MAS 49/56 to 500yds: Practical Accuracy feat. Forgotten Weapons / Ian McCollum

this video is brought to you by slate black industries for grips and accessories visit slatesblackindustries.com hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on forgotten uh nine hole reviews it's unfortunate for you guys in france it's theoretically your rifle but uh they're all over here and it's really a pretty cool situation for us in the united states it's not so much that the french decided not to adopt the nato cartridge as the french didn't need to adopt the nato cartridge because they already had something that was very similar see if i can find some rifle grenades for it maybe [Music] so during the day of the shoot i forgot to bring the tripod for the spotting scope to see the shots we were able to fix them with post-production stabilization but i also forgot to switch on the microphone to record the audio so you've got onboard audio and 29 mile per hour gusts uh yeah i was uh i was a high scoring batter that day so enjoy we'll catch you at the debrief with the imicon all right for the glory of the republic 150. [Music] [Applause] yeah these are those are center cluster okay i'm on a 250 [Music] neutralized that's what i like to hear okay 300 sites okay i'm on at three impact neutralized 350. okay you're off the right edge [Applause] complete reverse bottom edge of the target half target to the left impact same spot short left three quarters of a target good elevation impact i had a little trouble with that all right 400 400. [Music] impact just off the left edge goes probably to the right just off the left edge it's literally like an inch off the left edge ready [Applause] he's off the left that was off the left a bit more full target yeah okay that the one right before the impact that was my fault i heard you i heard you begrudge it before it even landed yeah that was i knew it too all right i'm on it 450. just underneath [Applause] the target and i don't see the target when i'm aiming at it [Applause] that's a much better arrangement better picture for you what better sight picture for you yeah i mean basically i'm doing a six o'clock with a gap in between uh so 500 meters translates roughly to about 458 uh yards oh no 500 yards translates to like 450 or change uh meters so i'm going to use a 500 meter setting hold it low for this one with no gap ready just off the right edge 3 o'clock it was either way left or it was an impact that grazed off to the left side impact should i do another one yeah that was a very very obvious and authoritative hit that the one previous was not so that first shot we were about 70 sure there was a hit and then we made a good second shot and then we were going to shoot more until the rifle reminded spoke up and reminded me that it still had its heavy military firing pin in and we were shooting ppu civilian primers um however we went back and reviewed it at that point and saw that it was a hit so good to go rifles cleared those two hits okay it had a slam box okay so what did we just witness we saw a mass 4956 shoot through wild winds and hit the 500 yard target and it wasn't easy but is that what we should be expecting from these rifles hmm someone's talking about french rifles i can tell oh henry hey how's it going hello ian you must have been out shooting at 49.56 how did you know i just know these things were you able to view the shots from wherever you telepathically we're viewing i saw the whole thing oh wow okay perfect that that that absolutely works so we just as you saw um through your brain wave so we shot a 4956 from zero to 500 yards which is 450 ish meters it wasn't the smoothest it wasn't the smoothest reach all the way out there i mean it's not going to set any records however the winds were also absolutely crazy so you've shot you you know you've read a few things about french rifles presumably somewhere or something yeah yeah internet wikipedia mostly wikipedia yeah so what do you think about the uh about the performance of the moss 4956 frankly i was rather impressed um to my mind the sights on the 4956 and really that whole series the whole semi auto moss series are much better suited for relatively close range use they have a really big chunky front sight post you know if you think about the the national match style of iron sights intended for precise long range shooting you've got very narrow very crisp squared off front sight posts and the 4956 is the exact opposite it's not not a barley corn but it is a sort of a trapezoidal front sight post it's very wide and i think it's really good for picking up quickly i would never frankly i well obviously i couldn't shoot it that well at that long of a distance but uh that's what you're particularly good at so um yeah i i thought it went pretty well um especially considering the wind so i i guess i guess looking back at this you know the 75 french some people will say that it's somewhere in between 762 nato and 762 soviet the m41 cartridge 76239 um but really i mean what are we looking at 139 grains how fast are we going uh we're going about 2700 2650 2700 feet per second so it is in between the two cartridges but it's much closer to nato than it is to the soviet m43 so were they looking for more recoil management when they when they designed 75 french i mean what were they really looking at or what or did the cartridge just exist before so what they were looking at when they designed 75 french was a rimless cartridge that's that was the most significant thing because that cartridge was originally designed for that machine gun and they were using it in that machine gun for basically a decade uh before it was used in rifles this was a cartridge it's i think it's important to point out maybe i think of this as obvious but i'm much more deeply into it than most people 75 french pre-date 762 nato by like well it's 1924 1929 that it was developed so we're talking like 30 years pre-dating 762 nato it's not so much that the french decided not to adopt the nato cartridge as the french didn't need to adopt the nato cartridge because they already had something that was very similar slightly lower pressure slightly lower velocity slightly lighter bullet which conveys a number of advantages everyone talks about how 30.6 was massively overpowered for an infantry rifle and the 762 nato was essentially designed to duplicate hot 6. which interesting enough because because your 30 odd 6 goes from the m1 to the m2 ball it steps down significantly the trend was i mean it's obvious the trend was already stepping away from the high drainage to the mid the mid-range 30 cal drainage and then really the next step was to shorten the case because your m2 ball really was almost like a 308 with a with a longer casing it's just loaded less and the french had already gone through all of that process by you know long before nato was even conceived so what you have essentially is a cartridge that was it still took the western standard the western idea of we're going to have one cartridge for rifles and machine guns where the soviets well today all of nato nato adopted this when they went to 556 but after world war ii the soviets went to a system of we'll have one cartridge for the infantry rifle and a larger cartridge for the machine guns now they have a squad automatic in the form of the rpd but the the higher level the company battalion level machine guns were all in 762 by 54. so uh the idea being we've got our sirius in place like the machine guns they're going to be on tripods that need to be firing at longer ranges we're keeping this full power rifle cartridge we would like to have some automatic firepower in the hands of the individual small squad and the only logistically sensible way to do that is to give them the same cartridge that the individual rifles have and they did the same thing working in the opposite direction by at that time developing the ak which uses that cartridge in a submachine gun role the ak was originally a replacement for the the pbs 43 submachine guns so it's it's basically the concept of it is to have a universal system rather than they're designing the cartridge for this one rifle pretty much the universal cartridge um it was used in the bolt action rifles the mos 36 which at that time was for uh the reserve unit and then the front line troops uh got the self-loading rifles they figured the way the mos 49 system 4956 is built it's uh has the potential to be a very accurate rifle and so they they kind of took a page from german design and figured every one of these is accurate enough that it's suitable to be a designated marksman's rifle and so they actually have a scope dovetail on every rifle and all you need to do to make it a marksman's rifle is boop drop the scope on at the same time they also gave it a gas cut off so you can use it for a grenadiers rifle it's already got a gas cut off all you have to do is drop a rifle grenade on the muzzle now the exception to that would be they still used a submachine gun they had map 49s with the development of bullpups a number of countries would try to replace try to basically combine the rifle and the submachine gun into a single item at this point that's not happening that's the downside of using if you can use the the cartridge in a machine gun you can't use it in a submachine gun so how effective were let's say in the field uh they use it for snipers right the um the mass 4956 or just designated marksman uh it was intended originally as a sniper's rifle and it didn't really pull off that roll all that well okay um it worked well as a marksman's rifle uh part of the problem is sometimes and this this goes back to the moss 49 that predates the 4956 um they sometimes were using the same rifles to launch grenades and to snipe with and that you get bore erosion and issues with the grenade launching that that impede the accuracy of the rifle um we could talk about that for half an hour and how they adjusted for it but we won't ultimately what they would do is develop the frf1 as a sniper specific rifle the 4956 works fine as a dmr but it doesn't quite have the accuracy potential that the frf1 did which the fro f1 actually shares the same apx scope the initial well the one we shot anyways yeah um in fact all the frf ones did so that's the scope it's large so it's largely like a copy off of the world war ii german scopes um three and a half power it's got a nice easy dovetail yep yeah exactly right there so every mos 49 every mouse 4956 has that rail on it and you can just drop the scopes on there you go cool thank you yeah that was the idea it's really interesting to me that they actually kept this same scope on the frf1 for quite a long time because uh i mean you shot this thing on the f1 it's it's kind of a limiting thing on that rifle isn't it honestly i the fr everyone that blew my mind that that particular setup was able to reach out with honestly minimal misses and that was the same cartridge that we shot too now they did have a precision ball loading for the frf1 that used a heavier bullet and uh it's not so much that the weight was important but it was a longer bullet that gave it a better ballistic coefficient that's true actually the the cartridges that i sent the rifle back to you with are duplicates of that particular cartridge um which still i mean it blew my mind that the fraf1 was able to basically clean the entire course and still hold the record up until today i mean it beat out the m110 sir sorry what did you expect so okay so that actually transitions us really nicely into the the cartridge itself the downside like the upside of how the french did the cartridges it's got less recoil force to it and it's nicer shooting the downside is by lightening the bullet and slowing it down but sticking with a 7.62 millimeter bore you now have a short bullet it's a flat-based bullet and it's not going to do very well in wind which you do see me really struggle with it at the 350 i think 350 or so yeah you went clean out through 300 and then it was like 350 took something like seven shots i think it was remember too though i mean that was 21 to 29 mile an hour wins that we were facing that day i honestly and seven five french is not cheap in the states to to find right now but yeah uh because i wasn't watching when you set up the whole thing uh were you using straight ppu ammo or did you use your case well that's part of your issue i've had like i shot ppu to try and do some shooting with my f1 and it's not hugely accurate so some of your issues are not just wind they're the the not super consistency of 75 ppu okay so the difficulty of met of the french military ball load ppu is the closest to it because it's got the 139 grain projectiles right i did actually prior to this i bought some actual french surplus ammunition and i told you about the world war ii surplus that i had i don't know if it's powdered degradation or whatever but i had a casing uh split um i mean it wasn't a huge split it was just a tiny uh pressure crack but it singed a little hole it not a it gave the chamber a little bit of a battle scar and cooked a bunch of smoke inside of the rifle so i mean hang fire aside um finding components the projectiles specifically to load for the military ball load is very difficult so while i i will i will agree with you ppu may not have the most consistent load um match load it's not a match load per se but no i mean i would be able to get somewhere like a 3moa no issue probably three ish mla that's probably fairly c fairly comparable to what the the ball issue ammunition in the military was doing so so really the idea of using ppu outside of the fact that i'm lazy and i don't want to roll every single cartridge that i shoot for every single rifle um is also that it to duplicate the the performance of the military firearm so we get a better reading on on what a french soldier would be expecting in the field which again the winds were quite exceptional this time but it's nothing out of the ordinary if you were in the sahara in north africa in the atlas mountains or um less so in indochina but more so in north africa i would say right you're probably not making 350 meter shots in indochina either yeah yeah so i mean i i honestly i do think that the mass 4956 would be i mean going up against sks's in indochina i mean that would not be a bad compromise but then at the same time having aks as the opponent um i mean that would not be amazing in indochina to to have one third of the magazine capacity um and then the range that you don't really need right that's the the thing in a in an environment like that is the whole cartridge has been designed to give your machine guns an effective range of something like 800 meters well if nothing is is capable if nothing ever needs to shoot more than 100 or maybe 200 because you're in very dense vegetation then you're absolutely going to be a disadvantage to the guys who are running around with much smaller uh higher capacity rifles now and anyone can argue logistically that france would have been great in those area if they were you know the french empire has to has to prepare for a much wider variety of environments than the vietnamese military does right and and i would say in the case of north africa and my exposure to really doing deep dives into that is uh the book legionnaire by simon murray uh he talks about going on engagements in the mountains and shooting through shooting through brush uh punching at you know combat actually pretty close to the distances that we saw uh today because wide open fields uh a lot of elevation terrain going up and down mountains sometimes uh in that type of open field in let's say continental europe if there were a soviet invasion i mean that would not be the worst to have uh that cartridge in the open field but yeah the other aspect of of weapons though outside of just talking about the cartridge performance i think a lot of times people don't think about in in a very military context is um the wear and tear the maintenance and really how durable is the weapon and a lot of times people would compare the moss 4956 to the m14 what do you think about that if if you were to compare the mass 4956 to any type of battle rifles of the era i think the much more appropriate comparison to make would be to the g3 okay so the 4956 is developed with specifically an eye towards industrial manufacture it is a very simple gun to make it has a very small number of parts it uses a gas impingement system that it's a locked breech unlike the g3 but i think otherwise the two have a lot in common has a fixed barrel there's no moving gas piston on top of the barrel this sets it up to be intrinsically quite accurate as well as fast and easy and cheap to manufacture all all characteristics that the g3 was also designed for but you people see the wood stock and i think that immediately conflates the moss with the m14 so the moss actually it sounds like it was designed as a pretty well-suited weapon for continents like africa i think so yeah um open fighting in europe as well yeah it's a very reliable gun it's a very simple gun i mean you can you take that thing apart and it's just a couple of big chunks blue and there they all are you know if you're in if you're in fine sand don't put so much lube in it or don't put any lube in it if you're in the jungle coat that thing with oil to protect the surface from the ordnance side of looking at things too the cartridges both 308 and 75 french more so seven five french because it's got a low bearing surface area because when we're talking about a smaller grainage a lot of people think about oh how heavy is it but really that's that's that's less of that's that's not as good of a way of looking at it you think of grainage to me i correlate it to the diameter of the caliber and then think about how long it is and then when i think about how long it is it tells me two things well more than two things but two main things one if it's ver if it's relatively short let's say seven five french or if you want to go even more so a 30 caliber bullet you know with a 123 grain the uh 76239 those are very short cartridges they're not going to have the same performance as longer cartridges like the m80 760 or nato bowl or even more so the lr m118lr the 175 grain nato 30 cals they're going to be shorter so in wind they're not going to perform nearly as well as some of the longer projectiles but the bearing surface on the barrel i.e the the area that the amount of surface that it contacts with the barrel is much less so you see absurdly low barrel wear with aks because it's also shooting at a lower velocity it's also shooting at a lower velocity which much less barrel wear so then ak barrels last forever and then yeah you know if you're thinking about it there's there's a couple of ways of elongating the projectile either you make the projectile the same diameter and elongate it or you make it thinner so you spread the material longer like a 6'5 creedmoor but then a lot of times what people don't think about when you elongate a projectile like that uh yes it performs better in wind i mean do you need that better performance in in the winds i guess is the real question but how often are guys shooting at 350 and longer yeah so but once you do that you increase your barrel wear significantly because if you look at like prs shooters like if they if they run a six millimeter cartridge they need to replace your barrel every thousand rounds that's you shoot a thousand rounds out of a bore in a couple training exercises yeah that sort of thing would be insanity for a military to adopt there is an element of we have how many hundred thousand rifles and how often are we gonna have to rebuild them with brand new barrels that matters i guess if you think of if you think of it this way if your dmv was also your vehicle's garage and you had to submit paperwork in order to get an oil change um i think if you think of it that way people would have a much better understanding on why would a military specifically choose a lesser performing cartridge at distance to get a better wear characteristic the french 75 when i think of it it being shorter and then having maybe i would say in a high wind condition a 400 meter you know effective range and then in lower wind maybe push it out to 600 that's not bad if if you have that type of effective ranging capabilities out of a main rifle and then to think that it is easily manufactured uh there's not a lot of parts hanging off like clanging together in the front to beat itself apart and then the lower muzzle wear characteristics i think all of that added together seems to be a pretty decent investment towards military arms right there is an element of of the logistical side that again most people don't think about because as a individual private gun owner these really aren't issues that come up you don't have to take you know how much does it cost to refurbish 50 000 of your rifle well you've got one and virtually nobody in the civilian sector is ever going to refurbish it at all so yeah we just don't think about that but you have to if you're planning to arm a huge entire army and the other thing too civilian owners tend to when you pay for a rifle you tend to take care of the rifle winner than the recruits down in indochina oh worse than that the conscripts i have a couple of bertiers that came back from indochina and they are not happy about it um yeah so i mean i think i think there's a couple different aspects that it's interesting what you would look at to to make a decent military arm versus a a good performing civilian sporting arm right yeah but anyways um could um perhaps if we have an opportunity to shoot it with a scope perhaps we could revisit and see how this uh how this works i'd be interested in that i think you should pick a less windy day but yeah let's just turn down the wind you have the power to do that right i i think you do yeah i wish i wish do you need it back or do you already have one um we don't we don't necessarily have one right now uh but we'll we'll start looking around okay well why don't you just take this one um and you can give it back to me when you're all done um it's my spare so yeah cool let me know how it goes yeah we'll do i mean you won't have to i'll i'll watch oh sure yeah all right well uh appreciate everyone for tuning in thanks ian for uh for hopping on i know you know this is uh i honestly i i could not think of anyone more appropriate to to bring up here to really have an intellectual conversation on what happened in the background of some of these more iconic firearms from history oh thank you namely french of course the most iconic the best the most iconic the best [Music] subscribe to our newsletter at slateblackindustries.com where you can get updates on nine hole review publications and access the practical accuracy scoreboard to help you argue with people on the internet on which rifle performs better on the practical accuracy course we maintain this newsletter to be majority gun content with nine hole reviews updates per every email with less than 33 percent marketing content subscribe today on slateblackindustries.com [Applause] okay

Channel: 9-Hole Reviews

Views: 368,122

Keywords: french republic, armeé de terre, army, MAS 36, MAS 49, MAS 49/56, gun jesus, ian mccollum, chinese warlords, chasspot, famas, FR F1, FR F2, Famas, foreign legion, legion étrangère, 2rep, gign, gendarmerie, nationale, navy, marines, Armee de terre, armée, mas 36, mas 49, mas 49/56, 7.5 french, 7.5mm, nato, l'otan, france, française, fusil, précision, Groupe d'intervention de la Gendarmerie nationale, l'intervention, inrange, karl, iv8888, algeria, indochina, vietnam, suez, syria, garand, thumb

Id: h9C3MaMOgfA

Length: 31min 12sec (1872 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Waterstar]

That picture never gets old

[u/[deleted]]

Can I get the pic of ian

[u/Grand_Cookie]

Lol, I love the scope handoff