Calico Light Weapons System: Roller Delay and Helical Drums

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapon scum I'm Ian McCallum and today we're gonna take a look at the nine-millimeter versions of the Calico alight weapons system we have a carbine and a pistol here to check out today and they are mechanically identical it is just there are a couple different form factors on the same base system so that system was put together by two guys named Michael Miller and Warren Stockton in the mid 1980s came on to the market commercially just a few years after that and what they have is a combination of actually a roller delayed blowback locking system well not quite locking system and a very interesting and rather creative and innovative helical magazine design so really the heart of the Calico system is the magazine technology the magazine design the magazine patents the 22 and nine-millimeter magazines work a little bit differently but will pull apart one of the nine-millimeter ones here today to show you and what you get essentially is in this relatively compact magazine a hundred rounds and then there's the shorter version that holds 50 and unlike any other magazine system that can hold a hundred rounds this one actually fits fairly nicely on the gun I would say the other relatively common firearm out there that uses this sort of form factor is the FN p90 although it does not use a helical system the Calico was not the first helical magazine ever to be developed or produced we can actually see a helical magazine in the Evans rifle way back in the 1880s and I have a video on the evidence if you're interested definitely check that one out I'll link to it at the end of this video but what Calico had in mind was basically a submachine gun that had a massive ammunition capacity advantage over everything else in its field and they weren't wrong now the problem was there were a few practical issues that got in the way and then there was a huge legal issue that got in the way so let's start by taking a closer look at this I'll pull it apart there's a lot of clever elements that when into this mechanically it just all kind of came down to does it work as I said at the beginning the mechanical core of the Calico is identical between the rifles and the pistols so we're gonna start by taking a look at the pistol because it's just a lot more compact and easier to work with and show you so first bit of unusualness with the Calico is that the front sight is located out here on this tower that is an integral part of the gun if I squeeze these two mag catches right there I can pop this magazine off so there's your front sight windage and elevation adjustable the rear sight however is actually located on the magazine you have the option of either an aperture or not there's the knotch but what this means is that every magazine has its own rear sight now this the Calico was never really marketed as a precision target sort of thing so I'm actually kind of curious as to exactly how much wobble or how much play there is between different magazines but you do certainly have the potential of well kind of like interchangeable machine gun barrels where the rear like where the front sight mounted on the barrel and the rear sight on the gun every time you change mags you might change your zero by the way the 50 round and hundred round magazines both fit on all of the different guns making this a particularly bulky thing here but it does work the muzzle brake on the end was an optional accessory the barrels are not threaded they just have a little pin divot cut in them so that you can press this on and pin it in place a neat idea as you'll see in just a moment it does prevent you from taking off the fore-end or the charging handle so basic controls of the Calico we should go over those so we have a charging handle on the left side it is non reciprocating and in fact it's return spring is up here under the handguard we then have a safety pull this all the way back to [ __ ] it you can see that pin sticking out there that is the ejector obviously this feeds from the top edy checks out the bottom that what looks like a magazine well here is actually the ejection port and then we have a two position or three position if you had one of the law enforcement a lot of ones safety the safety is also ambidextrous kind of cool actually that the Calico is a almost totally ambidextrous gun the safety the ejection are both ambi the charging handles not of course and there is a bolt hold-open there's not an automatic bolt hold-open but there is a manual one and interestingly if you push this in we can pull the bolt back to there and I can lock the bolt open halfway which is intended to be used to check to see if the thing's loaded I can then also if I hold the bolt latch down there we go I can open the bolt all the way and lock it in that position as well and from either one you just push this lever in and it'll drop the bolt forward you saw the magazine release a moment ago they are just these two catches that lock into the the mag and there is a notch here at the front that hooks into this recess in the magazine like so and that locks it in place now disassembly is done by a single pin although you do have to dry fire it first to drop the striker there we go then we just push this pin out charging handles gonna kind of hold it in there there we go once this pin comes out you basically are able to separate three main components of the gun you can pull the handguard off the front although because this has a muzzle break it won't come off unless I take the muzzle brake off but that's okay there's really nothing up there you can then take the grip assembly and just slide it back off of the receiver you have this this gives us our safety which simply lifts up that and locks the bolt in place the trigger mechanism is at the rear and when I pulled the trigger it's just going to drop that hook there is a semi-auto disconnect er here so it only fire once moving to the receiver itself we have the actual bolt mechanism which comes out as a single self-contained unit pop it back with the charging handle there we go so that comes out that leaves us with just an empty shell of a receiver the charging handle normally would come off the front it sits right there the action uses a roller delayed locking system just like HK taken from HK in fact so when this is all the way in battery these two rollers push out into recesses in the receiver and you can see those two recesses right here and here in the receiver there are these hexagonal bars that are used as the actual locking surfaces note that they are both pinned in place so if anything goes wrong or if you need to change headspace you can take these out and replace them I don't think anyone ever has in the history of Telugu but it would make sense as a manufacturing technique when you fire and pressure pushes back on this whole assembly it is going to push backward against these two captive recoil springs however the two rollers have to push inward first so the bolt head is going to stay in place and it is going to push the bolt body here backward once the rollers can go all the way in then the whole thing can cycle backwards now we have an additional part here that you don't have on NHK system and that is the actual striker so there is a firing pin inside the bolt head here and you can see it right there there it is it's sticking out a little bit now when this striker goes forward it's going to hit the firing pin and push it out the bolt face to fire so the bit that you saw in the trigger mechanism right here that little hook is holding this back in this position that that little tongue on the front is there to keep everything lined up it's got its own guide rod up here and this top spring is the striker spring so that goes forward and snap fires and then the whole thing reciprocates against actually all three of the springs simultaneously the guide rod here is kind of cool in that it is a single guide rod that comes up and bends around the front and they actually use that in the receiver that guide rod loops around this lug and holds the whole fire the whole bolt group nicely in place now the magazine the magazine is really the heart of this system so we've got a 50 rounder here there are four viewing ports through and their numbers here at when this one's filled when you can't see when you can see a cartridge in at the mags full and then you've got spots for 37 23 and 9 and that's just based on how many cartridges stack up in this thing at the 12 o'clock top position there is a winding spring and a handle at the back and the deal with these is that they have a ratcheting sort of clutch mechanism inside you've got a spring that you have to wind up in order to tension the magazine to use it specifically for a 50-round magazine fully loaded it needs ten revolutions of this winder for a 100 round magazine it needs 23 revolutions there's a button in the center that allows you to remove all the spring pressure plot like that that makes this actually a really easy magazine to load because you can load it without needing without any spring tension being needed and you can say load it halfway up which will pass wind you know it'll it'll put a number of revolutions on the spring you can then use the clutch here to remove the spring tension so that you can finish winding it you can leave the magazines loaded without any spring tension on them like this is all a pretty good system so the way that we disassemble this is also pretty easy and you need to most magazines you pull the floor plate pull the follower out you can wipe them out if they get dirty inside well as you might imagine a helical spiral drum like this is going to be particularly susceptible to any dirt so you need to be able to clean it out to do that you slide this top bar forward just enough that it will come off it has a little interrupted instead of dovetails up there put that aside and then we can pop this open like so want to make sure that all the internal bits stay on one side and then we have a second spring on the bottom there we go so this guy holds the bottom of the magazine together this is the follower and this is the central hub of the magazine I suppose and the follower is going to spin in this spiral track see if you can hold this all in place there we go follower is going to spin around like that now what's interesting about this magazine is this is not just a single stack of cartridges you might imagine this stacked up something like this wound around this central coil and well that's feasible what calico opted to do was actually increase the capacity beyond just that so if I put the follower in place there I've got one cartridge that's going to sit right there in this central spindle but then this is basically a double stack helical drum so as you can see every second round sits on the main spindle and every other round sits move pushed out away from it so you can't really see the inside of this because of course it'll all fall apart and I don't have a transparent one to show you but there is it this is in fact a double stack helical magazine which is really pretty cool just like a typical double stack single feed pistol magazine this does in fact come out as just a single feed system and what we have here is one fixed feed lip and then one metal that is spring-loaded and there's a little notch in the receiver right here on this side so the bolt will actually hit this as it comes forward press this spring-loaded feel it back up into the magazine and allow a cartridge to drop out to be pushed forward and chambered by bolt note that I mentioned this earlier but you can see the ejector sticking out there that's going to punch the empty case off the bolt and out bottom now that you've seen the pistol we can take a quick look at the carbine this one has been all Gucci doubt with all the optional add-on accessories which is pretty cool so you can see that this this system down here is the same mechanical core it disassembles exactly the same way the barrel is longer still has a compensator on it again an option has a vertical front grip added on as an option it has a rail out here for mounting a laser as an added option frankly I actually really liked at least in concept having not shot this one yet I like this optics mount idea to me one of the assuming the magazine to work reliably one of the big shortcomings of the Calico is this funky sighting system that uses the magazine as well as the gun being able to have a higher optic this by the way is a horrible horrible cheesy airsoft your gun optic but being able to use the magazine as a cheek weld have a red dot style of optic up here this is kind of the equivalent of an HK claw mount that is screwed into the frame of the gun so it is no longer dependent on the magazine to be a part of the sighting system and that's a good thing the carbines there we go put that in its actual locking position we're offered with a collapsing stock that you can extend out or compress they also made a fixed stock version this is just a stock but it made this version as well if you prefer that the sling swivels are just very simple screw attachments that can be mounted on either side there's the threaded hole for that there and you could take this bolt out of the front and reverse it to put the front sling swivel on the other side so maintaining the ambidextrous the ambidextrous options on the gun and the original factory configurations allowed you to really just mix and match any of these features fixed stock folding stock pistol only barrel length all those things take your pick and they had a designation for each of them when the Calico guns originally came on to the market specifically the nine-millimeter ones they were clearly trying to get a military or police contracts for them they offered these guns in full auto formants machine pistols as full auto rifles as a submachine gun you know with a stock and also a shorter barrel and their marketing was largely targeted towards that the problem was well historically they have a relatively poor reputation now for reliability and I think there's a lot of complexity in those magazines that the engineering is cool the design is cool it's very creative it's well thought out but it still requires someone to manually wind the magazines and make sure that they've got you know if there's too much tension or too little tension you'll run into and I think it was just fundamentally a little too complicated to really appeal to a military market which left them with the commercial market and unfortunately they brought these onto the market she asked shortly before the 1994 omnibus crime bill aka the assault weapons ban which prohibited in the United States manufacture of magazines that could hold more than 10 rounds and if you're limited to 10 rounds there's no reason to buy a calico and basically nobody did and the company basically went into stasis for 10 years now it did come back after the assault weapons ban which expired at sunset in 2004 the company was actually sold in 2006 moved Oregon and it still appears to exist they have a website it's a terrible website like it's an awful website and they talk about like they reference some interesting new products like the twenty two versions in 17 HMR 22 Magnum they talk about a 45 ACP version but nothing beyond just having a link to a broken webpage I don't know if manufacturing is still going on or if they still have a stock of original production guns these were renamed the Liberty series Liberty one two and three after the end of the assault weapons ban so you'll find those out there but they it seems to me that the new calico company just doesn't have the capital to really do anything other than work with the existing stock that it appears to have been left over from manufactured before 1994 so the reputation that these have online is rather poor with most people experiencing a substantial number of malfunctions with any given magazine so I'm very curious as of this filming I have not actually had a chance to shoot these so we're gonna take him out to the range and see how this system actually works if I can get it to run reliably I'm wondering how much of those reliability issues are people not paying close attention to magazine maintenance and proper winding and loading of the magazines and how much is in fine just know they didn't quite fine-tune it enough to get it working right so we'll find out we're gonna go ahead and do that tomorrow so stick around thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 600,725

Rating: 4.9682512 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, calico, 9mm, pic, pistol caliber carbine, m900, m950, liberty I, liberty ii, liberty iii, helical drum, drum magazine, pistol, carbine, military, law enforcement, magazine, aww, omnibus crime bill, 94 ban, 50 round, 100 round

Id: CbKj2t7MnBg

Length: 20min 18sec (1218 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Krazee9]

Why do I feel like I've seen Ian cover a Calico before?