Ruger's M16 Alternative: the Select-Fire AC-556

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on forgottenweapons.com i'm ian mccollum and i'm here today at morphe's taking a look at a ruger kac556 this was bill ruger's attempt to get military and police and security contracts for what was essentially a select fire version of his mini 14 rifle the mini 14 was introduced in 1973 and it was a little bit too late to really compete for say a u.s military contract there's also some question as to whether the gun was really quite rugged enough to have passed those tests and beaten the m16 but it is a theoretical possibility at any rate ruger would sell that rifle for a couple years while working on a select fire model which requires a completely different fire control group and actually involves a different casting for the receiver which we'll take a look at in a minute and he released this onto the well not the commercial market so much but the international security market in 1979 he would get a few small clients for it um these were actually relatively popular with a lot of smaller police agencies especially agencies that were looking for weapons that were technically comparable to the m16 which is to say select fire or full auto 556 but didn't quite look as scary or military the ruger has this very friendly neighborly looking wood stock and that actually made a big difference to a lot of police agencies and that was a major source of ac 556 purchases however there were a couple large military contracts as well or a couple small military contracts sorry the royal bermuda regiment apparently bought 500 of them the u.s state department bought some of them the biggest of these was actually sale to the french the french crs or company or republican security who do uh they do a lot of public security uh riot control that sort of um work they purchased uh ruger ac556s and ultimately contracted to manufacture guns in france under the name of musketon amd which is there are a few variations differences between that and the original ruger mini 14 or ac556 and that's the subject for a future video when i can get my hands on an amd but suffice to say the french police agencies actually came to a good working relationship with ruger and they would buy essentially converted mini 14s and they would also buy a variety of revolvers based on ruger revolver designs so uh just for a little bit of nomenclature's sake what we have here is a kac556 the leading k indicates that it is made of stainless steel without that it indicates a blued steel gun this has an 18 and a half inch barrel the other option that was available was a 13 inch barrel typically paired with a folding stock that got the designation ac556f for folding or kac556f if it was stainless steel now there are some serious mechanical differences between this and a regular mini 14. the action is identical it's a short stroke m1 carbine style tap it gas piston um the rotary two lug locking on the bolt is identical however the fire control mechanism and the receiver itself are different so let's take a close look at that ruger as a company never offered these on the civilian market although it would have been perfectly legal to do so they instead prefer to only offer them to police and military agencies what we have in here right now is a 20 round magazine which is what ruger sold with their semi-auto mini 14s with the ac556 they did also introduce and offer a 30 round magazine of the same basic design which they opted not to sell to the civilian market they're of course perfectly legal to have now the place where we're going to see a visible difference on this gun compared to the mini 14 is the back end of the receiver so of course it's actually marked 556 instead of mini 14 and then it's got this three position selector switch on it so the top position is one the middle position is three and the bottom position is a little harder to see down there uh and the 556 actually has a three round burst as well as an unlimited full auto option now there's a little bit of funkiness with the three-round burst this is a ratchet-based mechanism and we'll take a look inside in just a moment um but it does not reset automatically so the ratchet is always counting rounds and you know even if you're in full auto or semi-auto so when you go to fire a burst the first time you really have no idea whether it will be one two or three rounds because that that counter is incrementing every time the rifle is fired in any mode after you fire the first burst it will reset and your next burst will be three rounds as long as you hold the trigger down for the whole burst if you let go of the trigger early and fire only one or two rounds and then release the trigger and go to fire another burst your second burst will only be the remainder of the first three round burst before the ratchet counter resets clear is mud all right let's take this apart all right the first step on disassembly is make sure the gun is cocked and empty of course and then set it to semi-auto don't disassemble this if it's not in semi-auto or you will break something now i'm going to use a punch here to give me some leverage this opens up just like an m1 garand or obviously a mini 14 and i can slide the fire control group out there are some extra bits on here compared to a mini 14. then i can just pop the stock the action out of the stock you can see we've got some extra bits let's start by taking a quick look at the inside of the receiver of course we have the selector switch on the back here and what that's going to do is simply rotate this lug forward and back you'll see what that does in a moment this piece here is what would typically be called the safety sear or the auto seer what it does is ensure that the the rifle doesn't fire out of battery and it doesn't have hammer follow so if you're holding the trigger down this lever prevents the gun the hammer from dropping unless this is pushed into the downward position which it's currently in actually this goes down that goes up when the bolt is open this spring pushes this lever up up at the front and you can see the difference right there so when firing in full auto uh the whole thing is cocked and the the sear in the fire control mechanism is released because you're holding the trigger down but the hammer doesn't actually drop until the bolt gets to there which means that the locking logs are fully in battery right back here and it's safe to fire now if we compare our ac556 receiver to a standard mini 14 receiver you'll see that there are a couple subtle differences the ac556 has more space inside the receiver back on this corner where the mini 14 is rounded forward you can also see on this angled surface it's shorter on the ac 556 because the opening in the receiver is a little bit wider at the back and that's to accommodate the extra full auto parts in the fire control group what that means as well is that you cannot simply change a mini 14 to an ac556 by swapping fire control parts because the ac 556 fire control parts will not fit in the semi-auto receiver in addition just for reference sake the same is true with the stocks this is our ac 556 stock this is a plain semi-auto mini 14 stock you can see the mini 14 stock has much less material removed you can't fit an ac556 receiver uh into a plain mini 14 stock you can put the semi-auto into the full auto stock not that that really does anything for you but mostly i say this as a caution if you have an ac556 and you are looking for a replacement stock perhaps you want the wood stock or the folding stock make sure that you get an ac556 style one that has all of the inletting otherwise your fancy machine gun will not fit in your new stock all right now fire control groups here's our plane semi-auto mini 14 looks just like an m1 garand here is our ac 556 fire control stop fire control unit which has these extra movie bits which are going to this is your selector lever in effect this guy right here is the three round burst counter and then we have some extra hardware at the back so let's take a look at how this actually works one of the neat things about the mini 14 and ac 556 is that i can actually assemble the fire control group to the receiver without the stock being in place which makes it really cool and easy for me to show you how it works right off the bat you can see here this is why you don't try to assemble the gun with the selector switch anywhere other than semi-auto if i have it in three round bursts there and i try to put this together you can see what's going to happen there these pins are going to bend these sheet metal parts ruger stopped supporting these guns at the factory for any reason whatsoever for any problem whatsoever in 2009 so if you damage one of these today you have to find a gunsmith familiar with them to send it to to fix because ruger never sold full auto parts on the civilian market as spare parts and they don't service the guns themselves anymore so be very careful leave that in semi-auto and then when you assemble it we'll make sure this is all the way back and then now when i assemble it these pieces just lock nicely together there we go so this is semi-auto none of these parts are interacting or doing anything because it's semi-auto okay now i want to switch over to just the fire control group to show you this a little bit better so right in there are the gear teeth that do the counting when i pull the trigger this whole thing is connected to the trigger itself so that's going to drop down and when it drops down that little tooth on the hammer will interact with those cam those lugs on the gear and they will cause this to cycle uh incrementally so when i pull the trigger and recock the hammer this is affect the effect of the gun cycling this rotates now this would be the last shot of our burst and the gun would not fire anymore because this isn't going to be able to do anything so now i'm going to release the trigger now we'll start a new three round burst so pull the trigger that's going to come forward and it will increment one position right there when it cycles and then this pin is held by our safety sear here when this gets pulled up which is to say the bolt is fully locked that drops the hammer that fires our second round when it comes back when the bolt cycles it's going to increment us to position number two this is again going to pull up when the bolt goes forward it's going to fire a second time and then that is going to come back that increments us to position three and now when this pulls up it lifts into this little cutout which means it's not actually pulling this up and it's not releasing the hammer so that is how you get a three round burst now that you've seen the three round burst this will make more sense i think so in semi-auto you can see that these parts aren't interacting with the cam wheel at all so in three round burst mode they are so right here this would be this is on round number two of a burst so if we set it to a burst and fire it we'll get one more round and then and then just like that we're in the end of burst cut out and no more firing now if i move this to full auto there's first there's a full auto now this leg is going far enough that it doesn't even notice if it's on a cutout it will always continue to fire the burst the burst counting wheel is not going to stop it after three rounds and so that's how the full auto system works all right now we can put this back together which is a pretty simple affair stock goes in the front and it's going to drop in right there and then just to reiterate always make sure the selector switch is on semi these parts are all the way back this one's vertical and then and of course the safety is down and then we can gently there we go that goes in never force these things in fact that's a good rule of gun assembly and disassembly in general never force it if you're forcing it you're probably doing something wrong anyway now that this is together a couple other quick little things to touch on the ac556 uh got a flash hider on it which the regular mini 14 did not and it also had a front sight block that included a bayonet light so this could take a standard usgi m7 ban out the same one that would fit on an m16 and that was just kind of done for military purposes i don't know how many people would actually need the bayonet on on their ac 556 but if you want it to be a military rifle that's kind of difficult need to have that having initially introduced these guns in 1979 ruger continued to sell them until 1999 so a 20-year life span i wouldn't call them a commercial failure but obviously ruger was hoping for a major military contract and he never did get that however the guns certainly paid for themselves and made the company a nice profit um they have historically been like the cheap option for a a registered transferable 556 rifle in the united states compared to an m16 uh typically historically at something like one-third the cost of a registered m16 of kind of any generic type so they're a pretty interesting rifle in that regard i have never actually fired one myself so we're going to go ahead and do that we're going to take this out to the range tomorrow and try it out so stick around if you're interested in seeing that thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 282,506

Rating: 4.9757977 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, ruger, ac556, kac556, ac556f, kac556f, m16, colt, armalite, 3 round burst, burst, law enforcement, security, bermuda, mousqueton amd, france, French, full auto, automatic, stainless, collector, transferrable, collectible, 223, 5.56mm, selector

Id: U1SsVahzSp8

Length: 15min 8sec (908 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Das_Sikorsky]

The store I work in used to have a transferable one of these. They're "cheap" as far as machine guns go. Anywhere between $10k-$14k. I never got to shoot it unfortunately.

[u/Nihilistic88]

The A-Team had these, their rifles had a pistol grip and a folding stock.

[u/HulkSmash-1967]

Dream gun