some documentation, a letter from Hill from the late '50s,
complaining about the fact that he's discovered he has to pay NFA taxes
to register his prototypes.
He is fairly bitter in this letter, or sounds fairly bitter to me,
about the idea that he spent like $10,000 of his own money in the 1950s
developing this system, and getting it working, and getting it patented.
And he was doing this to try and provide the US military with better weapons to do its job with.
And then he becomes aware of ... the NFA,
and the fact that he's now apparently required to pay $200 per gun
to register his prototypes as machine guns.
That's going to add up to like $1,400 worth of [registration] taxes that he has to pay. ...
And that's 15% of his development costs, and he finds that ... completely unfair.
It's not clear from this letter if he actually did go ahead and
go through with this and pay to register all the prototypes.
I suspect he may well not have,
and that the gun that was taken to FN was never actually registered.
And so when it came back it was probably seized for that reason.
Who knows? Maybe it's still in some agency reference collection somewhere.
But most of the production of course were these semi-automatic guns that H&B did.
They were unable to get anyone else further interested in the guns,
and so the whole idea kind of died on the vine.
Except for FN, ... it's pretty clear that they didn't ever totally forget about this.
There's no information that I was able to find on whether anyone
who had originally seen the Hill was still in FN
working on what became the FN P90 project in the early 1980s. It's possible.
FN's patents for the P90 do reference Hill's patents,
and so there was obviously some level of institutional knowledge still there.
... The P90 is not an exact copy of this.
In the P90 the rotary system is built into the magazine instead of into the gun.
And of course by the time the P90 was in development,
Hill's patents were long since expired.
So it's not like there's anything nefarious going on with FN.
They recognised what had been a good idea at one time,
and were able to turn around and reuse it themselves.
That's how inventing works.
You don't get a permanent perpetual licence on an idea.
So, hopefully you guys enjoyed this look at
one of the very rare, very few, surviving examples of a Hill rotary feed pistol.
Thanks for watching.