SA80 History: XL60 Series in 4.85mm

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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.

👍︎︎ 29 👤︎︎ u/vonHindenburg 📅︎︎ May 10 2017 🗫︎ replies

Gun Jesus, always a good watch.

👍︎︎ 12 👤︎︎ u/kmrst 📅︎︎ May 10 2017 🗫︎ replies

Is the concern real for the cut-away mentioned here: https://youtu.be/KhwN099XTKg?t=6m20s

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/copyrightisbroke 📅︎︎ May 11 2017 🗫︎ replies
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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 ]
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Channel: Forgotten Weapons
Views: 304,583
Rating: 4.978272 out of 5
Keywords: sa80, xl60, l85, l85a1, l85a2, enfield, xl60 series guns, armalite ar18, nato trials, prototype, rifle, assault rifle, british rifle, 4.85mm, history, new British rifle, Armament Research Services, lsw, xl64, xl65, pattern room, firing assault rifle, full auto, automatic rifle, slow motion, gun slow motion, development, enfield weapons system, ews rifle, quick change barrel, mccollum, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, forgotten weapons, cartridge, rsaf enfield
Id: KhwN099XTKg
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 26min 58sec (1618 seconds)
Published: Wed May 10 2017
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