Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company, where we are taking a look at a pair of semi-auto Israeli Galil rifles, one in 5.56 and one in 7.62. Now the history of the Galil really dates to the 1967 Six-Day war. The Israelis fought this war armed primarily (talking infantry rifles), with the FAL and their opponents primarily with the AK. And the Israelis found that their FALs didn't
really perform as reliably as they had hoped in the sandy, dusty desert conditions of this war.
And yet the AKs that they were facing, even when really treated with complete neglect and lack
of maintenance, those AKs kept on running. And they looked at this and decided well maybe
we should find something other than the FAL, it's big and heavy and it didn't work all that well. So they put together a couple series of tests
to come up with a replacement for the FAL. And the first series was just kind of a basic thing,
they looked at the M16, and the Stoner 63 and the AK. The AKM it would have been at that point. Primarily,
but not exclusively milled (and stamped) AKs. They had captured actually quite a lot of AKs in the
1967 war, so they had a bunch of them to tinker with. And the results of this trial, the initial trial, was
that the AK ... came out on top, was the best gun. Well, Israel wasn't particularly interested
in adopting the 7.62x39 cartridge. They were much more interested
in the 5.56 NATO cartridge. So they went to a second series of
testing, and also of rifle development. And ultimately they would kind of put
everything on the market through its paces. This second major test involved the M16,
the Stoner 63, the Armalite AR-18, the HK33, a couple rifles from Beretta and Steyr (I'm not sure
exactly what models), and then two domestic rifles. They had a 5.56 rifle developed by Uziel Gal,
the designer of the Uzi submachine gun, and one designed by Yisrael Galili. Now Galili, we should go back and
discuss him a little bit. Galili was originally born in 1923 in Russia, and emigrated to
Israel as a young child, and his birth name was actually Mishmar Hayarden (I'm probably
butchering the pronunciation there), but like many Jewish immigrants to
Israel before Israel's independence, he changed (well, and after actually), he
changed his name to something a little more Hebrew Jewish sounding so he actually changed
his name to Yisrael Balashnikov, with a 'B'. Completely coincidental, actually has no relation
to Kalashnikov despite being virtually identical. So, here we have now Yisrael Balashnikov in Israel.
In 1940 he joins the Haganah, the Jewish militia. In 1948, pretty much right after Israel declares its
independence, he joins IMI, Israeli Military Industries, and starts working for them. And he's
one of the two guys who ... is tasked with developing the AK into a 5.56 rifle for Israel. And during this developmental process he
put together a bunch of interesting prototypes using some of the features that the Israelis
would go on to adopt for good in the Galil. In particular things like converting bolt
handles to be a little more ambidextrous, adding ambidextrous safeties to the rifles.
I have seen a couple of Balashnikov prototypes, and they're interesting. There are a whole bunch of
different varieties to them, and they're all kludged together (kludged maybe isn't the right word). They're
all modified captured Eastern Bloc AKs that Israel wound up with as war booty after
the Six-Day war. They got tons of these things. So it's just, you know, we'll weld some safeties on
this one, we'll change the barrel length on this one. He was apparently using primarily Stoner 63 magazines
and barrels that he was adapting to fit AK receivers. And in the final major set of trials, Balashnikov's
rifles ended up being the best ones, they came out the winner of the trials.
Now this left IMI in a position of, "OK, that's the rifle that we want to go with, that the
army wants. Now, how do we go about producing it?" And it was at that point that they actually
ordered a handful (I think initially it was just five), Valmet rifles from Finland. The Valmet being a
really high quality, slightly modernised, but milled AK. ... Without doubt at the time the
best-quality AK you could get. The Israelis got these and liked them, and they
ordered a hundred more, and really liked those. And they ended up getting the receiver dimensions
(it's unclear to me whether they got them, you know, from Finland, or if they just reverse
engineered the receivers they had gotten). At any rate, they ended up with the design
specifications for the Valmet receiver, and used that as the basis for
the Balashnikov AK pattern in 5.56. Now around this same time, Yisrael
Balashnikov is deciding that this name ... it's ... still a little too Russian sounding,
and apparently IMI was a little concerned that naming the rifle after him would
also sound a bit too Russian like. Well, he changed his name to Yisrael Galili,
and that kind of solved the problem. They went ahead and named the rifle after his
new adopted name, and hence called it the Galil. So let me bring the camera in close
and let's show you what what Galili, Balashnikov turned Galili, did to make
this such an interesting AK variant. Let's start at the muzzle end here and go
through all of the changes to the Galil, because really there's actually quite a lot of them. Very few parts
of this rifle survived unscathed from the original AK design. So at the beginning we have a muzzle device
here that is capable of launching rifle grenades. You can recognize that sort of thing, by the
way, when you see bits like this wire spring. That's on there as a tensioner, so
that you can slip a rifle grenade on, and it won't just fall off if you
point the rifle slightly downwards. So, rifle grenade capability. We then have a nice front
sight post out here, along with a night sight, you can flip that up. This would have
originally been luminous, it would glow in the dark. The tritium or radium that they used
there (probably tritium, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure what the element was),
but it is dead now, half-life has gone. Unlike the AK, which is just a
drift adjustable front sight, The Galil has a much more precise
screw adjustable windage set up. We then also have a bipod built into the
rifle. There are versions with and without, in general the Galil AR does
not have a bipod, the ARM does. This is the shorter barrelled version for civilian
export, which does not have a bayonet lug, but the standard Israeli military ones
would also have a bayonet lug there. This is a pretty simple bipod, (pretty lightweight bipod I
should say), folds out like so. There you go. This little opening in the bipod mounting
block actually doubles as a wire cutter. You can put a piece of wire in there and then open
the bipod up like that, and use it to shear wire off. That's a deliberate design. And of course, I have to mention the fact that, yes,
it was also intended to work as a bottle opener. So the two bipod retaining hooks back here are
the right dimension and size to fit a bottle cap. The reason for that, (there we go), (when ... you don't have the bipod in there), the reason for that was Israeli soldiers had previously
had a tendency to use magazine feed lips to open bottles. You put the edge of the bottle cap under one
of those, pop it open. Obviously not a Galil mag, but FAL or Uzi mags. And that would lead to damage
to the feed lips over time. And so rather than just, like, yell at the soldiers and try
and get them to stop doing it, they just gave in to the inevitability
and added a bottle opening feature, or capability, to the rifle here, where it's
not going to actually hurt anything. A carry handle was added to the side of the rifle.
It's interesting on some of the Balashnikov guns you'll see weird stuff like a FAL carry
handle welded to the side of the receiver. On the the actual military guns, they went ahead and
added that feature to the rear handguard retainer. The charging handle has been extended
upwards to make it somewhat ambidextrous, so that you can reach over the
top of the gun and charge it, in an attempt to take the fairly left handed AK
and make it a little bit more ambi [ambidextrous]. The magazine release was also improved a bit. There's
this big tab here to prevent you from accidentally bumping the mag release. And then,
in sort of a counterintuitive thing, because that gets in the way, then they
extend the mag release off to the side so that you have access to it more easily. The
magazines were originally based on the Stoner 63 mag, but they are not Stoner mags. This is a
proprietary IMI designed magazine. Standard magazines for the 5.56 Galil were 35 rounds,
and they did also make a 50 round magazine, which was primarily intended for the ARM, the
sort of quasi-squad support light machine gun role. Definitely the primary [one] used was the 35 rounder here. In 7.62, by the way, they had 25 round magazines. We have a standard sort of safety. Of course,
this one's semi-auto and pinned here, and the receiver's not capable
of taking the full-auto parts. But in addition to that Galili also added an
ambidextrous thumb safety on the left side. So, as a right hander, you can hold the rifle here, the
selector's on safe, push it forward to the fire position. And this is just a mechanical connection on that
same safety lever, so when you operate this, it also operates the lever there. The rear sight here is also a vast
improvement over the standard AK. It is a two position peep sight with also a
rear night sight there. You can use this as a close up, very quick sort of sight. The peep sight has a detent on it
specifically to set it in the middle there, where it's just low enough that it's out of your
line of sight to use the flip up night sight there. And, of course, this rear sight is
mounted on the back of the receiver cover, instead of on the back
of the barrel like on the AK. That allows them to use an
aperture sight, which is more precise, and it gives you a much longer sight
radius, which is definitely a nice thing. Excellent sights, and that's basically
copied directly from the Valmet. The rear tab on the mainspring here has
been extended, that allows you to shoot rifle grenades without the top
cover popping off of the gun. They added an optics mounting rail right
here. This is a proprietary Israeli mount. And to be honest, they don't seem
to have used it all that much. You can find mounts out there for things like AN/PVS-2
early night vision scopes, as well as other optics, but the Israelis never seem to
really exploit that all that much. And having gotten to the very back of
the rifle they have a folding stock on here. These were also available with fixed stocks, but folders
are kind of the more common, the more military pattern. This is based on the FAL stock and it's a
really good stock. So you've got a nice, very solid lock up there. All you
have to do is pull it down to fold it. Locks into position there. And no locking latch, just swing it out to extend it. In 1983 IMI released a version of
the [Galil] in .308 or in 7.62 NATO. This was exclusively for export, the Israeli military never
adopted or used these rifles, but they are pretty cool. I think the biggest contract for them went to Columbia. In the 1980s, Columbia bought a whole
slew of these to replace their G3 rifles. And these were also sold on ...
commercial import in the United States, and that was of course what this
one is, one of the semi-auto ones. These are probably most recognizable at a
distance from their sort of waffle pattern magazine. This is a 25 round magazine, they did
also make a 12 rounder for the 7.62 guns. Other than the the scaled up
design making these a little bit bigger, everything else is identical to
the standard 5.56 calibre Galils, all the features are the
same, as you can see here. There were a couple different versions of these
released on the semi-auto market, both the 5.56 and .308. You'll find both shortish and
longish barrels. On the .308 I believe it was either 18 or 20 inch, on the 5 .56
I believe it was 16 and 20 inch, or 16 and 21 inch. You'll also find them with both fixed and folding stocks. Note that the 7.62 one here, they actually added
a little rubber butt plate to the end of the stock. We can take just a brief moment
here to look at the internal mechanics. I don't want to do too much of this
because it's basically identical to the AK. But the top cover has a little bit of reinforcing here,
and the connection of the top cover to the receiver, the tolerancing, was tightened up in order to make
it a secure and stable mount for the rear sight. This comes apart exactly the same as a
regular AK, until you get to the gas tube. By the way, we do have a slightly different
design to the front of the gas piston there, more similar to the AKS-74U, the
so-called "Krinkov", than the standard AK. But they did make the gas tube a
little more easily detachable, in that it just slides off, and it's dovetailed into the
... front trunnion here and then nests on top of the gas block up here. So the original AK had a lever
release that you had to rotate on ... the rear sight block, that was also here. Because there is no rear
sight block, ... can't mount it on something that isn't there. So instead you get
this slide-out, dovetailed, gas tube. So the Galil up being adopted formally
by the Israeli military in 1972, although it was never fully issued out,
never fully equipped the Israeli army. In large part because they ended up getting a lot of very
inexpensive, if not free, surplus M16 rifles from the US, and free is kind of hard to compete with.
The Galil was still an expensive rifle to produce. It's a very high-quality rifle. It's an excellent rifle.
But because of that cost never got fully adopted, and then it was phased out by about 2000,
being replaced by the new Tavor bullpups. So, in addition to Israel, these were also
actually sold to a surprising number of countries. A lot of Central and South American
countries, Guatemala, Nicaragua. Colombia, like I said bought .308s. This would
also be the basis for the R4 rifle in South Africa. There was a lot of collaboration between the
Israelis and the South Africans, to the point that early South African R4s were actually
made and exported complete by IMI. And then years later IMI would actually buy complete
rifles from South Africa. So that went both ways. Estonia bought these, Portugal bought
these, really a lot of clients for the Galil. And that doesn't take into account
the US semi-auto civilian market. There would be a series of companies to import
the Galil in semi-auto form into the United States, for the US civilian market. The
first was Magnum Research, that was later replaced by Action Arms
(who also did a lot of business with the Uzi), and then finally ... Springfield Armory (the
private company, not the government armoury), would import them until ultimately the 1989
assault weapons import ban prohibited importation of guns like this.
And then the supply dried up. In total, something like 7,000
to 9,000 of these original IMI manufactured rifles were imported
before the ban went into effect. Now we have a lot more of them today. Century Arms sold a whole bunch
of what they were calling Golani's, which are slightly different because those were
actually built on parts kits from, I believe, Nicaragua, one of the South American countries
that purchased Galils from IWI later on. So those Golanis are the Galil design,
but not actually Israeli issue guns. So ... for what it's worth, that's where
the Golanis came from, South America. At any rate, these original early imports
are, of course, the best pattern of Galil, because they are original actual IMI manufacture,
just imported into the US back when that was legally an option. So pretty cool to have both a
minty gorgeous 5.56, as well as a 7.62 here. So if you'd like to add either one of these to
your own collection, you can take a look at the description text below, because they are
both being sold at Rock Island coming up. The link below there will take you to
ForgottenWeapons.com, and from there I have links to both of the catalogue pages
for these two rifles, where you can find Rock Island's catalogue pictures, price
estimate, description, all that sort of good stuff. Thanks for watching.
