Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today
at the HS Produkt factory in Croatia
to take a look at some of the interesting firearms
that HS Produkt, and the company under its
former name, IM Metal, have created over
the 30 plus years that they've been around.
People are often familiar with their XD series of pistols
that Springfield Armoury sells in the United States.
But there's a lot of other stuff that they've manufactured, and today
we're taking a look at a cool sort of hybrid submachine gun here called the Alka.
Now there were a lot of simple basic submachine guns
being manufactured in Croatia during Croatia's Homeland War.
This is their fight for independence against essentially the Serbian army in the mid-1990s.
And what led to the creation of all these different designs of guns
was the fact that Croatia, along with Serbia,
was under basically complete international arms embargo.
And shortly before Croatia declared independence
the Yugoslav People's Army basically disarmed all of the Croatian military forces.
At that point the Croatian military was simply a subset of the Yugoslav army.
The Yugoslav army decided to take all the guns out of Croatia,
because they saw perhaps that independence was coming, and didn't want it to be feasible.
So Croatia is in a position where they can't buy anything really from outside because of the embargo.
They don't have a lot, ... their own army doesn't have a lot to work with
until they can manage to capture stuff from the Serbian forces.
And so they start manufacturing submachine guns.
And the IM Metal Company is in a position to design one itself.
So this was designed in 1991. It was actually formally adopted by the Croatian military in 1993,
and production only ran until '94 or '95.
This was a product specifically for military use in Croatia during the War of Independence.
So, it's also a cool hybrid of a couple of different designs.
Let's take a closer look at it.
So here is the Alka in its firing configuration with the stock extended.
The mechanical elements of the gun primarily come from the Ingram Model 10 or Model 11,
specifically like the Model 11 in scale. This is actually a pretty small, handy little gun.
MACs, as they are colloquially known, were well known over here in Yugoslavia.
They were available, they were something that could be examined and copied.
Or at least copied in spirit.
For sights we have sort of the traditional simple submachine gun front sight
of a round post offset on a screw so that you can adjust
elevation by screwing this in 180 degree elements, in half turns.
You can adjust windage by moving it within a 180 degree turn.
So all your adjustment is out there.
The bolt handle of course has a channel through it so that you can see the sights.
And then the rear sight is a notch, you've got two flip positions,
one for 50 metres and one for 100 metres.
Construction-wise you can actually see that this wasn't made from seamless square tubing.
This was done from a flat sheet that was bent over a mandrel
and seam welded into a square right there.
And there is a rear trunnion that has been welded onto the back
to give you a place to put on the stock.
And at the front here you have a simple two slot compensator just permanently cut into the barrel.
And just like on the Ingram guns there's a coarse thread that is intended for a sound suppressor.
And there was a suppressor made for these, although I don't have an example of it here to show you.
And then of course we have the stock, which is very clearly taken
from the influence of the Czech vz. 61 Skorpion.
So the [stock] folds up, locks onto the wings of the front sight, just like a Skorpion.
Snaps in place there for stowage.
And to deploy it you can just do the cool little bop thing,
and it locks in place as soon as it folds down.
To refold it you just take this button, push it down, and you can lift the stock up.
There is a little spring-loaded detent in the stock,
and a hole for it in the back of the trunnion there for it to snap into.
Before we go any further we can take a look at the markings here, a little bit lightly stamped.
But Model 93, ... as I said development started in '91,
it was adopted in '93, hence the model designation.
... So Alka was sort of a medieval knight's game
of trying to put your lance through a small circular target.
The target was called "alka" in Croatian, and that's where the name comes from.
If we move to the back of the gun we have IMP here, that's the mark of the company IM Metal.
A Croatian crest, serial number. This is one of the very first ones that was made, this is number 1003.
And it is marked "Made in Croatia".
So this is a formally manufactured firearm, not just
thrown together in a garage a couple at a time, all made by hand.
This was significant serial production.
On the other side we have a pair of sling swivels.
And we have a safety and a fire selector.
These controls are both very much taken from the MAC, the Ingram design.
So this is full-auto, that is semi.
And then this is the safety lever, which is in the fire position when forward
and in the safe position when backward.
The magazine release is also very much like the MAC,
It's a ... lever on the back, you pull down and you can then remove the magazine.
The magazine is proprietary, although it is clearly copied from a Sten or MP40 style of magazine.
You can see that there are a pair of over-travel stops here that were added
because this is sitting up in the pistol grip of the gun.
But double stack, single feed, there's your total capacity,
and a witness hole so that you know when it's fully loaded.
You can see the floor plate here, clearly copied from the MP40.
It does fire from an open bolt just like a MAC.
Now disassembly, we're going to go ahead and close the bolt first of course.
And then we have this piece comes out.
It's got two pegs over here.
Just going to poke that out, there we go.
There we go. With that off ...
I can pull off the rear trunnion with the stock.
Like the MAC, the main spring is captive.
So we're going to pull the bolt handle back to this position.
You can see the hole here, that allows me to remove the bolt handle.
There's ... a detent in the bolt and four little holes there,
so you kind of rotate the bolt handle about 45 degrees and pop it out.
And then we can pull out the bolt assembly itself.
This is a classic MAC style or Ingram style bolt.
So it's telescoping, the breech face is back here,
but most of the weight of the bolt is leveraged out in front of the action here.
It does have, still, a pretty darn short length of travel.
This is the total length that the bolt can move backwards,
so it has a very high bolt velocity, it has a very high rate of fire.
It's something around 1,200 rounds per minute of, I should say, 9mm Parabellum on this.
... Interestingly, it is a longer action than on a standard Ingram M11.
Which makes it a little bit more controllable than like a .380 M11, or it should.
Honestly, it's a really compact, handy, nice little gun.
I would definitely rate this as better handling than an M10 or M11.
It's nice and light. Honestly, for ... especially a very simplistic simple manufactured gun
with simple blowback action, nothing special,
it handles very nicely, it's slim, it's very convenient.
Anyway back here, single recoil spring.
There was originally a little rubber pad, buffer pad basically, on the back of this plate.
But as with the MACs, that tends to get worn and fall apart, and it has fallen off of this one.
In theory we could remove the main spring by tapping out that pin.
And that would allow the spring and guide rod to come out the back,
but there's really no need to do that.
You can see two sear catch ... notches here.
The front one is the actual firing sear, and the rear one is a safety.
So that if you drop the gun and the bolt bounces backward
it will catch before it actually slam fires a round.
... There you go, there is the Alka field stripped.
The Alka is really one of the nicest of the indigenous Croatian submachine guns from this period.
There were literally a couple of dozen different varieties that were made.
The Alka is one that was made in substantial quantity,
we're talking probably a couple of thousand of them, and really well made.
IM Metal at that point was already a substantial fabrication facility, it had a lot of tools,
this wasn't just a couple of guys in a garage.
Which some of the other Croatian submachine guns were in fact
basically made by a couple of guys in a garage.
So it was very cool to get a chance to take a look at this one.
I have videos on a couple of the other ... similar Croatian guns
from this period as well if you're interested.
I have videos on the Šokac and also the Agram 2000, you can check out those.
I'll link to them at the end of this video.
A big thanks to HS Produkt for giving me access to this guy. Hopefully you enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.