SPAS-15: Franchi's Improvement on the SPAS-12

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian McCullin and I'm here today at the Rock Island auction company taking a look at a Franchi spas 15 police shotgun this was developed really to be the replacement for and an improvement upon the Franchi spas-12 shotgun and one of the iconic features that the Espace 12 introduced was the ability to easily change between semi-automatic operation and pump operation or manual operation the idea for this and they carried it over into the space 15 was that being aimed at a law-enforcement market it would on the one hand usually probably be used with you know proper full power shotgun ammunition buckshot and slugs however there is a substantial police use of less lethal and other sort of specialty ammunition and things like less lethal beanbags or rubber slugs don't develop the sort of recoil energy or the sort of gas pressure that real slugs or buckshot do and they don't tend to function well and sent me automatic shotguns so by allowing the gun to be switched into a manual mode then they could be easily used with any sort of fancy specialty ammo that might not run the action properly in semi-automatic mode of course if you just need straight old good buckshot then you switch it back to semi-auto and the gun runs properly so that was the idea with this past 12 they carried it over to the 15 now in addition to that the main from a user point of view the main improvement to these past 15 was replacing the tubular magazine with a box magazine the two magazine actually held more ammunition this is a six round box magazine but it's far easier to change out and it also allows you to have magazines of different kinds of ammunition like buckshot and slugs independently so the Box magazine was a definite improvement from a user handling practical perspective they also then made this relatively economical sort of done to manufacture with a stamped sheet metal receiver and it really is a quite nice combat shotgun these went into production in 1986 and well I'll tell you what let me go ahead and pull it apart and then after that I'll tell you what happened to it and where they are now one of the things you notice when you pick this up is that this is a big chunky shotgun kind of all of these 1990s semi-automatic box fed shotguns are the u s-- s12 thus past 15 there are a couple other other limited production guns like this they're all big now as for controls we have an easily detachable little stiff in the magazine well though box magazine it like it says there holds six rounds this thing seems a little bit goofy until you consider that they did also make a like a hunting purpose civilian IIST two round magazine pinned it was the exact same magazine body just pinned to only hold two rounds those are marked with a green shotgun shell that says to max so it's just a way to keep track of of the capacity of the different magazines we have I don't even need to zoom in we got Franchi spas-12 a nice big lettering there these were made with both fixed stocks like this one and also side folding stocks here on the left side we have the model designation again and the manufacturer l Frankie Brescia in big paint letters again and the serial number there are two safeties built into the gun one is just a simple grip safety the other is a manual safety here that kind of cool it the unit it is easily used by a left-hander not quite as convenient for a right-hander unusually but then it also has kind of interesting functionality but in order to properly tell you about that I need to also go over this mechanism at the front where you can either have this as a pump action or by pushing the button you can slide that forward to automatic action or back to pump pump or semi-auto so when this is in we'll leave this in pump for the moment interestingly the safety on here doubles as a slide lock normally on a pump action shotgun you'll have an extra little button and once the thing is cocked and locked so to speak literally you have to push the button to unlock pumphandle so that you can open the action well the same sort of requirement applies to a gun like this you want to be able to lock the slide forward so that you don't understand intentionally pull it slightly out of battery and then not be able to fire so when I [ __ ] this thing that safety is going to flip to the fire mode because the action is now locked so it's still in pump-action mode but I can't actually open the bolt because that lock is engaged now there isn't a little button here to unlock it instead the safety does that so if I engage the safety now I can open it again and if I cycle it all the way open you see right there the safety just disengaged itself so once the Safety's once it's on fire position then the only other way to unlock the slide is to actually fire the shell that automatically unlocks it because now I would need to pump the action like so at which point we'd go back to fire mode I can engage the safety if I want and that will lock the trigger with the grip safety that'll prevent the trigger from doing anything until I disengage it now if you switch the gun to semi-auto you still actually have the same functionality so right now it's ready to fire which tells me I can't open the action if I want to open the action manually using the charging handle now because the pump handle up here is locked I have to engage the safety now I can open the thing if I want to you know take the mag out and empty the gun or if I want to hand load you know a specialty round I do that and then once it goes back into battery the safety automatically disengaged us again so it's on safe and I cycle the bolt it goes back to fire this is a little confusing at first but the more I fiddle with this the more I think it's really a pretty ingenious system and it has some interesting side effects like if I wanted to say carry the gun with a loaded magazine in a police cruiser but no round in the chamber I could simply put in the magazine I could have it unsafe if you know especially if department policy requires to be on safe even though it's empty well racking the slide is going to chamber around and disengage the safety as one automatic action anyway enough rambling about the safety the rear sight here is just kind of an open rear v-notch sitting up on top of the carry handle actually not so much a carry handle as it is a protective guard for the reciprocating bolt handle the front sight is just a round post so overall these are basically rifle style sights and these do come with removable interchangeable chokes now disassembly is going to start at the back here we have two H K style pushpins go ahead and pull out the bottom pushpin that allows me to remove the entire trigger group pistol grip group fire control assembly all of it things are a little bit complicated in here but this is the hold open so when the magazine is empty this will lock open both in pump mode and in semi-auto mode we have our safety here so you can kind of see how that works when this is engaged obviously you can't pull the trigger but when the bolt comes back it's actually going to push down on this lever and disengage the safety so that's how that functionality works it's just one sort of three-pronged lever in there the hammer is this guy right in the middle let that up so there's the hammer now we can continue disassembly by pulling out the other rear push pin again rather HK inspired this allows us to take out the buttstock and Springs and actually the entire bolt group so I have to pull this back to this point there is a hole in the receiver and the carry handle here to allow me to pull out the bolt handle and then I can remove the hole bolt and carrier assembly out the back of the receiver we have a three lug rotating bolt here it is spring loaded so it always pops back forward which is nice because it has to be forward to be reassembled but then the bolt itself is captive on these two guide rods with its two recoil springs so this is a short-stroke gas piston operated gun so now we can take apart the front end and see the gas system to do this we are going to start by unscrewing this this is a plug at the front of the gas block so you can also just clean the gas block by pulling this out then I'm going to pull the pump handle back slightly and I can actually just pop the front sight right off of the front of the receiver it's got this locating pin to keep it in place then flipping it over we have the lever that actually determines whether or not the gas system is engaged so inside this bulge in the handle is a cam track you actually can't really see it here but it's going to cause you can just see that starting to rotate it's gonna cause this plug to rotate so if I rotate it the other way I can pull it out of the receiver and it's simply a plug like that so when it's in one position gas can flow through this vent and operate the gun and when it's in the other position the gas block is cut off so that's pump that's semi-auto mode with that out I can now hold the pump assembly pump handle off use the button here now you can see that little cam track this lug on the outside runs in that little track so when you push this forward or backward into pump or automatic mode that's what it's actually doing now we're getting close here now we can take this shield off the barrel that comes off that is just a plain hollow sheetmetal cover now we have our gas piston this is the piston it's an annular piston so this whole thing is the gas block gas pushes up inside here and hits the front face of this gas piston which pushes this back which pushes this back and you can see those rods running inside the receiver those two rods run in these two holes so there's actually there are four guide rods there are two guide rods from the gas piston that are gonna come back hit this and stop and that's what will push the bolt back every time you fire and then there are two more guide rods that the things running on that have the recoil springs and these by the way are dual recoil springs so there's a small diameter inside there and then a larger diameter one on top so just for the record the reason that there's an extra set of guide rods here is to reset the gas piston so when this fires normally this would all be up forward with the gas block but I have the back end of the gun assembled a bit disassembled a bit so just bear with me here the gas piston is in contact with this when you fire gas fills up the gas block this all comes back like so to see it working against the springs there then after it cycled all the way back and it's coming forward the carry handle pin is actually locking these two guide rods which are these two guide rods into the bolt carrier so when the bolt carrier comes forward those two rods come forward they are going to push the gas piston with them all the way back into battery so that it's ready for the next shot all right and there is the whole thing nicely disassembled really a pretty slick system and really quite economical to manufacture so the whole receiver assembly is made out of a very basic stain and welded sheetmetal you have a polymer fire control group polymer buttstock polymer pumphandle the action cover goes over the front of the barrel is another piece of very simple sheet metal this would have been a much more cost-effective firearm to manufacture than this past 12 one last thing I want to mention if you have one of these and you want to shoot it make sure that the buffer you have in the back is in good shape like this past 12 these came with some sort of rubberized buffer but the material is such that like this past 12 they harden up and shatter and this one had just a few little bits of the buffer left inside there so that is an important element for cushioning the the stop of the well the end of travel of the bolt in semi-auto mode get a replacement buffer before you shoot one of these or else you are liable to damage the gun over time so these initially went into production in 1986 they came out of production in 2005 so in 86 it was legal to import these into the United States and it remained legal to do so until 1994 when the assault weapons ban passed that prohibited from manufacturer or import when it came to shotguns semi automatic shotguns that had a detachable magazine a pistol two of the three of a detachable mag a pistol grip and a folding stock so this has a pistol grip this has a box magazine neither of those can be easily changed you can't you know that this pistol grip assembly houses all of the functional parts of the fire control group you can't change this very easily into a traditionally stocked gun I brought whatever reason they decided that there wasn't enough market to justify trying to bring it in with a thumbhole stock of some sort so only about best number I can find a hundred and eighty of these were imported into the u.s. before the assault weapons ban passed of course that ban expired in 2004 right about the time that this actually went out of production and my understanding is it went out of production because trunky is currently wholly owned by beretta in fact Benelli is also wholly owned by beretta and beretta has gone through and little bit of sort of reorganizing of the companies and they want to have beretta do military and security law enforcement type sales where Frankie is they want to have Frankie doing more sporting shotguns so beretta had its own police law enforcement type shotgun semi-auto shotgun that was a competitor to the Franchi so they discontinued the Frankie to focus on beretta for that market so 2005 these go out of production they're still reasonably popular they are used by a number of law enforcement and security agencies around the world and hey especially here in the US where they're pretty darn rare they're coveted and very cool shotguns to have so hopefully you guys enjoyed the video if you'd like to follow the rock island auction company more you can check out in the description text below their YouTube channel and their Instagram feed keep up with everything that they are doing thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 432,035

Rating: 4.9695764 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, spas, spas12, spas15, franchi, shotugn, combat shotgun, 12ga, pump action, semiauto, semiautomatic, law enforcement, security, riot shotgun, italy, italian, import, short stroke gas, gas piston, box magazine, beretta m3p, successor

Id: x0mx2JqUK-Q

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/doggologgoroggo]

cav mains already know about this one

[u/mbrk-]

This aint forgotten this thing is legendary