Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, I am here today at the National
Firearms Centre, part of the Royal Armouries in Leeds, UK. And I'm here courtesy of ARES,
Armament Research Services. And we are taking a look at an interesting
side note to the British SA80 service rifle story, and that is carbines, or as they would say over here, "carbines". I have three here today, and these are pretty
much all three patterns that ever existed. We have an original first version from 1989. We have a second version from 1994, and
neither of these were ever seriously adopted. And then we have the current version, the L22A2. Interesting thing to note, there was never an L22A1,
just the A2 version. And we'll get to why in a moment. Now when these were first developed the idea was ... In fact what's interesting, when these were
first developed the idea was that the L85 rifle would replace both the SLR, the FAL, and also
the Sterling submachine gun in British military use. The idea was being a bullpup rifle it was short enough to
do the duties of both of those previously accepted guns. That was part of the idea of adopting it
is that it would simplify the logistics because you'd no longer need two
separate guns, you'd have one for both roles. But some people were looking at it and they realised,
"We could make a very compact carbine version of the gun, and use it for things like armoured vehicle
crews, helicopter crews, that sort of thing." And so they put this gun together.
They actually used the rear butt grip, the rear monopod grip,
from a light support weapon. In fact interestingly, all of these were actually
built from light support weapon receivers as well. The LSW had a lot of teething issues, and a lot of them
were not actually put into service or were torn apart. And a lot of the receivers ended up in carbines. At any rate, this was developed
in '89, never really put into use. We'll take a look at the gas system and the
modifications in just a moment. But before we do, this is a version that was put together later in '94. And what's interesting about it is it's actually a
little bit longer, and it's a much simpler gun to make. It has fewer specialised custom carbine-only parts to it. But in '94 they were still unable to get this adopted in
any format. People just weren't that interested in them. Finally, after HK had been contracted to
fix basically, to redesign, redevelop the standard rifle and light support weapon,
HK also put together a version of the carbine. Now the layout has gone back
to the very original 1989 design. It's quite short here, although it still has a remarkably
long barrel because it is still a bullpup type design. And this is now the A2 pattern
with all of the HK upgrades. This actually was adopted, and
because it was the first one adopted, well, the designation was made as the A2 because
it contains all of the standard L85A2 upgrades. So it would simply be confusing to
have referred to it as a Mark I or an A1. Let's go ahead and take a closer look at the mechanics
of these, and how they differ from the standard rifles. So here's our very first version. You'll notice it's kind of awkward,
the barrel doesn't have to be this long. But because your ... rear grip with the trigger is here, you
have to have enough space to have a front hand on the gun, and then that kind of dictates where the muzzle
has to be. And then because it is so close, in order to avoid getting a lot of muzzle blast
on your hand or potentially muzzling the gun when you're trying to shoot it, they added this
long extension here that holds the pistol grip. And that's to protect the firer's hand. Of course the blast on these was pretty substantial,
although not as much as you would expect from a typical 5.56 of this length because this is a bullpup,
meaning that the barrel does come all the way back to here. So we do have like a 12 inch barrel on it. Still short, but it's not the 4 inch or so barrel
that you would normally expect from this design. Now you can see from the serial number this is
... experimental carbine number 1, by Enfield. This was by the way done after ... the Enfield production
plant had been bought out by British Aerospace, and it was a privatised company instead
of an actual government run armoury. In order to access the gas system for, say, the
required regular cleaning, you take out this cross pin. The head of that pin is recessed under here, in
fact the easiest way because it's tapered like that. you can actually grab it here and pull
it out. And we want it all the way out. At which point this top sheet metal cover simply lifts off,
and allows us access to the gas system components. Now this is a customised gas piston, it is quite a
lot shorter than a standard L85 or L86 gas piston. So it does require some specialised parts in
addition to this front assembly and the special barrel. That is something they would fix with the 1994 version. So the first version never got adopted. They went back
to the drawing board in '94 and came up with this version. Now this is a much simpler gun to manufacture, or it
ought to be. It is once again built on an LSW receiver. But then the front handguard here has been
replaced with a standard LSW front handguard. In fact you can see that moulded
right into it there on the right side. Now, this system actually has two gas blocks on it.
It also has a slightly non-standard gas piston. And that's because they had to move the gas block
slightly farther back to have reliable operation. You didn't want it right out at the end of
the muzzle, they moved it back to here. But then there's an additional gas block, basically
a dummy gas block, there's no gas port in it. But the same part is put here at the very front end
with a dovetail for a front sight, should you want that. As with all of the other carbines (or "carbines"),
these do have an optics mounting rail on them, and ... that is definitely the
better way to shoot one of these. The optic gives you much more accuracy than a
pair of iron sights with this very short sight radius. You can see here this gun has been built to standard
A1 spec. We've got this large plastic trigger on it, the magazine release is unshielded. And while this would also have the potential
issue of dropping magazines unintentionally, one of the other problems
that existed with the carbines was that they were often expected to
be fired from the hip at very close range. And that was difficult to do, because you did run the risk of
the bolt handle hitting your arm and causing a malfunction. So if you wanted to shoot these from the hip, you had to be
a little bit cognisant of exactly how you were holding the gun. Now the final version, which actually
was adopted, is an HK built gun. This is, like I said, the L22A2, and it
goes back to the original 1989 pattern. It's this guy, rebuilt by HK basically. So we have the shorter barrel. And in this case what they have
done is instead of making a stamped steel handguard piece, they've actually made a large
aluminium casting or machining here. That incorporates a front sling swivel, as well
as a short piece of Picatinny rail down here, to which has been attached
an HK vertical front grip. The trigger has this rear bevelled wedge,
just like an A2 standard trigger. And then to access the gas system
we have a nice simplified system here. There's a little finger cutout
right here on this top cover, and that simply pops open. It's held
by spring tension by this little guy. And underneath you have the whole
gas system accessible for cleaning. Here you can pretty clearly see the difference
in overall length, it's only about 2 inches. But when you have a gun this small,
2 inches can make a difference, so. Especially when you're trying to cram it into a tank,
or armoured vehicle, or an Apache helicopter. [ sub by sk cn2 ]
