Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at Movie Armaments Group, up in Toronto, taking a look at three different patterns of AR-10s. And these are in fact representative of each of the three major patterns of AR-10 rifle made by the Dutch. This is basically the whole lifespan of the military AR-10, which is a really cool opportunity to take a look at. So the first Dutch pattern AR-10s... Let me back up just a bit. The AR-10 was, of course, designed by Eugene Stoner in the United States in California ... by the ArmaLite company he was working for. And
the first prototype guns were manufactured in Hollywood. But ArmaLite in Hollywood didn't
really have a major production facility, and ... what they ended up doing was licensing production
to Artillerie Inrichtingen in the Netherlands to actually produce guns in large quantities for the
military contracts that they were hoping to get. So in 1958, right at the beginning, early 1958,
the first Dutch production guns come off the line, the sales effort has been going since, like, 1957
on these guns. And production would end in 1961, when the Dutch government pulled the plug
on arms manufactured by Artillerie Inrichtingen. So we only have a period of about, what, four years: '58, '59,
'60 and '61 when they were actually producing these guns. Now the gun ... changed pattern fairly regularly, fairly
constantly throughout those four years of production, and what we've come to do is identify the major patterns
by the countries that actually purchased them. So the sales efforts for the AR-10 were on-going,
and as each country made a purchase those guns were manufactured and shipped out.
And then the improvement process would continue. So what we have here is what's considered a Cuban pattern gun, a Sudanese pattern gun, and a Portuguese pattern gun. And we are going to go ahead
and look at each of those in sequence, and take a look at what actually
changed between them. So, let's get started. So we'll start with the first pattern here, which
is commonly referred to as the Cuban pattern. ... That is, of course, because the Cubans
were the first country to actually buy these, and they were actually really the only
country to buy this particular pattern in quantity. So in 1957 Sam Cummings, who ran Interarms
and was one of the main sales agents for the AR-10, he visited Batista in Cuba and demonstrated the gun. Batista, of course, was dealing with a ... communist
rebel uprising and thought these things were awesome and went ahead and placed an order for 100
of them, specifically for his Presidential Guard. Now it took some time to actually get these guns produced. This ... sales push was going on while AI was still tooling up to put the guns into production, and so it wasn't until mid '58 that these guns were actually completed. And
then it wasn't until late 1958, like November of '58, that the guns actually got shipped to Cuba. So Cummings
had some sort of sneaky, scammy business going on, and he would have the guns actually shipped to his warehouse
in England and then shipped again from England to Cuba. Long story. At any rate, ... while the
guns were on the water in transit to Cuba, Batista fled and of course Castro took over power in Cuba.
And when they arrived they hadn't been paid for yet, they were gonna be paid for on delivery,
and so Cummings actually called up Cuba, he called up Fidel Castro,
and basically said, "Hey, you know, these guns are showing up and they haven't
been paid for. How do you want to deal with it?" And he ended up going down to Cuba, set up a firing demonstration
with Fidel and Raúl Castro and Che Guevara, of all people. They also found these to be very nice
rifles and they agreed to pay for them, presumably with someone else's money, and were apparently actually interested in buying
more of them, but then the US embargo came down. And ... the Dutch government decided that further sales
to Cuba while under embargo were not going to happen. So in total only 100 of these went to Cuba.
However this of course is number 312. This was also the early pattern of rifle. So these were
trialled by a lot of other countries at that same time. I'll point out a few specific things here. If you've seen the
Brownells reproduction of these guns, you'll recognise this. They have a charging handle that sticks out
the back. There is a little ball detent, right here, that holds the charging handle in place, so
that it doesn't come back when you're shooting. It is non-reciprocating, and also
does not function as a forward assist. The hand guards on these very first pattern
guns are ... sub-optimal in several ways. So first of all, they're fragile. You can see
that this one's had some damage to it, and that is not at all uncommon. A lot of the
furniture on these early AR-10s is in poor shape from a lot of use, and not being
all that durable in the first place. In addition the handguard is very difficult to remove,
so there is no slip ring or anything on the back here. Nor is there any sort of removal device at the
front up here. In order to remove the handguard you actually have to ... punch out the pins holding
on the front sight block and pull the muzzle device, take this off. And then you can slide
the handguard off the end of the barrel. Speaking of the barrel, it is a very
lightweight barrel, especially for a .308 rifle, especially at that time, and has
an open three prong flash hider. So this is the standard. I'll hold off showing you other features,
because what we're gonna go ahead and do is, as we go on to the other two patterns, I'll
show you how they changed from this standard. So the next one up here is the Sudanese gun. In January of 1956 Sudan gained its
independence from the United Kingdom, and started looking for arms because ... at that point
they had basically leftover British SMLEs, Lee-Enfields, and they wanted something more
substantial. They were neighbours with Egypt. Egypt was of course working
quickly to modernise its military force, and Sudan had a bunch of internal problems that
its military wanted to try and keep a handle on, so the Sudanese went looking for new small arms.
They actually tried to get L1A1s, FALs, from the British, but those weren't available to them at that time.
So interestingly, and this was in early 1958, ... when they went to talk to the British in England
they were informed that, "Yeah, we can't give you FALs, but you know, there's this American dealer just down the street
and maybe he's got something that he can set you up with." Well, that was Sam Cummings and his office in England.
And ... two Sudanese officers showed up at Sam Cummings office basically and said, "Hey, we're here
from Sudan and we're looking for guns." So he was happy to demonstrate the AR-10 to
them. Sudan actually wasn't in his sales territory, in his jurisdiction, but Sam Cummings wasn't the
sort of guy to let a minor issue like that get in his way. He actually ended up taking these guys up
to Scandinavia to test out the guns, because 7.62 NATO was not easily available
in 1958 outside of military circles. Anyway, they tested the guns, they thought they were great.
And this being Sudan, which wasn't exactly, you know a representative democracy at the time, the
Sudanese military was able to formally adopt the guns on a decision from one of these two generals who
showed up. And they decided to order just over 2,500 guns. They ... requested a couple of changes. So one of them you'll almost certainly have
spotted already, a small number of the guns, somewhere between 8 and maybe 30,
were ordered to be sniper versions, which have ... much of the carry
handle trimmed off and they have this threaded nut here and a scope mounting
bracket. These were shipped with a 3x25, 3x power by 25mm, optical sight. The barrels
were hand-picked for being particularly accurate. There's just a tiny number of these,
so that's a really cool variation to have. The standard Sudanese guns have the exact same carry handle
as as ... the Cuban pattern, as all of the AR-10s would have. One little detail, the Sudanese sights are
actually numbered in I believe that's Farsi, not Latin numerals. The hand guards on the Sudanese
guns are the same as on the Cuban. However, the barrel changed...
well, the barrel didn't change but its profile did. The Sudanese wanted to
be able to mount a bayonet on these rifles, which is something that the Cubans did not do,
... the early AR-10s didn't have a capability for it. So what they ended up doing was they
pinned a barrel sleeve on over the barrel. This still has the exact same very light
pencil weight barrel as the first Cuban guns, but pinning this on allowed them to mount this
bayonet lug, and this is actually strong enough that the Sudanese bayonets don't have a muzzle ring.
They're kind of like the German K98k bayonets, they just lock onto this lug right here. So the way that you can distinguish a Sudanese gun most
easily is by looking for this shroud and the bayonet lug. The ... flash hider is slightly different in that it
is threaded externally for a blank-firing adapter. One other visually distinctive feature on the
Sudanese guns is that they requested specifically a brass disc on the stock for a unit marking.
And those are unique to the Sudanese guns, and they actually allow the guns to
be fairly easily spotted in pictures. So if you see a shot of an AR-10
in some far-flung battlefield today, if you can see the left side of the stock
that will often be a clue that there's a Sudanese gun and not one of the other patterns. In fact, there's a picture that became notable a
couple years ago of an original ArmaLite AR-10 in Afghanistan or Iraq, or Syria I think [Yemen] that had very obviously one of those discs on it. Now after the Sudanese contract there did
come a contract with Guatemala, and I don't have a Guatemalan gun here to show you. Which is
OK because it is almost identical to the Sudanese. The one thing the Guatemalans wanted was to
increase the cooling capacity of the barrel a bit. And so what ArmaLite did, or what AI did, was
just drill a series of holes in this barrel sleeve, barrel shroud there. So that gave it a little more
airflow to cool, the Guatemalans were fine with that. And that's how you can identify a Guatemalan gun.
It's ... got this sleeve on it, but it's perforated. One other notable addition to the Sudanese
guns was this white dot above the aperture there. That was filled with a luminous
(probably radium), paint to act as a night sight. A similar dot was put on the front sight
tower just below the front sight here, giving these guns at least rudimentary night sights. And that is going to bring us to the final and
most highly developed pattern of the AR-10, and that's the Portuguese gun. Now before
Portugal actually made this contract for AR-10s, the big thing that AI tried to get was a Dutch contract.
The Dutch military was looking for a new rifle at this point and it seemed like a really
obvious kind of a shoo-in for a sale, for a Dutch company to sell the most modern,
the best new combat rifle, to the Dutch military. Well, they put in a lot of work, and they
made a bunch of changes to the design to make the gun more robust,
and more practical, and better. And ... these all fall under the heading of transitional
guns. There are not very many of them out there, they were never made for a large contract
and, unfortunately for ArmaLite and AI, the Dutch government ended up
adopting the FAL instead of the AR-10. However, the changes that were made to try and make
the guns more suitable for Dutch trials stuck around. And that is what was actually
produced for the Portuguese contract. So we can see all these changes in the Portuguese
guns, and that's of course what we have here. A bunch of changes here,
so let's start at the back. The furniture composition was
actually changed to make it stronger. The sling swivel on the rear was moved
from the bottom of the buttstock to the side. So there's our Cuban, there's our Portuguese. A rubber butt plate was added. That replaced the metal butt plate (with a
cleaning kit storage area on the earlier guns). Interestingly the selector settings were changed to
be safe, semi-auto, full-auto. Where on previous guns, on this Cuban for example, we have safe in
the centre, full in the front and semi in the back. So they swapped around that. This is actually a change that would happen
in the United States to the very early AR-15s. In the US this was done because
if you are crawling with this gun, and say carrying it like this with your
right hand and dragging it on the ground, as you drag the gun forward you could very
easily ... push the selector switch backwards. On this pattern that now points it to safe. On the American guns, on the early M16s that
had that early type of selector, a setup like this, you push that to the back and now it's set to full-auto.
And if you then catch something in the trigger while you're crawling you get a
burst of fire going downrange. And that actually happened in one American trial and
directly led to the changing of the selector set up. So some people think that that's there just because
it's now very ergonomic to flip from safe to semi. Yeah, and actually that wasn't why they did it. But moving on. Let's see, if we take a look up here the
charging handle has been substantially changed. So this is now... in order to use the charging handle
you have to push it down. When it's down it engages positively in the bolt, and can act either
to ... pull the bolt back or push it forward. This is also now a two-piece telescoping charging
handle, so it does not protrude out the back of the receiver. And the lower receiver has been changed
just slightly to fully encapsulate the back end. On the early guns you can see that this is open,
and it has to be so that the charging handle (do this one-handed, there we go),
so the charging handle can come back. Once you have this ... telescoping
charging handle that's no longer an issue. This, by the way, is why semi-auto lower receivers
for AR-10s are not necessarily interchangeable, this is one of the reasons, why they are not necessarily
interchangeable between early and late parts kits. Early AR-10s are serialised right down here. On the Portuguese guns they added
this designation up on the upper receiver. And the Portuguese actually formally
adopted this as the M961, standing for 1961. They formally adopted it 1960, first
deliveries, well, deliveries were in 1961. And ... this was supposed to be a
rifle for the entire Portuguese military, but the Dutch government cut off
AI's production before that was possible. So in Portuguese service the AR-10 ended up being
limited to use by basically elite paratrooper units. We can also see a change to the bolt release lever. So the top here is the bolt release, and the bottom
allows you to lock the bolt open without a magazine. On the early guns you have a pattern with a
big bolt release paddle, and you can still do this, but you don't actually have a like a
control lever down here, it's much smaller. And ... for the Dutch trials they wanted the gun to be more easily locked open
manually. And that carried over to the Portuguese. The hand guards were a big source of
potential problems in the Dutch trials and so they made a number of changes
to those, and they are by far the most distinctive change to the
Portuguese pattern of gun. So first off, the hand guards are now split
in two so that they can be very easily removed. There is a threaded ring back here, and if you unscrew that, like so, you now have two pieces of
handguard that come out. Now this particular handguard is a rather rare
variant that is cut with these slots for bipod legs. The bipod up here, right there,
just clamps onto the barrel. So the bipod is not a
permanent piece, it just clamps on, but it requires special hand guards
that have cutouts for it to fold up into. The standard Portuguese guns worked
this same way, but they didn't have bipods. Underneath the bipod there
is a two-piece heat shield. Vented at the front, solid at the back. This is a bit more substantial of a heat shield
than was in the handguards of the early guns. And the Portuguese barrel is
substantially heavier as well ... so that it takes longer to heat up, make it
more durable, more resistant to extended firing. We have a number of additional changes up here at
the front. So the pattern of the flash hider has changed. This has been turned into a pretty much
standard grenade launching style of spigot. There is a bayonet lug located on the
top of that grenade launching spigot here. We also have this lug right here, which allows the
mounting of a little clip-on grenade launcher sight, which just sits up here ... behind the rear sight
tower to give you proper ranges for firing grenades. There's a quick view of that clamp on bipod. ... That's an extra accessory that,
in theory, could be added to any gun as long as you also got the
hand guards with the bipod cutouts. And then the Portuguese pattern guns
also have an adjustable gas regulator. So you can just use the tip of a cartridge.
Normally of course, you'd use a 7.62, I have a dummy .223 here, but you push
down this little plunger and then you can rotate this guy through three different positions, (there we go), to whichever
gas setting is most suitable. That's the outside but we're not quite done yet,
there are a number of internal changes. Here in the fire control groups (we have a
Portuguese on the bottom and our Cuban on the top), now has been converted to semi-auto only so
this isn't an entirely correct fire control group But if you look just above the hammer here, you can
see an additional spring that doesn't exist on this gun, And that was added specifically during the Dutch
trials, and then to the Portuguese pattern guns, in order to ... basically to increase the force of the
hammer when it falls, which made it more reliable to fire. It also meant that re-cocking the hammer took
a little bit more force than on the early guns, which meant the rate of fire was slightly
reduced, which was seen as a positive. Overall, this was an improvement to
the reliability of the trigger mechanism. And then a couple changes were
also made to the bolt and bolt carrier. This is our early one down here and you
can see that it's relieved back at this end. The later, the Portuguese pattern guns, are solid.
So they actually added weight to the bolt carrier. This made it again a little more reliable.
It also reduced the recoil slightly, more of the force of firing was taken
up in forcing this thing to get moving. More substantially, the size of
the locking lugs was increased. So this is the early Cuban gun or, you know, early pattern
Cuban, Sudanese, Guatemalan, everyone until Portugal. This is the Portuguese pattern. The extractor is
bigger and beefier and these bolt lugs are larger. There were some problems with in extended
endurance trials, the AR-10s shearing locking lugs. And so to counteract that problem,
to fix it, they made the locking lugs larger. These bolt carriers do not interchange,
by the way, because of these various changes. And lastly, they also chromed the chamber of
the Portuguese guns, again increasing reliability, especially in harsh environments. So all of this put together substantially
increased the weight of the Portuguese gun. By this point in the development they weren't
really looking to have the lightest possible rifle. They weren't trying to work under the American Ordnance
Department's rather unrealistic weight expectations. And so by the time they got to the Dutch
trials and then the Portuguese contract, the focus was much more on making the rifle a more durable
and a more reliable gun, even at the expense of weight. So the very first ones, the Cuban
patterns, were 7 pounds 2 ounces. The Sudanese guns with that extra little bayonet shroud
added a little bit, that bumped it up to 7 pounds 4 ounces. By the time they got to the Portuguese
guns, extra weight in the barrel, extra weight in the bolt carrier, extra weight in the
furniture, extra weight on the muzzle, all of this came together to bring the gun to 8 pounds
15 ounces. So just under 9 pounds. This is still a remarkably effective, very
comfortable weight for a .308 calibre rifle. But not quite the same as where the gun had started. Just to reiterate and go through the
production here. If we ... tabulate up the number of actual major contracts that were delivered,
we're looking at 100 guns to Cuba, and then about 300 to Italy (and
those were very late pattern guns, the Italian Navy, the Italian naval special forces
actually, purchased and really liked the AR-10). Going back to the early ones, we have just
over 2,500 for Sudan, we have 450 to Guatemala, and then the big Portuguese contract was right about
1,500 guns. And ... that's all of the major contracts. There were other guns that were made, there were
of course, you know, trials guns made for this and that, there were sales sample guns,
but no other major contracts. And what makes this a little bit confusing is that
there were ... major gaps in the serial number range. They didn't make every gun sequentially. So despite the
fact that, for example, on this particular Portuguese gun we're looking at serial number 7,800. There were actually
not more than about 6,000 of these made in total altogether. So in that sense it's interesting to point out that ... there were
fewer of these made than, say, FG-42s during World War Two. Which I think really puts in perspective
the actual scarcity of these guns, because a lot of them went through
a lot more combat than the FG-42s did. Certainly the Sudanese and the Portuguese guns were
heavily used, heavily repaired, sent back into service. You know by the end of their service
both of those countries were tearing down existing rifles to scrounge
parts for ones that needed repair. Hopefully this has given you a better
understanding of the transition, the progression, of the AR-10 design over the few brief years
that it was being manufactured by the Dutch. You know, it's really interesting to see it go from
this super lightweight gun that kind of has that special sauce of being a 7 pound, reliable,
semi-auto combat rifle in .308, in 7.62 NATO, all the way then up to the Portuguese
guns, where ... it's put on some weight, it's gotten a little chunky. It's close
to 9 pounds now, but it's nicer to shoot, it's a much more robust gun, and
they've added features to it. So really a fascinating rifle, one of the most interesting
of the Cold War era 7.62 NATO combat rifles, I think. I'd like to give another big thanks to Movie
Armaments Group for giving me access to their awesome collection
of AR-10s here to take a look at. If you're in the movie industry and you're in
Toronto, well you probably already know about them, because I think they're about the biggest movie
guns and gear supplier up in this area of Canada. But anyway, thanks for watching,
hope you enjoyed the video.
