Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here again today at the
Royal Armouries' National Firearms Centre in Leeds, courtesy of ARES, Armament Research Services. And today, we're taking a look at the next
step in the development of the British L85 rifle. What we have today are the first pre-production
prototypes of what would become the L85. So these don't actually have any
sort of formal numerical designation. These ... two in particular are examples from
what was called the "double 0" prototype series. And between 1972 and 1974
they built 12 of these rifles, some infantry weapons, the
short standard infantryman's rifle, and some light support weapons,
note the longer barrel and the bipod. These weapons all would have been issued with optical sights,
this one doesn't have one, but the infantry weapon here does. Like I said they built 12 of these.
One of them was actually in ... 5.56, all the rest were in the 4.85x49 cartridge
which the British had standardised on. In penetration and power testing that 4.85 was
quite suitable for the infantry rifle, and just barely met the requirements for the light support weapon.
And that was a trade-off they were willing to accept. So, originally they had 20 round
magazines for the infantry rifle. They had 30s for the light support weapon, but
of course these magazines are interchangeable, and there are 20s in both of these guns right now. These rifles were very heavily
based on the Armalite 180. But what's unfortunate, and we kind
of get the very seeds of the problems that would exist all the way
through this rifle's lifespan, is that the design team behind these at Enfield was made
up of people who hadn't actually designed rifles before. In fact, believe it or not, of the
26 people on the design team, a grand total of none of them had fired
a rifle before engaging in this project. This was viewed as simply an engineering project.
Which is fine, it is an engineering project, but there is in firearms, as with every other
specific area of engineering, there are a ton of small little lessons that you
learn over the course of a career. Knowing little details: how do firing pins work? How
do extractors work? The basics of what makes firearms. Specific engineering tasks from cars
or tractors or elevators, or anything else. And the Enfield design team
didn't have any of that experience, and that is ultimately what will cause
most of the problems with these guns. Now the development would continue for a couple
of years into the late 1970s with basically this design. It would be only after NATO ammunition trials in '78 and '79 that
... the SA80 was moved from 4.85 to standard NATO 5.56 calibre. And all the guns before that are this
like 8 year development process. And what would happen is, while the
project leader remained on the whole time, most of the other design team were cycling in and
out between different positions and different jobs. They would leave and new people would come in. And there was a lot of ... regular changes
to a lot of the small features of the gun. Things like: where are the sling swivels? ... Do we have a push button ... safety or a lever safety? Do we have a push button fire control lever
or do we have a lever fire control lever? Do we have the magazine
release on the side or on the back? Kind of the the outside, not quite aesthetic
features, but the less important details of the rifle were the ones that everybody was focusing on. Partly
because they were the ones that were more obvious, and I think because none of the design team
really had the expertise to properly address the main functional foundation of the gun.
As I said it was taken primarily from the AR-180. We'll go ahead and pull one of these apart and show you
the internals, which are basically straight out of an AR-180. So disassembly process for this is
going to start by removing the magazine. We'll take a closer look at the
magazine catches in a moment. Slightly longer than an AR magazine
because the 4.85 cartridge was slightly longer. Once the magazine is out and the rifle
is cleared, there is actually only one pin that has to be removed. It's right here,
and it holds the butt plate on the gun. And it's stiff. So we can pull that out. It is a captive pin, which is
nice, it's going to stay there. And then the butt plate comes out under spring tension. This is our butt plate and end buffer assembly. That's
what prevents the bolt from flying out the back of the gun. A dual guide rod system, there's a recoil spring on each
one. And this is basically a direct copy from the AR-180. And then we can pull the bolt back to this position, at which point we can pull out the
charging handle. And then the bolt slides out the back. So this is the gun field stripped, which is
actually pretty slick. That's a good system here. If we take a closer look at the bolt, you can see that it is a multi-lug rotating bolt, straight out of an AR-180. This gives it the potential to be quite accurate. Multiple lugs tend to contribute to accuracy,
and lugs at the front tend to contribute to accuracy. The idea is if you have quite a large
number of them all locking up simultaneously, you get a much more repeatable lock up
than you would with only one or two lugs. You'll notice this bolt has had a chunk milled out of the
side to reduce its weight. It's been marked "trials use only". presumably that was part of a later experiment.
A little bit of material removed here as well. And just one interesting feature to look at here is note
the cutaway in the bolt where the extractor goes in. This I think is kind of an excellent example of a design team
that is based on engineers without specific firearms experience. This is the sort of thing that one
would never normally see in a firearm, because you don't want to cut that much
material away from behind your locking lugs. That's leaving these lugs largely
unsupported, and that's a really bad idea. But if you don't have firearms experience you might
not recognise that, you might look at it and go, "Well the numbers add up, should be fine." When that's really not fine for a firearm. We do have a cam pin over here, so in
its rearward position the bolt is locked. When you fire, a short-stroke gas piston
is going to hit the bolt carrier right here. The bolt stays locked, the ... carrier goes back to there, and then in this angled track the cam pin forces the bolt to rotate, which unlocks it. And then
at this point the whole thing can continue travelling backwards. Got the firing pin back there, which is spring-loaded. Accessing the gas piston itself is also quite easy.
There's a spring clip on the front of the handguard. We pop that up and off, and then
the handguard is made in two pieces. This (there we go), that comes off. There are our two halves of the handguard. And here is our short-stroke gas piston. So when you fire, this pushes back. You can see it right up there
at the ... front of the chamber. So that piston is going to come out,
and it's going to go only about that far. So that's a short-stroke gas piston. After the bolt moves that far, it travels
the rest of the way just on inertia. This gas system is largely copied from the German G43,
which is largely copied from the Soviet SVT-40. This is a very well proven gas system. As long as you
build it right, this is a very reliable and very good system. Overall, the early version of the
SA80 is a simple and effective gun. Now the things that we would see later on that
would lead to major problems for it are ingress of foreign material into the action. So the vent holes up here, as well as the vent holes on the
handguard, allowed dirt to get in and access the gas system. And because this rifle had a fixed charging handle
that had this continuous open slot that it required, they would see problems with material getting
in through this slot and fouling the locking lugs. That would be probably the single major failure
of the rifle over its entire length of service. And so we'll look ... later [at] some of the things
that were done to ameliorate that problem. Alright, so let's take a look at some of
the details of these two prototypes here. This is number 001, it is the first of the first
prototype series. Let's look at the controls. Now the safety on this series is a push button (which
grabs my glove), right there, so you have safe and fire. There's our serial number. 4.85mm, and it is number one. The fire selector is back here. Now this was
a rifle on which safe and fire was one control, and then what type of fire was a separate control. So this gave you the option for semi-automatic,
full-automatic, or three round burst. And to make sure that you didn't forget which was which, it
was actually conveniently marked on the back of the receiver. A is automatic, that's automatic. R is repetition,
which is semi-automatic in British military parlance, which is right there in the middle. And then
3 round burst is all the way over, like that. Remember on the Sten gun you'd had a push button selector
like this, ... and also the EM-2 had a push button selector. So this wasn't something totally out of the
ordinary for British firearms at the time. Lastly, here on the right side of the weapon is the
magazine release. And this is an AR-180 type of release, which doesn't want to come out, there we go. So there's a blade on this push button,
and that blade locks into this slot. If you have an AR-180 you'll notice that slot
looks exactly the same as your 180 mags. This is a straight-in magazine, push in and it clicks. However, this was going to be
subject to some development. Now, as these rifles developed, they started
making changes to a lot of these controls. So here (this is actually an LSW,
a Light Support Weapon), the second batch of rifles had a single zero prefix
serial number. So the first batch were double zero, second batch is single zero
and that's what we have here. And here we have a different set of controls. Now our fire selector is back here. The 3 round burst has been
dropped entirely, and we have a lever to go from repetition to automatic. (And a rather stiff lever at that.) The magazine catch has been
changed to this L-shaped lever. Which works kind of the same way, but it is a nose in, rock
back magazine now. This is a pretty awkward actually type, because you kind of have to push the
lever in order to get the magazine in like that. Now the safety remains the same. The safety is still a push button over the trigger, that
was less controversial, but we'll see that change as well. Now two other things I want to
point out about this single zero series. First off, they actually had a cheek
rest, it's a piece of plastic here. And that's so that in very cold or very hot weather
you don't either burn your face on the side of the gun, or have your face freeze to it. Both of
which would be awkward and uncomfortable. Now I've got this one partially disassembled here. ... It's another single zero,
this is a right-handed gun, single zero 1. So you'll see we have the L-shaped mag
release and we have the lever fire selector. On this series of rifles they also made some
modifications to the receiver to allow you to remove the fire control mechanism from the bottom. This is
something that would carry over to the final production guns. And it is definitely an improvement, because it
actually gives you access to the trigger group. So now we have two take down pins here, push them both out. With those pins both out, then we can pull the fire control mechanism off.
So now I can show you that as well. Up at the front of the gun is basically just the trigger. We'll put that on fire and that allows the trigger
to pull. And you can see we have this long connecting rod right there, going all the way back past the
magazine well to the fire control group. Back here we have our hammer. We have a magazine hold open right there, so the follower
pushes that up which locks the bolt to the rear, right there. ... When you pull the trigger the hammer comes up,
we can re-cock that. There is actually an auto trip here. So when the bolt goes forward into battery it pushes this
trip down, which allows the hammer to release, and fire. When the bolt comes back it's going to drop that. However, until you trip the auto-sear here, I can pull the trigger all I want. You can see right down
there the sear is coming out and releasing the [hammer]. But the auto trip is still holding the
[hammer] in place. When that trips, the [hammer] is going to come up just
slightly. Now it's being held by the sear. And when I'm not holding on to it, it will come up. We have a plunger type hammer spring right there. This is the same fire control mechanism that was in
the earlier guns, just now we have easy access to it. Now we have a third iterative development. This is a B series gun,
which I believe was done in preparation for NATO cartridge trials. The British were going to be presenting the 4.85
as the ideal cartridge to replace 7.62 NATO. Now that wouldn't ultimately work, NATO
would choose the Belgian SS109 cartridge. But in this development process we can see
another set of controls that were tried out by Enfield. So now we still have our lever fire
selector here. Three round burst is still gone. However, the magazine release is now
sort of an AK style. It is a nose in, rock back, lever at the back of the magazine.
That is actually a pretty darn good system. And in fact, it's probably the best of the
magazine retention systems that Enfield tried. One of the problems they would ultimately have with
the rifles is an exposed magazine catch on the outside. It would make it pretty easy to unintentionally drop
magazines if you press the rifle up against web gear or clothing. And a lever like that would
have eradicated that problem. At the front here we see that instead of the
push button safety we now have a lever safety. Fire and safe. And being a right-handed gun this is actually also a
pretty slick system. It drops nicely under the thumb. There were concerns that this ... lever was actually unintentionally
pushed out of the way by a left-hander's firing knuckle. And this was done when they were still actually
making left and right-handed versions of the gun. Ultimately, they would drop that and only
make the gun in the right-handed configuration, which would have obviated
the problem with this safety. But that's a pretty big paddle there actually. So this was yet another short-lived design iteration. The whole time that they're doing this, the
rifle has ... fundamental functional problems. But they weren't really being discovered because of the way that
the testing was being done on these in rather controlled environments. So it's unfortunate that they spent more
time fiddling with little things like the controls, and less time looking at what would become
the fundamental problems with the rifle. Now it is also on this iteration of the
gun that the first dust cover was added. This is slightly smaller than the dust cover they would
end up using on the final product, but we do have it there. That simply provides a way to keep gunk from
getting into that open charging handle slot. Doesn't want to stay closed for me right
now, but remember this is a prototype, and I'm sure it did work when they first built it. One of the ideas during production was to have
varying lengths of butt plate to suit different shooters. I believe the idea here was that they wanted to
have one standard mounting point for the optic, and then shooters of different height
would use different thicknesses of butt pad to accommodate for having the right eye relief. Ultimately what they ended up doing was getting rid
of this idea, and having multiple mounting locations so you could move the SUSAT optic
forward and back and fit it that way. At the same time that they were making
all these changes to the individual weapon, they were making the same sorts of changes to the light
support weapon, as well as a couple other experiments. This particular rifle is of that second pattern. It is
a single zero series gun, it's a light support weapon. And it is an experiment with a ... quick-change
barrel specifically. So if we look at this side you can see that we have a rock in but lever released magazine. We have a lever selector fire selector. It's also interesting to point out that this particular gun fires
from a closed bolt on semi-auto and an open bolt on full-auto. So I've got that set to "R", that's semi-auto right now. Cycle the bolt and it stays [closed].
If I switch this to automatic, it now locks open when I pull the bolt back.
So this was yet another developmental experiment. Do they want the ... light support weapons to be
open bolt or closed bolt or a combination of both? Just ... another element they were experimenting
with. Now we'll leave that locked open. We have this lever here on the bottom
of the receiver. When I push that forward it's going to unlock the barrel,
and drop the bipod block, like that. Now I can take this wire handguard, pop it up, that gives me a carry
handle effectively. And I can use that to pull the barrel out of the gun. One of the problems they were having with the light
support weapon concept was that it overheated very quickly. The two things that they looked at to accommodate
that were firing full-auto from an open bolt, because having the bolt lock open would allow
much better air circulation through the barrel. And it would also eliminate the
danger of cook-offs, because, of course, with an open bolt gun there isn't a
cartridge sitting in the chamber to cook-off. They also briefly experimented
with a detachable barrel like this. This is actually a pretty remarkably efficient
detachable barrel, which I'm impressed to see. You'll notice the gas block is built into the
barrel, so it is a complete barrel assembly. But unlike something like an M60, the mass of
the gas system built into the barrel is quite light and it does make sense to
have that on the barrels. To reinstall the barrel we are just going to slide it in there. Here on top we have to make sure that the
gas ... plug goes into the gas piston like that. And then we need to push the
bipod legs up as we install the barrel, so that this locking lug goes into that catch. Now the easy way to do this, which is not really
viewable on camera which is why I'm not doing that, is to have the gun resting on its bipod so that
you can use pressure on the gun to pull this up. Since I want to show you, we'll do it like that. And now you heard it click, the
barrel's locked in place and ready to fire. You can push the carry handle
down like that to get it out of the way. It is interesting to note that the bipod legs here can only
fold 90 degrees, because there are fixed stops on them here. However, there are bipod leg cutouts
in the bottom of the handguard. There are two possibilities going on. I suspect you can take the
screw off at the front here, and rotate the bipod around quite easily. In fact I expect you can do that with most of them, all the LSWs,
so you can have the bipod go whichever direction you want. However, because this bipod mounting
block has to fold down to change the barrel, it would be awkward to try and change the barrel
out with the legs folded back into these recesses. This is one of the developmental guns
in 4.85mm. It is a left handed gun, so you'll notice all the bits are on
this side, and this has a lever safety. But what's funny is while it is deliberately a left-handed
action that can only be fired from the left shoulder, it still has a safety on the left side. If you're
going to make this a left-handed gun, what you would want to do is flip the safety
over and put it on this side under the thumb. This safety is actually remarkably well
designed to fit under the thumb for a right-hander, and you'd think on the lefty guns you'd put it on
the left side. Instead they left the safety alone. And then one of the complaints that arose in
troop trials was if a left-hander was shooting this, they had this tendency to just slightly bump the
safety with the knuckle of their finger, as I just have. Once you do that the gun will no longer
fire. If it's all the way in fire it works, but you only have to bump it a little
bit like that and ... it locks the gun. That would have been very easily fixable
had they decided that they wanted to actually incorporate left-handed
guns, but it wasn't done. Thanks to the UK Defence Academy,
I actually have a chance to try shooting one of the Enfield Weapon
Systems, or EWS, rifles today. This is, I believe, an XL64 infantry weapon,
chambered for the 4.85mm cartridge. So, be really interesting to see how this
compares to a 5.56 L85, the final service version. Let's give it a try. And we are in repetition, so semi-auto only. That's really nice to shoot. That might be just a tiny bit more
powerful feeling than 5.56, but not much. That's a really comfortable cartridge. Yeah, this is still really nice to shoot. The optics maybe not so good as some stuff that
they have around today, but the gun is fantastic. Alright, I have just a couple
rounds left in the magazine here, so we're going to flip the fun switch from some fun to
lots of fun, and see what this is like with multiple shots. I suspect it's not going to be that much
different than full-auto in a 5.56, but let's see. Pretty easy to fire two round little
controlled bursts too, that's quite nice. It has been said that British bullpup rifles from
the EM-2 through the L85A1 (leaving out the A2), in fact actually progressively got
worse as their development progressed. And there's kind of a little bit of truth to that I think.
This, the XL60 series, is a really nice rifle. That 4.85 cartridge, ... obviously from this experience
I can't comment on its ballistic effectiveness. But it's very comfortable to shoot, it's controllable in
full-auto, at least the little bit that I've been able to try here. And the rifle itself is light, svelte, and very nice. My only complaint might be ... the SUSAT
optic here, which has a very short eye relief. You know what? Give them some credit,
in the 1960s, 1970s this wasn't a bad optic. And my understanding is these
things are like totally bombproof. It may not be the most finessed,
perfect optic, but you can't break it, and that goes a really long
way in a military service optic. So overall, fantastic rifle. Comfortable to shoot. Would
have been a great choice to adopt, but they continued from this on to
the XL70 series, and then the XL85. Thank you guys for watching,
I hope you enjoyed the video. This is the second in a series on
the L85 history and development. So if you're interested in it, make sure to stay tuned
to ForgottenWeapons.com for the subsequent series. And of course if you didn't see the first episode, check the
notes below the description text, you'll find a link to the first video. Now these rifles are all in the Royal Armouries
Collection at the National Firearms Centre in Leeds. If you are a small arms researcher you can make an appointment to visit the collection and see these guns, although it is not open to the general public. And of course if you would like to see more detail on these particular
ones, make sure to check out Armament Research Services, where ... we will be posting high-resolution
pictures of all these guns as the videos go up. Thanks for watching. [ sub by sk cn2 ]
Always upvote Forgotten Weapons.
Not just for gun fans! He really goes into the details of how politics, marketing, economics, and engineering all mix together to create a finished product.
Gun Jesus, always a good watch.
Is the concern real for the cut-away mentioned here: https://youtu.be/KhwN099XTKg?t=6m20s