[ Semiauto FAMAS F1 (MAS .223) ] <i>Bienvenue à hommes aux bien, je suis Ian,</i> and today, we are going to take a look
at <i>le Clairon</i>, the bugle, the FAMAS. This is the standard combat
rifle of the French Army for at least the next couple of
months I think at this point. These were originally adopted in 1978 by the
French military, and they are still in use today. Although they are actually in the final stages
of choosing a replacement for this weapon. So it seemed like a good idea to take a
look at this before it's completely gone. Because the FAMAS here is one of the very first
bullpups actually adopted by a major military power. Now, the very first one of
course was the British EM-2. Which was adopted for about 10
minutes, and then un-adopted, and never put into any substantial production. And then right about the same time as the FAMAS
was adopted, the Steyr AUG was also adopted. So those two came in ...
effectively simultaneously. So in addition to being a
bullpup action, meaning that the magazine and action are located
behind the trigger instead of in front of it, the FAMAS is also interesting because it
is actually a delayed-blowback 5.56 rifle. That's a pretty unusual setup to have. Specifically it's lever-delayed, which
is also a pretty unusual system to use. There are not many examples of
lever-delayed blowback rifles out there. So, we will take this apart in a few minutes and
we'll take a close look at exactly how this works. The upshot is it makes for a very simple rifle. There's no gas system to deal with,
the bolt only has a couple of parts in it. Four parts really, not counting little
things like the extractor and the ejector. And it makes for a very appealing
package for a military force. Now the French went with a bullpup
configuration because it allowed them to shorten the overall length of the rifle
without getting rid of barrel length. So the barrel is ... this long. In a normal rifle the end of the
stock would come way back to here. This lets you shorten it up. That
was seen as a good compromise ... because French troops are spending a lot
of time in vehicles, armoured cars, helicopters. This was the 1970s, we're
looking at a lot of mobile warfare. You don't have guys simply marching on
foot as much, or at least that was the theory. And giving them a nice short compact
rifle in a vehicle was a big advantage. Now despite that, they wanted to give it all of
the other benefits of a standard combat rifle. So there are actually a lot of features on this
thing. Obviously you can mount a bayonet. It was also designed to use rifle
grenades, two different types. There was a rifle grenade sight here,
which is missing from this one because this is a semi-auto
civilian sale FAMAS. It has a long-range sight, it has a close-range
sight, it has a setup for night sights. It can actually be converted from left to
right handed, which is a big advantage. Normally one of the major
trade-offs of a bullpup is that the shooter's face basically
covers the ejection port area. So if it's set to eject out the right, and
you try and shoot it as a left-hander, you're going to get a mouthful
of brass, very unpleasant. However the FAMAS, like the AUG at the same
time, is actually reasonably easy to convert. Can't do it on the fly, but you
don't need any extra parts to convert this thing from
left to right-handed shooting. It was equipped with a fire control
mechanism in the military gun that was single-shot, safe,
3 round burst and/or full-auto. It had a burst setting, and then it had a second
selector where you could deactivate the burst, which would turn the burst
setting into a full-auto setting. Now at this point the French Army
still had universal conscription. So the burst setting wasn't there because burst
is really a good idea with trained professionals. The burst setting was there
because they had a lot of totally untrained conscripts
being handed these rifles. And you didn't want them to set it to full-auto
and just spray bullets all over the place. If you can mechanically confine a
recruit to a 3 round burst in full-auto, you'll at least prolong the magazine. Speaking of the magazines, these
use a proprietary 25 round magazine. They do use the standard 5.56 NATO cartridge. But at the time France had to be a little different,
they kind of always had to be a little different, and in addition the 30 round NATO,
well, US standard magazines at the time, are in fact rather longer. And it was thought that maybe this would be too long
and get in the way when you were shooting prone. In addition, the French wanted to
design a cheaper disposable magazine. Now the disposable magazine
had been the concept with the US/STANAG/AR-15
magazine in the first place. But just as happened to the French also
happened to the US, the military got in and like the very moment the first magazine
was about to be thrown away because it had been emptied, someone decided, "Yo, wait a minute! That magazine
costs us like a dollar to make, and it's not totally useless yet. Let's just go
ahead and reload it and use it again." And so the disposable magazines very
quickly became reusable magazines. This ended up causing
problems in both armies, but I think a little bit more so in the French. Where the magazines, simply they
weren't originally built to last, and when you started using them over,
and over, and over, they'd wear out. So the magazines caused a
number of problems in these rifles. Like I said, these were
originally adopted in 1978. The original design process started in 1967,
so this spent quite a bit of time in development. Once it was adopted, it was adopted basically in
this configuration, this is called the FAMAS F1. And roughly 400,000 of these were manufactured. They are the standard ... rifle
still today of the French Army. However, in 1994 the French Navy
adopted an updated version, the FAMAS G2. Now the G2 has a number
of substantial changes. One of them is it has a full-hand trigger guard,
kind of like the Steyr AUG or the Israeli Tavor. Also, and more importantly, it
uses standard AR-15 magazines, which is a nice advantage. When you've got these mags, ... it may have made sense
for a national military, having interchangeable
magazines isn't that big a deal. But when you start doing a lot
of cooperative work with NATO, and when the original magazines
don't work all that well, it make sense to go to the
standard NATO magazine. The other big change from
the F1 to the G2 was the rifling. Now these were originally
made with a 1 in 12 twist. I don't want to get super technical
nerdy on the ammo here, but the 1 in 12 twist is only
good for lightweight bullets. Well, when this was designed
the NATO standard was a 55 grain bullet: short,
light, very high velocity. And this rifle works just fine with 55 grain. ... Well, almost fine, it
actually used a steel case. Because this is levered-delayed blowback,
there's a ... relatively high pressure when the cartridge is trying to extract. And a steel cased round dealt with
that pressure better than brass. These also have fluted chambers to also
ameliorate the problems of high extraction pressure. So the French had a couple of
tools in this rifle to deal with that, the steel case, the flutes. ... Well, NATO always used brass, but when NATO went to a heavier
62 grain ... semi armour-piercing bullet, these rifles kind of had trouble with that. The brass case wasn't as reliable for them, and now the 1 in 12 rifling is too slow of a
twist to adequately stabilise a heavier bullet. So 62 grain bullets don't
stabilise, they'll keyhole, and they're not particularly
accurate out of these guns. I have heard, but not totally really
confirmed, that the 62 grain bullets also have a slightly different pressure
curve, and they don't run as reliably. Barrel twist and case material aside, the bullet
weight may also contribute some problems. So the French had to continue to use their own
specific steel case 55 grain ammo with the F1 rifle. Now the Navy adopted G2 fixed that
problem, they went to I believe a 1 in 9 twist. ... I don't know for sure if they
had to make changes to the bolt. If they did, they did make them, because
the G2s do run just fine on 62 grain ammo. So the one other benefit that the French
were trying to get out of this bullpup concept is that when they adopted this rifle they used
it to replace not one rifle in service, but two. This was the official replacement
for both the MAS 49/56, which was a 7.5x54 calibre
semi-auto combat rifle. And they also used it to replace the MAT 49, which was their 9mm Parabellum
little blowback submachine gun. The idea was, "We can get an
intermediate calibre rifle in 5.56, make it a shorter rifle
than you typically get, and we can replace both sub guns and rifles." And they did, and it seems to have
done reasonably well in that role. Although you'd have to talk to some
French military vets to really get, I think, a notion for how satisfied they
were with it ... in bridging those two roles. As a bullpup? Well, most armies have
kind of abandoned the bullpup concept. It was popular for a little while but, like
the French, when people replace bullpups they tend to replace
them with standard rifles. ... The only advantage really that you get
with a bullpup is this short overall length, and there are a number of trade-offs
that you give up in exchange. One important one being you can't really use the
rifle ambidextrously without swapping around parts. You also typically have poor triggers in them, that's been addressed in some
modern bullpup concepts, but the FAMAS in particular has a
pretty darn heavy yuck trigger. You do also have issues
with clearing malfunctions. When it happens it's ... just not
quite as conducive to quick fixes. Actually both with malfunctions and reloads, so. There are people out there who practice enough
and can do everything super-fast on one of these. But you'll always have a lot more training time
involved to get to that point with a bullpup rifle than you do with one where
the magazine and the action are out here in front of the gun
easily in your field of view. And lastly of course I called this <i>le Clairon</i> in
the beginning, which is French for "the bugle". That name of course comes from
this big ol' carry handle up on top which does kind of make it look like a bugle. So, having chewed your ear off
on the background of this thing, why don't we go ahead and take this
apart because it's pretty cool inside. And ... like I said, this lever-delayed
blowback system is pretty unusual. Wow! I can actually even get it all in the camera
shot here because it is this short little bullpup. Let's start by taking a look
at a couple of the markings. So on the right side of the
magazine well we have MAS .223. This is technically the designation of this semi-auto
civilian version of the rifle, it is the MAS .223. MAS stands for <i>Manufacture
d'Armes de Saint-Étienne</i>. And serial number on this is 209B. It appears all of these guns
have a "B" suffix serial number, I'm not entirely sure with that indicates. And then on the left side we
have the rest of the markings. <i>Manufacture Nationale D'Armes De Saint Etienne,</i> so national arms factory of Saint-Étienne,
not that difficult to translate that. Made in France, and then imported by
Century Arms of St. Albans, Vermont. Now the magazine release for this guy is located
right here on the front of the magazine well. And the idea with these, as with many
military guns, is that you are retaining mags. So you're going to grab the mag,
push the button, pull the magazine out. And you can see this is definitely a distinct
magazine from the NATO STANAG ones. The bottom of this reinforcing
plate is your magazine catch. And then this little block on the
back is the ... over-insertion stop that hits on the back of the receiver here. So it's a straight push-in magazine. Something I find kind of ironic and humorous is a lot of people got really excited
about the Israeli Tavor having this super-fast magazine change option where you
could just push back with the back of your thumb. Which of course you can do just
as well on this FAMAS from 1978. The FAMAS is actually a
remarkably ambidextrous rifle. And part of that is the charging handle
located up here right on the top of the action. It does have a little lock hook, and it
is a reciprocating charging handle. Just grab that, slide locks back,
open and close the action. It is kind of nice that this is open to the
side. So you can remediate problems a little bit better than you could
with some other bullpup actions, because you do have access in there. Then we also have the folding bipod legs. To use these you pull out
slightly and then rotate down. They do only have this one length available,
these two rivets don't adjust anything. So you get the bipod height, or no bipod. The sight here is kind of an
interesting and creative idea. You have two flip down apertures. So we've got a large aperture
for close range shooting, and a small aperture for
more precise shooting. And you pick whichever one of them
you want to use and flip it up, like so. The range adjustment is down here. You have a basic 300 ... metre zero,
which you can then rotate to 500, or get it down a bit. Easier to do with the tip of a bullet. But you can see that it raises
and lowers the sight, right here. Now the front sight is just a little
round post, it is windage adjustable. But you have to take the
carry handle off to adjust it, so it's the sort of thing you
zero once and then leave alone. Now there's also this thing on
the front sight, which slides up and gives you a little [holder for a
tritium vial night sight on the military F1.] Let's take a look at how that
works with the rear sight. On the rear sight, if you open up both
of these peeps you get this gigantic like 7, 8mm probably, 3/8 of an inch, open tube. And that's actually intended
to be your night sight. So you can line up this
small front [tritium vial holder] with this big huge rear aperture. You get a lot of light transmission through it, and it allows you to use the iron
sights at night as well as possible. Then when you're not using them, this just folds
down behind the front sight and out of the way. So the safety selector is located
here in the front of the trigger guard. This position of course is safe, which makes it
pretty obvious that the rifle is not ready to shoot. And then originally you had a semi-auto on
one side, and a full-auto on the other side. On this civilian semi-auto version of the rifle,
both forward positions are semi-automatic. There is one other cool little just like
Swiss Army sort of gadget feature here. This is designed to be big
enough to use with a glove, but maybe not with a really big
glove, or maybe not with a mitten, or maybe not if you're wearing some
sort of giant NBC warfare biochem suit. So if you need to have
more space for the trigger, you can actually pull this off of its little peg, rotate the trigger guard around in front. It's got a little slot that it sits in. And now you can run the trigger with like an
entire whole-hand mitten should you need to. Lastly let's take a look at the bayonet. Unlike most bayonets, there is
no lug on the back to snap on. Instead what you do with this is you
actually lock it in place on the flash hider, between this tab in the front,
and this tab in the back. The rear tab is spring-loaded
to move out of the way. And this actually mounts
up on top of the barrel. So I'm going to slide the rear ring on,
and then at this point I depress that. ... This front lug does line up
with a notch in the flash hider. And then it locks on
with that lug in the back. A little bit rattly, but that's kind
of typical of most bayonet lugs. Alright, let's look at taking this thing apart. It's actually very simple, it's ... all pushpins. We have one pin that holds on
the ... carry handle assembly. So I'm going to push that pin out. It just comes free, it's not a captive pin,
which might have been a better idea. Then I can pull this forward, up, and off the rifle. It's kind of a little clumsy here because I've
got the sling tightened all the way down on it. Next up, we'll pull the magazine. And the next thing to come off
will be the rear buttstock assembly. Same thing, we have another pin here. Just push it through from this side. These are very much like HK pins, they have a little
wire spring at one end so they don't just fall out. There's that pin. And then this, this one's
a little stiffer. There we go. This is just a plastic housing. Actually ...
honestly kind of thin and flimsy feeling here. We'll set that aside. Now we have the trigger
assembly and the bolt to remove, and we have two more
push pins to do that with. So you can use the tip
of a projectile, a bullet. You can see they put a little
dimple in the middle for that. Or you can actually use one of the other
cross pins, so I'm going to push that in. ... These two pins are captive, so I'm
just going to pull it out to that point. And then there is my fire control group. This one's really simple,
the military ones have this somewhat more complicated ratcheting
gear system to give them a 3 round burst. This doesn't have to bother
with any of that nonsense. And then lastly we have the bolt.
This one is a little bit stiffer to use because it does have a
recoil spring working against it. The recoil spring is in this tube,
which is not a gas piston, this is just a hollow tube with a recoil
spring and to give you a charging handle. So what I want to do is
punch out this cross pin, which is what locks the
recoil spring onto the bolt. ... That's all the way out, now the bolt
just slides off the back of the receiver. Once we're down to this level you can see
some other interesting elements in there For example, the rear sight elevation adjustment. You can see how that works here, it's just ... an eccentric cam to push
the sight to different heights. So you'll notice the barrel profile changes
substantially at this locating block. That's because this is actually not the
barrel, this is just a tube over the barrel. The barrel is free floated in
here, which is a cool feature. You can see that it's not
touching this block right there. This lug is just to give something solid
for the charging handle to affix itself to. There is no actual locking shoulder in this
rifle, because it's a delayed blowback gun. And I'm sure someone's going to see that yellow
gunk in the barrel and ask what the heck that is. I believe that's actually a
preservative grease in there, I suspect this rifle has
probably never been fired. I should also point out you have a
convenient little oil bottle in the pistol grip. Never been used, still feels totally empty. Alright, now we have the bolt assembly,
this thing is super easy to take apart. Oop, there's the bolt body, there's the accelerator, there's the
firing pin, and there's the bolt head itself. Alright, I've got the bolt together here so we
can take a look at how this actually functions. You can see that these two
little rabbit-ear arms pivot, and affect the interaction between
the bolt and the bolt carrier travelling. Now when this is ... fully chambered,
ready to fire, and in battery, the bolt is all the way back
in this configuration. And these two little arms are sitting
against surfaces in the receiver. Specifically right there, and right there. So when you fire this, the bolt
wants to start moving backwards, because of course there's a lot of pressure on it. However, it's locked against these two surfaces. So in order for it to move,
these two cams have to push up. Now when that happens it looks
like the bolt's going forward here. But when the bolt's fixed in
place, what would happen is pressure on these two cams forces the
bolt carrier to actually slide backward first. ... These are called accelerators, and what they're
doing is they're magnifying the amount of force, because there's a little short lever arm
here, and a longer lever arm up at the top. So the bolt is going to
start moving very slowly, and the bolt carrier is going
to move much more quickly. What this does is delay
the opening of this bolt so it doesn't open up enough to
expose the case of the cartridge until pressure has actually dropped
because the bullet's left the barrel, and a lot of the gas has gone along with it. So this is a very simple system, it's clever, it's been used in a few other
carbines, but not very many. ... The Dominican Republic
made a carbine using this system, as pioneered by a Hungarian designer.
How's that for a weird combination? But what you've got here
is the bolt can't really open until after this bolt carrier
has been cammed backwards. That takes time because of the ... inertia
of this extra mass of the bolt carrier. ... Now once it's in this position, now these
two arms are no longer touching the receiver and the whole thing can freely
move backwards, and it does. Something else I want to point out in here. You'll notice that there are two extractors. Except that this one on the right
is fake, it's just a place holder, it doesn't actually have an
extractor hook in it or a spring. This is what determines which
side of the rifle ejection happens on. So in this case the [extractor] is on this side,
so cases are going to flip out that direction. ... You see the ejector plunger is
right in the bottom, centrally located. Now, ... using this pin you can actually
remove these two and replace them so that the dummy is on this side, just a place
holder, and the actual extractor is on that side. That would cause cases to
eject out that side of the action. And when we look at the rear stock, you can see
they've actually cut ejection ports in both sides. I can take this cheek piece, pop it off, and hey oh, it's open on both sides. I can take this cheek piece and snap
it back onto the right side of the gun. Now I've made a lefty friendly version. I can
swap the extractor so it ejects out this side, swap the cheek piece, and in fact we
even have sling swivels on both sides. So I can take this ...
super-fancy three-point sling, and I can swap it around to
the other side of the buttstock. I can swap the bipod legs,
because the front sling swivel is attached to the left bipod
leg. I can swap that over. Every single feature of this, if it's
not ambidextrous to begin with, it is convertible from left to right
without any additional parts. And that really is kind of cool. One other little feature in here that I want
to point out, or rather lack of feature, there's a little rubber buffer pad on the
back and you can see that white surface. That is a space for a feature
that's on the military version of the FAMAS that
was left off of the civilian one. On the military guns there's actually
a little hook and spring buffer in there that ... buffers the impact of the bolt on
the back of the receiver with each shot. I guess they figured for semi-auto, without the
full-auto capability, you didn't really need that. As a result the semi-auto civilian
FAMAS rifles do have a bit harsher recoil. Not really harsh, but kind of abrupt, because you are getting more impact of
the bolt carrier onto the rear of the stock, which is I'm going to translate into ... a
more abrupt impact onto your shoulder. Now the top of this carry handle is just
a trough, this sits in between the sights. Yeah this is plastic, but it
doesn't really do anything. ... Actually it's interesting to point out, this
lug is what locks the carry handle in place. So ... this lug sits on top of a plug on the front
of the charging handle assembly, right there. This is attached to the stock
and to the action back here, but it's not actually attached
to the barrel in any way because the barrel is free floated inside this block. What that means is that the bipod, the bipod being here on
the front handle assembly, is actually free floated
away from the barrel. So you can put pressure on the
bipod or put pressure on the sling, and it's not going to affect your zero. That's a clever, interesting
element to the rifle design. One last thing to show you
here is the trigger mechanism. So when I pull the trigger it's just got this long
connecting bar that's going to pull this forward. There's our trigger spring. So we've got this hook right there. So that hook connects to this
triangular piece and pulls it forward. If you look at the hammer here, you
can see that sear notch right there, which is held in place by this
under part with the number "2" on it. When I pull this forward (I'm going to
hold this back so it doesn't snap on me), when I pull that forward, it clears,
and allows the hammer to drop. Pretty simple. Just doing this manually you
can really feel for how much spring pressure and travel there is on it, this is not
a very good trigger unfortunately. The semi-auto version of the FAMAS, which
we have here, is really quite the rare bird. If you look around on the
internet, you'll see people suggest that only 100 to 125 of these
were imported into the US. Having looked at a bunch of serial numbers I
think ... the numbers are actually about double that. I know of serial numbers
as low as 30 something, and this is serial number 209, which ... assuming they did a
continuous serial number block, that would suggest that there are at
least 209 of them, maybe 225 or 250. A little more than most people think, but that
still makes it a very unusual rifle in this country. Now when Century brought these in,
Century didn't have any hand in building them. They simply bought them from the
Saint-Étienne factory and imported them over here. Interestingly, at the time you could
also buy a semi-auto FAMAS in France. Although over there they were
chambered for the .222 Remington cartridge, because France had a restriction (or still does I
believe), on civilian ownership of military calibres. So .223 was not allowed,
but .222 Remington was OK. Anyway the .223 versions that came into the US, obviously they are semi-auto only,
they leave off a few of the military bits. ... There are ribs on the barrel here
for rifle grenades on the military one, the rifle grenade sight has been left off, the
recoil buffer like I mentioned has been left off, and obviously semi-auto only. Now when Century brought
these in they were really expensive. In 1988 they were selling
one of these rifles for $995. To put that in a little bit of context, they
were also selling Steyr AUGs at same time, another hot new cutting-edge bullpup rifle. That came with I think 5 mags and a scope,
and you could get one of those for 650 bucks. So substantially less than this rifle. And $1,000 in 1988 was quite a substantial
amount of money compared to today. So these took several years to sell. Once they did sell out, there were
never any other batches brought in because these came in
in 1988, like I said, which was just before the 1989 US ban
on imported assault weapons. So that ban didn't have any impact
on things that were made in the US, but it did end the importation of
semi-auto foreign rifles like this one. So it's really cool to get a
chance to take a look at this one. As I mentioned in the disassembly,
I believe this thing is probably unfired, still out of the box from whoever originally
bought it. So it is in gorgeous condition. If you're interested in adding
it to your own collection, if you want to play with one
of the original combat bullpups, well, take a look at the description text below. You'll find a link there to Rock
Island's catalogue page on the rifle, you can check out their
pictures and their description. And place a bid online, or come up
here to participate in the auction live. Thanks for watching.
