SA80/L85: Why Didn't Enfield Just Scale Down The EM-2 Instead Of Bullpupping The AR-18?
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- čas přidán 23. 09. 2020
- Bloke takes a look at why Enfield nicked the Armalite AR-18 design and bullpupped it to make the L85 series of rifles, rather than "just" scaling down the .280 / 7mm EM-2 rifle from the late-40's/early-50's.
Turns out it's not as trivial as all that...
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AR18 L85A1 L85A2 L85A3 EM2
It is interesting how reverse engineering something properly is almost as much of a pain as starting entirely from scratch.
No it's always a pain in the ass
Yeah, the biggest question you have to answer is almost always "why did they do this?"
@@vimtheprotogen2855 Exactly, even if you have access to fully-detailed drawings it's hard to tell *why* they've done it that way.
Engineers can engineer, there were plenty at Enfield. The problem was they were engineers not gun designers or gunsmiths. That is a special skill set.
@@vikingsoftpaw wouldn't at least some of the Engineers be versed in gun design considering that the designed and built many models of rifles?
As Her Majesty's government was stingey enough to essentially undercut Sterling on the SMG they were highly unlikely to contract them for the AR18, no matter how much sense it would have made haha. Good video mate, wrote my MA thesis on the EM2, you make some excellent points regarding the engineering.
@Bertie Bollocks Yeah, MA, as it was a military history focused Masters. I looked at the political wrangling behind it too.
Oh, the bad blood with Sterling was massive. "Undercut" is putting it nicely - they ripped them off, refused to pay them anything for the design until forced to by the Courts. It seems that Enfield never forgave Sterling for not taking it lying down...
One of the reasons I have so much vitriol for the L85/SA80 series is not just because of the practical realities of how badly the thing worked when it was first developed and basically all the way up until HK fixed most of the issues with it, but just how it represents all the worst parts of British engineering culture and procurement internal politics...
- stubborn nationalism in the face of reality (bought the great Belgian right arm of the free world like everyone else before it, and most others bought the AUG or G36C elsewhere) but no, gotta make our own even though we didn't have much of the industry left/it was in the process of being sold off.
- lack of direct required specialist knowledge / excess of hubris in understanding the challenge - Ala Ian's video series where a bunch of aero engineers who changed around relentlessly during the project didn't have the right background to get it done right.
- design by committee round robin changes ad nauseum focusing on bells and whistles all the time instead of ensuring proper function as a core goal first.
- bad business ethics with relation to Armalite and Sterling and basically exacerbating things with the people who would have been in the best position to help
- corner cutting to save cost ad nauseum because lowest bidder govt reasons for something people's lives will depend on.
There are probably more things I'm forgetting, but that's basically all the worst and most aggravating aspects of my own career personified in one heavy cut and shut unfit for purpose rifle... 🤔🤣
See also; The Pentagon Wars 🤔🙄
I remember when they trained me on the L86A1 and were like 'don't forget to tap the charging handle forward to make sure the bolt went all the way into battery' to which I replied "made with pride in the UK?"
Persons using the "just reverse engineer it" argument have not tried to dimension items. The tools used to dimension the part have tolerances, on parts with tolerances. And, you have little control over whether those tolerances are additive or subtractive. The Data Package you buy with a license includes things like fixture measurement jigs, that are used to calibrate the QC gauges and tools.
And, the AR-18 were not made with an "Enfield Inch" either.
Thank you for leaving the bolt carrier departing the rifle in. It's been a tough day, I needed the laugh. The observations are solid.
Just from reading the title, I get the same feeling of dread as when someone (sales/management etc) at work asks me to (re)design something saying "oh you JUST need to tweak project xyz, that won't be any trouble"
It's 90% done for you. Then the nightmare begins.
Have to love it when a man who clearly actually understands all the whys takes the time to explain it for a wider audience. Thanks for this Bloke, helped me understand something that had bothered me for a while.
I love how everyone in this debate tends to forget the Cold War.
European nations went to bullpups because they were looking at a new, faster type of warfare on the battlefield: precision artillery and airstrikes before rapid, tank-led thrusts followed up by infantry delivered by APC or truck, not marching. A shorter rifle that took up less space in a cramped APC made a lot of sense, even more so when you consider troops might be wearing bulky NBC gear. Hence, most European armies in the late 1970s and 80s began transitioning away from full-length 7.62mm battle rifles like the FAL.
A bullpup is a compromise that makes sense in that environment. Now that the likely conflicts we face have changed, armies are adopting weapons appropriate to them. It doesn't mean "bullpups are shit", it means warfare has changed.
I can see your point but surely there is a better design than this?
And yet we survived with SLR's in APC's for the vast majority of the Cold War, as did many others with M16's and similar. I think this is one of those theoretical things to justify "we want a bullpup"...
@@BlokeontheRange Very good point, never heard of soldiers tripping over SLR's while getting out of vehicles and stuck in aircraft while trying to jump out and I think that the G-36 had similar dimensions when the stock was unfolded.
I hate it when you "military types" try to set yourselves up as firearms experts, just because you tend to be the end-users. I wouldn't ask a car driver for detailed information on the workings of different models of engines, personally, or to tell me what types and models of car led inventors to create which other types and models of car.
I used to be into military history until I realized that it was mostly flag officer-worshipping crap, as though they determine the outcome of battles/wars to the exclusion of absolutely everything else. Good weapons, good equipment, good tactics, the leadership/aptitude of junior officers, and frequent training in/with them wins wars, not some general pushing division markers around a map from his chatau command post. "Operational" success is nothing more than the aggregate success of "small", "insignificant" units.
Wouldn't a folding stock AR-18 have been equally compact and cut out a lot of the jiggery pokery involved in converting it into a bullpup ? .
Appreciation for the sheer amount tooling and engineering that goes into the manufacturing process of firearms and other complex machinery is something that your channel, Forgotten Weapons, InRangeTV and C&Rsenal have given me. For that I give many thanks to you all!
Until I started watching "history of firearms" videos like Bloke, Forgotten Weapons, etc. I'd never given any thought to how difficult it is to reverse engineer or scale down a piece of technology. I really enjoy videos like this which explain why certain decisions were made in weapon design.
"Only 4.5 inches shorter than an M16." That is a significant difference, in handling characteristics.
The cartridge is "only 6mm shorter than a .308". The .208 is a short action cartridge, to be begin with. Six mm off that makes for a very nifty little cartridge. The difference is, again, significant, in terms of weight, cost, etc etc.
I can't help but feel that 6.5mm in such a short cartridge might have retained more downrange thump, if it could reliably cycle in that design.
The SA80 failed every trial it was subjected to, with all the program managers assuming that ‘somebody will fix it later’. That somebody was HK after the rifle had been adapted and had turned into a scandal.
Ah yes, the eternal question - "can you not just...?"
No. No we can't. That's not how this works.
I hear that everyday at work, mainly from engineers
@@brandonalmeida5493 imagine if the answer was always no though...
Imagine if everyone was conservative (small C).
We wouldn't have advanced from rocks
@@sarchlalaith8836 I completely agree. Really what I saying is more of "its not worth it" move on to something better. I constantly do that at my work. Shop full of ww2 era machines but since I been here been pushing for getting new cncs. Just got new mill and on my second day running it already did 2 months worth of work. But back to the point, I hear it all the time for stuff like "why can't they remake such and such gun" just isn't worth it or not having data packs and prints. And I must say engineers i deal with are for u.s. army corps of engineers, they are engineers who can't hold down a civilian job. Normally when they open their mouths only stupidity comes out
Some comments on the non-engineer drawing office thing.
It doesn't hold that the drawing office system doesn't produce fully qualified engineers; Enfield may possibly have had a particularly lousy implementation of the system, but it's pretty much how most of the aircraft companies were set up through at least WWII (and probably the rest of the defence and engineering industries as well). The Spitfire was designed by R J Mitchell, who came out of a drawing office, and not even an aircraft company drawing office (Kerr-Stuart built steam trains). Sydney Camm, who designed the Hurricane, Typhoon, Tempest, Hunter and Harrier started as an apprentice carpenter with Martinsyde, swapped to the drawing office, went to Hawker as a Senior Draughtsman and was their Chief Designer two years later. The Royal Corps of Naval Constructors (who designed almost all of the UK's warships from Victoria's reign through the '80s) did push their Constructors through an in-house degree-equivalent, but that didn't mean the drawing office staff under them weren't also capable of carrying out the complex calculations involved in things like stability, they just needed to be checked by a Constructor afterwards. Draughtsman as a career route was considerably more than just technical drawing.
My father started off with an engineering apprenticeship with his local council's drawing office, by the close of his career he was a Chartered Civil Engineer (Professional Engineer in US terms), running the entire engineering department. He got there by the well-established route of engineering apprentice-drawing office-night school for HNC-night school for HND-Chartered Engineer by demonstrated competence, which is pretty much the same route Mitchell took in a different branch of engineering. (To get to CEng under the current system you need an M.Eng + experience).
In my own engineering career I've worked with chemists, astrophysicists, mathematicians, and probably a whole slew of other non-engineering specialities, while the most useful of my colleagues had an HND rather than a degree, and it didn't stop us from turning out the safety-critical FBW systems for Typhoon, 777 and a bunch of others, or being rated at the highest level of engineering competence by the US government. Admittedly software engineering is probably more amenable to that than other areas of engineering, but the safety margins we worked to tended to make other safety critical engineers go pale.
I've seen Ian's videos on the EM2 the EM2 is a manufacturing nightmare
I know that Ian has address this sort of question alot on Forgotten Weapons, but I think that the EM-2 and it's cartridge .280 British would have actually made an appreciable difference on the battlefield and a wars outcome. If the EM-2 or FN FAL in .280 had been developed and deployed earlier, I think it could have made a difference in the Korean War, especially given the fact that the Chinese heavily relied on close in mass infiltration tactics, aka human wave attacks with extra steps. The extra fire power over Lee-Enfield rifles would be appreciable. I am not saying that EM-2/FAL would have allowed the UN to straight up win the war, but it may have given Commonwealth units and extra edge. More specifically one battle in particular comes to mind, the Battle of Kapyong, where 1 Australian and 1 Canadian battalion faced down a Chinese division during the spring retreat in 1951. The Canadians and Aussies won in the end, but took serious casualties and both almost overrun due to the Chinese actually having superior small arms fire due, mostly a crap ton of Soviet SMG's.
Eye opener on mass distribution. Very true on coming up through drafting to "engineer". The very best went to night school on the way. Others came from the machine shop. Still, understanding section modulus, and materials is something you need. These days many have access to solid modeling tools but it helps to understand the fundamentals to be a good designer. To be great, one needs more of something.
Not always sure of what that something is.
Most apprenticeships allowed "day release", by the late 50s,early sixties. Apprentices would do three days per week on the factory floor,and two at the local technical college. The employer benefitted from a more qualified workforce, and the apprentices could command a higher wage when they were time served.
Not a bad system,but a bit haphazard.
Enfield had been gutted of people who knew what they were doing years before they got told to make the SA80 system... it's not a shock they screwed it up.
Awesome vid me old.
As someone who worked in reverse engineering hydraulics before I escaped the UK there are usually *very* good reasons for including stupid angles or wierd expensive features. Usually to prevent explodey seal situations or parts bending or flying off spectaculalry.
Even when dealing with writing about the toy gun industry in Taiwan and how airsoft guns are made and where the costs stack up it can be frustrating dealing with people devoid of an engineering background. It's all 'so easy' when you don't have to deal with/think about thebtolerancing issues, materials selection and manufacturability of them, even just getting access within enclosed spaces for welding or machining and design and manufacture of tools, jigs, CNC fixtures and programs to just get things made consistently.
One of my old colleagues was at Enfield Lock and Nottingham before it closed down and we had endless discussions about the L85 program and other heavier systems he worked on as well as the same culture you heard of regarding progression and apprenticeship etc.
Would love to sit down with a few steins at some point when I'm in your part of the world if it ever goes back to normal 🤔😉🍻
Must agree. No designer or production engineer is going to incorporate unusual angles, surface finishes or dimensions outside of the preferred series unless it's necessary.
Agree'd also, I think a lot of people in manufacturing perhaps assume that something has been designed complexly or hard to make because they assume the person designing is incompetent. Rather than it being necessity.
Your anecdote is actually very similar to the experience I had with the L85A1, I was in the R.A.F. competing at Bisley in 1984 when an Enfield rep turned up with an example of the new SA80 “wonder weapon”, he went on about what a great improvement it was over the current L1A1 we were all used to and the American M-16, we did get to try it out and it was nice to fire, apart from the horrible feel of the trigger, luckily I had left the forces by the time it was standard issue and all its problems started to appear.
An SAC!! I was looking at the last rifle siting in the rack, thinking it looked very much like my old SAC. At the end of the video you bring it out it and it is an SAC. Such fond memories. Make sure you keep neoprene buffers on the end of your breech block. It was always considered to be their weakness. Thanks BOTR, it was good to see an SAC again.
The polyurethane buffer died on mine, so I've temporarily replaced it with one made of felt until Chappie turns me up a new one on his lathe :)
Just figured I would add another point regarding why bullpups are often heavier than standard configuration rifles is the barrel length. It seems like a lot of bullpups tend to have longer barrels as a selling point. Same overall rifle length but you get a handful of extra inches or maybe a hundred or hundred and fifty mm of extra barrel. That's a fairly significant weight increase as well; probably not as much as the extra receiver length but it does make a difference. L85A2 and the M4 are roughly the same length, L85 is slightly shorter even, but the L85 has almost 50% more barrel length so that is adding a fairly significant amount of weight to it. Roughly comparing the M16 to the M4 you have about a kilo difference in weight and lost about 140mm off the barrel and overall length. Not exactly an accurate comparison but I think it's safe to say that a bullpup might be carrying an extra kilo of barrel compared to a similar overall sized standard config rifle.
Just got a new $250,000 haas mill at work. Big upgrade from all the ww2 machines and crappy garage shop cncs we had. Ran it for first time yesterday and within 1 day I did a job that would have taken me 30 working days. Upper management and the command (organization is part of u.s. army) already looking at completely overhauling how we do things. Something people do not understand is how manufacturing techniques constantly change and how much of it plays a role in say firearms of a certain era.
There's a reason modern US firearms manufacturers factories are grids of CNC machines....
Non engineers don't understand tolerances, some engineers don't either. Ford were tasked in WW2 to build Merlin engines, by mass production methods, they had to spend a year in the middle of the war just re-tolerancing the drawings from RR so they could make the things quickly as there were not enough time served fitters to do it the Rolls Royce way.
The anecdote I heard/read was that Packard engineers went to Rolls-Royce, who were busy hand-fitting Merlins. They asked what tolerances were being held to. A figure was proudly announced. The Packard engineers scoffed, and the R-R guys said something like "don't think you can hold to that then, eh?" to which the reply was along the lines of "we can go much tighter, without hand-fitting, and with 100% interchangeability". Thereby putting the R-R guys firmly in their place.
@@BlokeontheRange Quite.
@@BlokeontheRange That's been debunked.
@@JohnyG29 Have you got a source for that?
@@BlokeontheRange Well not quite, the production techniques approriate to and associated cost difference between producing low hundreds of engines a month compared to thousands of engines a month. Packard were volume manufactures, the RR way was the right way for low volume (they had a works culture & staff capable of routine hand fitting as a trade skill etc, Packard didnt, the machinery had to and did provide the skills) Packard were the mass producer of Merlin 60 series, 65/66's mostly which is how the mass production should be utilised on standardised production. Remember RR retained the engine development and experimentation, also the more esoteric versions were all UK built in UK factories including Ford at Trafford park btw ;-)
Wait, wait, you're telling me that just because it worked that one time with the AR-10 to the AR-15, it won't work with the EM-2? No... impossible... HERESY!
I know its a bit silly, but I still enjoy the idea of Kraut Space Magic as a literary device. Same with other hemi-demi-semi true weapon myths. Like Soviet weapons being forged from Stalinium and being utterly indestructible. Or American weapons being infused with the power of Freedom and Liberty.
You're only slightly wrong. British small arms are infused with milky tea and flatulence.
@@tamlandipper29 British? I didn't mention British weapons.
Yes! I'd like to see a game or TV show that takes these themes literally! It's very amusing
The Kraut SM : - looks like fit a nipple on butt and use as a water bottle. . . (and swiss cuckoo clock ; -D
@@KageMinowara I think he was just picking up the idea you put down, dog.
Just signed up on Patreon. I feel better now. :)
A sincere thanks for illustrating some of the design and materials selection decisions made at Steyr in the production of the AUG.
The best thing about the EM2 wasn't the rifle, but the cartridge it fired. NATO would have been much better served if they'd adopted .280 British as their main rifle cartridge during the Cold War. The FAL, CETME, and G3 would have been much better arms with that round.
Also, to your point that it would be easier to turn the AR 180 into a machined design than turn the AR-15 into a stamped design, aren't you basically just describing the BRN-180?
It would have been better than 7.62mm NATO in service rifles, but it was no intermediate cartridge like they should have gone for. They really missed something the Soviet and Germans had figured out there.
I do not know how .280 would have compared to 7.62mm out of machineguns, though. Would it have been better as a tank coaxial machinegun or firing from a fixed position?
@@88porpoise Yeah, I'm not really sure why people keep insisting it's an 'intermediate' cartridge, unless your definition of intermediate is 'any cartridge less powerful than .308'. I think if it had been widely adopted, two things would have happened:
1) The older generation of cartridges would have stuck around for machine guns and sniper riles, just like 7.62x54R did in Russia. Therefore, .30-06, 8mm Mauser, and maybe even .303 would likely still be in widespread front-line military use today
2) It would still have ended up being considered overpowered for general infantry use, and would still have been replaced by .223.
@@jic1 well, intermediate is subjective like you said. Most people do just use the .308 as the basis. What would you use to define it? I assume muzzle energy but then the question is getting everybody to agree on what muzzle energy counts as intermediate.
But then that raises the issue of "what if I make a low velocity .50bmg, is that now intermediate?"
A smashing video! What a pleasure to listen to somebody with the right qualifications discussing a subject they know. I wish you would do something similar about the FAL, which I still believe was the best battle rifle ever put into production.
10:32 brownell's has in part started producing a machined AR 18 with their BRN 180. They shortened the upper receiver so it would work on a standard AR lower and the upper is made from machined aluminum Pete Brownell said in an interview that making a stamped upper would be very cost prohibitive.
Excellent and balanced presentation there.. I think the root issue with Enfield was that it had produced nothing original or of value since the 1950s and that their much vaunted expertise was simply not tested. If they had been kept producing technology demonstrators and concept weapons during the period, then the development staff would perhaps have learned something. Instead, although the factory was perfectly capable of doing repair or refurbishment, they had almost no development capability.
You also need to understand that the British small arms industry was being chopped to pieces at the time as well. It became almost impossible to get export licences for military small arms (...unless you were a governement factory!) and most went to the wall. We did manage to produce a world beating sniper rifle, but this was more down to good luck than judgement..
The Enfield management were not a nice lot, and were perfectly willing to stick the knife into anyone who challenged them. They were not adverse to setting the Police and the Security Services on individuals who voiced concerns about what they were up to!
The 50's? I think you're giving them too much credit... their skill was at incremental development of other people's stuff.
@@BlokeontheRange Could be.. although they did a reasonable job on RARDEN development, although most of the core work was done at the Fort..
)
A VERY good point, and the whole reason SAAB (the Swedish aircraft manufacturer) got into the car making business (what would become SAAB Automobiles):
The times between Flygande Tunnan, Lansen and Draken wasn't particularly long, but long enough that SAAB had a problem retaining the engineers between the projects of designing a new aircraft. Rather than losing them, either because shareholders wouldn't agree to having a whole bunch of highly paid staff sitting around, twiddling their thumbs while waiting for the airforce to come up with some draft of specifications to have a look at, or said thumbtwiddlers getting bored and find something interesting to do elsewhere, SAAB set them to work with a car, which eventually became the production model SAAB 92.
Ah, your trademark British rambling. :)
Always a pleasure to listen to.
Excellent background info on the EM-2. Its nice to learn the hows and whys things were done...and the end results.
Ooh, this is relevant to my interests! Thanks Mike. To support this, I can add that at no point in development was the EM2 considered as a starting point. Not even for the bullpup layout (well, it might have been looked at, but they didn't reference it in writing). The only connection is the original designer, Hance, having worked on the EM2 originally (but did not design it), and the use of old EM2s as test-beds for the 6.25mm cartridge.
There were some trials around 1970 that probably involved EM2 as I have an example of a 7mm Mk.1Z by Radway Green dated 1970.
@@TheWirksworthGunroom edit- I do mention the 1970-dated ammo in the book but wasn't able to turn up any info on why the heck they made it...
@@jonathanferguson1211 I also own one of the Mk.1Z cartridges, the story I've seen generally accepted by collectors (but have no documentation to back up, so for now it's just a story) is that it was for direct competitive testing between the two guns (The XL of whatever mark was for the period and the EM2) I'm guessing for reliability and not ballistics but who knows. But that's just a story unless somebody pulls a source out from somewhere.
Also related to your book, is there a place to get it in the UK where I won't have to pay $50 shipping like on the headstamp publishing website?
Finally (promise, if you even see this), can you please put an EM2 on display at the firearms museum? I must admit I don't know if you have in recent years but I know when I was last at the one in Leeds there wasn't. Also just as an FYI if you didn't know, the REME Museum down South appears to have an SLEM and XL series gun on display (I'm not good at remembering the different XLs sorry, that's why I need your book!). It would be great to have a display of all the prototypes lined up together somewhere especially with CoD adding the EM2 now.
@@Kav. Re Mk.IZ - plausible, and I haven't reviewed every SA80-related file here by any means, so could well be the case.
Re my book, I'm afraid you've just missed a batch that were acquired by the museum shop and sold online. You could email them in case there are any seconds or display copies?
As to display, I wish it were that simple. As curators we are only one voice in what gets displayed in the galleries, which are overwhelmingly pitched at the general audience. I tried to make our First and Second World War displays as gun-heavy as possible, but we have yet to tackle anything post-WW2 and currently have no plans to, sadly. If I find an excuse, you can bet I'll get an EM2 out :)
@@jonathanferguson1211 I'll pop them an email, I don't suppose they had any of the copies of the EM2 manual reprint as well? I'll ask regardless.
Maybe impossible (I'm an engineer, not an expert in museums by any means) but any chances of loaning the REME museum an EM2 for a prototypes display? (although that would raise the question of if they'd be unable to for the same reasons you stated)
If you do find an excuse to get one out please advertise far and wide, I've been trying to just find an EM-2 to look at for years so I'd make the trip up from the South just for that.
Finally thank you for replying to a response on a year old comment.
Back around 1984 my good friend and mentor, the late Pat Walker, acquired SN#2 BSA built EM2 rifle in 7.62 NATO in a 'trade' with Major Maurice Fogwell of the Smallarms School Museum. It was missing the unity power optic sight but I modified a Red Dot scope to fit... Pat shot it a lot (as did I), it was quite a hard kicking rifle, not well suited to the heavy 7.62mm round. I studied that rifle extensively, and also had a chance to study the two examples that Interarms had at their Manchester HQ. They were beautifully built guns but obviously toolroom prototypes, to enter service they needed extensive engineering input in my opinion....
On a side note, I wonder where SN#2 is now? Australia or Canada is my best guess!
@Bertie Bollocks Interarms was based in the old newspaper building at 1, Worsley Street. It was closed and demolished to make way for a bypass and the administration moved to Brazennose House West, Brazennose Street, that too is no longer as it is being redeveloped for housing!
Thank you for bothering. I can't get enough of this kind of content. Patreon dollars well spent. Cheers.
Iron Sky for meme purposes. That's the most correct use for a film ever.
Yup, German Space Magic. And leather trenchcoat space suits!
@@mpetersen6 And president Adolf Palin!
Great Video Bloke and Nathaniel F! Keep up the good work....
Well hello! I just discovered that your channel is back, can't believe it took me so long to find that out! So glad to see you're still around :)
I'm on Arizona time, gotta watch this in the morning🤙 very interesting and insightful so far
As an engineer, I can tell you people have no clue as to the investment costs to make stamping dies, especially progessive dies as very few bent parts are stamped just once. Firearm magazines are a prime example. Not easy to make, that is why so many manufacturer's just have Mec-Gar make their magazines.
thanks bloke and team,i needed this educational distraction. Please be well everyone.
The AVRO Arrow suffers from the same "this would be the most perfect thing with no issues ever if it had been adopted" where people get completely lost in the fantasy of that thing.
YES! Good initial design, clearly, but there are some real fanboys out there that talk about it in this melancholy manner.
True, but if it had been adopted and time was given to work through what would have been forthcoming issues, the EM2 would probably have been a more advanced platform than the SLR.
The Arrow was a fine enough interceptor, and advanced in its time. Watch CBC's 'The Arrow' and see that the actual aeroplane was the least of Avro's problems.
The AR-18 is the Velvet Underground of rifles--they only sold 10,000 guns, but everyone who bought one designed their own rifle.
I find it interesting that the rifle itself never sold well, but its guts form the basis of loads of successful designs, with greater or lesser changes made.
@@BlokeontheRange I own a Sterling AR-180, and other than its admittedly military trigger, it's a great rifle. With a nice QD optics mount--in the early 1970s. I think it was largely a victim of time and circumstance.
👍 for the Iron Sky clip. One of my favorite comedies.
Good, intelligent presentation, Bloke. Excellent! Thanks!
Thank you kindly!
Thank you for the video. While all interesting the main thing I learned in the last few minutes was the reason why bull pups are heavier. Always amazed how heavy my SA80 was compared to my SLR.
Doesn't seem to apply to the Steyr AUG tho'.
Cos made of plastic and a completely different construction :)
I found the SA80 heavy too though a lot of that had to do with the SUSAT. All the other service bullpups are at least half a pound lighter.
I don't think it's necessarily a bullpup problem, there are conventional designs in 5.56mm that are inexplicably heavy, the Italian's AR70 rifle is an even bigger lump.
@@Matt_The_Hugenot The other factors are SUSAT, a heavy tapered barrel, and the expansion in size and shape of the upper and lower when they redesigned the gun entirely to save money...
Shooting that factory semi L85A1 with irons alongside my M16A1 really drove it home how heavy the basic rifle is. Some conventional designs are also heavy, either by having fat barrels or through design choices which make them so - in the SA80's conception, the receiver design means it couldn't be light even if you wanted it to be by putting a really thin barrel in it.
Funny you mentioned machined AR18s, as there's a company here in Canada that's done exactly that, not once but twice.
So a couple of observations for you;, Engineer James Sullivan was one of the engineers at Armalite, who was tasked with scaling down the AR10 to create the M16. Later he worked for Ruger on the Mini-14 rifle, which is actually largely made from investment cast parts, which eliminates the vast majority of machining required, as parts are cast in the desired shapes.
The AR18/180 was first produced in Costa Mesa, California and then produced by Howa Machine in Japan and finally by Sterling in England. The Costa Mesa is considered, along with the Howa to be the best. The Sterling produced guns are basically junk, poor quality control and unreliable. The (continuing) disaster of the Enfield SA80 is not surprising and even the H&K rebuild and redesign, which cost more then buying new M16/M4 rifles or G36's, basically put lipstick on a pig. Since civilian riflemen are in short supply in the UK, I expect more of the same in the future, unless they simply commit to buy unmodified, proven, foreign designs.
At least the Army & Police purchased Glock 17 pistols.
Nathaniel F. is awesome.
Thanks Mike for all that you do.
> Since civilian riflemen are in short supply in the UK, I expect more of the same in the future, unless they simply commit to buy unmodified, proven, foreign designs.
Gun ownership in Britain isn't that much more strict than in, say, Russia or Germany, and both countries have good gun design capabilities. Even China, which has stricter gun laws than almost any western country, can do gun design effectively. You just need a good cadre of gun designers, and where the civilian market can't support that, either export sales or government arsenal systems can.
Fascinating. I get the distinct impression that you are an engineer yourself, Bloke? I had no idea about the political skullduggery between HMG/Enfield and Sterling. I still have moderately warm memories of my L85/SA 80, but that was probably because we could carry twice as much ammo and blaze it away on auto. Didn't ta e it to war in the sand, though.
Enfield tried to reverse engineer the Sterling SMG to avoid paying Sterling for them. You can tell a government knock-off because the mag well has a horrible bracket on it. The government armourers couldn't do the same sophisticated construction that Sterling could.
I was told that 1 WFR and 1 BW carried out the field trials for the L85 A1 and ended up passing a huge list of issues back to the trials team, think the only one I saw that was fixed was the magazine release catch but the SLR was my lersonal weapon until I was posted to NI and did the conversion course.
The A1 gets quite a bit of grief, some of it is deserved, some of it isnt, tbh I had more issues with the L1A1 than I ever did with the L85A1, the A2 fixed the major problems but in theory that should have been done before acceptance.
I can squeeze the RG magazine issue in here as well, we were told that these were disposable magazines, then they changed their mind and we got stuck with them rather than the heavier and less flimsy ones, the RG ones were not really squaddie proof, slamming the mag home rather than placing on and pushing just damaged them, causing stoppages when you didnt need to (due to now damaging the top of the magazine).
Likely they trialed the L85, it as the revision of things like the magazine catch that made it the A1.
Come to think of it, the AR-18 itself is basically Eugene Stoner's idea of "making" the AR-15 into a stamped design. It seems that it is easier to design something from the ground up, especially when your goal is ease of manufacture
Except it's Sullivan's rifle, not Stoner's ;)
@@BlokeontheRange Still, somebody who Stoner trusted and respected!
National Serviceman firing an experimental rifle? - seems unlikely.
I did a weapons familiarisation programme in 1981 and spent several days firing almost every available military weapon, from all over the world on the ranges at Portsmouth. The M16 was everyone's favourite. I believe the modern variant is currently the weapon of choice for UK special forces. I'm not surprised.
I didn't say a National Serviceman fired an experimental rifle, merely that one claimed to have witnessed one being fired...
@@BlokeontheRange I should have listened more carefully but wasn't trying to score points - I enjoyed the video.
@22:37
It was at that moment Mike became the "Linus Sebastian" of the gun world.
(Viewers of Linus Tech Tips will know what I'm on about! :P)
A good explanation of why the Tavor bullpup is surprisingly heavy, despite its polymer chassis and aluminum receiver.
No...?
That's not actually a good explanation
The Tavor is a AK hiding inside a bull pup chassis with great ergonomics
Brilliant essay.
Point of order on the length: The barrel is 623mm, rather than the 518mm of the L85 & the receiver longer than needed for 5.56x45. Merely reducing the barrel length to that of the L85 would bring it down to the same length (actually 1mm shorter...).
Interesting topic! After watching this, and remembering Ians videos about the L85/SA80, even if the EM-2 would have been a readily usable tried design, i think the scale of messing up the endresult, would have probably been the same. As i suspect the same people would have been involved...
Also i never understood why people always claim Bullpubs are so heavy. (The ones we had, including optics, were at 3.6kg empty) Due to this video i looked up the weight of the L85/SA80 and was surprised. Wiki says an empty SA80 is weightwise closer to an AUG-A1 or A2 with full mag than to an empty one. 😮 (the a3 is heavier than the A1 and A2 but still lighter than the L85/SA80)
Now look at the weight of an m4 / m16a1.
People say they're heavier because they're heavier
@@scottc1857 What i didn't know was the weight difference between the L85 and the M16. And this difference i can understand is big enough to complain about. The difference between the M16 and an AUG is there, but it's half of that and has obvious reasons. What the M16 A1 is lighter than the AUG can be mostly atributed to the thinner profile barrel and it lacking optics. -> less metal->less weight. But both weight that can be helpfull if present. The A2 Barrel was only thicker in front of the handguard which made it heavier but it still had no optics. So if you put the same barrel profile on an original length M16 and a tough set of optics on, there's not that much difference anymore. At least not enough to complain. (With the M4 of course the shorter barrel contributes to additional weight difference) But the L85 has no such "advantage" over the AUG: it doesn't feature a heavier profile or longer barrel, and both have optics. Granted the one on the L85 has a bigger magnification, but it isn't as sturdy (soldier/field use proof) as the original 1.5X swarovski.
I never thought about that but this was interesting
1:06 if you want to illustrate this point to yourself ever, print off a side view to scale using publisher.
It's a damn big gun, you really don't appreciate how big until you do this.
Also having now held one since posting this comment.
With bayonets and rifle grenade launchers attached the EM-2 is fairly muzzle heavy, maybe a loaded magazine would rectify this but I doubt it.
The gun balances perfectly when unloaded and is superbly comfortable.
The unit sight is garbage and would've been the first thing to go when in service. The 3.5x (iirc) magnification "DMR" scope is a very nice optic which I liked a lot.
Oh and when holding one it doesn't feel big, but it is, it's a long rifle. It's equivalent to a G3K or AR10 really.
Check out what some CZcamsrs are doing with 3d printed stamping dies.I think that lower volume demand for obsolete clips could match up well. Heat-treating them for spring tension might be trouble though.
The key to design sounds like tolerance rather than patience.
Very interesting. I find the rifle very pleasing to look at and admit to imagining it didn't see use because of those awful bureaucrats who always spoil things. It is rarely so simple.
In Engineering, where I'm from, a Draughtsman is a trained Engineer, he's really a junior Design Engineer.
The problem arises when design staff have insufficient knowledge of the manufacturing technologies and their limitations. That’s why these days most designs are produced by cross functional teams including specialists in mechanical design, manufacturing engineering, quality assurance and so on.
When it comes to tolerancing features on engineering drawings I personally think CAD has made it worse for the machinist. Engineers can be just as lazy as any body else. CAD makes it too easy for the designer to simply call out the same few tolerances for everything. Especially if they are using ISO tolerancing. Also, for shops in the US unless they have ISO tolerancing handbooks it can be tough on the person producing the parts. Plus every place behind the decimal point adds a lot of cost. Often it means an extra machining operation that involves grinding.
My last job before I retired I was doing inspections on machinery designed under ISO tolerances with Inch measuring tools. Having to convert everything to metric was a continual PITA. I tried talking them into just setting up everything with Excel forms that used macros to do all the calculations with automatic accept/reject.
THIS!! Holy crap the amount of micrometer tolerances on crap I've had to lathe. btw There's a cellphone app now ISO fits.
Edit... I'm mostly machining for americans, so the parts are in inches, but the tolerances are in metric because ISO is easier for them to type in.
As a CAD engineer myself, I agree to an extent - CAD basically allows any Tom Dick or Harry to churn out parts and drawings without really understanding what they're doing. The worst offenders will simply turn over 3D models to the machine shop and expect them to CNC them at exactly nominal dimensions - or to apply overly tight tolerances without considering what will still work.
However I don't believe that CAD is responsible for shoddy engineering, it just makes shoddy engineers able to fart out parts at a rate that wouldn't be possible in the drawing board era.
The reality is that unless you're building a 100% known quantity, there will have to be extensive testing to identify and solve issues. The perfect modern example, IMO would probably be the US Army's IVAS program, which attempts to apply the technologies around the Microsoft hololens to a military environment. The first version which used a literal modified hololens was developed and tested for the better part of a year among a mostly closed loop of infantry troops and microsoft employees basically camping in a field before the second, ruggedized and helmet-borne prototype was finalized.
Thing is, that second set of prototypes was tested by a bunch of troops outside of the program recently and there were _a lot_ of little things that were identified as needing refinement. You don't get quality hardware overnight, and if you rush it out before it is ready you _will_ get a substandard product that is not reflective of its true potential.
Was it ever considered that they just adopt the AR18 from Sterling and drop the bullpup idea altogether?
It is rather telling that so many armies do not do bullpups; I wonder why? The AR-18 would have made more sense as I suspect that it could have been improved.
Why do something so simple and sensible? This is a government program we're talking about.
No. It wasn't considered even for a nanosecond.
@@BlokeontheRange Out of interest do you know anything at all about the Sterling T7.62, what was it, was it a back up to the SLR or was a light machine gun?
We miss you Nathaniel F!
Before watching the video I am going to guess:
A decade plus newer design integrating developments not available to the EM-2 in the late forties. Combined with extensive use in the field and resulting refinement of the design.
Plus just downscaling a rifle to a significantly smaller cartridges isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds.
The EM-2 may have been the right rifle in 1950, by 1980 it was out of date, made the wrong way with the wrong materials. If it had been fully adopted and continuously developed for the next thirty years then it might have been fine.
Heck, we don't even know that the EM-2 was the right rifle in 1950, it was simply a very promising rifle. 60 toolroom prototypes don't make a very representative sample, and had the thing been continued with, what with the results of mass troop trials, optimisation for mass production, Civil Servant/CQMS pennypinching ("TWO magazines per soldier? They'll just end up wasting expensive ammunition. Give them one each and have the rest of their combat load in cardboard boxes."), and the inevitable unforeseeable attacks of the Harsh Reality Fairy we really don't know what the rifle would have become had it not been cancelled. Had the SA80 programme been cancelled in the early 80s and the MoD very sensibly just bought a big pile of M16s/AUGs/CALs the internet gun community today would be talking about the incredibly rare and very promising toolroom prototype bullpup rifles that the UK nearly could have got 40 years ago.
Good points. Politics, War Department and MoD aside, it was still not a possibility with all the points you gave.
Also wish more people would reiterate the points Eugene Stoner made when he came in to look at the L85 and its issues during production.
I have no idea what Stoner's points on the L85 were.
@@owensmith7530 at one point during the X-series development, they brought stoner in to figure out a problem with jams and metal build up. He took a quick look and he found out that it was the ejector tearing a bit of brass of casings when ejecting, hence the buildup. Ian of Forgotten Weapons covered this story in his series on the prototypes.
Didn't have the ability or the money so they made the SA80 that ended up costing quite a lot for H&K make work.
The cost of modding a single rifle was the same price as a brand new HK G36.
@@pdallen8355 The G36 when over heated suffers from inaccuracy issues just as did the SA80 at room temp but at least G36 makes a bang when the trigger is pulled and works alright in cold climates and if time is given to allow it to cool. That alone makes the G36 far better than the SA80 and it's multitude of defects.
unrelated to everything outside of 10:17 , in Canada we do actually have machined AR-180 variants.
Nice video I bet you have ordered a copy of Thorneycroft to SA80?
Interesting video, you have managed to answer a question I've had for a while about scaling down guns. One of the firearms I wanted to see shrunk down was the M1 Garand to Mini-14 weight/size. Yes, I know I could just get a Mini-14, but I like the feel and look of the Garand better. Well, now I know why it isn't feasible.
As for the weight issue with bullpups, has anyone ever tried to use the same polymer as the type used in Glock pistols for the extended receiver of a bullpup?
Wouldn't something like a Styer AUG, IMI Tavor or KelTec RDB be the result?
They seem to have polymer receivers pretty-much like you describe.
I'm wondering if the Ruger Mini-14 would have replaced the M-14 had it been introduced in the early 60's rather than the 70's.
That’s what Bill Ruger thought
Nah. It's just not really a military rifle, even in the AC556 config.
@@BlokeontheRange This is true, but it didn't receive the special years worth of attention to develop and perfect like the M16 had. Don't get me wrong I'm glad the M4 and M16 are the weapons they are today, but they took time to get there.
Almost every weapon there are service men who loved it, and servicemen who hated them it seems.
There is also the obvious point that the L85 is almost entirely made of steel, whereas the AR-15 is part steel, part aluminium or polymer.
It's quite possible to make a lighter bullpup, but it would have been more expensive, at least till injection moulded glass fibre reinforced polymer construction took off in the 90s.
as an up and coming draftsman, hearing that a company making mechanical parts brought in fine arts majors with no engineering background baffles me, though I can understand hiring them as draftsmen, because drafting was a lot of artistry and drawing back in those day, and in some countries it still is.
I had an art teacher at school who did technical drawing for a while between university and becoming a teacher.
Oh wow! You have a Leader T2 Mk5, I've always loved them for the brutally simple Aussie engineering, how do you find it and would you do a video on it?
Do you have a thing for aussie guns or just the two AIA rifles?
I don't have a T2 Mk5. It's an AAA SAC. I also only have the one AIA rifle, not two.
@@BlokeontheRange Ah, I've rechecked the wiki and I see now. Same gun, later company. You do call it an International Arms at 21:25 but thats our fault really for having two nearly identically named manufacturers I think. How'd it get to Switzerland, are they common enough there?
If Sterling upset the Ministry with a court action, then they were ultimately doomed. Government ministries always bear grudges- think Virgin/Stagecoach who sued the DfT over their unethical award of the West Coast rail franchise to First Group. Now no more Virgin/Stagecoach franchises.
It's the senior civil servants, rather than the elected Ministers who bear these grudges, largely because they're a bunch of incompetents, promoted beyond their mediocre) abilities & hate being exposed.
Unfortunately, most politicians rely on their word when making decisions - thus perpetuating the whole mess (& stifling progress).
That is what is known as "The Establishment". A truly pitiful gathering of incompetents.
Enfield never forgave Sterling for not taking being ripped off lying down...
Maybe the L85 would have turned out better if they didn't bullpup the AR-18, but derived a different design from the AR-18.
Awesome
Don’t mind me, I’m just here to try and help boost the metrics
Don't mind me boosting the metric with a comment on your comment and a like for good measure.
@@genericpersonx333 Here, here, whot! Geoff Who fakes a British accent on the wrong syllable.
What's the conical thing with the brass machinery on the top right of your shelf? A partial mortar shell? My brain wants me to think it's some kind of small rocket engine.
It's part of a training mortar as far as I can tell.
Ah, I see, thank you.
What did happen to the FN in 280 British? Was this weapon finished as in finalized?
Only a proto.
I'm not an engineer but even I groan when someone says to just make whatever thing we've got in stock bigger or smaller.
A case of making something bigger that didn't really work was the 1986(?) Honda XR250 where they bored out a smaller engine but slapped carburetors from a much larger engine onto it. This change made it more akin to hand grenade in terms of reliability. My uncle has one and had to rebuild it several times despite meticulous maintenance.
Tldr: build a new thing rather than change an old thing.
good video
I think I'm one of the people who thinks revisiting the EM2 design would've been better than messing about with the AR18, but my perspective is that of all of the AR18 designs I've seen the only one that seems to have been without some kind of significant problem is the armalite itself - though admittedly I think most of the problems have been political in origin, such as the SA80 itself or the G36. Also on the engineers being unable to successfully reverse-engineer a known-good design likely ballsing up the ground-up reconstruction of em-2-small, I agree, though there's a chance that putting these people in a position where they *don't* think they've got an easy job might have been enough to force them to do it properly, rather than the ballsup we got.
I also think that in a lot of cases in weapon design there seems to be this idea that newer is automatically better, irrespective of the relative merits of the system itself and the relative technical maturity of it. The AR18 *is* a very technically mature design as this point, I don't think the flapper lock system is as mature and could turn out to have it's own advantages which aren't well understood currently - at least to my lay-perspective
Steyr AUG, FN SCAR to a point, "SIG" MPX/MCX, Howa Type 89.
Those are all designs that show some level of inspiration on the AR-18 and have been successful in different degrees.
@@ShortT-RexLikeArms AUG required significant redesigning of the bolt capture mechanism (the whole cage-thing that extends out the front) and it still doesn't seem to fare too well in adverse condition testing from what I've seen. I've heard the SCAR has major issues but I confess don't remember what they were. I wasn't aware that the Type 89 or the MPX/MCX were AR18 derivatives so I'll happily give you those, though. IIRC the HK 416 is also based on the same action and the only fault it seems to have is that it's expensive. That said, I hope I was clear that this is just my limited perspective, and certainly not meant to be authoratative at all
While a good point, I would say that flapper locking mechanisms were mature at that point, (DP-28 and DShK to name a few) but they had really only been used for large machine guns and full power rifles. Scaling it down to an intermediate cartridge rifle might have caused it to be too small to work and another locking system might have been more space efficient. Even today, someone out there is making a large caliber semi-auto rifle that uses two huge flaps like a DP/DShK, but that also not a small caliber rifle.
Truthfully I'd be curious to know of any other flapper locked guns other than the DP-28, DShK, and the G34.
@@vorlon010 The Steyr cage-thing is something they added to stop the bolt from rotating when in travel, all AR-style bolts have some type of measure to ensure this doesn't happens, for example in AR-15 the bolt can't rotate before in reaches an area in the receiver where a space was machined(that small bulging part of the left side of the upper).
Don't't take the mud test as gospel, it's a single stress test for a design and it doesn't tell the whole story about reliability, the fact that the AUG has been adopted in multiple countries, with a multitude of environments should be much better testimony about it's performance.
In SCAR has alleged issues with damaging optics on the long run.
@@ShortT-RexLikeArms You make fair points - I do still think the AUG cage thing is a significant redesign, at least compared to others in the extended AR18 family, and I shouldn't take things like the inrange mud test or random anecdotes in comments as gospel or all encompassing. It's all enough to make me *personally* wonder about the design and if there might be a better one for all these different companies to iterate one - but that's a personal speculation and I'm just some guy on the internet, not required to necessarily be right about it, if you get what I mean.
Imagine carving something out of a block of wood versus making something out of folded cardboard. You can make way more shapes from the wood.
Also, I wonder if they had similar design problems with the AK-74? They weren't changing fabrication technique but they were going to a higher pressure cartridge.
I know they did have some issues, including gas port erosion. Although given that the rim diameter is much closer between 7.62x39mm and 5.45x39mm, case length is identical, and overall length is the difference of a millimeter, I don't think the issues were nearly as bad. I have a feeling the cartridge was developed around the AKM design as much as it was being designed around the 5.45mm.
Never just walk away from the CNC.
It might just throw something at you.....
Any idea why they changed the bolt carrier design on the SA-80, putting the recoil spring in an extra rod?
To fix problems they created by refusing to build the AR18 under supervision from the designers and licence holders.
Actually I don't know why they did that. I can make educated guesses though - by not having the guide rods double up as spring guides you can improve how the carrier is supported, but it's likely marginal at best. You can go down to 1 return spring, but then need an extra hole in the bolt and an extra spring guide. But it's likely that "someone thought it was a good idea at the time"...
Needs to be renamed Bloke sitting on a sheep.
Also just casting parts and then mashine finish them where needed is or was also a thing, like bolts.
As long as you mashine finish parts in contact with other parts it's completly fine. It may be heavier and look weird but if done right its cost effective and faster than mashine something from a bigger block of steel.
That is true in certain situations but again depends on the quantities involved, the part concerned, and the technological capabilities of the manufacturer. It's not a simple or cheap process to cast a dozen rifle receivers from a tough steel with no inclusions, without burning the part, and to come out ahead of forging the blank or just machining from solid. Need 1 million sling swivels on the other hand? Great, we'll have them done by October. Will that be cash or card sir?
Ruger in particular uses casting for a number of things, like Mini-14 receivers, but the properties of the finished part vs. forging or milling have to be taken into account during the design phase. I used to work at a casting facility that was able to crank out small parts with precision surfaces like threading cast directly into the piece, no machining required.
Wonderful. We lay people seldom get to learn of the problems involved with design and development. That Australian carbine would be nice to have, OH NO, we can't import them to the USA.
You actually could get them.
There's been two different runs by people associated with Charles St George who have made t2 clones
As I eagerly await Jonathan Ferguson book, Thorneycroft to SA80, do you think if the EM2 had been adopted would it have been a better rifle than the L1A1? and the now infamous L85? Would you also like to speculate on the L85's replacement as it's now pretty long in the tooth?
I doubt it... It'd have had the same teething troubles as everything else that's not already a mature design, and apparently wasn't very accurate anyway. Would likely have been replaced by something in 5.56mm in the 80's anyway, whatever that might have been.
I suspect that the C8 adoption will be quietly expanded over time to replace L85 given that a) it's already in the system and has been for a long time, b) it's just been adopted as the standard rifle of the Paras and Marines, c) expanding this adoption likely wouldn't need a tender irrespective of whether the UK ends up subject to EU tendering laws or not, since it's a pre-existing programme, d) it's a good system and anything else that actually is better won't be that much better and is probably rather more expensive. But don't underestimate the ability of the MoD and UK Govt to screw up something that should be completely simple and obvious!!!
Adopting the L1A1 was a pretty safe bet - the basic design was super-mature by then, so there were relatively few teething troubles.
@@BlokeontheRange I agree an AR15 platform made wherever is a logical and sound choice and your right the MOD could still screw it up.
Huh. I never knew it was so complicated.
What movie is that ~12 minutes in?
It looks like *Iron Sky* or as I call it Nationalsozialists on the Moon.
The iron sky cameo made me laugh
Excellent video. Design teams , with the expertise, experience, open minded, able to think laterally, only as good as their last success, need to be nurtured.....they do not grow on trees.