Today we continue our series on the development of Croatian pistols towards the XD line. Last week we saw Marko Vukovic's first design, and today we are looking at his second. This was the V.M.18, a step towards a more proven system instead of the really unusual flapper locking of the Kordun. The...

Croatian engineer Marko Vukovic first developed his P38-based pistol in the late 1980s for the Yugoslav Peoples' Army. It was left unadopted at that time, but when Croatia declared independence in 1991 the gun found a new life. The newly formed Croatian armed forces needed quite a lot of small ar...

The “Kordun” (named after a region in Croatia) was the first pistol design from Marko Vukovic, lead designer for IM Metal and later HS Produkt. It was made in 1985 for the Yugoslav Peoples’ Army, with the goal of being a softer-shooting and higher capacity sidearm than the then-standard M57 Tokar...

Today we are continuing to trace the development of the IM Metal / HS Produkt VHS rifles. During this period, Croatia briefly considered adopting the Israeli Tavor rifle. Part of the adoption would have included a license for domestic production, and HS Produkt would have been the company to do t...

The HS Produkt company, best known for making the XD pistols sold in the US by Springfield, was originally called IM Metal, and was a general fabrication company in Croatia. When the Croatian Homeland War began, there was a clear need for domestic small arms production, and the two engineers at I...

The HS-95 was developed by HS Produkt to replace the PHP pistols. With the experience of producing many thousands of PHPs, the company had a much better understanding of how to design a pistol for production, which is immediately obvious in the HS95. It is a traditional tilting-barrel Browning ac...

After their abortive effort at designing a bullpup AK conversion, IM Metal (later to become HS Produkt) decided to make another try at developing a rifle for the Croatian Army. This time, they decided to base their design on the FAMAS. Why that rifle? Well, at the time the Croatian Homeland War w...

The ALKA model 93 is one of the nicest of the several dozen simple SMGs made in Croatia during the Homeland War of the 1990s. It was produced by the IM Metal company (later renamed HS Produkt) starting in 1991, was formally adopted by the Croatian armed forces in 1993, and produced until 1994 or ...

The Agram 2000 was originally developed in the 1990s in response to a Croatian Army need for a submachine gun during the Independence War. It is a closed-bolt, hammer-fired, simple blowback submachine gun. The initial prototypes used a top folding shoulder stock, but the production model omitted ...

With the HS95, Croatian manufacturer IM Metal (later to become HS Produkt) had learned how to effectively manufacture a good pistol. However, the design had some shortcomings and had not been accepted by Croatian police forces, nor had any commercial export contracts materialized. The company rec...

There was a fair amount of small arms production in Croatia during the breakup of Yugoslavia, but most of it was not particularly high quality. After the government of Croatia had become established, it looked to arm a formal military, and turned to the Elmech company to produce a sniper's rifle....

The Šokac is just one of more than a dozen different submachine guns developed and produced domestically in Croatia during the Yugoslavian civil war of the early 1990s. It is a mechanical copy of the Soviet PPSh-41 made in 9x19mm and a folding stock modeled after the vz25 family of submachine gun...

Today we are taking a look at the Springfield Hellion, the semiautomatic US version of HS Produkt's VHS-2 bullpup rifle. The VHS-2 development goes back almost 20 years, with a first VHS rifle and then the revised second model entering production in 2014. These were trialed by the French, and cam...

Yesterday we took a look at the inner workings of the VHS-2, and today we are going to put some rounds through it. I am trying out both a short-barreled VHS-K2 that was limited to 2-round burst (for French police trials) and a full-length VHS-F2 from French military trials.

Overall, I quite l...

HS Produkt of Croatia makes an interesting modern bullpup rifle, the VHS. The rifle has gone through several major design iterations in the past two decades or so, and the most recent version (the VHS-2) was part of the competition to replace the FAMAS in French military service. It ultimately pl...