Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are going to take a look at a British L96A1 sniper. This is the first ... military sniper rifle produced by Accuracy International and it's a really cool kind of a pioneer in modern sniper rifle development. So first off, this video is being done courtesy of
Steve Houghton who has published a book on British sniper rifles. So if you'd like to know more
about this, or any other British sniper rifle, from well 1915 through basically 2018, definitely check it out. It is called "The British Sniper A Century Of Evolution", and we'll have a link where you can
pick it up in the description text below. So back to the rifle itself here. When Accuracy International got its start in the early 1980s, they were really kind of the stereotypical
British company consisting of two guys in a shed (I shouldn't even say British, that's kind of
stereotypical for a lot of small arms development). At any rate, they got their start manufacturing
precision rifles for a British Olympic shooter by the name of Malcolm Cooper. And it was actually
partly his activism that got these into military hands, and ... by 1984 Accuracy International had actually
provided a small number of rifles to British special forces. And this is relevant because they got
feedback from British special forces on tweaks and improvements, and things that
they could do to make these into better rifles that would serve them very well in the upcoming
major British MOD [Ministry of Defence] trials. So in 1985 the British MOD decided to hold some
trials to replace the L42 as its standard sniper rifle. The L42 was, quite literally they were updated,
upgraded Number 4 Mark 1 (T) sniper rifles, which had been around since literally the '40s.
This was kind of the old school of military sniper rifle, which was take your standard service rifle,
pick the best, most accurate ones and then mount scopes on them.
Basically the Number 4 (T) and then the L42. And the British, you know, these rifles were
getting older and they wanted something new. However, they weren't really expecting a fundamentally
different rifle like Accuracy International provided. Anyway, AI gets this option to submit a rifle to MOD
testing, and ... they weren't really optimistic about it, this wasn't like their big goal. They were a
couple guys making competition rifles and it appears that actually the mindset was well,
we might as well submit one. We won't win, but it'd be interesting to see our rifle go through a
military trial, and find out what bits we need to improve. You know, this is something that we ... haven't really done
on our own, why not? What's the worst that could happen? Well, it turns out what actually
happened was they won the trials. There were a number of other entrants: SIG was
in there, HK was in there, Remington was in there, and then the major competitor that they had was Parker
Hale that had submitted their ... M85 rifle for the trial. And ultimately it came down to a very close
fought battle in the trial between the Parker Hale rifle and the Accuracy International
rifle, and AI ended up winning out. Although there were Parker Hale
diehards probably still to this day. And what made this rifle different is
that it was built on a chassis system. So what you see here looks a little bit unorthodox, and
that's because every component on this rifle is modular. Instead of the classic traditional approach of
you have a receiver, and you screw a barrel into it, and you put a trigger group on it,
then you drop it into a stock, and you bed it very nicely,
and that's your precision rifle. This instead has, basically, the receiver as the main element
and everything else bolts separately onto the receiver. So when we take these stock sides
off, which we'll do in just a moment, you'll see it's basically one big metal strut in here. The barrel is free floated by nature of
being completely independent from the stock, the furniture of the rifle. There's no need to bed
anything because nothing actually touches here. And when it comes to military use this was very
practical, because it meant that pretty much everything on the rifle was modular and
independent. And there was almost nothing on here that could go wrong that you couldn't fix
by removing the bad part and putting on a new functional part. As opposed to one of the
old traditional types of rifles which, if it gets damaged too badly, the whole thing
has to go back to a workshop to be rebuilt. So it was that modularity, I think,
that really gave Accuracy International ... the winning entrant in this competition. So in 1985 Accuracy International wins this trial, much
to their surprise, and are left in a bit of a tight situation. ... It was a couple of guys in a shed, they didn't have any
manufacturing capability. And in fact, they had so little ... industrial capability that they were
really concerned that having won the trial, they might be disqualified from it simply for not
being capable of producing rifles in quantity. So apparently there's this, I think, a really funny
anecdote (and this comes by the way from Dave Walls, not directly but indirectly, who was one of the
principles in Accuracy International at the time, and I believe this is going to be in a book that he is in
the process of writing on the history of the company), but apparently having won the contract, the
British MOD sent out a couple of officers to take a look at ... Accuracy International's
factory, which of course didn't exist. And so the guys at AI rented a little
industrial space in a little industrial park, and kind of threw together a bunch of work benches,
and some tools, and some vices, and scattered gun parts around to kind of make it sort
of look like a working gun assembly shop. And they took these two MOD officers and brought
them in and kind of ran them through it really quickly, like, "Yeah, there's that and that and that and that, and let's go get lunch now". And dragged them out of the place over to
lunch, desperately hoping that they wouldn't buy anything particularly expensive for lunch,
because AI at the time did not have the budget or the money to provide much more
than basically a beer and a sandwich. Fortunately, that's all these guys ended up wanting
and getting. And as they left, one of the officers actually commented that, you know, "Yeah, it looked
great, we weren't really concerned. We just wanted to make sure you weren't just two guys in a shed."
Which is exactly what AI was at the time. So, eventually this came to light
because as ... a result of winning the trials AI got a contract to make 1,112 of these rifles. They had been, by the way, designated the Accuracy
International PM, the [Precision] Marksman rifle. And AI continued to sell the PM on the commercial
market while this was all going on, and afterwards. When the British military adopted
the PM they designated it the L96A1. So the two are actually identical rifles,
they're the exact same thing. Because AI didn't have an actual factory to do this
production, the British government gave a contract for it to a company called Pylon Engineering,
which would prove to be a major problem in the story of this rifle and in its
introduction and development. So the first hundred rifles, the first hundred
receivers were made by AI, by Dave Walls himself on his lathe in his garage, and that's actually one of
the ones we have here is one of those first hundred. We'll take a close look at it in a minute. After that, it went to Pylon because they
were an established engineering company they had tools, they had production facilities.
And unfortunately they were not really gun people, and they decided to take some liberties with some of the
specifications. Like this firing pin material spec, it's really far beyond what we need, and it's pretty
expensive, and so let's just simplify it. There are a couple of, say, bolt holes in the back of
the receiver that are supposed to be blind drilled, well, threading blind holes is problematic,
you know, it's easy to break taps that way, so let's just drill them all the
way through and it'll work fine. They made a couple of changes like that, and
the one that would come back to really bite them was their change to the material
specification of the firing pin. Because just as these rifles were
starting to be issued into the British military the firing pin started breaking. And they
would break just in front of the cocking piece, which is a particularly bad place with this rifle's
design, because it meant that the firing pin spring was now pushing the firing pin forward,
exposing the firing pin through the ... bolt face and not catching, you know, that when you closed
the bolt the ... back of the cocking piece would catch, but it was no longer connected to the front of
the firing pin, and as you chambered a cartridge the firing pin would contact the cartridge, the
extractor would hold it into the breech face, and the cartridge would detonate out
of battery, blowing the bolt back open. And a number of British troops were injured by
rifles basically exploding out of battery this way, and it became an immediate and huge problem. In fact, for about six weeks there was
kind of this panicked look at how do we go back and modernise the L42 now,
because it looks like this L96 thing is a disaster, it's gonna be gone. Do we still have some
L42s, we didn't get rid of them yet, right? Let's make some brackets and
attach night-vision scopes to our L42s. What ended up happening was Accuracy International
was put back in charge of overseeing all of the production of the rifles. Pylon ended up
going out of business as a result of this debacle. And AI was able to fix the problem,
identify what had been done, reverse it. In fact the rifles were retrofitted with (and later
ones modified), with an exposed firing pin. So you could see if there was
going to be a problem like this. And within six weeks or so the rifles were actually back
into British service, which is a pretty remarkable turnaround. So looking at this from a mechanical
perspective, aside from the chassis system, which I promise we'll take off in just a minute,
... well, there's nothing revolutionary about this. It is a kind of typical turn bolt system. We have
a bolt release button back here on the side. Pull the bolt out. Got a three lug rotating bolt there. Note that the cocking piece extends
out the back, that was the result of this product improvement after
the debacle with broken firing pins. Originally, on the very first guns, this was
a completely enclosed shroud at the back. These are all chambered for the 7.62 NATO
cartridge. That was of course the British standard sniping cartridge. That's what the
L42 used, that's what these used. This has a double stack,
10 round, detachable box magazine. This has a number of features both for a military
rifle and things that you would expect to see on a civilian competition rifle.
Things like spacers on the butt pad, so you can adjust your length of
pull by adding or removing these. There's a sling swivel back here, but there
is also a small rear monopod leg, which if I loosen this thumb screw that will come out. So not all that long, but you have a little bit there.
If ...you're in a position where you can set this up on a three point fixed rest on your
target, well, that makes it easy to do. It is spring-loaded. And this is an element that was improved in later
rifles because it's a little bit tricky to put it back in. The trigger is a two-stage trigger with a fantastic
... light and crisp break. It's really an outstanding trigger. Nothing at all like what you get on an L42. This is much
more reminiscent of a proper competition match rifle. Again, like you would see on a match rifle, you have
an adjustable sling swivel here for a shooting sling that can be adjusted for position, or
removed altogether if you don't want it. And a nice robust bipod at the front of the
rifle. It's a fairly wide bipod which is nice. The legs can extend out, like so. And if you don't want the bipod on, you can rotate
it out and simply remove it entirely from the gun. However, while we're talking about cool modern
modular features, you will notice that the muzzle is not threaded, doesn't have a flash hider. It
doesn't really need a flash hider because of its length, But it was not threaded, which is something
that would be quite remarkably odd today. Remember, this is basically the first of
the modern era of military sniper rifles, and so the idea of adding a suppressor
on there, or any sort of other device, wasn't really something people were thinking about. They did go ahead and put an iron sight on it,
a rather substantial iron sight. You can zero this quite effectively. That's your backup sight.
We'll take a look ... at the front iron sight right now. In order to get to the rear iron
sight we have to take off the scope. That's held in place by two thumb screws here. This just pops off. So there's a rail milled
down the length of the top of the receiver, and we have an oval hole right
here in conjunction with this peg. That's what gives you your repeatable
zero. You can drop the scope on, line it up so that that peg is in place.
You have a little bit of play, so you push it to the [front],
which is where recoil will pull it anyway. And then tighten it down and you do actually
have a very effective repeatable zero from this. A lot of people think that a repeatable
zero is this mysterious thing that, you know, requires all sorts of extra levers and controls
and, you know, quadruple locking things to get right. In reality, a repeatable zero is gotten based on
mechanical precision of the manufacture of the parts. And one of the things that AI did was
they brought basically a custom rifle level of precision to a
mass-produced military sniper rifle. Here's our rear backup iron sight,
which is a pretty sophisticated backup sight. You could actually, I suspect, shoot this
quite well and effectively using just this sight. So it lifts up of course, and then it is adjustable for elevation. It is an aperture sight and we have our adjustment dial right there.
You can also adjust it for windage. Now that we have the scope off, I can
also show you the markings on the receiver. The company name, Accuracy International, England Above that we have what is basically a part
identification number for the gun, CR 138 GA, and then Rifle 7.62 mm L96A1. This is one of the very early guns. In fact, once production really got into the swing of things, the markings would improve, they'd
standardise them a little bit better. You can see that this looks a little more
nicely done. The markings are the same, however, they have now added
the British NSN number to it as well. And this one is actually a police issued rifle. This was used by the Bedfordshire police and
it is a 1989 production. You'll notice it has a PM prefix and that is that Precision Marksman,
which is AI's commercial name for this rifle. And this one is serial number 0576. So that's one of the places you'll see a difference between
the military and the civilian or police production guns. Now, of course, optics are as
important as the rifle on a platform like this. The original L96A1 optic was a Schmidt & Bender,
specifically a fixed 6x power by 42mm optic. They're painted green to match the [rifle]. And, in fact, you can tell this is kind of early production
because it's still marked "West Germany" manufacture. If we look on the bottom of the rear
objective, you'll have AI's serial number, so this one is not actually matching to the
rifle, but because of the level of precision in the mounting and the fabrication of these
guns, that really wasn't all that important. At times you could conceivably even
interchange these scopes without having to re-zero, or with an absolutely
minimal re-zero necessary. So swapping scopes around
really wasn't that big of a deal. On the elevation dial of the scope
you'll find two sets of numbers. The top number, in basically
white and black, is your BDC. So that is your ... distance in hundreds
of metres, and you can set to that. Or you can use the yellow numbers at the bottom
which are adjustment in minutes of angle. So you have ... one minute clicks on this, which is another interesting aspect of being the first of the modern sniper rifles. We would think today of
one minute of angle clicks as, like, hopelessly coarse. And you know people are expecting quarter minute,
or even eighth minute adjustments on scopes. But 1985 this is what was being done,
and this was suitable for the military. You'll see that the windage knob is similarly marked. We also have one minute of angle
adjustment clicks for the windage. The L96 remained in British service for quite
some time. And ... right around the invasion of Iraq, some of the British snipers who
had these rifles, started complaining that the 6x power scope really wasn't
sufficient, like this was kind of outdated. And so right about that time, the guns
went through a bit of a midlife upgrade process, and they replaced the optics
with a different Schmidt and Bender. So they now have a 3x to 12x by 50. A
variable power optic which offers both a lower magnification for a greater field of view
and better target acquisition, as well as double the magnification at the high end if you
want it. And a larger lens for better light gathering. The original scopes had been designated L13
(I should have mentioned that), this was the L17A1, and this
was actually taken off of the Accuracy International Arctic Warfare rifles,
the L118 rifles, that were in service with ... some parts of the British military by that time. So this
was a scope that was already in service and available. And so it uses a slightly different mount. But it can drop onto the L96 rifle and this was a
substantial increase in effectiveness for the gun. By this point we no longer have minutes of angle
for adjustments, we now have milliradians (mils), and however, you'll notice that while we have mils on
the bottom we still have your BDC numbers also listed. So you can now adjust this in one tenth of a
mil increments, or set it to specific holdovers. The windage is also now set in tenth of a mil clicks. You have a focal range adjustment, and this scope would actually have a mil dot
reticle, and it is a first focal plane reticle. So as you adjust the magnification of the scope here, your reticle shifts with it, so that your
mill dots are usable at any magnification. There's also a range finding element
to the reticle, a pair of horizontal lines. The idea is a man-sized object, a human being, will go from the waist at the bottom line
to the top of the head at the top line. And those those four different increments
there are 400, 600, 800 and 1,000 metres, and those also shift as you adjust the magnification
of the scope, so usable at any magnification. Over time the reticle was actually developed,
... or improved, especially by special forces units. And this is the 6x power fixed scope,
but with the improved reticle. And then here is the L17 reticle, mil dot with the range finders. And by the way, in order to mount this you
actually have to take the iron sights off the rifle, because it's just a longer scope base.
So, by this point in the rifle's development the iron sights were not considered as necessary,
and the rifles lost them in that midlife upgrade. Alright, I promised I would show you what this looks
like with the side panels taken off, and there it is. This is actually our police sniper here,
but exactly the same. So instead of having a stock that the receiver drops into, you
have this long solid metal (this is aluminium), basically strut, or chassis, into which
every component simply bolts. So the receiver is bolted on here, trigger
group is bolted on through the strut. The side panels of the stock (it's almost a little odd to
call it a stock because it's really just, like, rifle cladding), you've got two of these guys. One goes on each
side, and you can see where the strut fits right here. These two sides simply mate up with each other,
the screws the (one two three four five six seven), eight screws that hold these onto the
rifle don't actually screw into the chassis, they go through it and the screw
attaches into the opposite side panel. So, you can't over-tighten this and
... modify any of the harmonics of the rifle, because ... these holes are oversized
and no matter how tight you put this on, you're not going to mess up
the fine aspects of your zero. Incidentally, one of the issues with these is when you
take these off the rifle, they are apparently extremely fragile. It's not an issue when they're bolted on, because there's
no way for them to flex, but these were made of resin, and when removed, are quite delicate. That was
something that would be upgraded in later rifles, the Arctic Warfare series, that
would build on the original PM. There's a bit of a close-up of
the receiver segment for you. I guess the one piece that is sort of integral
to the chassis is the magazine well, because it's just a hole in the chassis with
a spring and a release lever pinned into it. One of the other weak points in the gun
(such as there were weak points in the gun), is this joint at the back which is a welded joint,
and apparently AI actually had some trouble with the fabrication in this area. Because aluminum is
really kind of obnoxiously difficult to weld, they had overall length issues with forming
that joint. And so in later iterations, after they got done with the military contract, they
would change this to basically be pinned together. So that you didn't have any issues of, you know, the weld melting more or less
metal and adjusting the overall length. The block at the front end for holding the bipod. And you can see quite clearly how the
barrel doesn't touch this chassis at all. So the thing is free floated automatically,
doesn't require bedding, doesn't require any fancy
special preparation of any sort. I didn't mention the safety earlier
because we have a really good view of it here. This is the fire position, and that's
the safe position. And ... all it does is we have a flat surface there that allows the striker to go past, and a higher surface there that prevents it from going past. Simplicity ... is the goal in a rifle like this. One of the cool facts, little anecdotes, to me that
really highlights the increased capability of of this rifle, the L96, over what had previously just
essentially been upgraded Lee-Enfields, is that with the L42 the rifle was considered
to have a deadly effective range of 600 metres, and a harassing
range of 800 metres. And with this rifle, firing the same cartridge, those ranges were increased out to ... 900 metres
and 1,100 metres of effective harassing fire, just because the rifle was so much
easier to use and so much more accurate. At the same time the Royal Marines, who had
been running basically the sniper training courses for all of the British military units, they didn't change their sniper training
course when the L96 came into service, it didn't really occur to anyone that there was a reason
to. But what they found was that the passing rate, the number of students in the class
who actually passed the course, skyrocketed with the adoption of this rifle.
Because it was just so much easier to be effective with this compared to the old L42 Enfields,
that guys were massively more effective with it. Along the same lines, that highlighted some
shortcomings in some of the other sniper equipment. Things like the spotting scopes that were issued
out to sniper spotters were 20x power magnification, and the snipers began to complain that, basically,
they were able to make effective hits out to distances beyond where their spotters were able to be effective.
So that led to a search for new spotting scopes. And sort of ... every aspect of the British sniping
program all of a sudden had to be improved just to keep up with the capabilities of their new rifle. For the record, the police rifle that you see there
was retrofitted with a military barrel by a collector. This is the original police barrel. So instead of having a front sight, or a rear sight
for that matter, the rifles that were purchased by British police agencies had this kind of
interesting spiral curved flash hider at the front. So in total 1,247 of these rifles were built and supplied
to the UK military, with the last ones produced in 1992. They would become known by the British military as the
"Green Meanie" because, of course, the green colour. And would have a fantastically successful service life. They would serve actively in pretty much every
conflict that the British military got into until 2012. Their replacement was actually adopted a few years
earlier in 2008, and they were phased out ... in 2012. We will touch on the replacement for this rifle in a future video. In addition to the military rifle, of course, there
were a handful of these made for the police. Not very many, and basically the same gun,
the barrel was a little bit different as you saw. And the scopes were a little bit different as well, but the functional bits, the gun itself, was the same. When these went out of service they
were put into storage for a couple of years, and then the ultimate fate of the L96s,
unfortunately, was in 2014 and 2015 they were cut up into pieces and then
all the pieces dumped in the North Sea. The British Ministry of Defence was apparently very
concerned to make sure that nothing of this project survived. So there are only a very small number of guns like this
one that managed to escape that destruction through various circuitous routes. This one I believe had
been used as a testing platform for new optics, and so had kind of gotten its way out of
the standard British inventory system, and was disposed of onto the civilian
market. So I think it's one of two military provenanced L96s that survive in private hands today. There are a couple others in various
collections, the MOD did give a couple to, you know, different organisations under
the condition that they could never be sold. But outside of the British military these weren't
adopted by anybody else, except I think Ireland, but there was not a widespread international use of the L96. Now this rifle ... would end up being basically the
proving bed for what would become AI's Arctic Warfare rifle developed for Sweden (we'll touch on that in a
future video as well), and that rifle would see a lot more international use and it's a lot more common.
But the L96 is today an extremely scarce military rifle. So, like I said at the beginning,
if you're interested in this subject definitely take a look at Steve Houghton's book
on the British Sniper A Century Of Evolution. There's ... a lot more discussion of this
including some of the ancillary items, the transit cases, the spotting scopes,
the changes to the optic, a lot more detail. [Thanks for watching.]
