Hill SMG/Pistol: Inspiration for the FN P90

hey 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 p90s magazine and feeding system this is well this is a semi-automatic pistol which was developed from a submachine gun designed by a gentleman named john l hill mr hill was a actually served as in the canadian uh flying corps or canadian air forces 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 uh work and ended up in the united states working in the oil and gas industries and it was just after world war ii 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 fnp 90 runs now uh 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 seven or eight uh 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 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 springfield armory or 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 ii had already ended and by the time this was getting into you know where the military would see it the korean war was also ending and you know that's twice now we've shut down wars and and there's you know we're gonna we're gonna scale back a bit on military development um so uh hill at some point in here and the date's not clear ends up selling the patents uh to two guys in texas uh 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 recognize 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 colors 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 uh submachine gun that uh that aberdeen proving grounds was photographing and testing was actually built using an mp40 barrel it's 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 nine millimeter parabellum was not a particularly common cartridge in the u.s well why not get one of those old you know 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 nine millimeter parabellum like this one so uh 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 munchkey they made something like 90 or 100 of them i suspect they started at 1001 and just went to about 100 and the only other marking on there is on the barrel which just identifies it as nine millimeter oh and an h on the charging handle here which is i'm 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 had 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 uh what we do is pull this latch forward as 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 uh 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 gun 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 uh 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 and the striker comes forward hits the firing pin and fires the gun it's a simple sort of semi-auto uh 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 just like that uh push them down out of the magazine every time that this turntable rotates to a position where it can accept a cartridge so the turntables 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 on after you fire on the ejection stroke it's going to pull the cartridge out backwards like this and presumably once the case is far enough 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 i'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 the you had three positions the center 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 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 uh by allen screws uh 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 a say a special forces or hostage rescue team rappelling down the side of a building upside down perhaps and that you know 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 uh 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 a 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 projectile 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 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 to 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 one of these guns a full auto version of one of these guns to fn in belgium to try and interest fn and perhaps producing the gun apparently they were invited there on the under the auspices of val browning who was still alive at that point and obviously a big influence on fm they got there in 1963 they showed the gun to to some of the guys at fn apparently uzil gal of the uzi and galil was at fn at the time as this would make sense fn was in the process of tooling up to produce the uh the uzi under license apparently uzi algal 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 u.s customs during the importation process probably i suspect because it was probably not actually registered under the nfa um to continue on our little side track here there's some documentations a letter from from hill from the late 50s complaining about the fact that he's discovered he has to pay nfa taxes to register his prototypes uh he's fairly bitter in this letter or sounds fairly bitter to me about the idea that he spent like ten thousand dollars of his own money in the 1950s developing the system and getting it working and getting it patented and he was doing this to try and provide the us military with you know better weapons to do its job with and then he becomes aware of this 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 1400 worth of transfer taxes that he has to pay or registration taxes and that's 15 of his development costs and he finds that rather 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 um 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 who clearly 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 fnp 90 project in the early 1980s it's possible fn patents for the p90 do reference hills patents and so there was obviously some level of institutional knowledge still there it's 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 hills patents were long since expired so it's not like there's anything nefarious going on with fn they recognized what had been a good idea at one time and were able to turn around and reuse it themselves that's how that's how inventing works you don't get a permanent perpetual license 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

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 516,387

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, hill., John hill, h15, h&B industries, texas, ww1, ww2, korean war, smg, submachine gun, pistol, carbine, 9mm, rotary, turntable, helical, p90, fn, fn p90, pdw, inventor, patent, invention, rare, scarce unique, unusual, clever

Id: tAZs7GdLreI

Length: 15min 39sec (939 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/bmbreath]

I got mad at Ian when he was shitting on the black and gold.

[u/Sgt_Stinger]

Not being able to eject an unfired cartridge without the pistol jamming seems like a pretty bad design flaw.

[u/STerrier666]

Is it wrong that when I look at this I think of Christopher Lee's gun when he played Francisco Scaramanga in The Man With The Golden Gun?

[u/jexmerrill]

I actually saw this just the other day before the video was posted on a search for inspirations for the P90 with my FN fan of a dad. This is pretty cool!

[u/alahos]

I honestly thought the mag had been put in the wrong way.