Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian, I am here today at the Institute of Military Technology taking a look at some of their unusual and experimental firearms. We have a really cool one here today. Now this is a British Farquhar-Hill semi-automatic rifle. I had a chance to shoot one of these many years ago, and it was one of the very first videos I did for Forgotten Weapons. And I have regretted ever since that I didn't have a better camera, and wasn't able to take the gun apart and really show you how it worked. Or for that matter, figure out how it worked for myself. Now we have that opportunity, so I will be splicing in
some of my shooting footage from that original video. That's why the shooting footage is much lower quality,
but it's really cool and this is an awesome gun. So the backstory here is this was
developed by two guys working together. A guy named Moubray G. Farquhar
who was a financier type, he was the money in the deal. And he
came from Aberdeen or Aberdeenshire. And a guy named Arthur Hill who was the gunsmith. He was
from Birmingham and he was the technical side of the project. Originally this was patented in the
UK in 1908 and in the US in 1909. And in its first version under that
patent it was actually a long recoil gun. Clearly Farquhar and Hill, one of their primary
considerations was poor quality ammunition, because the two different designs they came up with are
both very safe, and very adaptable to overpowered ammunition. So long recoil is a very safe system, like the
Remington Model 8 or the French Chauchat. But in 1911 they ditched that system, and they went to a gas
piston system instead. But it's a unique gas piston system. ... So I have this rifle here, I also have a second one, a
sporting model of the Farquhar-Hill, which is in better condition, and we have taken apart. So I'll be able to
show you exactly how this works in a moment. But basically what happens is you have a mechanical
valve inside here. You have two separate main springs. When you fire, gas is taken off of a port here,
and it pushes a gas piston back a couple inches. And the gas piston moves to about
this point and then locks in place. So at that point the bolt has just started to
unlock, and at this point any excess pressure cannot move the gas piston further back. So
excess pressure is forced to vent out the barrel. Thus, no matter how high of a
charge you have in the chamber, ... the amount of energy pushing back
on the gas piston is pretty much constant. Might go up or down a little bit,
but you're not going to be able to just blow the gas piston out by having
an extra high charge in the chamber. At any rate, once the piston moves back to here it locks.
At that point the bolt is moving backwards, ... not under a direct connection from the gas piston. And that's where this is different than most guns.
Typically on a gas piston the piston hits the bolt. Either, in a long stroke system, they're
permanently connected, like on an M1 Garand, so the piston moves all
the way back with the bolt. Or in a short stroke system,
like for example an AR-180, the piston just moves a short way and then
stops and the bolt moves under residual energy. In this case, the piston compresses a spring, and then the
other end of that spring moves the bolt. So it's buffered in a way. And you ... won't get transmission of all
the pressure from the piston onto the bolt. So it's very safe system, and it gives it this
kind of interesting unique recoil impulse where "buffered" really is I think the word that
applies. The recoil impulse is delayed slightly, and it's softer because there's this intermediary
spring kind of mediating everything that's going on. Now beyond that we have a two lug rotating bolt
system here on this side, which you'll see in a moment. There's a big cam track that
operates the bolt to rotate it. This is the military version. Now this ... design started in
1911, in 1917 it was formally adopted by the British military. They thought, "OK, we can make some use
of this. We can give it to airplane pilots." I don't know if they were planning to use
them with ground troops, but it's possible. And 100,000 of them were ordered in 1918. But kind of like some of the late
development stuff in World War Two, by the time production was actually ready to get started,
the war had ended and the order was cancelled. So ultimately very few of these were manufactured. The sporting
gun is serial number 5, with a couple of mixed parts up to 15. We're talking a couple dozen of
these, tops, not more than that. The military gun is unique for
having a wood vertical front grip. This is actually kind of reminiscent of the Chauchat,
and that maybe where it was coming from. They may have wanted to allow fire from the hip, marching
fire, like they had intended with the Chauchat and the BAR. And then it had a large capacity magazine.
This is a drum magazine, catches front and rear. It's a drum that holds 19 rounds, these are in .303 British
calibre which is what you would expect for the British military. (And let's see if I can get that back
in there from here, there we go.) I've actually seen a piece of the
original web gear intended for these, it's a curved pouch or holder that sits on the
belt and holds three more of these drums. So the trooper would have had one drum on the gun,
three more on a belt. Maybe a second pouch of, you know, 4 through 6.
A fair amount of ammunition. And they're a really comfortable gun
to fire. They are a bit awkwardly long, but as a self-loader in World
War One these are really cool. We do have this bolt carrier and dust cover
simultaneously that is going to cycle back. This locks open. And we actually have two ways to
close this. We have a release here that drops the bolt. Or in classic early automatic rifle
design, you can pull the trigger and drop the bolt. Either one works. If you pull the
trigger to do it, your next trigger pull will fire the rifle. Now we also, interestingly, have this spring catch here
which allows me to disconnect the bolt from the gas piston. So there is our operating rod
and gas system. And now the bolt (it's locked open there), now the
bolt is just free to move as it will. This allows you to use the rifle
as a manually operated gun. It's also kind of nice for disassembly because I don't
have to worry about maintaining spring pressure on this. Now the drum here has, as I said, catches
on the front and the back. Pull that out. Now this might have gotten more intricate
had it actually gone into military production, but the way this is made right now
(and this is drum number 60, right there), is there's actually a
... back plate here, and a front plate here. And then the body of the drum is a
piece of sheet metal that is wrapped (you can see that the surface isn't very smooth), that's just
been wrapped around the front and back and folded down. There's a lip around the whole edge. And held in place with
two screws at this end, and two cotter pins at the other end. Now we have a dummy cartridge in here, and a coil
spring in the middle that provides the motive force for this. And we have this catch on
the back of the magazine. That allows you to open and close the magazine,
there we go. There's a little arm right here. That arm holds the cartridges
in or allows them to come out. So when you're loading the magazine, you
load it up, and then you engage that switch. And then you can put this magazine away,
you know, in your web gear or wherever, without cartridges coming out
despite the fact that it has no feed lips. Then when you're ready to use the magazine,
you take it out, you insert it into the rifle, and the feed lips are built
into the receiver here. So you take this, we have a front guide rib that
runs right in there. Lock it into the rifle, and then run that lever up. That will allow the first
cartridge to come up into the feedway and fire. The important point here is if you have a
partial magazine and you want to remove it, you have to remember to turn the magazine off to
capture the cartridges in the mag before you take it out. Or else all your cartridges will go flying out under spring pressure,
as I may have discovered when I was shooting one of these. The rear sight is kind of interesting, we
have a regular battle sight peep, right there. And then if you want longer range, you can flip
this entire assembly up like that, and then you have a windage adjustable aperture sight on the back there. This one's
pretty loose, that's why it kind of flops around. This poor rifle has seen better days. Lastly, in a true first of tactical modularity, the vertical pistol grip can
be located in any of these five holes, wherever you would like to screw
it in to best fit your shooting technique. Alright, here we have a sporter version of the Farquhar-Hill,
which just means that the stock and the magazine are different. This has a fixed 5 round mag instead of a drum. I have the screwdriver in it so
that we can operate the gas piston. The way this works is we have our gas port
up here. We have a gas piston right here. The gas piston pushes a little plunger plug here
which is sitting on the outside of this operating rod, and on the inside of this large diameter spring. We then also have a small diameter spring
back here running inside this whole assembly. So, if that's not complicated enough, I'm going to go
ahead and put the bolt carrier on without the bolt. Alright, so now I have the bolt carrier in place.
And I can cycle the gun manually, like this, and I'm just compressing
this small diameter spring. So when I fire it, the gas piston here is going to come back
and it's going to push this plunger until it goes into this block. When it goes in, the face of the gas
piston is going to push on this spring, which is going to push this locking catch down,
and it's going to lock this plunger in position. Right there, see that catch?
Now our gas piston is free and clear. We now have this plunger
locked in place by this latch, and it's acting as a fixed position off of which
this spring has compressed and is pushing on the operating rod and thus the bolt here. What we've really accomplished by
doing this is effectively created a valve where gas pressure in the barrel is able
to push the gas piston back to this point. Once it hits here and locks, any additional pressure vents out
the barrel and thus does not cause the bolt carrier to move faster. That's going to prevent the bolt and the
bolt carrier from being over accelerated, slamming into the back of the
receiver and damaging the gun. As a side effect, it also means that the
recoil has this kind of soft, buffered feel to it, because this gas piston is not
physically connected to the operating rod. They are intermediated by this heavy-duty spring. Now at this point this thing's
kind of sitting at a balance point. If this were actually cycling, this would
... have been pushed back with a lot of force, and it would have accelerated the bolt and
carrier and they would continue to travel rearward. Right now, this spring is in tension against
that spring and it's holding this in position. As soon as I continue to pull this
backward, I'm relieving tension on this spring, and ... this is going to release the catch. There you go, did you see it pop up right there? Now this cycles backward. When
it reaches the end of the travel this inner spring is pushing it
forward to load a new cartridge And now you can see our plunger,
right here, moving forward. So as I close the bolt, that
plunger goes all the way forward, and now it's back in contact with the
gas piston ready to fire a second time. Hopefully that made sense. This is a really
whacky one-of-a-kind style of system here. Now the bolt is a two lug rotating bolt. This
roller runs in the cam track in the bolt carrier. We have a pivoting extractor here on the side. This is, well, it's the bolt. So if I put this into the rifle, When it's in the rifle the bolt runs like this. It's going to (it's stuck on the hammer, there we go). When the bolt locks it comes
forward, forward, forward, and then this cam track, you can see the inside is hollow, right there. (There you go, you can see it better there.)
That hollow section controls this roller. So when it gets to the end of travel that roller
is pushed up like that, which locks the bolt. Now it's also interesting to point out that
as the bolt carrier begins to move rearward, this cam track is going to force the bolt [down].
Before the bolt can start moving, it has to unlock, so it's going to come down. When it hits
this position it's now on this curved track, and that's going to give us
some primary extraction, where the bolt is still in the process of unlocking but it's going
to pull the cartridge out just a couple millimetres, like 2mm. And It's got a lot of leverage
to it when it's doing that. What this does is that has freed the static
friction of the cartridge inside the chamber, so that when the bolt then goes to moving directly backwards
it doesn't have to fight the static friction to rip the case out. ... Without that primary extraction you'd
be much more likely to have the extractor either break or tear through
the rim of the cartridge. By giving it this extra leverage, where it's got a lot of
force to move the cartridge just a short distance, that helps make the extraction much more reliable. This is a really pleasant gun to shoot,
I'm actually very surprised by it. The recoil is really gentle and the dual spring setup that Farquhar came up with for this gun works really well.
This dumps the brass out just [bloop], right into a nice pile. Ejects cleanly, loads cleanly,
I'm really impressed with this gun. Thank you for watching guys,
I hope you enjoyed the video, I've been wanting to get my hands on a
Farquhar-Hill ever since I did that first shooting video. And thanks to the Institute of Military
Technology I finally had an opportunity. Not just this one, but this one and the sporter as well. So we can actually finally take a
close look at how these work internally. And that really is the mission of the Institute of
Military Technology is to preserve this history, and use it to educate people
so that we don't lose track of it. It is a collection that is not totally open to
the public, but it is accessible by appointment. So if you're interested in doing research on this type
of material, definitely contact them and arrange a visit. I can pretty much guarantee you'll
enjoy it, there's a fantastic collection here. And of course if you enjoy seeing video like
this, consider checking out my Patreon page. It's a buck a month from subscribers
there that makes it possible for me to travel and bring you guys fantastic old guns like this one. Thanks for watching.
I love watching these videos on all the guns from the game, and just found out that Ian did a video on the new Farquar Hill Semi Auto!
Love this channel.
Regarding this weapon ingame. Is there something wrong with the Storm variant? I feel like I miss a fk ton of shots with it. Im not the best at the game, but im definitely not as bad as I feel when im using this gun.
Just got the Farquad optical. Is nice gun