Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today I have the pleasure
of visiting Mr Joschi Schuy, who is the author
of a fantastic series of books on
... Austrian semi-automatic pistols.
In particular, early and very interesting Austrian semi-automatic pistols.
And I'm taking a look at some of the guns from his collection and his book.
And in particular, this for obvious reasons jumped out at me.
This is an experimental Austro-Hungarian
essentially sort of a functional copy of the Villar Perosa.
What had happened was that Austro-Hungarian troops encountered the Villar Perosa
in Italian hands, and reportedly came back saying
that it was quite the devastating weapon and they wanted something like it.
"We want one of those full-auto, really high rate of fire, double barrel, bullet spraying things."
And so the Austro-Hungarian government decided that it would
see if it could develop something like this.
Now they didn't want to interrupt ongoing production at say, Steyr,
which was making all sorts of guns that were essential for the war effort.
So instead they gave the project to FÉG in Hungary.
And it was there that essentially a practical copy of the Villar Perosa was made
using Frommer 1912, or Frommer Stop, pistols.
So that's what we have here
I can loosen up the tripod here. This is the world's most adorable tiny tripod.
And it is a double barrel, spade grip equipped, extended magazine equipped,
Austro-Hungarian version of the Villar Perosa.
Now the first of these were actually delivered
to the Austro-Hungarian government in April of 1917.
And ... the first batch was 10 of these double-pistol sets,
as well as 39 Frommer Stop pistols that were set up
to be fired with shoulder stocks and extended magazines.
And of those 39, two of them were actually sort of a hybrid, this special model.
Which is essentially the version of the pistol used in the machine pistol set-up.
Which doesn't have a traditional trigger, it instead has a trigger back here.
And set up to be open bolt. This was intended to be used with a shoulder stock as well.
So we'll talk about the trials in a moment.
But first let me show you how this whole set-up actually works.
This thing, ... honestly actually this I think would be far more practical
than most of the Villar Perosa setups I've seen,
largely because of the tripod that it is sitting on.
Alright, so let's start with the basic set-up here.
We have two pistols, they are mounted upside down.
Because FÉG in 1917 wasn't going to go out
and completely ... design something new from the ground up.
They were going to take an existing pistol that they had in production,
a mechanical system they knew worked,
and simply adapt it to this sort of configuration and use.
So these are simply held in by a pair of ... oops.
Tighten this guy down before we start messing with it. There we go.
So these are held in place by a pair of thumb screws here.
That just literally presses the pistol against the frame of the gun.
This is your charging handle and this is the trigger bar.
Now we'll take a closer look at the rest of the tripod assembly in a moment,
but first the pistols themselves.
The barrel has been approximately doubled in length.
The trigger and the trigger guard have been deleted
because they are really not necessary on a tripod adaptation.
They have extended the magazine release so I can pull that back,
and pull out the magazine.
This is 25 rounds, single stack.
And by the way, each of these double gun sets was equipped with 30 magazines.
So you had 15 reloads, and presumably a crew of guys who would be with you
to be furiously reloading these magazines as fast as you could empty them.
Taking a look at the actual markings on the pistol, they are Frommer Patent Stops.
They are made by FÉG in Budapest, and they are all calibre .32.
So these pistols were eventually being made in both .32 and .380.
The ones that were put into these
(and by the way, this is the Pistol Machine Rifle Model 17)
those are all .32 calibre guns.
We still have a grip safety, but the grip safety has been converted into the trigger.
And they have been modified to be open-bolt guns.
So ... normally the Frommer Stop is a single-action semi-auto hammer-fired pistol.
So I ought to be able to cock the hammer and have it stay back.
On these guns you can't, because ...
we have a peg here that is held open by the cocking levers.
And so instead, once I cock this (there we go)
the gun locks open just like an open-bolt firearm.
And depressing the grip safety, or this bar right here
which is what's being used as the trigger,
drops the bolt, chambers a round, fires it, and the gun immediately cycles open.
So as long as this is held down, ...
the gun will simply continue to fire until you release
the grip safety and then it will lock back open.
The other modification that has been made here is these metal plates have been put on
in place of the regular wooden grips.
... In fact under this plate we have a ... big open oval in the frame
as you would have on a typical Frommer Stop pistol.
There's no need to have the metal there because normally there's a wooden grip plate over it.
Since they are not putting on the wooden grip plates,
you obviously don't need them for the tripod,
they've got this metal U shaped wrap-around grip cover instead.
And I should say of course, the extended barrel
makes perfect sense for this sort of tripod mount,
where you can get a little more velocity out of them with really no downside at all.
This is already an absolutely tiny weapon system,
even with a barrel that looks this goofy long on a pistol.
So I mentioned that in April of 1917, when they delivered 10 of the machine pistols
as well as 37 regular Frommer Stops that were set up to use shoulder stocks and extended magazines,
the idea being just a more capable pistol along the lines of say, the C96,
they also delivered 2 that were sort of hybrids of the pair. And this is one of those 2.
It's serial number 44, it has just a slightly lengthened barrel.
It has this U shaped wraparound metal grip,
but it does actually have wooden grip panels on it.
And it has been set up with the same sort of trigger as the machine pistol.
And it's also an open-bolt example.
So the intention of this is that you would put on the shoulder stock,
and then you would fire it like so, and it's full-auto.
We actually have a print here of an original photo from some of the trials.
And you can see one guy with the tripod system, you can see the extended magazines coming up there.
And then there are ... two guys here who have the shoulder-stocked Frommer Stops.
And one guy who has a shoulder-stocked Steyr Model 1912, or Steyr-Hahn.
And just like these are full-auto versions of the Frommer Stop,
that is one of the full-auto Steyr-Hahns.
You can see he's holding onto the extended magazine that's coming down below the grip.
I think this picture really does give you an idea of the potential handiness
and use of this Model 1917 machine pistol/machine gun contraption.
Especially if you consider how much of the fighting in World War One with Austria-Hungary
was done up in the mountains against the Italians.
Having something this small that's really easy to get into sort of
small cramped awkward positions could ... be a very capable weapon.
If it passed all of its trials successfully.
Now let's go back to the tripod for a moment.
For sights, they have gone ahead and put an M95 carbine
rear sight back here on the spade grips.
We have this long bar that has a front sight blade cast into it down here,
and then two oblong holes in the main frame of the gun.
You could loosen these screws to adjust this bracket left and right.
You can see it's actually a little bit loose right now.
And ... that's how you would actually zero the guns.
You would need to do some careful work. One of the interesting parts here
would be regulating the two pistols so that they fire to the same place.
They are both simply held in by these thumb screw blocks.
... When they manufactured these you can see a bunch of this is basically left as a raw casting.
The inside surface right here is finished machined to presumably a very accurate tolerance
to make sure that the two pistols are pointing in the exact same direction.
Looking down at the tripod base here,
we have one screw here that is going to lock your rotation.
So we can loosen that to pivot the gun back and forth.
And we just have these little pins that act as your traverse stops.
So there's the traverse stop in action.
I can just drop that pin into say, that hole
and ... that will allow me to fix a specific field of fire.
This is a system that was used on all of the World War One
and frankly, all of ... the tripod mounted machine guns that were [ever] put into military service.
And then over on this side we have this screw. ...
When I loosen that, that allows the gun to pivot up and down.
So there are stops on this, it can only go that far down, it can only go that far up.
And this allows you to lock it in position.
So this is way more practical to actually aim and use
than for example, the bipod mounted Villar Perosa which I had a chance to shoot.
I'll link to that video at the end of this one.
Honestly, this tiny, adorable little tripod is really cool.
Now the way this works is this lever is going to act on this pin.
That pin is attached to the rear end of the bolt and slide.
The Frommer Stop is a long recoil pistol, so this is its typical mode of operation.
On the ones that are in the gun, these pins are on both sides of the bolt.
On the shoulder stocked one, it's only on one side.
So when I cock that back it's going to lock the bolt open.
It's going to stay open because again, this is an open-bolt gun.
And then I can do the same on the other gun.
While there are two ... pistols in this system,
they both operate independently and they both have their own triggers.
So when using the gun you could fire both simultaneously,
or just the right, or just the left.
(Ignore these little hang tags, they're not original of course.)
This is your safety, you hold that out to the side
and then you can press the trigger in.
And pressing the trigger pad pushes this bar in.
That bar is locked into that tab on the grip safety of the pistol.
And that fires the gun.
So as long as you hold that in, it's going to continue firing.
When you let go it's going to stop,
and that safety is going to snap into place and prevent the gun from firing again.
There are a couple of markings on here to point out.
On the back of the spade grip frame we have FÉG Budapest, and the serial number 30.
And then the left hand pistol is also numbered 30, interestingly the right hand one is not.
The right hand one doesn't have a serial number marked at all.
Once the Austro-Hungarian government received these guns they of course put them into trials.
And we don't know the details of the trials,
but it's for kind of obvious reasons this wasn't adopted by the military. ...
Almost certainly they found that it wasn't particularly practical on the ground.
I'm sure it sounds impressive, these would have a very high rate of fire.
But you have a 25 round single-stack magazine.
That's not going to be hugely reliable,
single-stack magazines this long almost always have problems.
So I'm sure that they ran into some functional troubles with that during the trials.
Although again, I don't actually have documentation on this.
They almost certainly ran into trouble with that.
And you have a gun that is effective at short range,
but not the least bit effective at extended range, it's only .32 ACP calibre.
So a really interesting neat idea,
but the Austro-Hungarian government opted not to put this into production.
And I should also say part of that is probably the fact that this was,
by the time they are doing trials, approaching the summer of 1917.
They don't have a whole lot of resources to put into
manufacturing an exotic new weapon system like this.
It really is wiser to spend the resources available on systems
that are known and proven and already in use in the field.
The Schwarzlose machine guns, the M95 rifles and carbines, that sort of thing.
Only a few of these continue to survive today.
It was extremely cool to get a chance to take a look at not just
the whole dual-pistol tripod set-up, but also the thumb-trigger pistol version.
So a big thanks to Mr Schuy for the opportunity. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
If you would like to know more about this sort of exotic Austrian and Austro-Hungarian thing,
I would encourage you to check out the books by Mr Schuy and his co-author, Mr Josef Mötz.
Fantastic books. They are in German. Even if you can't read German, really cool books to flip through
and utilise your Google Translate skills on particularly interesting sections.
Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.