Hi guys, thanks for tuning into another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the National Firearms Centre, part of the British Royal Armouries in Leeds, And we are taking a look at one of the very first FAL rifles. Well, one of the very first batch ever to be made. So the background to this is in 1945 the British government put together what it called the Ideal Calibre Panel. The British knew that they wanted to replace the Lee-Enfield with a semi-automatic rifle in the aftermath of World War Two. Really the only reason they hadn't done it during the war is cost and logistics. And of course, they also recognise that the .303
British cartridge was completely obsolete by 1945. ... It had originated as a black powder cartridge with
a large rim, fairly heavy taper, this is totally obsolete. And it's not really well suited to box
magazines in self-loading firearms. They made it work with the Lee-Enfield and
with the Bren, but things are a lot simpler with a basically straight non-tapered rimless cartridge. So the Ideal Calibre Panel is put together to try
and pick like, "What should our next cartridge be?" And it comes to the conclusion
that 7mm is the ... ideal diameter. And they put together a pair actually, two different
7mm cartridges. They are both 0.276 inch bullets, but just to keep confusion from rearing its ugly head, they
actually designate these cartridges one at .270 and one at .280. So they're actually the same diameter, but different names
so people can keep them straight, which is rather thoughtful. Now the next step is going to, of course, be picking
a rifle. And the idea is that whatever rifle they choose ought to be standardised throughout NATO,
so that in the case of another future war NATO can have simple standardised logistics.
As opposed to World War Two where the US was using .30-06, and the British were
using .303, and the French were using 7.5x54. And everyone has different cartridges and logistics are really
kind of a headache to try and operate combined forces. So, the British start doing some rifle testing.
In 1947 FN provides them with a sample of its new rifle. Now what FN has basically done is taken Dieudonné
Saive's what was gonna be basically the FN 49 rifle. He has spent several years in England
during the war developing this gun, ... it doesn't have a detachable box magazine, but it
is a tilting bolt, ... short-stroke piston, gas operated rifle. And they basically take that and kind of blend
it with aspects of the German Sturmgewehr. So they give it a pistol grip, they give it a detachable
box magazine, and at the very beginning here in '47 they actually chamber it for the 8mm Kurz
cartridge. The original intermediate cartridge. The British get this rifle and they test it and they think,
"Wow, this is actually a pretty nice rifle. However, we've decided that we want 7mm for our cartridge,
and by the way, here's the cartridge we've designed." Which would ultimately be the .280/30 ... I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself here, but basically
in an attempt to compromise with the US side of NATO, they took the 7mm cartridge and redesigned
it so that it had the same case head as the T65, the US submission to the trials. And that became known as the .280/30, which is
the cartridge that we'll be seeing the most of here. So anyway, getting back to our story, the British go back to FN and say, "The rifle seems
pretty nice, but we need it in 7mm, in .280 calibre." So FN scales the gun up a bit,
redesigns it, beefs it up for that cartridge. This is I believe a 140 grain bullet travelling at 2,330
feet per second, so it is a relatively light cartridge. It's still leaning towards rifle rather than pistol,
if we look at it in terms of how intermediate is it. But at 2,300 feet per second it's substantially lower velocity, and thus also lower recoil, lower stress on the guns etc. It's substantially lighter than .30-06
or the T65 7.62 NATO cartridge. And the British idea here is basically that they
want to use one cartridge for a wide array of guns. Everything from the soldier's individual rifle, through
the automatic rifle, the replacement for the Bren gun, and the medium machine gun and
vehicular mounted machine guns. They want them all to be on the same
calibre and that's gonna be the 7mm. So FN delivers this rifle, not necessarily this exact one,
this is serial number 11, but FN delivers the first prototype. Which is actually, the first of the rifles to be
called the FAL, the Fusil Automatique Léger, the light automatic rifle. And that's this guy,
pretty much exactly as you see it here. There's some variation, they had one with
a little bit longer barrel and no flash hider. They had one with a little bit shorter
barrel. This is one with a flash hider. A little bit of variation, but mechanically
speaking this is what they presented. And at the same time the British ... Ministry of Defence
is working on its own domestic rifle at the same time. So it's important to remember that while
the British are very interested in the FAL, this is a Belgian designed,
Belgian produced rifle. The British submission to the
NATO trials was the EM-2 bullpup. And in 1950 the first NATO rifle trial takes place,
which is basically this rifle, the EM-2 in .280, and the T25 rifle designed by [Earle Harvey]
in the US and that one was in T65, which is basically the name for
the early version of 7.62 NATO. And in these trials the FAL
actually comes out really well. The British trials report thinks the FAL is great,
the American trials report not so much. But the Americans don't really have a problem with
the rifle here, so much as they don't like the cartridge. And there are three main American complaints
about the .280/30 cartridge here, or the .280 cartridge. The first one is what they called a "zone of safety". And
that is because this had a relatively low muzzle velocity, it had a very high trajectory. And the
American objection was that basically ... if you had a target, and you set your sights to 800, because
you figured the guy's at 800 metres, and you shot at him, but he was actually at like 500 or 600 metres,
the trajectory of the cartridge is such that the bullet will go whizzing metres
above the guy's head at 500 or 600 meters. And this was unacceptable because you didn't
have enough margin of error in range estimation. Well, the British looked at this complaint and said, "Our sights
only go out to 600, like we only intend this to be effective to 600, we'd never be shooting at someone at 800. And
within 600 metres there is no such "margin of safety" where the bullet's so high over the target that
you'll completely miss someone like that." The second American objection was in very cold
weather the muzzle velocity would drop even below 2,300. Which is true, in cold weather your
pressure drops, your muzzle velocity drops. And the US was anticipating a
lot of cold-weather combat when the inevitable World War Three against the Soviet Union
was, you know, fighting in the frozen great north. So they were concerned that what was already an unacceptably
light cartridge would become even worse in cold weather. And then thirdly, they argued that a 7mm in diameter
bullet was not big enough to have the internal volume to make effective specialty cartridges,
namely armour-piercing rounds, tracer rounds, and "observation" rounds,
basically explosive rounds. All three of these objections in
retrospect are pretty much hogwash. Obviously we have all of these sorts of specialty
rounds in 5.5mm today, they work just fine in 7mm. But largely, this was the work of US Colonel Renée
Studler who was running the US Ordnance program for the new rifle, and he just basically had
decided that the T65 cartridge was what he wanted, the American rifle is what he wanted, and
he wasn't willing to make any compromises. So, the British and the Canadians and the Belgians started
trying to compromise in toward some sort of middle ground. The British really wanted an intermediate cartridge
that would allow them to have a rifle that was actually controllable in full-auto from the shoulder. Something
much more akin to the AK or the German Strumgewehr, (they didn't know about the AK
at this point, but bear with me), where the American cartridge was
substantially too powerful for that. As you will find if you ever
shoot an M14 in full-auto. Or like if you look at the British, who ultimately
of course adopted the FAL in 7.62 NATO, they went ahead and adopted it as a semi-auto
rifle only, having judged the full-auto 7.62 NATO in the FAL from the
shoulder to be uselessly uncontrollable, so. At this point I think we should probably take a close
... well no, let's continue a little bit more. So first trial in 1950, the US says, "The .280 cartridge is
crap, we don't want it. The rifle's not bad, cartridge is crap." There are two follow-up British tests in 1951,
one at a place called Pendine and one at Warminster, which is the infantry school I believe, or Defence
College? It's the infantry school. Anyway, those two tests are just British internal tests. They're
not interested in adopting whatever this American rifle is. And for good reason, it would eventually
get dropped because it was crap. But they're testing the FAL against the EM-2
in .280 and the Pendine test comes back pretty conclusively in favour of the FAL. The
Warminster test comes back split 50-50. The British government looks at these results
and decides to adopt the EM-2, on account of every EM-2 was equipped with an optical sight and
the rifle was shorter and a little bit lighter than the FAL. So in mid-1951 the British formally
accept and adopt the EM-2, Churchill then formally unaccepts it
in December of 1951 on the basis of Churchill had of course some experience from World
War Two (he had something to do with that conflict...), and recognised the logistical issues that had been
challenging for the British/American alliance in World War Two and realised it was more, I'm ... guessing here a little bit, but almost certainly recognised it was more important to have the same cartridge between two countries, even if it was a worse cartridge, just for the sake of logistical interchangeability. That would be more important if
another war broke out than the minor ... difference in a 90% effective
rifle to a 97% effective rifle. So Churchill figured it was more important to
play nice with the American Ordnance Department, unadopted the EM-2, and set the stage for the FAL to
ultimately be adopted by Britain and by the rest of NATO. Now having gone through all of that, if you're still
here watching or if you fast forwarded to this point, now let's go ahead and pull this
apart and take a look at the inside. Despite the fact that this is an early prototype
version of the FAL, it's actually really quite similar. All the fundamentals are the same as the FAL that we know and love today. However, there are some details that differ. So, let's see, just starting off we have
a three position selector switch here, safe, repetition which is semi-auto,
and automatic, full-auto. We have a nice fancy FN crest or logo here on top of
the receiver, these of course were FN Belgian made guns. And similarly, we have Belgian proofs
here on the front of the receiver as well. And they went ahead and wrote the entire
factory name out on the right side of the receiver, Fabrique Nationale D'Armes
de Guerre, Herstal, Belgique. ... The rear sight is virtually identical to what we
would have on later standard production FALs. It is an aperture sight and it can adjust forward out to
600 metres there. So the base zeroing distance is 200. We have a blade front sight that is side to side windage
adjustable with a couple of little protective wings. We have our removable gas plug on the
front, we'll take that out in just a moment. The magazine release is exactly
where it would be on later guns. However, what's interesting here is that this is not a rock-and-lock style of magazine well, this is a straight-in magazine well. And if you look at the magazine itself, you'll
notice that the front ... strap is completely flat. There is no front magazine catch. We do have the rear catch here. In fact the back of this
magazine looks almost identical to a modern FAL magazine. As does the bottom and both sides. But no front lip. We have a charging handle with a little hook style of actual handle. Oh, and by the way there's the serial number, 11. ... The bolt hold open is right here,
so I can pull this back, lock it open. This is a non-reciprocating charging handle,
so it stays in the front when you're shooting. And this has no way to
manually force the bolt forward. Disassembly is basically the same as a modern FAL. You've got a disassembly lever here, although in this case you pull it down. And just push that back, this one's
pretty stiff, there we go. Once you open that up, it just cracks
the ... upper and lower receivers apart, and then we can pull out the bolt and carrier,
which look pretty much exactly like a modern FAL. Pull that out. There's our actual bolt. So it's a
tilting bolt, locks right there at the rear. Bolt carrier, very much
like a standard modern FAL. At the front end we have our
gas plug. If we push this button in, and then rotate the gas plug
(there we go) 90 degrees, it comes springing out. So that's the plug itself. Note that there is only one gas port in it, so this
does not have multiple adjustable gas settings. And then we can pull out the gas
piston itself and its return spring. One cool aspect of this early prototype pattern that didn't
end up on the final version is that it actually has this sort of removable inspection plate on the fire
control group. So I can take the selector lever out, like that, and then I can (see if I can get it out here, there we go). There we go. It's got a lip in the
front that you have to pull outward. But we can take this plate off. And then you can see the
internal status of things like the sear and the hammer. That's just kind of cool. On the other hand
it's not really anything more than "kind of cool", which explains why it ended up
not making it into the final design. So last bit here. We have a split screw pin that holds the upper and lower together.
So we squeeze that together, and then unscrew it. We can pull out this side, and then push out this side, there we go, and then we can
pull the lower assembly off the gun. So there is our early fire control group. Let the hammer up here. I'm going to do that carefully,
the hammer spring is right here, and it's just kind of ... just leaning up in a little detent in
the back wall here of the grip assembly. So if you mess with this too much this
can pop out and go flying across the room. In general ... none of these parts interchange with the
modern FAL, but the design concept is pretty much unchanged. So what would eventually happen to this rifle? We
know it didn't get adopted in the .280 chambering here. It would eventually morph into a
slightly scaled up 7.62 calibre gun. But basically the .280 cartridge itself evolved
over a couple of years in the early 1950s. It started with a relatively quite low
muzzle velocity, 2,330 feet per second. And over a couple of iterations the British and the
Belgians would increase that muzzle velocity, trying to make it more acceptable to the Americans. So by the end of its development
it was the .280 or 7mm High Velocity, coming out of the barrel at 2,670 feet per second.
So they upped the velocity about like 15%. If we put that in pistol terms, +P is a 10%
overcharge and +P+ is a 15% overcharge. So what they effectively did was turn .280 into .280 +P+,
... actually starting to get really pretty close to 7.62 NATO ballistics. But, of course, this would not be successful in
appeasing Studler and the American Ordnance Department. So ultimately this rifle went by the wayside. The
Belgians, in response to an American request, designed a new version of
this in 7.62, the T65 cartridge. That would go into trials in 1952 and
that's what would ultimately be adopted. So we will take a look in a later video at a couple of the ... very early British 7.62 calibre FAL rifles, or SLRs. If you are watching this when it first
airs, that video's coming in the future. If you're watching this after it's been out for a little while,
then that video might very well have been published. So take a look at the end of this one and if the British
experimental video is out I will have links at the end of this one. A big thanks to all of my patrons, it is your
direct financial support that makes it possible for me to travel to places like the British Royal Armouries
to show you awesome prototype guns like this one. And of course it is thanks to the
British Royal Armouries, ... well I need to thank them for giving me access to this thing,
to pull it out, and take it apart and show it to you guys. If you are doing firearms research,
their collection is open by appointment. So unfortunately not open to the general public. However, it is located in Leeds at the Royal Armouries Museum, which is a quite large museum that's well
worth your time to check out if you're in the city. Anyway, thank you very much for watching.
