Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the National Firearms Centre, a part of the British Royal Armouries in Leeds. And what we're looking at today is a rifle that I've been wanting to get a look at for a very long time now. This is a Model of 1916 Fedorov rifle. It is the first semi-automatic rifle fielded by the Russian Army, and it is, depending on what you read and who you talk to, perhaps the first "assault rifle" ever actually put into military service. So, we're going to discuss the history of it today, we're going to take a look at exactly how it works, we're gonna take it all apart. And we're
gonna then touch on - was this an assault rifle? So, the development of this goes back to the
Russo-Japanese war in 1904 and 1905, and Russia had a pretty bad time of it during that conflict. But there were a few things that worked out
very well for them, primarily machine guns. This was a conflict where some of
the ... foreign military observers that were watching had an opportunity to really
recognise the potential of machine guns, ... and get a view into what would be
happening ten years later in the First World War. Not many people did, but one of
them appears to have been Fedorov. So, looking at how well machine guns were
used by the Russian forces he got this idea, among other people, that maybe we
should be looking more at volume of fire. Let's see what can we do to equip our armies with more actual firepower? This may seem obvious to us today, but it
stands in stark contrast to, say, the French doctrine of the time - overwhelming
doctrine at the time - which was the idea that basically the army with the better morale and
the stronger character will overcome through ... character, and be able to overwhelm the enemy. Which of course was a terribly flawed idea that led
to a tremendous number of deaths in World War One. So Fedorov starts working on semi-automatic rifles. He actually builds a semi-automatic
conversion of the Mosin-Nagant (every country had to try something like that,
as is typical, that conversion went nowhere). By 1911 he had started working
on what would become this rifle. And it was presented kind of in public in the
ordinance community in Russia in 1912. Fedorov actually won a medal from the
community, from the Russian Government, for his work in semi-automatic rifles in 1912. And the Fedorov rifle had its first actual trial in 1913, and ... at this point the rifle had a fixed magazine and it was chambered for
basically a proprietary 6.5mm cartridge. One of the things that Fedorov decided
was that he needed a cartridge that was less powerful than the 7.62x54 rimmed, and
so he designed his own 6.5mm cartridge. As of 1913, this was a 131 grain bullet with
a muzzle velocity of 2,800 feet per second. So still definitely a rifle cartridge. This is a more
powerful cartridge than a lot of the other 6.5s out there, that's kind of on par with, like, 6.5 Swedish. But it is substantially lighter than 7.62 Russian
(7.62x54), in particular it has a lighter bullet which is going to mean less pressure, less
recoil, easier to shoot, easier to handle, easier to build the rifle to handle the
pressure. All of these are very good things. Now, in 1913 they made 150 of these
rifles for trials, and things went fairly well. But then World War One broke out and that kind of put a halt on a lot of this design work. It became much more important to
produce standard rifles that, you know, we have a production line for the Mosin-Nagant
and we need, like, 5,000,000 of them. We can't spend our time trying to tinker with this expensive thing, and there's no way this would be a standard
issue rifle in the next, you know, six months before Germany potentially overruns Moscow and
kicks us out of the war and steals the whole country. So this kind of gets set aside until about 1916. And interestingly, with specifically influence
from the French Chauchat automatic rifle, this design is kind of tinkered with, it's
tweaked in 1916 to make this pattern of rifle. Specifically by changing the fixed magazine to a 25 round detachable box magazine, and by changing the calibre. The Russian
Ordnance System didn't have any way to be producing a new proprietary cartridge. However, the Russians were buying
Arisakas, 6.5mm Arisakas, from the Japanese (well from the British, who ... were
getting them by way of the Japanese). There was 6.5 Arisaka ammunition in the
Russian logistics system, and so Fedorov ... made some slight tweaks and adjusted
the rifle, re-chambered it for 6.5 Arisaka. And by 1916 there was now some more
interest in developing new weapons. The immediate threat of the
Germans has passed for the moment, and a small order was placed for troop
trials. And .... in fact by 1917, this had been ... someone saw the light and ordered 5000 of these
rifles. That production would never happen, but there were a small number of
them that were actually manufactured and issued during World War One.
They were issued specifically to specially trained companies of riflemen
who had the skills and the training and the ... morale I guess really, to put these to proper effect. Because if you gave these to a
bunch of under-motivated conscripts, you're gonna waste all the potential
of a select-fire magazine-fed rifle. Apparently they were quite well liked.
However, it didn't turn out to be possible during World War One to put them into mass
production, they were all kind of hand fitted guns. Mass production would come later. We'll talk about that ... well, actually let's continue on to that right now,
because this particular rifle was actually made in the 1920s. So of course, October of 1917 is the
Russian Revolution and at that point all of this falls apart, kind of like what happened in 1914. Ultimately Fedorov and his design team
would be moved to the Kovrov Arsenal, and they would start working to
put this into mass production there. Interesting side note on Kovrov, this
was a factory that was actually designed ... was actually built and equipped
by the Danish Madsen company, because the Russian government had
ordered Madsen light machine guns (or as we pronounce it in the US,
Madsen light machine guns [!]). Part of the deal was the Danes were going to
build a factory and produce them in Russia. Well, they built the factory, they filled it up with nice
brand-new machine tools from Pratt & Whitney in the US, and then the Russian Revolution happened. And
the war happened, and they never got paid for it, but the Russians ended up with this very nice factory. And that's where they put Fedorov and
that's where they were making these guns. So, starting in 1920 or 1921 they managed to
get all the tooling in place, the quality control procedures in place, and started mass-producing these guns ... ("mass producing" sort of in a limited number). By 1925, when production ended, they had made 3,200 of them. So that's the total production of Model 1916 Fedorov rifles, is 3,200 plus maybe a handful
more made during World War One. The guns were in service during the Russian
Civil War. They were apparently quite well liked, although they did have a reputation for
being a bit delicate and a bit unreliable. You can almost think of this
like a Stoner light machine gun, if you give it to guys who are willing to put in a
little bit of extra time and a little bit of extra care, you can really get a lot out of it. You can exploit its capabilities. But you have to be willing to treat it a little bit more
gently than you would treat an AK, or a Mosin-Nagant (an AK in Vietnam). It's a little bit of a finicky gun. So
they're apparently well liked despite that. Eventually, they were pulled out of
service in 1928 and just stashed away. I'm sure at that point there, you know,
the number of guns was deteriorating, they didn't have a lot of spare
parts for them, and it became ... there's not a whole lot of
reason to leave them out in the field. Pull them in, put them in a warehouse. And they did actually break them back
out for the Winter War against the Finns. Which is why you will find some of these in
Finland. That's one of the few places where Fedorov rifles exist in any sort of numbers today.
And that's because the Finns captured them and ... well, I've seen a couple of
them in Finland, so they're out there. At any rate that was their last hurrah,
during what we would call World War Two, what they would call the Winter War
and the Continuation War. Now with that in mind,
let's go ahead and take this apart. It is very exciting just to get a
chance to pull one of these apart. I've been looking for one of these for a long time. So let's start by looking over the outside for a moment. We have ... there are no markings
on this that say Fedorov or Model of 1916. We have a serial number up here, right in there. This one has clearly been through some
rebuilding and it's got some mix-matched parts on it. It was originally number 1798, 1798, it has been renumbered as 1779. We have a serial number up here on the
upper handguard as well, which is 1779. So, what exactly ... you know, they
renumbered the barrel I suppose to match, they then electro-pencilled number 1779 on the bolt handle. Sling swivel on the side of the stock back here, and one on the barrel band. There is a bayonet lug and a cleaning rod. No
idea exactly what pattern of bayonet this took, I don't think I've ever seen a Fedorov bayonet. The front sight is a basic unprotected barleycorn, and the rear sight is a V-notch that you can flip up and move out to 2000 ... Honestly, I am not sure if that is arshins or metres and
I'm not even gonna guess [probably metres at that date]. But there's your rear sight, flip that up if you want to. The Fedorov does not lock open on an empty magazine, so there's our magazine. However, once you
open it up you can see it has stripper clip guides. So if you want to reload this magazine with stripper
clips, because say you don't have another spare magazine, which is entirely plausible here,
you do have a lever right here, right there, which is a manual bolt
hold-open so you can pull the bolt back (there we go), lift that lever up and lock the bolt open. That will allow you to put a stripper clip right in those guides and reload the magazine. And
then to close it you just pull back and let the bolt go forward. This is for disassembly, we'll get to that in a minute. Down here on the trigger guard we have two separate levers. This one, the rear one here, is the selector switch. So in the rearward position like this,
you might think this is a safety, but it's not. Back here it is in semi-auto, and
you can actually hear the disconnector. So that's semi-auto fire. When you push that up, you now have full-auto fire. And then this guy is actually your safety, and engaging that simply holds on to the trigger and prevents it from being pulled back. so that ... ah, you can't really put that on in full-auto, it'll push this back, But that ... very simple safety mechanism, especially compared to some of the
complexity you'll see inside the gun. And last control we have to look at here is the
magazine release, which is kind of oddly on the front. Pull that in and we can pull the magazine out. This looks very much like a German MG13 magazine. It is not of course, substantially different. They just added the ribbing to give it some structural strength, a little bit of curvature to fit the ...
semi-rimmed nature of the 6.5 Arisaka cartridge. You already saw it doesn't lock open, there's no
... hold open tab on the back of the follower, just a locking catch on the back there. And the front pistol grip, which is
a little bit of an interesting conundrum, because the magazine is close
enough to the grip that it's a little tricky to hold the grip, like, all the way around with your hand. However, it's easier to put the flat of your hand on here, grip around it and you can use
this to kind of pull the gun downwards. Presumably to help control it, especially in full-auto. I think that would work reasonably well, probably better than this, which is a little weird because of
the proximity to that magazine catch. Now to disassemble it, we're going to start by taking off the nose cap, which means I have to take out the cleaning rod. There we go, pull that out. Then we can push down on this spring-loaded band, pull the nose cap off of the gun. Then we can come back to the barrel band, push that spring-loaded clamp down, pull the barrel band off, There's that guy. Then we can remove the upper handguard, which is a little bit finicky, we have to lift
this up and then actually push the barrel back under recoil, and we can lift up the back of the handguard. And it's got ... a
pair of hooks at the front there that lock it in. So once we take that out ... I should actually have mentioned, although it's obvious now, the basic mechanism for this is a short recoil action. So when you fire, the whole barrel assembly is going to cycle backwards, which causes the bolt to unlock. When the bolt's all the way forward like this,
and the barrel's forward, the two are locked together securely which prevents the
cartridge case from exploding out the back. When you fire, recoil pushes this whole thing backwards, And you can see the bolt handle stays with the barrel there. Once it gets to here, that's unlocked and now the ... bolt can travel back on its own. We'll see that in detail here in just a moment. One thing that that means, is that there will
be a recoil spring for the barrel somewhere up here, and there will be a recoil spring for the bolt back here. Now, the next step of disassembly is to
take
out the trigger guard and magazine well assembly. So there is one screw back here, it has kind of a cool little spring-loaded locking tab in it, push that out of the way with a screwdriver and we can take this out. That is the only screw that we have to remove, thankfully. This is easiest to do when you put the selector switch just kind of a little bit up like that. Then we can pull out the floor plate here. So there's our safety, you can see it just
impinges up into the trigger mechanism there. Not much else going on. There's a
little lip at the front of the magazine well that locks this in place. It goes in
there, and then locks in with the screw. Now this whole thing can come out of the stock. There we go. The outside of the stock is pretty heavily scuffed
up. The inside is actually kind of crudely inletted. Woodworking was maybe not their specialty, but the
metal components of the rifle are really quite nicely done. So there's the inside. You can see that there's a bolt
right here, that is holding the pistol grip in place. I'm assuming that's a separate piece of wood added on, although I don't see the seam underneath some of the the wood finish. It's possible that's the same, and they just added the bolt in there for strength. Anyway, there's the stock. Alright, now the fun bits. So we're going to start by taking off this sheet metal cover. That is on there just to kind of hold things in place. Just a protective cover, doesn't do anything
except prevent bits from falling off the gun. And then the most relevant pieces are these two plates. There is one here and there's one on this side of the rifle. They are symmetrical, identical in design and what we're doing here is we
are locking the barrel assembly here to the bolt assembly by (we have this like that), this round peg sits in there,
this square lug sits behind this lug. That is the bolt's locking lug. So, what happens here is
when the barrel assembly recoils, this comes back and then these plates pivot downward, like that. And you can see the safety mechanism here, there's
a flat bar that prevents this plate from moving until the rifle has recoiled that far and then it hits a little
cam, pivots down, and that's what unlocks the bolt from the barrel assembly. So we can pull ... (this plate's already fallen off, it's only
that sheet metal cover that holds that on), So if we pull that out, now the barrel is going to spring forward. There's our barrel recoil spring. So that's locked when you're holding behind this lug, and then with this lug (we can actually pull the barrel assembly off completely, touch on this in a moment) Here is ... your bolt. The recoil spring from the bolt is back here and it's still in place, so in order to get the bolt out, it has to
come out the back of the receiver here. Which means we have to take the receiver cover off.
We're going to push this pin through and rotate it There we go. Now we can pull
the receiver cover off, it's quite stiff. It's in there pretty tight. There it is, alright. So this comes off, and we actually have a sliding dust cover right here, that's going to seal up the top of the receiver cover.
That just comes out, and it's got a little lip on it which hooks over this little flange on the bolt. So that's a little finicky to put back together, because you have to have that in and then install the whole bolt and top cover assembly from the back. That is the bolt recoil spring, fairly small. And then the bolt itself ... slides out the back of the gun. What's interesting about this that we're really not used to, is this is the entire bolt. We're used to expecting a bolt and a
bolt carrier because there's something ... Normally there's something always that has to
move in this assembly in order to lock the action. And the design that Fedorov came up with
has these separate moving plates instead, So it's this plate sitting behind that locking lug that
holds this bolt in position. That's safely and securely sealed. Once the plates off that's it, there is
no separate bolt head. This is one, basically one part, with the exception of a firing pin. Spring-loaded firing pin in there, connected to that guy. As far as the fire control group goes, this is a hammer
fired gun. So that's the hammer face right there. And that is the bottom of the hammer. So when I pull the trigger, that is going to ...
this sear is going to pull down, once it clears this ledge the hammer will be able to pivot forward. It's got a big spring (you see the
back of the hammer spring right there). However, there is a safety mechanism and that is this little forked piece. So when this piece is down, it's going to hold on to the hammer and prevent it from dropping. This is an out of battery safety and it's
connected to this lug, this little lump right here. So when the bolt goes forward, we have this channel in the
bolt for that ... out of battery safety, which means until the bolt gets
all the way forward to right here, those forks are holding on to the hammer.
And it's only at the very end of the bolt, you can see the groove ends, which means it's going to push this lug down, which lifts these forks out of
the way, and now allows the hammer to drop forward like that
(I don't want to snap it of course). So there's your hammer spring
with a pair of struts pushing on it, and it operates right in there. There we go. Pretty stiff hammer spring. That's
going to be a pretty reliable ignition right there, I can tell, even being a hundred years old. So that's the firing system. Stripper clip guides. There's a lot of complexity to this receiver, but the overall system is actually not that difficult. It's a difficult gun to machine, but it's not a difficult gun to understand. Which is not exactly ... I was expecting this to be harder to disassemble than it really is. Now there's one other bit that I need to explain, because ... there are a couple more moving bits. And this is on the front, the barrel assembly. We have these two pieces down
here, and this is actually a moving, (you can see that this is a moving, come on, there you go), a moving feed ramp. And that is necessitated
by the short recoil nature of the gun, because the magazine is in a fixed location (up in here basically) but the barrel assembly is moving back and forth which means you have to have a way to reliably
feed a cartridge straight out of the magazine, (which I believe is the downward position), and
then you need to get this thing up out of the way so that when the barrel assembly moves backward,
it can clear the top of the magazine. And so that's why you have this lever system in here. When this starts to move backwards it pushes this lever down, which is going to push the feed ramp up out of the way. Hopefully that makes some sense there. So there is the whole Fedorov system field stripped. Again, like I said, ... it's a very complex gun to manufacture, there's a tremendous amount of
work that had to go into making this. But the actual design itself, while very
much unorthodox by today's standards, seems to me to be an extremely
effective one, considering the time period. You know, this was developed in ... before World
War One, we're talking about 1910 to 1914. This design was actually put into service. So you know, compared to a lot of the
other self-loading rifles of this period, if you compare this to say, some
of the German attempts, some of the Mauser self-loading
rifles, this is far superior to them. If you look at some of the guns the US
was testing in the 1920s, even those are gigantic garbage dumpster
fires compared to this one. So, it certainly was not ... it's not the end of the line, it's not the end of any sort of design process, because
there's a tremendous amount of simplification that I think there was room to do on
this, had they decided to pursue it. Ultimately, as a mechanical system, this was a dead end. So guns like the self-loading Tokarev rifle and the AK really took nothing from this mechanically. They certainly took some of the general expertise
on how to deal with and design self loading systems. But as far as taking specific mechanical elements, this
thing is pretty much a unique evolutionary dead end. Not just in Russian firearms, but to a large
extent self-loading firearms in general. This sort of recoil plate system I can't
think of seeing hardly anywhere else. So kind of the elephant in the room, at least on
the internet with this rifle, is is this an assault rifle? Or is this a light machine gun or, like, what is this thing? Because the classic definition of an assault
rifle is selective-fire, detachable magazine fed, an intermediate cartridge. And this fits the first
two criteria just great. It is a select-fire rifle, it does have detachable magazines,
but it's chambered for 6.5 Arisaka, and is that an intermediate cartridge? And I am going to go out on a
limb and I'm gonna say no, it is not. What the Russians recognised here with this
rifle was the advantage and the possibilities of firepower as ... a combat technique. Instead of
having masses of men, instead of having bayonets, you could make (and it's surprising to us today to think that this was ever like debated or questioned), but you can have a lot of success in combat by having a
smaller number of guys with a lot of firepower at their disposal. And it's something that a lot of the powers in
World War One took a long time to really figure out. But the Russians did, and this is the same concept that
the Germans would run with for their Sturmgewehrs, You give a small number of better trained troops rifles that have, you know, greater firepower. Basically a handheld machine gun for every soldier, and you can get some remarkably effective results from it. The difference is, this isn't an intermediate cartridge. This was a lighter cartridge to facilitate sort
of effective full-auto fire from the shoulder, as well as simply a lighter cartridge making it feasible in the 1910s to design a functional self-loading rifle. This, you know ... major powers wouldn't adopt
self-loading military rifles until really the 1930s, with the US adoption of the M1 Garand,
and a large part of that was because full-power rifle cartridges were really quite
difficult to design reliable and durable safe rifles around, that weren't 15
pounds and too heavy to be practical. So I think the inspiration for this is better tied not to the Sturmgewehr, (obviously not inspired by the Sturmgewehr,
future and past issues there), I would look at this not as analogous to a Sturmgewehr, but as more analogous to a Chauchat ... vastly improved. So what Fedorov did in 1916 was look at the Chauchat
and say this concept of a lightweight portable machine gun has a whole lot of good things going
for it, but that gun is really kind of terrible. So how can we take the core concept
and make a much better gun around it? And that's what he got here.
Now this was as far as I can tell, and I'm speculating here because I don't
have any original Russian sources to go on, I'm assuming this was much more intended to be a semi-automatic rifle capable of full-auto fire in an emergency. Where the Chauchat is kind of on the
opposite side, the Chauchat was a heavier gun, had a permanently attached bipod on it, and it was really a light machine gun that you could
fire from the hip when you needed to. So two kind of different approaches to the same concept. And frankly, this is the better one. So the vertical front grip seems like it would make some sense. It
would be useful especially in full-auto fire. I'd have preferred to have a pistol grip,
a vertical grip on the back as well. If I can only have one grip, I'd rather have it
on the back. But this rifle is still pretty handy, it's not all that heavy, the length of
pull is decent, the sights are decent. I would love to get a chance to shoot one of these. Hopefully I will one of these days, but of course
these are fantastically rare rifles to find today. So I'd like to give a big thanks to the British Royal Armouries for giving me the opportunity to take a look at this rifle. We actually pulled it out of a public display up in the museum to bring it down here to take apart and show to you guys. So I'm very much in their debt for that. If you are interested in visiting their
collection, the Royal Armouries, of course, have a giant five-story public museum in Leeds
that's open pretty much every day of the year. The National Firearms Centre is the
separate kind of reserve collection of the, basically the British government. It's a fantastic collection, is perhaps one of
the best, if not the best, in Western Europe. It is not open to the general public, but it is available to researchers ... by appointment, so if you want to get in touch and make an appointment to come and take
a look at what they have in the collection, their website is in the description text below. Click down there, get a hold of them, great
group of people, and they'll do you well. So hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. It's very cool to get a look at a gun
that's kind of been widely publicised, but not widely understood I think. So, thanks for watching.
Good ol' Gun Jesus.
Why do I constantly just get killed by medics using this and "The Kerensky" skin
I hope this gun makes it into BFV
I remember he made a disassembly video for one of these, but that was a long time ago, glad we got a nice new proper video on this
PRAISE BE TO GUN JESUS ΰΌΌ γ€ β_β ΰΌ½γ€
Why does this gun make me think of the AK47?
Gun Jesus sounds like a really bad rap name.
"Thanks for tuning in today... "
So thatβs why compared to every other reload in the game you just fucking rip it out