Armalite AR-17: A Shotgun from the World of Tomorrow!

I just want to say one word to you just one word are you listening aluminum there's a great future in aluminum thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian McCallum and we're here today at the Rock Island auction company taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be selling in their upcoming February of 2018 regional auction and specifically today we have the Armalite ar7 teen one of very few aluminum shotguns ever produced so picture this in the world of the mid 1960s the space race rocket ships the World of Tomorrow what better than a brand-new shotgun made out of the high-tech the new thing in Arms Technology aluminum you may think of Armalite as having developed the ar-10 and the ar-15 in stoner and thus one might think they must have been doing financially fantastic well actually Armalite sold the mb m16 the ar-15 design and all of its rights to the colt company in 1959 so just cuz they'd come up with that idea didn't mean they were making a lot of money off of it and by the 1960s Armalite was looking for some other ways to try and well raised some revenue we had some cash flow going and they figured maybe they could break into the commercial shotgun market so in the early 60s they developed this based on several elements of the ar-15 system rotating all multiple locking lugs we'll take a look at the inside in just a minute but they thought what they could really bring to market was the world's lightest shotgun and they pretty much did this this thing weighs in at just under five and a half pounds which is incredibly light for a 12-gauge full power shotgun the idea was it would be very light to carry it would be a fantastic hunting gun because weighs nothing carried around all day no big deal and they thought they'd also be able to sell it to competitive sport shooters trapshooters well they may not have taken everything into consideration so let's take a look at the inside and see exactly how this works this is a very typical looking AR 17 they very specifically went for this kind of a pale golden straw golden and the diaster on the guns and that was definitely a selling point in fact Armalite marketed this has the Golden Gun you'll see that in their advertising and in reviews of the gun from when it came out remember this was in the days when guns were looted steel and wood typically and you know well before the time when you could go seracote a gun any shade of sparkly rainbows that you wanted so the idea of having a fancy gold colored gun really was in interesting and novel thing not something you could just get anywhere so the engraving on the receiver is also pretty typical that was standard for the gun that wasn't anything special on these with that coloration the markings are a little bit pale and hard to make out but on the barrel Armalite ink at a Costa Mesa California some model a are 17 and these are chambered for two and three-quarter inch that was the only chambering that was available 12-gauge was the only caliber that was available patent pending and the only other mark on there is the serial number on the right side of the receiver it is actually hidden under the handguard so that's the handguard as as it is typically installed and you have to loosen it and partially remove it in order to see the serial number before we go any farther I do want to show you how to actually load this thing because it's a little bit different than most others normally you would expect a magazine tube here there isn't one there's just this black or brown plastic block thing and it's spring so in order to load this lock the bolt open you only have a two round capacity because that's how they designed it so I have a pair of 12-gauge snap caps here and what you want to do is take the front of the shell and use it to push that Brown block forward and then you have to push the cartridge all the way up into the action like so now once it's there pull the bolt handle back and it will chamber the first round you then return to the bottom of the gun repeat the process like that and then you're ready to go so when you fire the first round it will automatically cycle the second one into the chamber it's a little hesitant to eject these things because they're the weight of full shotgun shells and normally you wouldn't be ejecting a fully loaded shelf anyway it is easy to to kind of fumble this procedure if you try and stick the nose of the shell in it doesn't really work if you don't put the shell all the way in if you leave it like that it won't get picked up and then the carrier is kind of in the wrong position it's a little finicky one of the really interesting mechanical bits here is that they basically took the the bolt design from the ar-10 and ar-15 rifles so the bolt on the AR 17 has no less than ten locking lugs on it and rotates to lock now of course because it has ten lugs it only rotates a very short distance in order to fully engage the more lugs you have the shorter of a rotational distance is required so that goes forward this is then a short recoil action so when you fire the whole thing the barrel and bolt together reciprocate back just that far and then the bolt opens so there's a cam pin in the bolt similar to an ar-15 that allows it to rotate open like that now to disassemble this we are going to start by removing this threaded nut at the front of the handguard that hand guard is I believe a nylon material again directly from the World of Tomorrow this one the color is flaking a bit once we have this front plug off then the handguard slides off and the handguard sits on you can see a little kind of tooth Coll there that sits on this extension rod which holds the handguard in place the teeth prevent this from rotating because this then unscrews to allow you to remove the barrel it's got a fairly long threaded section there that you have to go through it's threaded it both ends so it's reversible doesn't matter and then we just pull the bolt back slightly and barrel comes out so if we look in the front of the receiver here you can see the bolt head and all of its many locking lugs as I pull the bolt back you'll be able to see it rotate right there it doesn't have to go very far because it does have so many lugs just takes a little tiny bit of rotation in order to move them from unlocked into the locked position and then from there the bolt cycles backward and on the barrel we have a very air 15 like barrel extension so the bolt locks directly into this barrel extension which means you don't need to have any particular strength in the receiver hence the receiver is made of aluminum in fact remarkably the whole barrel is actually made of aluminum threaded on choke tube at the front aluminum the whole length here is aluminum it just has this steel trunnion at the back that the bolt locks into because that's where most of the pressure is actually going to have to be contained so you know that's how you make a really really light shotgun it has an aluminum receiver at aluminum barrel a plastic buttstock a plastic or nylon four and the trigger guard is I mean everything in this is aluminum with the exception of a steel bolt steel trunnion and a few little steel bits inside you know little plugs like this that have to be threaded or steel but you know that's that's how you reduce weight is by not using steel anywhere what Armalite didn't fully think through or maybe just miscalculated miss estimated was the guns actually kind of to light so for any extended length of shooting it's a unpleasant gun to shoot because of how light it really is at the same time shotgun shooting is has a number of differences from rifle shooting and one of them is a swing and follow-through and you actually want a shotgun to balance such that you can start to move the gun and track a moving target and have the gun the gun have enough mass and inertia to follow through in this this nice arc this a swing and a lot of shooters complained that the AR 17 was just too light to do that very effectively now maybe they could have gotten used to it if they'd practiced a bunch but it required a substantial amount of retraining yourself if you'd been used to shooting with a more conventional shotgun and of course it hurt to shoot a lot this is a very light gun that recoils quite heavily and then probably the last element that really sealed the deal one on the AR 17 was the two round capacity well this is really perfectly adequate for competitive shooting where you're only firing two at a time anyway and for most hunting where you're not often going to have the chance for three shots in very rapid succession at something like a bird it certainly didn't help sales people like to have a larger magazine capacity and so between all of these factors the gun was only in production for two years in 1964 1965 and something like like twelve hunt 2000 and then they were assembling them as they were being sold and they only ended up assembling and selling twelve hundred of the guns so really a small number it was a commercial failure of a gun but that leaves them pretty cool and interesting for us to see and check out and collect today know if you're interested in this particular one take a look at the description text below the video you'll find a link there to rock island's catalog page on it where you can see their price estimate their pictures description etc and if you're interested you can participate in the auction or right there through their website thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 1,523,136

Rating: 4.942452 out of 5

Keywords: armalite, ar, -17, earlier Armalite rifles, Fairchild Aircraft company, short recoil action, nearly all-aluminum gun, limited 2-round capacity, AR-15 rifles, light weight, golden gun, ar17, stoner, eugene stoner, 12ga, 12 gauge, hunting shotgun, world of tomorrow, shotgun, aluminum, aluminium, hunting, trap, skeet, history, development, mccollum, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, Firearm, fairly novel material, failure, innovative, modern, flop, gun, firearm, 2 round, capacity

Id: 67tUMc__xHc

Length: 11min 19sec (679 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 27 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/markface9]

Oh my gosh that's +2 more deadly than an AR-15! We better ban it immediately, won't someone think of the children!

[u/cletusconnors]

AR-15 derivative. Banned! Next.

[u/sendmethemtoes]

My AR 18 is better

[u/CBD_Hound]

Banned yet?

[u/[deleted]]

30 clips a second. Release the BANNER.

[u/Eddicus]

A S S A U L T R I F L E S H O T G U N 17

[u/WaveLightGames]

Even more dangerous than Biden's AR-16.

[u/BSDnumba123]

Cool video. Odd gun. Can see why it failed.