Q&A #10: Collectible Surplus Guns, Dumb US Decisions, and Lots of French Stuff

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another Q&A video here on Forgotten weapons I'm Ian McCallum and today we're going to be taking a look at some questions submitted by some of the fine folks who helped contribute to support forgotten weapons on patreon thank you very much to all of you guys it is you that makes this channel possible now without further ado let us begin with a question from George says could you explain aim twist rifling is it effective and wouldn't it be ideal for making carbines that are both short in barrel length yet highly accurate yes progressive twist rifling is effective in that it it does stabilize bullets however I think George you have a somewhat something of a misunderstanding of the the relationship between barrel length and accuracy because it really does not take a long barrel to adequately stabilize a bullet in fact a two inch revolver will adequately effectively stabilize a revolver bullet and there's nothing different about a rifle a couple inches at most is really all you need to actually get the bullet spinning at the proper rpm to be stable gain twist rifling is kind of a different thing so first off what game twist is is it means that the pitch of the rifling varies over the length of the barrel so we typically think of rifling as one in X in us measurements we think of it as one in 10 or 1 in 8 or 1 and 12 and that is the number of rotations that the bullet makes over that many inches of barrel length so typical 4 5 5 6 for example would be between 1 in 7 inch so the the bullet aren't making one full revolution in 7 inches out to like 1 in 14 so one revolution in 14 inches and different the speed of the twist the the rate of revolution of the bullet needs to be sufficient to stabilize the bullet without over stabilizing it the proper number for that depends on a bunch of factors primarily the length and diameter of the bullet as well as to some extent its shape and that's a hugely technical discussion that we're not going to go into today figuring out what twist is appropriate what gain twist is is instead of having a the same rate of twist throughout the barrel gain twist barrels start with a very slow twist might be one in twenty five and then they slowly accelerate the bullet until at the muzzle end of the the barrel it's spinning at its final rpm its final twist rate as necessary to stabilize it so why would you do this it is certainly more difficult to manufacture than a standard barrel and that's part of why we generally don't see gain to its rifles being made today so there's really one place where gain twist rifling has a real advantage and that is in pressure so if you have a bullet that has a lot of surface area in contact with the barrel when you fire it just initially when it's starting to accelerate down the barrel you're going to have a lot more friction you've got to do a lot more work to engrave this rifling and and crush this bullet into the rifling as it starts to spin this is relevant on relatively large calibers for example the 20 millimeter vulcan is a cartridge that is in US service at least typically a game twist barrel and in fact they go one step beyond just having the game twist in the vulcan they have an actual copper band around the bullet that sits on the rifling and the body of the bullet doesn't however a gain twist means that because it's only doing a little bit of rotation at the beginning of its travel you're going to have lower pressure it's going to be easier to get that bullet started down the barrel once it started then you can speed up the twist of the bullet revolution or the you increase the rate of revolution of the bullet until it gets to what you need it to be for accuracy the other application of this would be in rifle cartridges but especially relatively small bore rifles that have very long bullets namely the early round nosed projectiles in six and a half millimeter not all of these sorts of rifles use game twist rifling in fact really only one did and that was the italian Carcano it was this was a big military secret weapon for the italians at the time which turns out to have not really been all that important but the early versions of 6-5 con used a very long round nose bullet it's actually the same bullet that you'll see used in the Kennedy assassination however that bullet it spikes pressure in the gun if you fire that with a standard twist barrel because it's trying to spin it up to its to a fairly high rate of revolution very quickly that causes a pressure spike so what the Italians did was used a game twist instead so it starts out turning slowly once it gets moving down the barrel then you can speed it up that is where game twist is useful this doesn't by the way this doesn't typically apply to rifle cartridges anymore because we have discovered that a spitzer cartridge is a much more aerodynamic option and so today we have much more teardrop shaped bullets in general boat tails you know the bullet comes back in on itself at the tail end the tip is pointed and they just generally have much less surface area in contact with the barrel than something like a round nosed 65 Carcano widow so game twist isn't necessary and because it is more expensive and difficult to manufacture no reason to bother web next question is from Paul says how does the old 65 Japanese air sock around compared to the more modern six point X millimeter rounds such as 65 Creedmoor 6 8 s pc or 6 v Grendel again there's I think a bit of a misunderstanding built into this question namely that 6 v Creedmoor and 6 v Grendel or 6 8 s PC have very little in common there are two different rationales for those 6 5 cartridges the 6 v Creedmoor is designed to be a very efficient long range cartridge and it's basically started on a 30 caliber rifle cartridge it's full a full rifle length cartridge and by necking it down from say 308 to 65 millimeter seven and a half millimeter down to six and a half millimeter you can get a much better ballistic coefficient it retains its energy better and stays supersonic over a longer distance of travel with the six eight SPC and six five Grendel what the the goal was to increase bullet weight but retain the ability to be used in an ar-15 magazines system so with a very strict overall length limit how do you increase the bullet weight on five five six well you neck it up to in this case six five or six eight however the velocity on those cartridges is substantially lower than something like six five Creedmoor because they are very strictly limited to a much smaller case much lower case capacity now the city of the World War one ear s65 rifle rounds like the 65 Carcano and the 65 japanese are actually fairly similar a little bit hotter than typically the a our conversion calibers slide 65 Crandall they did have a much larger case to work with but they typically weren't weren't loaded to quite this high of a pressure they weren't quite as efficient of around so ballistically just just above six eight and six five Grendel but substantially below something like six five Creedmoor next up we have a question from Laura who says when the u.s. entered World War one they discovered they had a great shortage of rifles indeed to address this they took the p14 Enfield being manufactured commercially in the US for Great Britain modified it to 30.6 and adopted it as the 1917 Enfield having fired one I believe the American Enfield our fantastic rifles and imo superior to the 1903 a1 Springfield the 1903 Springfield why then did the US scrap or decommission most of their Enfield rifles following the war the 1903 would not be brought up to par with the 1917 until the a3 revision just before World War two this is especially odd considering the army had more Enfield than Springfield's all of your facts are exactly correct Laura the u.s. in fact manufactured substantially more 1917 Enfield than they did 1903 Springfield's they fielded something like three times as many Enfield in World War one with the actual combat troops and at the end of the war had about twice as many in fields available as they did Springfield's at the end of the war there was a commission put together to decide which of those two rifles to keep as the US main standard and which one to relegate to secondary and secondary status and put into storage and they ultimately decided to keep the 1903 Springfield for a couple of reasons some good and some lame the good reasons were primarily around manufacture so the Springfield was manufactured as the name implies by the US Springfield Armory this was at the time a government-run manufacturing facility the Springfield we have today is a private company that has basically nothing to do with the original government Springfield facility so after World War one there were potentially some labor issues with the commercial company commercial rifle factories and remember that the 1917 Enfield was entirely manufactured by third party commercial companies so if you're in the government shoes the idea of maintaining the rifle that you produce yourself has a definite appeal compared to getting rid of your own production capability and relying entirely on outside contractors to make firearms this also is a reason that explains why a lot of countries will sometimes adopt subpar rifles you may look at and go why why did they build that weird thing themselves when they could have just bought rifle ax mousers or they could have just bought m16s from America the answer is often the country wants to have its own domestic secured arms production system and that was the good part of the reason why the u.s. kept in 1903 they also had all the training in hand they had all the spare parts they had the logistics some of that had been developed for the 1917 over the course of a couple years in the war but it existed in a much more fundamental way from the 1903 now what might actually be the more substantial reason they kept the 1903 and is definitely the really pathetic reason to keep the 1903 is that it was a better match rifle in service qualification and in national match competition the 1903 Oh 3 Springfield was superior because it had a sight a set of sites that were specifically designed whether intentionally or not they ended up being perfectly aligned to the National Match competition targets namely they had a rear aperture sight that was miniscule but it works really well with that six hundred yard known distance bull's eye from National Match competition the 1917 Enfield had a much larger at rear aperture sight it was fantastic for combat it was unequivocably a better combat rifle but national match qualification scores not so great and so in in something that we see repeated often enough to be well kind of depressing sometimes from a military perspective they decided to keep the one that looked better on the range and the qualification scores and get rid of the one that was actually the better combat rifle definitely not a good decision now in their defense I will say that the 1903 was kept with the understanding that they would look to adopt a better sight for it along the lines of the 1917 but as Laura points out that wasn't actually adopted until just shortly before World War two next question is from Frederick says what guns will you be looking at in the future which you are the mostest hyped about well there are a couple I would say in terms of modern guns I'm actually really excited to get my hands on a Hudson h9 having seen them at SHOT Show this year or yeah this year I think that gun has a tremendous amount of potential and I'm very excited to see if the production version of it lives up to the potential that we saw in the early prototypes that were at shot show so cross your fingers I'm excited for that one on a more historical note I am really looking forward to one way or another getting my hands on an F RF 1 or F RF 2 French sniper rifle you may notice I reorganized my wall here to be all French bolt-action rifles get into exactly why in a few minutes but an F RF 1 or F RF 2 would be really cool I finally got my hands on one recently I did some traveling in Europe including a visit to France and did an interview with a gunsmith who had worked on those rifles and he had one and that was the first time in that interview I was able to actually handle one of those guns and they're really cool most notably they're way lighter than I was expecting especially with just iron sights that is a very lightweight rifle and it's really interesting to look at how the decisions in the design of the frf one kind of mirror the decisions that were made in the design of the soviet Draganov you know in that you're balancing accuracy and speed of fire and durability and weight all together to come out with what is deemed optimal and both the Dragunov and the frf one took a more more critical look at weight than a lot of other rifles so anyway not exactly sure when that will happen or how but i would love to get my hands on and shoot in frf one or frf two next up Christopher says have you ever reviewed a gun at Julia or Rock Island and thought I must make you mine the answer is yes I have actually bid on a bunch of guns at both auction houses and I've won a handful of them most recently I actually won a Maus 38 submachine gun got not my first machine gun but it is actually it is my 2nd machine gun and I'm very excited to get that and it was one of those ones where I was looking at the estimate that they had and went I don't really think it's going to sell that low but just in case it does it's a gun I'd really kind of like to have and it's a gun that doesn't show up for sale very often and that one was a pretty decent example unfortunately someone stamped some numbers all over it a service number a serial number or something be nice if they hadn't done that maybe that's part of why I got it for what I consider to be a fairly cheap price for a nice original curio and relic transferable machine gun but yeah everyone's oil I do it on rifle so that I've seen there and or done videos on and sometimes I even win them not all that often but next up Arturo says in the spirit of your what would stoner do project which is an AR modernization kind of making a modern AR based on the principles of the original ARS and that's something Carl and I are doing over on in range TV we have a bunch of content about that if you're interested in modern firearms and their applications definitely go check out in range TV anyway Arturo says do you think stoner would today still choose direct gas impingement over a long or short stroke gas piston for the ar-15 if so do you think you would still decide to house the recoil spring and buffer inside the stock as for direct gas impingement yes I think stoner would absolutely maintain that decision it's not technically actually gas impingement it is in fact a short-stroke gas piston system where the piston is located directly inside the bolt carrier the bolt carrier is the piston body with a piston housing and the bolt itself is the head of the piston and that has some definite advantages it is commonly seen as being a reliability disadvantage which in actual practical real-world handling it is not you know the the common saying is it shit's where it eats because gas from the action goes into that that piston system behind the bolt head people see that as going into the receiver it doesn't really it vents out the side of the bolt carrier which you can see easily in slow motion and on a properly built air 15 it really does not contribute to reliability problems in fact there's an argument to be made that because it does glow gas out the side of the bolt carrier with every shot might actually improve reliability slightly in that it's actually blowing crud away from the ejection port just before the bolt opens on every shot now more importantly what that system does is it puts the the the movement of the bolt the unlocking directly parallel to the axis of the bore or directly in line with the axis of the bore not even parallel but collinear with it so on a tilting bolt gun for example you're going to have pressure coming down each time and it's going to put a one directional force on the cartridge and on the barrel and that's a pretty minor thing but when you're getting into trying to squeeze every bit of accuracy out of a rifle design having all of those forces in line with the bore axis really does make a difference and when you combine that with the multi lug design not just two but like six or seven locking lugs on the AR old those things are what really contribute to the ar-15 being a markedly accurate gun in almost all of its configurations certainly a tilting boat gun is not nearly as accurate a to lug rotating bolt is pretty good but that multi lug rotating bolt really does a very good job and that's because having a bunch of lugs ensures better repeatability on lockup if you only have one it can kind of go into a number of different exact configurations every time it locks up these are microscopically small but they do make a difference on precision accuracy having a bunch of them kind of forces the bolt into exactly the same place every time it locks up and that's what makes for an accurate rifle as for the recoil spring being located in the stock that's one that's more more suitable to maybe some redesign but only if you are able to come up with a really good alternative putting the spring in the buttstock has some advantages the disadvantage of course is that it means you can't have a folding buttstock or if the buttstock is damaged you potentially though the rifle becomes non-functional on the other hand having the spring and the recoiling you know the bolt recoiling into the buttstock gives you a very long distance of travel to play with it allows you to have a long recoil spring to more effectively slow down and stop the bolt without having it actually bottom out on the back end of the receiver of the gun so that contributes to light recoil and soft shooting can you do it in other ways yes the ar-15 is it's currently set up I think is a pretty effective system I think in general people overestimate the importance of a folding stock having had a bunch of them what I kind of find is you use it to transport the gun but you don't really ever use it when you're shooting anytime you're actually going to use the gun stock unfolds so unless you have really serious space constraints where that really actually matters is it that important not not convinced some specialty things sure would I would I give up the the benefits of having this the spring in the stock of an AR for having a folding stock no I would not there are options out there for people who do want that they've never become all that popular and I think for good reason next question is from Ryan says reading one of your old articles on the VAR you mentioned that it was a horrible modernization of another wise decent weapon if you had the ability to modernize the 1918 model how would you have done it well you're correct at least in my opinion the 1918 8 2 which is the world war 2 version of the var I think went backwards in a lot of ways compared to the original World War 1 version what if you gave it to me and asked my opinion which actually you did I would follow the lead of several of the other countries that did modernize the DAR in a much more effective way Poland did Sweden did and well obviously Belgium did and I think the Belgians probably well even the u.s. did on the commercial market Colt modernized the gun for the civilian for civilian sales I would probably follow primarily what the Belgians did they came up with what they called the FN model d-4d montage because I has a quick-change barrel and the the changes that they made were to shorten the barrel a bit they dramatically lightened and simplified the bipod and moved it a bit back on the gun the the 1918 a2 has the bipod way out at the muzzle which and it's a super heavy bipod the Elgin version has a much lighter bipod its farther back they as the name implies they made the barrel a quick changeable affair which does make the gun a bit more serviceable in the light machine gun role as it was fielded by the US the VAR was really more of an automatic rifle it was not intended to be capable of sustained fire because you couldn't change the barrel or rather you could change the barrel but it took an armored bench and a pipe wrench to do it so not something you can easily do in the field it was pushed into the sustained fire roll absolutely in World War 2 also in Korea Armorer's at least one armor that I know really tested that gun because of the number of times they would come in completely shot out from having been pushed into service as a suppressive fire or sustained fire weapon when they just really weren't built for it at any rate making it giving it a quick-change barrel solve some of that problem they also gave it a pistol grip which i think is a substantial improvement and then a good set of aperture sights I think would make a big difference the sights on the original in 1918 are very similar to those that of a 1917 Enfield rifle which is an excellent sighting system for the time at least the a2 version went back to 1903 style sights which are far too small I think most of the the Polish and the Belgian version and I believe also the Swedes used what is basically a Mauser model 98 rear sight it's just not bad I think an aperture would be a bit better but bunch of options out there the one thing I would do that nobody else really did was to lighten the receiver a big big reason for the weight of the the var and its derivatives was that the receiver was a gigantic Forge just massive chunk of steel and I think if someone had put work into it you could have reduced the weight of the receiver substantially and that would go a long way towards making the whole gun handier and lighter in fact if we look at the HC AR Ohio ordinances modernized version of the var they did that in fact a they lightened the receiver substantially and their gun is much handier as a result in fact there's a lot of those changes were made to the HC a are actually so next up timothy says why or how our large stockpiles at military weapons stored for extended periods of time several decades and then released in large quantities for public sale why do militaries keep them around for so long and then decide to surplus them all at once how do several well-known distributors ie classic firearms of North Carolina get these firearms in large quantities and lastly what type of firearm do you think might be next in line for large-scale surpassing so whole bunch of questions from Timothy there first off why do they do it all in a batch well it's because bureaucratically there or logistically they're all being stored in a batch I think a good example would be like the de Madsen of the from 1946 or 49 Madsen Oh action rifle the Danes tried to sell those on the international market right after World War two wasn't a really really good market for bolt-action rifles at that point not new manufacture ones they managed to sell 5000 of them to Colombia Colombia got them and then must have at some point realized we really have no need for these and nothing to do with them because they were pretty much put into storage right away and then a couple decades later they were surplus does a unit they were all purchased by an American company brought into the US and roll here now well the reason that they sold them all at once is because if the guns obsolete you either want a lot of them so that should you get into World War three and need to issue all these rifles back out you want to have as few different patterns as possible so if if all of your reserve rifles can be the same everything becomes logistically simpler if you have to use them if you have a relatively small number of these things or if you've decided that you just don't need these rifles get rid of all of them then you can get rid of all the spare parts you can get rid of all the manuals you don't have to train people on those things anymore it's just simpler to do an all-or-nothing approach to this type of surplus another excellent example of this sort of thinking is Spain after World War 2 the Spanish had a huge just a smorgasbord of different surplus firearms in their arsenals inventory because during the spanish civil war both sides got just a whole mishmash of obsolete guns from all over the world they all ended up kind of piled together after Franco won and all of those guns were sold basically as a batch to a guy named Sam Cummings who ran a company called inter Arms he brought them all into the US to sell in the collectors market and for Spain this is a great way to take all of this obsolete junk and you know these things went back to 1886 steyr straight poles Lebel rifle Berthier rifles all manner of old mousers they were able to clear all of this out turn it into cash that they could use for something else and dramatically simplify their arms stockpiling system at that point if it wasn't a relatively modern Mouser or a set me don't even bother with it it's just simpler not to have them and if you're going to sell in that way the customers you're going to get especially if these are obviously guns you're going to have a hard time selling them to other countries sometimes that works Finland for example bought a lot of surplus arms during the 1920s and 30s some of the stuff you know after a major war sometimes you'll be able to sell surplus to other countries who want to use it to rearm after World War 2 Israel for example bought a lot of mousers Mauser bolt-action rifles because they were still reasonably they weren't obsolete at that point but they were the market was full of them if you've got something like what Spain had or what Colombia had with bolt-action rifles and I think the 70s no government is going to be interested in purchasing those because they're obsolete so the market becomes firearms collectors the mat they by and large the the market for that is in the United States especially more recently other other countries have had more difficult or more severe laws curtailing the import and the possession of military-style rifles or firearms in general although interestingly England for a long time has been a hub for international arms sales like that it's often easier to bring guns from weird parts of the world to England and then organize them warehouse them there and then export from England to the United States this is something that's been done by a number of companies successfully in it they're not actually selling on the British market but British import export regulations make it easier to do that than trying to bring things directly into the United States anyway so how do well known distributors get them the answer is they're really a couple historically they've always been a couple of really big companies that brought guns into the US and then once they were here those big importers then distributed them to distributors who then distribute them to retailers or sell them individually and today the biggest one of those probably is century century international arms they have an abysmal reputation because often when they try to take part kits in build them into guns they hire really the the lowest rate contractor to do the job and often century built guns are not so great they certainly have a reputation for being a bismal however there are a ton of guns that Century imports doesn't do anything mechanically to they stamp the legally required import mark on them and then send them back out the door for sale and those guns can be pretty much anything and I think you'll find classic firearms is probably getting most of their guns from century classic firearms has actually I think has done a really good job of marketing in that they don't actually have a large quantity of guns they'll have from what I've seen when I look at their stuff a dozen or two dozen different guns individual examples and they they have video content and they promote those may let you see these specific guns that they're selling and then they're able to sell those at a substantial markup compared to what you would be able to get for them if you just if you are a general firearms retailer and you said yeah we have finished em 39 or we have em 24 mousers the condition is good here's the price and we'll take the one off the top you know whatever is on the top of the barrel for you you can charge a higher price if you're actually showing people the one specific gun that they're getting people will see that though I think get an attraction or they'll decide that they like that particular one and they'll be willing to spend more money on it if I'm not mistaken the the tags that are on those rifles in in classic Hiram's videos those are all century inventory tags and century maintains a large inventory of these things I think because of their marketing classic is able or willing to spend more on them than a lot of other retailers would be willing to because they're able to get a higher rate for them so that sort of stuff those are things that have been imported they've been in the country for a while and I suspect they've been sitting at century at prices that other companies just weren't willing to pay for them so if you look at a lot of the old advertisements like hunters lodge advertisements in the 50s and 60s where some of these old classic ones where you see you know machine guns for 20 bucks errors for 2499 that sort of thing Hunter's Lodge was one of the retail brand-name outlets for Sam Cummings company inter arms and so he sold mail-order that way and then he also sold to other distributors and Inter Arms would actually happily sell to other governments and did some of that Bannerman was a company that did this before inter arms century is a big company that does it now that's where you see this sort of thing happening I guess actually one other good example of this is the the Nepalese rifles that came into the u.s. through international military antiques ama they did the same sort of thing just like Sam Cummings bought out everything the Spanish had Alex and Oh Christian Kramer bought out everything that the Nepalese had Nepalese had stockpiled all the guns that they got from the British everytime they upgraded or updated their arms the old ones went into the stockpile and they just sat there and so by the 1990s they had an entire building full of flintlocks through early single-shot cartridge guns and they realized you know we don't really need these I don't think we're ever going to have an emergency that's so dire that we're going to be reissuing you know British 1853 muskets orga Hendra martinis so let's let's just sell all of that off and they put out bids and I ma was willing to put the highest bid on them and bought the entire batch and brought them to England and then the US and that's why all of those rifles became available here as for what I think would be in line next for large-scale surplus it's hard to say a lot of it depends on geopolitical changes that aren't maybe easily predictable there's a lot of stuff in Russia but a lot of the guns in Russia are actually legally protected or prohibited from export because they are considered state history so for example there are a lot of they're kind of Gatling guns in Russia that were made there there are a lot of Max and machine guns in Russia there are a lot of Smith & Wesson number threes there are Berdan rifles in Russia a lot of stuff in Russia that would be very interesting on the American collector market but I don't see any reason that I don't see any reason to expect that we'll see it the reason that we did get a lot of Russian arms especially Mosin Nagant you know this many several decade deluge of motion the guns was because of the breakup of the Soviet Union Russian guns that had been Soviet now were being stored in places like Ukraine Ukraine decided they didn't need 10 billion most in the gobs in long-term storage so they started selling them on the collector market to companies like century so it's possible something like that could show up um if there are legal changes in Russia or someone decides to find another batch of stuff in one of the old Russian Republic's Soviet republics sorry it is you know a lot of the stuff that is being made obsolete now isn't really eligible for importation into the u.s. anyway for example France has just replaced the FAMAS with the hk416 however it is extremely unlikely I think that we will ever see FAMAS parts kits there's zero chance we'll ever see FAMAS rifles in the US and that's partly because of us machine gun laws and import laws it's also partly because of French policy they don't tend to sell obsolete military arms on the commercial market in these days they did at one point the mas 49:56 rifles when those were surplus off when they were made obsolete a lot of them ended up here in the US but the FAMAS not so much I suspect a lot of those some of them will go to countries that France has a relationship with probably a number of African countries will get surplus FAMAS rifles as military aid and unfortunately probably most of them will be destroyed once they're deemed not necessary insert in surplus stockpiles in France unfortunately the odds the what I see on the horizon for new large batches of surplus I'm not seeing a whole lot I think we're on the tail end of that because most of the stuff that would be legally able to come into the country probably already has I don't think there are a lot of countries out there that still have big stockpiles of bolt action or semi-automatic only military arms that there they still have that are viable to be surplus next up from either Stephan or Steven I'm not sure which what are some key things to look for when searching for a collectable firearm that is a short question with an incredibly long answer in fact I think I'm going to do an entire separate video on that topic so will be brief here today a couple things the most important thing is know what you're buying not just why are you buying it but what exactly is it that you have do you know what this variation is do you know that it's a legitimate assuming that you're interested specifically in military arms do you know that it is in a legitimate military configuration if it's sport arised you generally lose all of the military collectible value immediately beyond that one of the common things is to look for matching serial numbers virtually every country put a serial number on the rifle either the barrel or the receiver and then stamped all of the component parts or a large number of the component parts with the same number matching that gun now originally this was done because manufacturing wasn't necessarily completely interchangeable and so by serializing every part of the gun you ensured that the parts that fit the gun stayed on that gun and if anything was ever changed you'd know it in modern you know today I think that's largely an administrative logistical holdover it's good for accounting and having serial matching serial numbered parts on a gun improves its value from a collectors perspective now this is always as with everything this is subject to caveats there are some guns out there that are simply virtually always mismatched there are some guns we're being mismatched isn't that big of a deal and there are some guns where the mismatch is really pretty rare and if you're looking for for example a Swiss k31 or G 11 or K 11 straight-pull rifle it's very easy to find those all matching and I would encourage someone to pass on a mismatch rifle unless they get a really good deal on it make sure it's worth the money on the other hand if you looking for a LaBelle the bells are much harder to find in all original matching-number configuration so you know that's something where you'd pay a premium for a gun having all matching numbers as opposed to wanting a discount if it doesn't have that and then beyond that there are details to every individual type of gun that can have a substantial impact on its value if it's narrow Sokka does it have an intact chrysanthemum or has it been ground off that makes a difference if it's a birthday a carbine does it still have the clearing rod or does it not has it been updated to ball in there are these details on every and on every different rifle is different things to look at so education is the primary thing all right next question I'm going to take is from David he has two questions first one is who are the unsung heroes of forgotten weapons every now and then although not much recently you've had someone else using the camera while I did stuff who are these people is it Carl from in ranges at random dude on the street wife husband who are they a lot of these people have legitimate full-time jobs and places in society and I don't know how much they want to be tied into some YouTube dude like me so I'm going to leave a lot of these guys anonymous for the time being pending actually talking to them but in general if I'm working with a gun that belongs to someone else I may very well ask them to help out they may be the person doing some of the camera work while I'm on the screen when I'm at auction houses there are a couple people at both Julie and Rock Island who often help out doing that sort of thing it is primarily just me but having extra people does help especially in especially when we're out shooting on the range if I'm doing a kind of a static position video like this I really don't need another person behind the camera so anyway at some point we may talk to some of those people in person but I don't want to do it without them being willing to be on on the youtubes themselves so David's second question is other than the possibility for rim lock why are rimmed cartridges a thing of the past other than 22 rimfire with rim locks such a major and unbeatable reason that it killed the rim cartridge or are there other reasons there are some other reasons although rim lock is a major one rim lock is typically what we would refer to for feeding a stripper clip and having a rounds mix-up improperly in Jam one rim in front of the other more substantially is that designing a box magazine for a rimmed cartridge is much more difficult than a rimless cartridge they just stack much more nicely I know they've been done Bren gun obviously the Draganov the well everything in 54 rimmed everything in 303 yes they were able to develop magazines for those but it's just simpler and more reliable when it's a rimless cartridge and then rim now rimfire is not necessarily the same thing as a rimmed or rimless cartridge rimfire went away because it is a less economical in in the overall picture there's a less economical system than centerfire centerfire cartridges are safer to manufacture they're easier to manufacture they're reloadable which is something that especially early on military did the US military did collect brass and they did reload it they did actually issue reloading kits that were sent out in the field with troops in the early days of centerfire cartridges so you'd have a way to you know the brass is the one thing that could be hard to get powder and and lead four bullets were reasonably easy to obtain they were reasonably common to find if you carried some primers and a reloading kit could take your old brass and reload it that's something you could not do with rimfire ammunition with 22 rimfire that has survived as a rimfire around because it is basically too small to be cost effective as a centerfire cartridge the whole point of 22 rimfire is that it is cheap and easily accessible and it wouldn't translate very well to a centerfire cartridge next up from our know what is my opinion on the new rapid-fire trigger systems like the eco trigger I believe Arno is referring to binary triggers in general here where you have the gun fires when you pull the trigger and then it fires a second time when you let go of the trigger I think they're kind of a dumb idea I have really no interest in having one myself for a couple reasons one is a safety reason especially combined with the general range protocols that people use these things in which is blasting away at dirt or something similar I think there's a real safety issue there basically what do you do if you pull the trigger and fire the round and then you have a reason that you have to stop shooting yes you can do things like manipulate the safety open up the action there there ways to mitigate this there are ways around this problem but I don't like the idea of someone holding what is essentially a Deadman switch on a rifle much much more much happier to have just a standard pull trigger on the rifle and then secondly what you get from them is simulated full auto and we pretty much acknowledge that in rifles shoulder rifles automatic fire is really not particularly practical for most things automatic fire is for machine guns with by pods in a shoulder rifle it's not a whole lot of need for it and getting fake automatic fire with something like a slide fire or a binary trigger to me it's not worth the money and the hassle I don't think you'd get anything substantial out of it so I'm sure there are plenty of people are going to disagree I think there a lot of people find them very fun to go out and shoot really fast to me that's kind of turning money into noise I can do that pretty effectively with standard semi-auto trigger I don't know I'm probably offending people already I don't see the glamour in in the binary triggers next up from Donald do you think that a modern adaptation of the crank a rotating bolt system could compete with some of the modern browning tilting barrel systems in pistols it seems to me that having a barrel that stays linear in its travel would be advantageous as opposed to a barrel that tilt out of vertical alignment with the sights when you fire yes yes and no both so on the one hand yes it can absolutely compete and we see that with like the beretta px4 it is a modern service pistol it is totally effective it's not you know a barn burning seller beretta is not not making scads of money on the px4 but it's a totally adequate gun it has a rotating barrel system developed from the Steyr Han which was sort of developed from the chrome cut the problem is it doesn't really add a whole lot the concept seems good that yes it should be more accurate if the barrel is moving in line instead of tilting the reality is people have gotten good enough at building browning style tilting barrel pistols that you don't really get an advantage with a linear rotating barrel instead right Nicholas asked what was your biggest surprise opportunity as in an invitation to a collection or interview or randomly finding a unicorn what is the Forgotten weapons related thing that left me most going is this really happening that's not that difficult of a question to answer that would I think be the Walther mm getting an email out of the blue from someone who basically said I have a Walther mm do you want to play with it that was pretty cool that was a gun I really I figured I'd probably find one for video eventually somewhere in Germany but it would probably be a static you know and seen a museum art in a private collection and I'd be able to do a disassembly video on it but that's it I really did not expect I'd ever be able to actually take one of those out in the field and shoot it so when that happened that was awesome and really took me by surprise and I believe if I can ever find a psg-1 that I have access to shoot I think the opportunity still exists to take the Walther 2000 out with it and do a side-by-side shooting video which I would really love to do so we'll see if that happens at some point Michael says I have been reading up on Jeff Cooper's concept of the scout rifle I'm curious what your ideas are on the concept and whether you think it's outdated well I don't think it's outdated I do think it is a very very limited scope and that's why we don't see it being used very much so the concept of the scout rifle if I remember correctly I believe Cooper called it used a rule of threes you wanted to be able to take down a 300 kilogram animal at 300 yards with a three kilogram gun I think that was the standard I Prai should have looked it up before but in practice what this turned into was a bolt-action rifle with detachable box magazines and integrated bipod good aperture iron sights as well as an intermediate eye relief scope low magnification scope and the whole idea was to have a rifle that was lightweight and very handy that could be brought up into a very quick shooting position so you could get good snap shots at targets you'd have backup iron sights if something went wrong with the scope and chambered for a full power rifle cartridge and there are two real iterations of this that came onto the market one was the Ruger scout rifle and one was the Steyr scout rifle the Steyr Scout was developed directly with Cooper's cooperation as far as I know the Ruger was not and the Steyr Scout is this very cool interesting purpose-built rifle it does it fulfills all the requirements that Cooper had including you know has this fold up bipod that just disappears into the stock and all polymer feels very flimsy but it's very lightweight it'll hold a spare magazine in the buttstock lots of cool features to it the problem is this is an answer to a question that was being asked by very few people I think it would make sense probably for someone who is in like the African safari guide profession I think Cooper had it in mind for some sort of like African brush war long range sort of quasi civilian Scout sort of person who might be hunting with it or might need to use it on human targets in either case there's a very small number of people who fit this role and very few very very few of them are in the United States so I think a lot of people got excited about the concept and a lot of people bought the guns or built guns in this style and I think what happened is then they went to start actually using them and realized that they didn't have anywhere to actually exploit this specific rifle build and so they kind of died out in popularity and people aren't really all that excited about them anymore for that reason I think it's it's a cool gun there's nothing intrinsically wrong with the gun it's just only useful in such a limited role especially especially relative to a buyer in the United States and that's why we don't see them at some point I would really like to do actually a video on an original steyr Scout because they really are cool guns Christian says what are your thoughts on shooting matching numbered guns for example I have an all matching 243 and I've installed an adjustable gas system in it to cycle just enough to eject the spent casings so the bolt and carrier isn't slamming itself into the rear of the receiver even after all that I still hear people claiming you shouldn't shoot them for fear of parts breakage I've even seen collector's forums also saying not to shoot matching car 98 saying quote you are throwing away money every time you pull the trigger technically those people are probably correct practically speaking I have no problem no qualms about shooting a matching numbered collectable gun now as with everything this is it depends so there are some guns out there that are in literally factory brand-new condition and all matching is a part of that but more important is the fact that they're totally mint pristine guns and yes if you take that out to the range and you do a bunch of shooting with it the shooting itself isn't what is a problem what's a problem is for example if it's semi-auto you're going to get brass marks on the receiver probably if it's a revolver you're going to get a scoring line where the the bolt is dragging on the cylinder probably with an older gun well just handling at the range makes it very liable to Nick the stock or scratch the stock or scratch the metal that just happens to gums when you take them out of shooting so if I had a gun that was pristine then I would agree with this this idea and I would not take it out shooting in fact I have a couple guns like that although as a general rule I try not to collect guns that are that nice because I want to be able to take my guns out and shoot them without having to worry about it with something like a g43 if you've installed an aftermarket gas system I just shoot it yes there is a chance you'll break something if you do break something you can generally get replacement parts you certainly can for a g43 yeah they would then be non-matching you'd have you know gun with all matching parts except for that one that you broke but to me the risk of it breaking is pretty slim and the enjoyment of getting to shoot the gun makes sense I like that and that's how I would generally approach that question of course it is always something you have to consider the rarity how likely is the gun to break something how difficult is it to get a replacement part all of those things come into play but I tend to err on the side of shooting my guns I think that is demonstrated most on my 19:17 okay so that guns just out the top of the screen but I have a 1917 French semi-auto rifle in RSC 1917 or FSA 1917 that I'm willing to shoot and most most people who own those would not be because that is really a rifle where if I break something I'm kind of screwed short of having a machine shop fabricate a new part but the amount I'm going to shoot the likelihood anything will break I'm willing to take that risk Stuart says will you be doing more early guns you see mostly to go back only as far as the u.s. Civil War with just a few exceptions yep that's true and that is really because my interest in shooting is pretty much restricted to cartridge firing guns I've done some stuff with muzzle loaders of all sorts we done some shooting wheel locks I don't know that I've done much with flintlocks percussion guns as well to me they're a pain in the butt to shoot I just I don't enjoy that part of shooting I'd much rather be able to just stuff a cartridge in the gun and go I also find them more practical people often ask or occasionally ask about things like you know do a two gun match with a flintlock well are going to happen because you just it's not practical that thing has a rate of fire of like three or four rounds per minute tops to gun matches are typically sixty to ninety second stages that means best-case I can fire six rounds total in the course of a stage it's never going to happen and I'm done this less interested in it myself then of course my ability to speak accurately and effectively on guns is based on the fact that I'm interested in them and I spend the time learning about them the guns I'm less interested in I know less about and thus I am less likely to present on video so when I do have that sort of thing when I like when I was when I had the video on on basics of wheel locks that's something where I'm much more dependent on other sources in that case the owner of that gun helping me out with knowledge that I didn't have myself so I tend to stick to this I'd like to stick to stuff that I know I'm more confident in describing it to you if I'm confident that I know it myself instead of taking someone else's word for it a long way of saying I will primarily be sticking to cartridge firing guns well I guess that could change in a couple years if if my taste changes and I just get that spark to play with a lot of muzzle loaders then you'll see a lot more muzzle loaders on the channel all right next up Chuck says well you have a real affinity for French designed arms you also seem to be in the minority so what are your thoughts on why they get such a bad rap I would guess the bad experience US troops head with the show Shaw in World War one would have a lot to do with it but what maybe some of the other factors as you can see here I have as I mentioned earlier in this excruciatingly long QA I have rebuilt the matrix armory wall here to be full of French bolt-action rifles that is actually because I am very slowly working on a reference book on French bolt-action rifles that hopefully will be completed before I die of old age that's a subject I've found myself very interested in and kind of put together a pretty serious collection of them and it puts me in a good position to answer Chuck's question on why the French have a bad rap comes from a couple things I think probably the largest single thing is Frances capitulation after six weeks in world war two is something that got a lot of commentary in gun magazines and in the gun culture shortly after World War two and what's really on kind of a sociological level is interesting to see there are a number of concepts that were solidified in the gun community in magazines like American Rifleman or some of the very early shooting magazines in the 50s and the 60s that just stick today even when they're not factually supported sometimes they are for example the arasaka being a strong bolt-action system that goes right back to the 1950s there was like one magazine article that made that a known fact in the community and it remains that way today and I think the idea that France surrendered there for French rifles must be bad I think that probably I don't have a specific article I can point to but to me it just tastes like something that came out of gun publications in the 50s and 60s and it's weird how that stuff is sticky you know for people my age our parents our fathers mostly read that and because magazines were the source of information we didn't have the internet back then it was taken as it kind of became gospel and I think that's largely where the poor reputation of French rifles comes from now what doesn't help them is that is what makes them largely very interesting to me and that is that they seem to have it had this tendency to either adopt the very first cutting-edge version of something or the very last version of something so the Lebel for example first smokeless powder spitzer cartridge rifle it was groundbreaking and it had flaws the French rushed it into service to make sure that they weren't beaten to the punch and as a result they ended up with a very poor cartridge the eight millimeter labelled it's 11 millimeter gras neck down to eight basically it's a heavily tapered cartridge it's got a huge rim on it it is terrible for magazines and it set French rifle development back substantially several times and other countries that followed suit Germany for example Paul Mauser was able to look at the Lebel and go WOW a Spitzer is great the the smokeless powder is awesome that two magazine is a really bad idea that rimmed cartridge design is a bad idea let me fix those take the concept improve it and just a couple years later introduced the Mauser bolt-action repeating rifles which were fantastic rifles because in part they were able to look at what French what the first one did wrong French semi-automatic rifles are largely the same the French did a lot of early development ended up adopting a rifle in the 1917 self loader that had some problems it wasn't an ideal semi-automatic rifle but countries like Russia in the United States were able to learn from the mistakes or the deficiencies of that and build a second-generation gun that was excellent like the garand on the other hand sometimes the French will go the opposite direction and they'll adopt the very last version of something kind of like the MAS 36 yes which you can see on camera this is an extremely simple rugged effective bolt-action rifle adopted in 1936 but one of the very last bolt-action rifles to be adopted and what happened there was it was only a couple years before someone else got the next major technological jump done with this for example the the MAS 36 was adopted the exact same year that the US adopted the garand a self-loading rifle and so while this is great it's almost immediately obsolete kind of like where the Lebel was great it was almost immediately made obsolete you know they just kind of don't have the luck they're what makes for a really good rifle is being kind of the second generation you know you don't want to be the first you want to learn from the first do it right and then be able to field it for a long period of time before it becomes obsolete and the French just had some timing issues in being able to pull that off and I think that relates that that's a part of why they have a bad rep in the u.s. they're kind of always a gun that's not good enough for their time or or they're good but only for a very short time before they get eclipsed by something else Alex we're almost almost at the end here second the last question alex says since forgotten weapons is diving into the sa80 line the british bullpup five-six rifles what is your opinion on the l85a2 as it sits now as a combat rifle and do you have you ever see parts kits or full rifles being introduced into the United States I have done a little bit of shooting very little but I have done some shooting with an l85a2 it seems to be between combining my shooting with discussing the gun with some veterans some British vets who have used it fairly extensively as well as having used the l85a1 and the FAL I think the a2 is a perfectly serviceable adequate weapon I think its main shortcoming is weight that gun is heavier than it should be by several pounds the l85a2 is like I think it's actually heavier than the fowl the SLR the l1a1 and British service and part of the the marketing the plan for it originally as the sa80 with it would be substantially lighter than the SLR that didn't happen the thing is a beast of a rifle it's way too heavy other than that in the a2 configuration it seems to be pretty reliable it's it's always been a pretty accurate gun it's fine I wouldn't choose a bullpup I certainly wouldn't choose a bullpup that is completely non ambidextrous as the l85 is but it works as for seeing seeing them here in the US dubious will never see full rifles they are machine guns manufactured after 1986 just even if that changes the British government isn't really all that interested in selling machine guns to American civilians so I would be shocked to ever see any quantity of l85 in the US on the market as for part kits I'd be slightly less shocked but still very surprised I don't think the British government is interested again in putting tho in the PR of putting those into the hands of civilians they could that the British have a semi a manually operated version of the sa80 the l98 I think it's either a 1 or a 2 now that they legally could sell in on the British civilian market as well as the US civilian market and they don't and I think that's a conscious decision on their part and as a result I think they would destroy the guns before they would sell them as surplus in the u.s. of course what they would be doing is selling the guns as surplus they would come in through a importer in the US who then chop them into parts kits to comply with US law but smooth point because I don't think he'll ever happening and last question is from Jim who says with all the traveling that you've been doing have you considered taking us on the tour of some relevant locations in other cities I think it would be interesting to get your take on for example an actual World War one battlefield historical outside places the answer Jim is yes not only have i given some thought to that i have actually done some of it although as of the recording of this video you probably well i know for a fact you haven't seen it i recently took a trip into europe and one of the things I did there was actually spend an entire day at the Ypres battlefield or rather around the various Ypres battlefield in Belgium and I recorded a bunch of video there I have some video of the Menin Gate ceremony that we'll be publishing as well as some tours I did some walkthrough video of a German trench system a british trench system a belgian trench system some video on some bunkers a lot of cool stuff out there and that video will actually be coming to in range TV because I think it's kind of more appropriate there where we are talking about more warfare and its implications where Forgotten weapons is more specifically focused on firearms specific firearms so if you are interested in that type of content I would strongly suggest that you check out in range TV there's always a link in the description text of every forgotten weapons video to take you over there that is a collaborative project with myself and my friend Karl kisara so that's where you'll be seeing those videos don't know exactly when we'll start publishing some of that Ypres battlefield stuff but probably sooner rather than later so keep an eye out for that as always these questions have been submitted by some of the folks who contribute to support forgotten weapons through patreon if you enjoy what you see here I would greatly appreciate a donation buck a month is all I ask and that contribution goes in incredibly long way towards allowing me to maintain the channel the volume of content that I'm able to put out and especially now having met a couple of major fundraising goals I'm able to do quite a bit of traveling so you will be seeing some video coming up from a number of different European collections some really cool guns that we can see in Europe that just simply don't exist here in the United States and it's thanks to patreon that I'm able to keep doing that so thanks to all of you guys and thanks to everyone for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 750,455

Keywords: q&a, question, answer, forgotten weapons, 1917 enfield, 1903 springfield, surplus guns, dumb decisions, french rifle, bar, 1918 bar, gas inpingement, ar15, stoner, 6.5 arisaka, scout rifle, jeff cooper, l85a2, rimfire cartridge, gain twist, rifling, rifling explained, 6.5 creedmore, 6.5 carcano, 6.8 spc, 6.5 grendel, mccollum, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, history, development

Id: wrx8Ar6bWOw

Length: 65min 34sec (3934 seconds)

Published: Tue May 16 2017