South Africa's Berettas: The Vektor Z88 and SP1

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian McCallum and today we're taking a look at a Beretta 92 that's not quite a Beretta 92 this is Z 88 and that is an sp1 and both of these were manufactured by vector in South Africa and there's kind of an interesting backstory to these so this project began for the South Africans in 1984 and it began basically because the South African police forces had a wide variety of different handguns they had some p-38s they did have a bunch of breadth a ninety two's they had some browning high powers and because the country was under international embargo they were having a very difficult time trying to maintain these pistols to get parts for them to work with the original manufacturers that sort of thing so they decided to put together a tender to try and develop a new pistol and just kind of get standardize everything and they really liked the Beretta they actually talked to a number of licensed beretta manufacturers about having the pistols built on contract or under license and every single one of them every single one of those proposals was rejected because of the sanctions that had been placed on South Africa at the time so instead they decided well I guess we'll do this locally and arm score the National Defense Corporation approached Musgrave and Lyttelton engineering these being the two main defense subsidiaries in South Africa and what they said was basically we'd like to reverse engineer this beretta 92 and manufacture them here locally and in 1985 286 Littleton engineering or Musgrave in Littleton went through this process and actually managed to very successfully reverse-engineer a Beretta 92 it was important in this project that the parts actually interchange a hundred percent with Italian factory Berettas because there were a lot of those guns in service and doing this would allow them to manufacture spares for their existing guns they they did that they took a I think it was a 20 gun sample of beretta and they used those to reverse-engineer the whole technical data so it's actually really quite impressive that they managed to put together a really high-quality gun without any actual technical assistance from beretta just taking a bunch of existing Baretta's and figuring out exactly what not just the part sizes we've talked about this before that's not really the important part it's things like the heat treating standards the material standards or specifications and the tolerances on each of the every single individual machining operation has its own independent tolerances and so the fact that they were able to reverse-engineer all of that is really quite impressive now impressive or not beretta wasn't very happy once they found out about it this was in fact a blatant violation of Loretta's rights beretta actually tried to take them to international court but it kind of fell through because South Africans because of the embargo weren't really allowed to travel internationally and so they couldn't appear at any sort of court proceedings international court proceedings ultimately sometime like in the very early 1990s they came to an agreement with beretta to pay a licensing fee and in fact when we look at this one up close you'll see it actually says beretta license on it however that licensing agreement was really quite strict it allowed South Africa to manufacture guns for their own domestic use for their own military and law enforcement and civilian sales but didn't allow them to export the guns because of course beretta wanted to maintain all of the export markets for themselves so by this time the the manufacturer was known as vector and vector decided that they really wanted to put together something that they could export these you know they had a lot of work in these guns and they were in extremely high quality gun and so they redesigned it as the SP one which we have here changing a number of features we'll take a look at all of those in a moment in particular changing the outside the visual look of the gun so it really doesn't really unless you actually know it's derived from a beretta it doesn't really look like a beretta and the sp1 they were able to export so they manufacture the sp1 from about 1991 until 1998 in 98 vector shut down all small arms production it was a government owned subsidiary and government to that point decided it just didn't want to be involved in the business of manufacturing small arms so that all shut down but had about a nine year production run they made a bunch of different varieties which again we'll talk about in a moment so here are both of the guns an sp1 and a Zed 88 we'll start by taking a look at the Zed 88 there's no mistaking what it is when you see it very prominently marked there is Z 88 nine millimetre parabellum made in South Africa and there's a big vector logo on the front of the slide along with a serial number which we're gonna see elsewhere as well now the way they manufacture these guns is upon production they were all serialized so this is gun 120 almost hundred and twenty three thousand and then when the guns were actually issued they were given serial number prefixes and the prefix is based on what agency or purpose the gun was being assigned to so in this case Q was the prefix for the South African Police T was the prefix for civilian sales and there's a few of the guns like this one that actually have both and that indicates a gun that was actually earmarked for police use and then later redirected to the civilian market so they just added that civilian T on to the front of the existing serial number prefix as this is one of the later production guns one of the last versions you'll see it is marked Beretta licensed they have that agreement going and that allowed South Africa to produce the guns for domestic civilian sales as well as both police and military use these were used by the military and we have vector logos moulded into both of the grip panels beyond that the gun is a complete direct and pretty much perfect copy of the beretta 92 parts interchange magazines obviously interchange it looks exactly like and functions like and is for all practical purposes a Beretta 92 now when they started making the sp1 here they had to make some changes because their licensing agreement agreement with beretta prevented them from exporting these guys so the changes that they made the most obvious one of course is the change in the slide and in addition to differentiating the gun from a Beretta 92 what they were also aiming to do with the sp1 project is reduce the cost of manufacture so this very flat angular slide design it looks different than the Beretta it actually looks pretty cool and it's less expensive to machine it's a simpler process to make those cuts than the curved open slide of the beretta they changed the grip panels so this actually has a wraparound plastic grip instead of having the metal spring guide at the back like a beretta maybe one of the most substantial mechanical changes they made was to get rid of the slide mounted decocker that the beretta has and replace it with a frame mounted ambidextrous manual safety so there is no longer a decocker on these pistols you just have the thumb safety the barrel length was reduced just slightly so the barrel is now flush with the end of the slide instead of sitting a little bit proud like the beretta and the disassembly system is just slightly different so where beretta has a locking button and then a tab that's lit that flips down the sp1 we have to open all the way up and then we can not quite all the way and we can flip that up take magazine out and the slide comes off the front spring out can pick the barrel out you can see that mechanically this is still the same system as the beretta with this pivoting locking block they did put serrations on the front of the slide to prevent glare nice set of notch and post sights they're an aluminum frame just as the beretta sand a little bit more angular trigger guard kind of matches the contours of the slide in addition while the Z 88 and the beretta itself had traditional rifling the sp1 used a polygonal rifling so it looks like a smooth bore the marking style of the sp1 is pretty much the same there but of course it says sp1 still a vector logo on the front the serial number scheme was also changed this is marked s for sp1 they no longer differentiated these based on agency or purpose although the military did use the SP ones the military and the police both in addition to the straight beretta copies the sp1 proved to be an excellent quality pistol and a very popular pistol and so much so in fact that they ended up bringing in a bunch of additional models or producing it a bunch of additional models they had a target model that had a weight and a compensator they had a sport model they had an ultra sport model which was basically set up to be an IPSec race gun right out of the box and really pretty cool stuff actually and then they also had a generals model or they called a generals model which is a slightly shortened version once again no mistaking what this is generals novel written right on the side there and that has a G prefix serial number for general the generals model has both a shorter slide and also a slightly shorter frame and a little bit of a different profile to the back of the frame interestingly though its magazines while slightly shorter still hold 15 rounds the same as the standard gun so these were manufactured generals model was only introduced in 1996 and production of all of these guns ended in 98 when vector shot down there was one other model that was introduced and that was the SP 2 which was basically exactly the same as the SP 1 including all of the different varieties but chambered for the 40 Smith & Wesson cartridge instead of nine millimetre parabellum and those were not as successful or as popular as the SP ones as we've seen in a number of other manufacturers glock notably what they did was basically just take the the SP 1 frame and drop 40 cal 40 caliber parts into it and the 40 is just a little bit hot enough of a cartridge that sometimes guns don't handle that conversion very well and that's why we've seen problems with 40 caliber Glock s-- and well this may not have been technically a problem for the vectors they're not as nice they don't handle as nice in that snappier 40 caliber cartridge so those were around but they also were only introduced in 1996 and so they had a much shorter production run and there are a lot fewer of them out there but apparently you do still occasionally see them in the South African ape Sixth Circuit where they are especially in the ultra sport model where they qualify as major caliber guns there's sort of an ancillary issue that I want to touch on regarding South African domestic production guns because a lot of the ones that you see are really let's be honest they're really kind of crummy guns they weren't commercially successful there they're low production they're crudely made and yet you also have guns like these that are really quite excellent rifles like the r4 and the r5 series that are absolutely as good as anything produced by any other country in the world and so the question is why this split in the domestic arms industry and there is an interesting if you look at where the arms designers come from you'll notice that a lot of the unsuccessful guns are actually originated with Rhodesian designs or Rhodesian designers and a lot of the guns that well all of the guns that were truly successful were really put together with government assistance from the South African government as opposed to independent start up attempts so in some ways this makes sense just on the basis of financial backing you know if you have the backing of a major industrial government industrial defensive defence company yeah you're gonna be more likely to succeed because you have the money to put into proper R&D and proper tooling and you're not trying to you know manufacture guns out of commercial hardware store square steel tube however it appears that there's also kind of a psychological aspect to it and in fact if you look at Rhodesian guns there was always this wide variety of guys trying to come up with indigenous Rhodesian gun designs and Ian Smith the president or prime minister of Rhodesia his reaction to this was always really rather negative and what he kept telling these guys and they never did well that they should all get together come up with one good design that works and everyone focused on building that instead of this very independent oriented split of resources and what South Africa actually did was very much along the lines of what Smith was referring to there they they took a really good design like the beretta 92 or like the Israeli gali old of finished bell mat and they put all of the resources into developing that and doing it properly and when they did that they ended up with a really good design when you had independent guys who were perhaps more concerned with getting their gun built and recognized than producing the best gun that could be done as a team effort that's where you see all of the failed guns guns like the Mamba pistol the Cobra carbine you know even really like the one production carbine slash submachine gun of that sort of relatively crude type but the only one that was really particularly successful was the B xB which was in fact all South African in origin instead of having ties back to Rhodesia so it's I don't know that there's a whole lot of scientific data there but it's an interesting and interesting connection of facts when you look at all of these guns kind of in context together so anyway I have diverted away a bit from the the actual focus of today's video the Z 88 and the SP 1 some of these SP ones did actually get exported to the United States you will occasionally find them there and when you do they're usually quite expensive because they're rare and they aren't in fact really good handguns so now hopefully if you see one at a show or on the market you'll know what it is hopefully you enjoyed the video thanks very much for watching

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Views: 211,712

Rating: 4.9760761 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, beretta, m92, beretta 92, z88, sp1, spo2, general's model, copy, knockoff, clone, vektor, lyttleton, 9mm, 40 s&w, redesign, licensed, unlicensed, military, police, ipsc race gun, compact, service pistol, sp2, handgun, south africa, musgrave, reverse engineer

Id: YlyloBewF8E

Length: 15min 23sec (923 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 25 2019