Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at
CZ in Uherský Brod in the Czech Republic
taking a look at a couple of the cool guns that have
come out of CZ's historical archive.
They were kind enough to give me access to do some filming for you guys.
So, what we have today isn't actually that old of a gun,
but it is one (two actually) that don't get a whole lot of coverage.
And the CZ 101 over here in particular is a really obscure and unusual firearm today.
So fundamentally what we have here is CZ's first attempt
at a polymer framed, striker fired, service pistol essentially.
These were developed in the mid-1990s.
The ... first complete prototypes were in 1995, production began in 1996.
The CZ 100 did see export and commercial sale in the US, although it was not particularly popular.
And what CZ's intention was with this pistol was to create a cheap and affordable ... handgun.
And it's for that reason that it has a bunch of the features that it does, like the polymer frame.
The idea was something that is going to be more economical to produce
than a cast or milled steel frame, and is thus cheaper to sell.
I suppose the best way to put this is it's the equivalent of a people's pistol,
a
And unfortunately what came out is, well, the corollary of a
not necessarily that durable or high quality, so it doesn't have that great of a reputation.
But it's still a very interesting design to take a look at.
So a couple of other basic things to go over.
These were made in both 9mm Parabellum and .40 calibre (.40 Smith & Wesson),
which was of course popular at this point in the mid/late 1990s, early 2000s.
And the standard version held 10 rounds of .40, or 13 rounds of 9mm.
And then they also introduced a single-stack version.
So the double-stack was the CZ 100, the single-stack version
(which holds either 7 or 8 rounds depending on calibre), was the CZ 101.
And with that, let's just go ahead and take a closer look at how these actually go together.
And why they weren't actually all that popular.
So the 100 and the 101 here look virtually identical from the side.
However, if we take a look at them from the bottom, you can see that the
101 here is noticeably thinner than the 100. And it certainly feels that way in the hand.
When we take the magazines out this ... looks like a CZ 75 mag.
It's not quite, this is actually proprietary to the CZ 100.
And then the single-stack magazine is a totally different design.
It actually looks a little bit Walther P38-like.
So both of these are magazines that are usable for either calibre.
So with the single stack mag we have it numbered to 7 for .40 on this side,
and numbered to 8 for 9mm on that side.
The same sort of thing here, 13 for 9mm, 10 for .40 Smith & Wesson.
The magazines that you run into for these in the United States
for the 9mm guns are generally blocked to 10 rounds.
Although if you have a .40 cal one it ought to be usable to full 13 round capacity in 9mm.
A little loophole in the system there. Anyway.
The biggest popular complaint about the 101 and the 100 was the trigger pull.
Because it has a pretty atrociously long staple gun-esque trigger.
And an equally long reset, it comes literally all the way back to the front there to reset.
And in some ways that's part of the idea of the gun, there's no manual safety on it,
it doesn't have a trigger safety on it, and it really doesn't need any of those.
This handles very much like a double-action revolver with a poor quality double-action trigger.
But it doesn't need any extra controls, it doesn't need any extra training.
You don't need to know anything special to operate this, it's simply - point gun, pull trigger.
We have a slide lock here.
So these do lock open when empty, and you can also lock them open manually.
That slide lock is a really low profile part.
So again, this is designed as a personal defence pistol
so it doesn't have a lot of things coming out the side, doesn't have a lot of controls.
It has this interesting part on the top of the slide.
... Generally you'll see people talk about how this is intended
to be able to rack the slide on your belt. And yes, it is sort of profiled to do that.
But fundamentally this is part of the slide disassembly, it's not a part just added for that.
We'll take a look at that in just a moment. It is striker fired.
The .40 cal guns were all ported,
so we've got two ports in the barrel matching ports in the slide.
The 9mm ones are not.
From the slide up there's really no difference between the single stack and the double stack,
between the 100 and the 101.
This one is serial number 5,
this is actually serial 01 one of the CZ 100, which is kind of cool.
Alright, now to disassemble these what we're going to do is push out this pin right here.
I just have to pull the slide back just a little bit.
That's going to come out.
Because of the way the striker operates, you do have to pull the trigger,
and then you can take the slide off the top of the frame.
And before we go any further, I will point out one of the other ...
characteristic, emblematic features of the 100 series.
And that is the fact that it uses full length polymer rails.
There is ... a metal insert for the barrel locking,
but the rails do not have any metal inserts, it's just plain polymer.
Now CZ did a long-term durability test on this system before they put it on the market.
They put 15,000 round through one of these, and according to them
there was no undue wear on the system.
As a practical matter, really none of these guns
have probably more than a few hundred round put through them.
They were not intended to be high-volume pistols, they were not intended to be military,
they weren't intended to be serious long-term competition pistols.
This was a simple, inexpensive, personal defence pistol.
And so people ... speak poorly of the idea of using just plain unreinforced polymer rails.
And in fact by the way, the whole frame is a simple polymer,
it doesn't have any reinforcing glass fibre in it even. But it works just fine.
You can see the trigger back here is pretty ... typical, it's just a double-action style of striker.
Double action for a striker means that the striker is not cocked when the slide resets.
So pulling the trigger pulls the striker all the way back, and then releases it.
There is a drop safety which is operated by this lever right here.
When the trigger's all the way back, that lever comes back and disables the drop safety.
That drop safety is this little button right here above the striker.
As long as that is in the downward position, as it is now,
it prevents the striker from moving forward.
That lever pushes that safety up, which allows the striker to move forward.
So fundamentally there's nothing unsafe about this pistol,
it just ... has some unergonomic factors to it.
Now if we continue disassembly. We have a non-captive recoil spring.
This is a basic Browning style of operation, tilting barrel, locked, .40 calibre, has the ports.
Disassembly, we can start by taking the striker out the back.
Be aware this has a really long, heavily compressed striker spring.
So hold on to this when you take it out, or it will go flying across the room.
Push the button there down, and then we're going to slide this piece out the bottom of the slide.
... Hold on to the spring. So there's our little retainer, it's polymer.
And yep, it goes flying across the room just like that.
Alright, having now recovered these from the other side of the room.
You have a very long striker spring and a little guide rod.
This is a polymer guide rod also, so a lot of kind of inexpensive parts in here.
Next, in order to take out the striker itself,
we have to depress our block there.
So next up we have the striker,
which kind of inexplicably has this little tiny plug in it.
There is a spring-loaded detent right here, push that in.
Which way does this one come off?
There we go. Once again, retain that thing so it doesn't go flying across the room.
This is a tiny, tiny little detent.
There's the cap, there's the spring.
And then this is a wedge that is holding the firing pin spring in place.
Which is still trapped in the front of the slide here.
This can go in either direction.
When you reassemble the pistol you want this notched side
to be on the right side of the slide as you're looking down the sights.
So it should go in that way.
It can go in either direction, and if you put it in the wrong direction,
you'll end up with the firing pin jammed forward, so.
Trapped inside there was our firing pin spring.
So when this whole assembly is put together,
you've got your striker spring and its guide rod back here.
It's pushing on, it's blocked by the front, that little square lug there.
You have a firing pin spring here at the front.
And then this wedge sits right there
which holds the firing pin spring in place.
It compresses it a little bit so this is pushing the firing pin back out of battery,
so that it doesn't protrude out and potentially fire out of battery.
That's the whole internal system, it really is a bit more complicated than it needed to be.
Which I'm sure didn't help production and sale of the gun.
And of course that ... whole assembly requires the use of this blocking lug.
They call it a barrel stop, because it does also
come in contact with the barrel when the gun locks up.
That goes in like that.
You see shades of CZ's other pistols in the design here.
I should say basic sights, rear sight is plastic for cost.
And I didn't actually mention this at the beginning, but there's our CZ 100 mark, calibre .40.
And on the single stack CZ 101 in 9mm.
As I mentioned, these were available in the United States.
The 9mm version in the US was of course limited to 10 round magazines
because it was during the magazine ban, the assault weapons ban in the US.
The CZ 101 never did make it to the United States.
There was another version that was introduced to try and remediate some of the
concerns with the trigger in 2000, and that was the CZ 110.
Which had a DA/SA trigger instead of the double action only of the 100 and the 101.
We'll talk about ... the 110 in a different video.
But total production was just over 35,000 for the 100, the 101 and the 110 all put together.
That's both United States sales, Czech sales and all of their other international sales.
So production ended in 2007, this thing has a run of just over 10 years.
Not a particularly successful firearm for CZ.
Certainly some good learning experiences in it,
they were able to come back actually much more recently, like 10 years after that,
and do a much more successful, much better regarded polymer-frame pistol, that being the P-10.
Anyway there's very little coverage of the 100 in the US, and basically no coverage of the 101.
So it was very cool to get a chance to pull both of these out of CZ's vault
and film them for you. Hopefully you enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.