My 1970s Vietnam Advisor M1 Carbine

all right so let's just go over a project I've already done I didn't document this project I did this a couple years ago um and so I just figured we just talk about it and I'd show some videos of shooting it and some of the stuff I do working on ammunition for it because it is expensive to shoot carbines now so as you can see what's in front of you is an M1 carbine but is a little different so it is an original 1942 43 produced um United Postal meter receiver with a uh an Underwood typewriter Co Barrel um it was a 50s Cold War Korea era redo with the upgraded rear sight and I have the original stock and the cleaning kit and the sling and all the stuff to put this back to original configuration whenever I want but this was a a project I did a few years ago CU I wanted to do a Vietnam War era kind of uh if you see some of the custom M1 carbin from the Vietnam War uh advisors right all the CIA Spooks that were in there they used things like this because they uh they gave the Vietnamese the South Vietnamese not the North Vietnamese the South um all the World War II surplus so that was M1 Grands M1 carbin Thompson submachine guns grease guns you see a lot of photos of the I think they call them rocks uh the the South Vietnamese troops a lot of South Vietnamese troops are carrying around World War II surplus so this was kind of a South Vietnamese CIA spook inspired M1 carbine build so we'll go over it and I'll kind of show you what I did and uh how it's obviously a little unique looking compared to a regular M1 carbine so starting we'll go classic Grand Thum tip to butt so here's the tip so it's got a uh an M2 flash suppressor on it one of the screw on ones so this just literally bolts on the front and it can be taken off whenever you want but this was made for the uh fully automatic version of the carbine so I've obviously got the bayonet lug from the 50s this like bayonet shroud thing from the 50s thing it's got the classic cheese grater you know upper part of this um rocking a 30 rounder she's clear um there's nothing in this thing there's you go so and then obviously the most interesting part of this is the back end of this so the back end of this is a original 1960s M16 A1 Bake Light pistol grip and if you can see it kind of in the light there it's kind of got that weird almost like chip chipwood like a plaster board or um plywood kind of texture to it so it's an very old original M16 produced A1 pistol grip and then this stock is a wire collapsing stock in a original World War II stock so this stock I had two stocks One stock had been chopped down for some reason and had a stupid butt plate like a rubber butt pad put onto into it to extend the length of pull which I thought was silly so I went and bought another original stock that stock is now this gun's like original configuration and that this stock which had been already cut down and messed with I uh I uh cut it down obviously so the back end of this has been cut down there's a square hole that was chiseled out I drilled and chiseled out a square hole for this locking mechanism so the locking mechanism and the wire stock components are from a 1980s Owen's stock so I'll find a photo of an Owen stock it's a really ugly 80s monolithic 8s receiver for M1 carbin that was like black and tactical looking and 80s so this is what so I went and found a photo of what an Owen stock looks like as you can see from these two examples you it's just this massive 80s polymer stock assembly that had that wire folding assembly in the back of it that I pilfered for parts instead and so I basic Bally pilfered the wire stock and the locking mechanism out of the Owens um plastic Owens stock I went to a hardware store and I found these little metal retaining Clips they were rubberized I cut all the rubber off of them I blued them I blued the screws I pre-drilled the holes into the stock I put these where they needed to go did the measurements on both sides so it's all very lined up perfectly and that stabilizes the wire stock so it doesn't rotate like this you're shouldering it and then this button right here came out of the Owen stock and it extends the wire folding stock so the sling the sling is a um 1970s uh Korean war or Vietnam War era uh the soft cantens if you ever seen those big soft squishy cantens that's what this came off of it's like a four cart canteen so it's canteen sling and yeah and I kind of uh beveled this in here inlaid it a little bit I guess is another word for it uh so that the wire stock can actually um travel in and out of this properly and it's just got these little teeth in the wire so when you push this button and pull out it just locks that plastic locking block into the teeth and it doesn't go anywhere so if I took this all the way out um I don't really like doing that cuz it's [ __ ] to get it back in but if we pull it all the way out here okay there's the stock you can see the plastic locking mechanism is literally just this plastic thing with a spring you can see the spring right there and there's a block in there like a little plastic block that's holding the spring under pressure in here that little screw is just a um it's just a a stop I guess I put it in there it just kind of makees sure nothing jumps out of here I've always thought about redoing this little plastic thing cuz obviously it's a high wear part eventually it will stop functioning because you just rub the plastic off of it so put this back together if I can do this on here you just got to line everything back up if I can do this where you can see as well it's kind of there we go so it's lined back up and it's going to obviously fight with me a little bit here because it doesn't like this there it goes now it's locked back in it's being retained by those clips push those in that's the clapped collapsed version of it so there you go my Vietnam inspired um M1 carbine uh like advisor SL South South Vietnamese Army you know M16 grip weird wire stock canteens sling 30 rounders M2 flash suppressor and there you go it's pretty fun little project and then I have a underneath this this bag right here is a a World War II era um paratrooper SL Airborne um drop leg holster for this so the one that they stra to their leg I put the carbine into it that carbine will fit into that bag which this is the end I'll put it away and just show you so this bag goes in your belt it was a factory reject so I've extended the the lip cuz it was too short it was like a these are like usually like 100 plus bucks to buy these even repop ones so I found one that needed some work and I did the work myself on the old sewing machine and made this custom drop leg holster so that clicks on that that clicks on that and there you go now it's in its bag so this um this ties around your ankle and this there's two different things there's this big thing right here and there's this thing right here and you hook it to your belt in however fashion you want you see it's a 42 reproduction and this straps to your leg for jumping out of airplane in 1942 in Normandy but I have this kind of funky Vietnam inspired thing hanging out in there this is kind of where it lives it just lives in its bag so anyway I thought that was pretty cool it's uh unique and I've never seen anybody screw with carbin that much in terms of like making them really custom and uh anyway figured I'd just show you and anyway thanks for watching I'll do some uh footage of me shooting it and some ammunition information too because I reload for this hand reload for this CU it's kind of expensive to shoot so I experiment with hand reloads um my last experiment didn't really work but you know you'll see in the videos and I'll uh look forward to seeing any input from this but thanks for watching and have a great day all right so out here testing some of my hand loads say a prayer for me that I don't explode the gun or my face didn't explode the gun or the face did that eject case so that we can look at it and make sure that primer good hit on the primer no weird bulging of the case no like overly fouling or anything like that so all right let's continue so the load on this ammunition in case there's any reloading nerds out there is it's 115 grain hard lead cast bullet covered in uh polymer it's one of those polymer covered bullets and then I got 14 1 12 grains of uh hogon little gun and I'm using CCI small rifle primers and mixed brass from original 1950s you know Lake City brass to like brand new Filipino made or Philippines made brass so it's uh yeah so we're just going to keep shooting see how this Cycles oh yeah safety okay we're cycling and extracting good okay all right just a second we're going to make [Music] sure okay it did EXT dra all the way I'm taking the mag out weapon is clear I don't know if this is just a failure to feed okay weapons clear so I'll be right back all right so we have a clear clear boore I think that was just a failure to um go in battery is all it was so we're going to keep going that stuff's uh that stuff's pretty potent to knock that Target down it's pretty potent well okay okay so we had a failure on the gun itself to go to strip on off the magazine properly all right so all in all I'd say that was a pretty successful test firing of that that load so 115 grain lead bullet going at somewhere around 2,000 ft per second it's pretty uh pretty impressive um okay so I found all 21 of the rounds I just fired and you know some of them are a little uh I didn't I didn't clean this brass this was once fired brass that I just kind of cleaned the primer Pockets out of and and uh and like wiped them down with some water so I didn't tumble this so a lot of this um nastiness is because it is once fired and I didn't tumble it I just wanted to test this load and see if it would cycle the gun seems to be cycling the gun the only malfunction we had was a failure to fully go into battery which is probably because of the lead bullets catching on the feed ramp and uh a failure to feed off the magazine which is notorious M1 carbine issues so I'm not done shooting this we're going to put I have an old box of Lake City with me and we'll put a box of Lake City through it but those 20 rounds all inspect this brass seems to have functioned fine so this is the box of Lake City I have I'm just going to load her up on in here and we'll put some more rounds through this and I'll go put that Target back up all right so now we got uh we got probably some Korean War era Surplus Lake City um I'm going to throw through this just this 110 grain military ball and uh I'm going to do this just to get a baseline for my load compared to this load in like recoil impulse how it ejects out of the gun so I don't want to shoot this more that that cycled beautifully and perfectly so it could be something to do you know I was experimenting with the lead bullets and you know the lead bullets might just have a uh a feeding issue because well they're lead they're not plated they're soft they'll get stuck in the the feeding process of this so I could also tell my rounds are a little hot they're way hotter than that whatever whatever that Lake City like load is is way hotter or way softer shooting than mine so I might have to heavier bullet I might have to recalculate my powder loads on this if I want to redo it again right now I said I have about 14 and 1 12 grains of hogged on little gun and I maybe go down to like 14 grains and see if that Cycles the action on this without causing any like undue stress on the action this is an original 42 produced carbine so all right so this next few rounds here are actually pretty special the first three rounds of this mag is original produced World War II ammunition three rounds of it with I think 44 and 43 case head stamps on it I just want us to put it through an original gun I'm not an ammunition collector and it's been kind of it's kind of it's beat up so we're just going to throw it through the gun and see if it still Cycles 80y old ammunition I mean the Lake City stuff's from the 50s that's 70y old ammunition at this point so let's see where the bat okay look at that so original ammunition it did not extract all the way it got stuck but yeah you can see this is a I'll show it in a different video but it's a 43 head stamp 1943 head stamp so all right so the first one did not cycle let's see if the second one cycle oh I found another ah good I found another case right there that's good get all my cases all right let's see if this cycles that one cycled and extracted that one did too so this one is a 43 as well head stamp and this one is a 44 so there you go 80-year-old ammunition still functions perfectly fine now let's get through this uh 1950 stuff and then that's all the shooting for this old girl today that's all the Amo I brought with me beautiful so yeah I'm having a little bit of a little bit of issues with my ammo we'll have to sort that out so I'm back for my testing of the first um round of using this these lead bullets so the second round so basically I think I did my overall length a little too long so down here you have my recipe down here so it's overall length is 1.68 in so basically um that's kind of the maximum overall length you want in a 30 carbine and so what I've done is I actually have this whole bunch of this Factory foke ammunition up here which is pretty decent ammunition and um I've measured out several of these and I've decided just to copy overall length off of foke and see if my gun likes that more so if you look down here the F and mine are now obviously mine's on the right F's on the left so you can see the overall length of that is now very similar and it comes out to about 1.66 so obviously 1.66 is um quite a bit shorter than 1.68 so and the fii measures 1.66 consistently across the board in those boxes of factory ammo so I think it might feed better now that it's a little bit shorter I think I was doing them a little long for my gun since I did have some um choking issues on it so anyway we'll see if the overall shortening the overall length is um going to fix this fix the some of the hiccups I had in my testing okay so I'm just D priming Old Lake City brass for this and I figured I'd get a shot of this process while I'm doing it on this press so and this one's really special I set this one to the side this one is original 1944 head stamped World War II brass piece of brass going to resize and D Prime and then all this is going to get washed and thrown into the tumbler which is right there thank you so I de primed and full re and resized one of these and this is a round that's been trimmed and T tumbled and is ready to go so I figur I just show this process so I don't need to resize it so we're just going to skip that process we're going to reime it going to bring it over here flare the neck get a power powder charge the cop the powder cop is going to tell me I have a powder charge and then right here is where I can put round into the neck that's been flared oh there it goes so flared neck cartridge then this is the bullet seating and crimp die and there you have a fully remanufactured 30 carbine round that we're going to make sure is good overall length which might be a little short on that one I don't know 1.66 isn't bad that's about in line with the foke factory ammunition I have up in my shelf here this stuff right here is all about 1.66 in length so there you go so this is video footage I've cut the sound out of because it was really windy and you couldn't hear me so this is the second batch of ammunition that I did and it is um five grains less so it went from 14.5 grains to 14 grains of hog done little gun it's 115 grain cast lead bullet polymer coated and my overall length is just a smidge shorter at 1.66 instead of 1.68 so um I'm realizing that all of the malfunction issues on this batch of ammunition which there's quite a few compared to average and when car beans have a reputation for being unreliable and being finicky for their magazines and the ammunition that they like so reloading it is kind of a ongoing experiment because as soon as you find something that your gun likes you just keep doing it because it likes it but it my gun does not seem to like the lead bullets I think the lead bullets get stuck a lot in the feeding uh action of this gun and there's a lot of weird uh malfunctions that I don't like I'm not comfortable with so I'll probably just go back to a standard 110 grain C copper jacketed bullets a one or 14.5 grain of hogr little gun and 1.68 overall length because it works um and this did not I did the buou bullets because I could buy a thousand of them for like 75 bucks and I thought o that was a good deal so I have a whole lot of buou bullets I'm not going to be able to use now for this because it just doesn't like the lead bullets it just chokes on them so obviously I do get some decent reliability I get good strings of you know 20 rounds going off without too much of a hitch but versus some of the factory ammunition I put through here like Lake City or the foke or even my original reload batch um that I did it's not reliable enough for me and I like weapons to be reliable if they're not then they're kind of useless so anyway thanks for watching we'll do one more batch of shooting and move on from here and thanks for watching this video video I had fun making it so these are um some of my other reloads but these have 110 grain copper jacketed bullets inste of those lead cast bullets so we're going to test these and see if they uh cycle better I haven't tested these in a [Applause] while [Applause] [Applause] so as you can see this is a my original load with 110 grain copper jacketed bullets and 14 1 12 grains of uh powder so I figure I'll probably just go back to this because it was way more reliable more consistent and uh the only thing that it had issues with was magazines so thank you for watching and have have a great day and leave some feedback in the comments

Channel: Maximus Overhead

Views: 89,367

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Id: Rf-7t7r4fbA

Length: 25min 32sec (1532 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 05 2024