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 in Leeds, where we are taking a look at a one-of-a-kind experimental Sterling submachine gun. So the
Sterling company had been chosen to manufacture what was at the time actually called the Patchett Machine
Carbine in World War Two, late in World War Two. This was the ... submachine gun that would
replace the Sten gun in British military service. The Sten was really an emergency, you know, we need
something right now, let's build it fast sort of design. The Patchett was a much more refined,
really a quite fantastic submachine gun. And it became known as the Sterling submachine gun because
it was manufactured by the Sterling engineering company. Well, Sterling continued to make these guns
after World War Two, the British military did in fact adopt them as an overall replacement for the
Sten as the L2 submachine gun in a variety of marks. And they made a lot of sales to international customers,
especially in the Middle East and the Far East. A lot of people bought Sterling submachine
guns, they had an excellent reputation. However, by the 1960s Sterling was starting to
get a bit worried about some of its competition. In particular when the MP5 came out. This you know, some of the other guns on the market
that were for sale internationally, things like the Uzi, Sterling had had co-existed reasonably well
with the Uzi. But the MP5 was looking like it may have been in a position to take over a lot of
their customers that the Uzi hadn't really appealed to. So in 1965 Sterling's chief design engineer,
a guy named Frank Waters, who was also the designer behind the SAR 80 and
SAR 87 rifles, he came up with this concept. And the idea was to have a submachine
gun that would be cheaper and easier to produce. Basically a stamped submachine gun instead of using as
many of the more complex milled and forged parts of the Sterling. They made one in ... approximately 1965.
It is this one, they designated it the S11. And, well, let's take a close look at it. So the fundamental idea here
was to do a stamped receiver gun. So the base of of the S11 is square
steel tubing. Now there are a number of unusual elements to this, starting with
the fact that the sights are offset to the left. And, in fact, the barrel is actually offset to the left of the
receiver for, as best as I can tell, no particular reason. There doesn't seem to be any necessity for
having this not all centre line, and yet they offset it. I will point out on the Sterling the
sights are right down the middle. So, I guess they had to do that to clear the charging
handle, but there would have been a lot of ways that they could make a charging handle
that wasn't interrupting the sight picture. So the markings are a little bit
difficult to read here on the magazine well, because, well, they're stamped ... they're finished
over in this stereotypical Sterling black crackle finish. But what we have there is: Sterling SMG,
9mm, S11, which was their designation (where exactly that came from, I don't know),
and then serial number is EXP 001. In terms of parts interchangeability, there are only
two elements of the S11 that are interchangeable with the original Sterling, that would be the
internal trigger components and the magazine. This does use a side mounted magazine like
the Sterling, and this is an excellent magazine. They were very wise not to
get rid of that. Magazine release is right here on the back of the magazine well. Push that in and pull the magazine
out, it's a little bit stiff. When folded up, the stock looks like a
standard Sterling stock. However, it's actually not. It uses a different style of
design with two pivoting legs, and to my mind this is actually a
better stock than the original Sterling. It's easier to extend and to
retract, and it's a very stable stock. This actually wasn't Frank Water's design however.
This was taken from one of George Lanchester's prototype lightweight Lanchester
submachine guns from about 1942. Lanchester had been working at Sterling because
Sterling was making the Lanchester submachine guns. And so his prototype lightweight guns were in the possession
of the Sterling company in the '60s, when this was made. If you're interested in seeing more about
those lightweight experimental Lanchesters, I have a previous video on those that you can take
a look at, and you can see this stock in there as well. There's a selector lever on the side, just like a Sterling. It's not marked, this is a prototype
gun so that's not particularly surprising. But rearward is safe, the middle position here
is semi-auto, and the front position is full-auto. That is combined with a grip safety as well. The grip itself is a bit awkward.
It's very square to use, I would have preferred it to be a little
bit more rounded, especially at the top. And there's no particular reason
that it has to be squared up, because there's no mechanism down
in here except for that guy. Looking at it in a little more detail. The rear sight is a
two-position rear aperture, flip between the two positions. See the two detent holes
right there to lock them in place. And then the front sight has a
couple of decent protective wings. You can adjust it for elevation
by screwing that front post in and out, and then you adjust it for windage by
screwing it side to side just a little bit. Which will technically affect your elevation,
but presumably not enough to make a difference. One kind of neat aspect to the design is that it's
actually made with two separate bayonet lugs, because Sterling, presumably, figured that there were two
different options that its customers might want to use. So there is on the one hand the Number 5
rifle bayonet, which has a large ring to go around the jungle carbine, the Number 5 flash
hider. And that can mount here on the side, right up in there, there we go. And you can see that this step on the muzzle nut
is designed to fit that Number 5 rifle bayonet loop. Or, you might have the ... small muzzle
ring style of bayonet for the L1A1, the FAL. Well if you wanted to use those,
there's a bayonet lug on the bottom and a muzzle ring lug right there, and this guy can mount on right down there. This one's really stiff to take on and
off, so I'm going to leave it off because we need to disassemble
this submachine gun now. Sorry, one last thing to point out. We do have a
charging handle up here, and it is a ratcheting style of charging handle. So if you pull it back
partway and then slip and let go, it will ... hold the bolt ... partway open. That prevents
you from accidentally firing the gun. The best analog to this is the Uzi, which originally
did not have a system like this, had a bunch of negligent discharge, or accidental discharge,
problems and they ... retrofitted on this style of ratcheting charging handle
to prevent further problems. So, disassembly here is also actually kind of
Uzi-like, we have a spring-loaded catch on the back. Pull this back, and then we can
actually take the whole top cover off, like so. So there's our ratcheting spring-
loaded charging handle on the bottom. And then we have a big recoil spring
that's just kind of squished down in there. To take the bolt out what we need to do is pull the bolt
all the way back past the ejector, and then lift it out, you have to hold the grip safety down to do that. There we go. There's the bolt, note that it is
asymmetrical in both dimensions because the barrel is offset to
one side. There's our recoil spring. From the top it is very
obvious that the barrel is not centred in the gun, which I still don't really
understand why they would have done that. To remove the barrel we
have to unscrew this barrel nut. There's a button there which you would expect
to push inward to release tension on the barrel lugs, instead you actually have this little piece in here. And what you do
is pull it towards the side of the receiver, that actually rotates this little
button, which disengages it from the barrel threads. And it's actually
kind of not tight enough to begin with, so on this one it's not 100% functional. But at
any rate, then you can unscrew the barrel nut, And then you can take the barrel out. Or so you
would think, except that it runs into the ejector bar. And that's gonna stop us up there, so we actually have to
take the ejector out as well, in order to take the barrel out. So, we will get in there, unscrew that, there we go. Then our ejector plate just kind
of falls out, along with its screw. And now we can slide the barrel out the back of the action. So there's the whole thing actually disassembled, and I think you can probably see
some of the issues that came up here. ... To be honest, it's not a particularly
well designed gun. In fact Sterling would... Well, we'll touch on exactly what happened with
this in just a moment, but instead of producing this (spoiler alert), Sterling would go on instead to,
in light of the declining submachine gun market, redesign some of its guns into semi-
automatic civilian carbines and civilian pistols like the Mark 7 and the Mark 8 Sterlings.
And they would focus on those instead. But, this is what ... Frank Waters, their chief engineer,
came up with before they decided to take that route. Ultimately when they went to actually do
testing on this gun, it had a number of serious issues. It had some trigger issues, presumably
failures to fire, I believe, or possibly reset. It also had problems with the
top cover coming loose during firing. Apparently these issues were sort of
interrelated, and they spent some time trying to really nail down what the
root cause of the problems was. They weren't ever able to really
actually identify the root problem. And they didn't spend all that much time on it,
because what they had recognised is that ... while this was a cheaper gun to
mass-produce than the standard Sterling, you can't do that until you've paid all of
the cost to actually tool up to mass produce it. And they estimated something like a million pounds would
have been required to tool up for production of this. And that just didn't make economic sense. They
were seeing, in addition to increased competition, they were also ... starting to see a decrease
in the market for submachine guns in general. And they looked at the numbers and realised it would
actually be a lot more effective to maintain the tooling they already had (which was already
long paid for), to manufacture the Sterling. Even if that gun was more expensive per unit, once you tried
to amortise in all of the extra tooling cost for a new design, they didn't think they would be able to get
enough sales for this to make it worthwhile. On top of that, with the problems it had, the
handling is not great, the design is ... not great. This is in no way as slick and efficient
of a submachine gun as the Sterling. In fact, it's documented that at one
of their internal meetings at Sterling some of the management actually referred
to this as "a donkey in a thoroughbred race". So in 1967 they shelved the project, never
made more than this one specific example, and that was the end of it. They would
continue to make Sterling submachine guns, but never did end up replacing
them with anything more modern. So, very cool to get a chance to take a look at this one. As I said, it is a complete one-of-a-kind
gun, because it's the only one they ever made. So a big thanks to the Royal Armouries
for allowing me to get access to this one. Their collection is not open to the general public,
but it is accessible by appointment to researchers. So if you have a project that requires taking
a look at some of their collection, ring them up. There's a link to the Royal Armouries
website in the video description below. And, of course, a big thanks to my patrons who
make it possible for me to travel to places like Leeds, and bring you cool, unique guns like this one. Thanks for watching.
Two bayonets because fuck you
I'd think we want the proper original Sterling SMG before we add this in
Still awesome though :)
My dad used one of these in the northern Ireland conflict. It would give him all the more reason to play h3.