Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the National Firearms Centre,
part of the British Royal Armouries collection in Leeds.
And we are taking a look at a Viper Mk I.
This is a sort of a modification, it's a play on the Sten gun
that was developed in the UK just after World War Two.
And this was actually developed for military policemen
in post-war occupation Germany.
And the idea was to give them a submachine gun
that could be fired one-handed. Now it's not entirely clear what
they were doing with the other hand at this time,
like, why does the gun have to be one-handed?
But that was very literally what the directive was,
and so they went through a couple different versions of these and this is the Mark I.
So it is basically a simplified Sten gun, if you can believe that.
And yeah, we'll pull this apart in just a minute. They did actually simplify the Sten gun,
encased it in this wooden housing, and it's set up with a grip in front, a 20 round magazine on the side
(20 rounds was a little less obtrusive).
And then a sling on the back that is intended...
You're supposed to carry this over one shoulder, hanging straight down ...
presumably under a garment, or perhaps on the outside of a garment.
I guess that depends if you're the military policeman or the 1940s bank robber.
But you can see a curve right here, a recess, and that's to go up under your arm.
So this is intended to be fired just like this.
(Swing it around that way.) That sits up under your arm. There are no sights on the gun.
You just have a trigger in the front. Don't even have a trigger guard because ... who needs that?
20 round mag on the side, and it allows you to presumably hose down
fleeing criminals in occupation West Germany.
Let me show you this thing up close.
I have to point out, from a video perspective this is a really kind of a difficult gun to properly display,
because it's got stuff coming out in every axis. And so there's no good single angle to show you this from.
Let's see, at the back here you can see the nice checkering or,
you know, the patterning on the side to give it some texture.
A metal butt plate, we'll be taking that off in a moment. The sling is actually supposed to go through here on
both sides up top, but ... the twine that they used in this is very fragile today
and it has already broken ... in a couple of places. So we'll be delicate with that.
On the top you can see sort of the remnant of the Sten gun.
You have a Sten type bolt handle, but it's coming out the top of the receiver instead of the side.
And you do have a safety notch back here, which is good, because that's the only safety mechanism in the gun.
... Lock that back like so.
And then that's the position where it's ready to fire.
Up front here we have the magazine well, still coming out the side. So the tube has been reworked,
... there's a lot more to actually building this than you might expect at first glance.
So the tube has been recut so that it ... still has an ejection port on the side,
but now has the bolt handle on the top.
I'm sorry, the magazine well on the side, the ejection port's on the opposite side.
The barrel nut has been replaced, of course. No front sight, just a plain bare barrel there.
And our pistol grip has no trigger guard, just an open trigger.
You'll also notice that there is no selector lever on this anywhere. Where the original Sten was actually
a select-fire gun, because it was intended for section leaders who needed to be able to, you know,
fire precise shots in semi-auto as if they were carrying rifles. That's been ditched on this, and it's full-auto or nothing.
Now, disassembly is going to involve removing the nose cap,
the butt plate, and these two screws.
So, let's start at the back end, we'll take the butt plate off. This is just held in place by a couple little tension tabs.
I can slide that off, just a pressed metal butt plate.
You see the back end is open there, but we'll see that better when we take ... both sides off.
We can then unthread the front. When I first took this off I made a comment,
a joking comment, of: "So do you think they just threaded the wood?" And lo and behold,
they just threaded the wood. So there's a... It's not quite, you know,
heavy-duty sharp metal threads, there's actually a piece of pressed sheet metal inside this nose cap to act as threading.
Go ahead and take the magazine out. And then we've got our two screws.
(That's that one.)
Another very thoughtful feature here is that these screws are actually captive.
So there's a little wire spring down inside there, and that's going to prevent these screws from coming out.
So this one's unthreaded completely, but it's not going anywhere.
Like I said, there's more to this than you would initially expect.
And now, take it very gingerly and gently,
lift that up,
and presto, there's now our cutaway Viper Mark I.
You can note some of the simplifications here,
the barrel nut has been removed, the barrel's just permanently threaded into the receiver here.
The trigger has been substantially simplified, in fact, let me get a regular Sten Mark II and show you that for comparison.
So here's a regular Sten, you can see the barrel nut system has been changed up completely,
the magazine well has been changed because it doesn't have
a ... sleeve going over the receiver here. Of course the receiver is a brand new
purpose-built receiver, because the slot for the bolt handle is not
adjacent to the ... opening for the ejection port.
And then on the original Sten we have the whole trigger mechanism back here,
where this one has a trigger bar extending up to the front.
And on the original Sten we have a semi-auto mechanism built in here as well.
And of course the back end of the receiver has also been simplified to just be a simple
internal cap, instead of having this extra flanged area for a stock attachment.
So all you've got here is a couple of pins put into the wood,
and when you pull the trigger, it's gonna drop the sear.
That's all there is to a simple submachine gun firing system.
If we look over here, you can see that the hole for the other end of this
sear pivot pin has been lined, so there's a metal collar in there.
So it's not just operating against the wood, which would quickly egg out,
although the spring retaining pin is just a hole in the wood.
There's a really neat thing you can see on the inside. This was obviously handmade, because you can see the scribe marks.
Someone actually had a block of wood and they had to, by hand, cut this into the proper shape
for this wooden housing. And so you can see the lines here denoting each critical element.
So we've got the curve there to make sure that this is thick enough,
our cross lines here to indicate exactly where you want to drill the hole for the screw.
It's really neat to be able to see those guide marks still in place on the inside.
Now, needless to say, this was never actually adopted.
There were several other versions of the Viper that were developed as well.
In fact in a little while we'll have a video on another ... totally different design,
intended for the exact same role. But
this is probably the only one that they ever made, and the whole concept is
really kind of obviously ludicrously bad.
You can almost understand the hip fire...
Well, you can certainly understand hip firing in a military context.
The idea of having a gun designed specifically for it, to the literal exclusion of sights or
any really sort of shoulder stock (although it is possible to fire this from the shoulder),
but without any sights, OK, that doesn't seem like a great idea.
But then when you deliberately put it in a civilian context of a military policeman,
you would think that this would pose a tremendous hazard to any innocent folks who might be around
when someone decides to do something that provokes a military policeman into shooting.
So all sorts of good reasons why this never went into production.
But it's certainly a really interesting gun to take a look at, so.
Big thanks to the British Royal Armouries for giving me the opportunity to come
in here and take this apart and show it to you guys. This is
definitely a one of a kind gun, so nowhere else we can find this. Big thanks to them,
and of course our thanks to my patrons, who's financial support makes it possible for me to travel
to places like the Royal Armouries to show you guns like this.
Thanks for watching.