[ South African 7.62mm Bren Conversion ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at DSA
taking a look at some of the really cool guns in their reference collection,
like this South African 7.62 NATO Bren gun conversion.
Now the British had a gun like this, the L4A1, that I have covered already.
But the South Africans didn't have access to British guns, nor did they have
access to British facilities to do this conversion for them, so they did it themselves.
The backstory here of course is South Africa had a bunch of Bren guns from World War Two.
They were used by the South African military until they adopt 7.62 NATO,
and then the Bren guns basically all go into storage because
it's kind of a lot of work to convert them to 7.62.
They have other machine guns that are much more easily converted,
they have Browning 1919s, they have Vickers guns,
those both get pretty easily converted to 7.62 NATO and put into service.
And then South Africa also buys FN MAGs from FN, a fantastic general purpose machine gun.
However, as the war in South West Africa (now Namibia) intensifies,
the South Africans find they don't have enough machine guns, they don't have as many as they'd like.
And because they are under economic embargo,
they can't just go buy more from FN, or really from anyone else.
So there is this obvious solution (or at least stop gap) of,
"We have all those Bren guns in storage, let's pull them out and convert them
to 7.62 NATO so we can just use them in the field
with our regular ammo, along with all the other guns that we're using."
So Lyttelton Engineering Works, LEW,
one of the main firearms industry companies in South Africa at the time,
they come up with essentially a .308 conversion kit for the Bren gun.
They pull the things out of storage and start converting them.
And this conversion program would last from 1972 until 1976,
and cover basically all the Bren guns that the South Africans had in stock.
So let's take a look at what they did, and how it's a bit different from the British L4.
The first thing I would like to point out is that this is a Mark I Bren,
that's readily distinguishable by this big drum rear sight adjustment.
The South Africans had a wide variety of Bren guns, Mark Is and Mark IIs.
They made no effort to standardise them all or to bring them up to the Mark II pattern,
they just converted them all as is to 7.62 NATO.
So you'll find examples of both the Mark I and the Mark II.
And in fact you can see on our markings here this is an Enfield manufacture Mark I, made in 1944.
This is the importer information.
But that 7.62mm is the only new marking
that was added by the South Africans when they did this conversion.
One of the conversion elements they did that we will not see here
is they actually made new furniture. They made polymer furniture
to use in replacing any wood furniture that was beyond the point of repair.
But this gun had its stock, grip and carry handle
all in good condition, and so it still has the original wood pieces.
Now for magazines, the South Africans would use these with their standard 20 round R1A1 FAL mags.
And they also developed a 30 round straight magazine for them, which is this.
Some of these did see use in Rhodesia as well,
the Rhodesians also used straight 30 round magazines.
Just for comparison sake, here's an L4 magazine from a British conversion.
You'll notice it has a slight curvature to it, it's also inch pattern.
So this is what you would expect to see.
This or a regular 20 round rifle mag in a South African gun.
The first element to making such a conversion would be the barrel.
So Lyttelton made new barrels in South Africa.
There's a Pretoria P proof, 7.62mm, serial number and proof marks on them.
However they only made the barrel, they took carry handles ...
and gas blocks and regulators off of the original .303 guns,
and just put them back onto their new 7.62 barrels.
They used ... muzzle devices from the R1 FAL rifles, so you'll see that there.
The only difference is they didn't include the retention ring for rifle grenades,
because you're not going to be shooting rifle grenades off of this guy.
And they actually took the front sights also off of their original .303 guns
and just mounted them back onto the new 7.62 barrels.
In fact they didn't do anything to adjust the calibration of the sights.
So the front sight is an original .303 sight.
The rear sight is an unmodified .303 sight.
And so in theory the range adjustments on this don't actually match 7.62 NATO.
In practice however, the difference between the two is pretty minimal.
The number of guys who are actually using the sights to shoot out to multiple hundreds of yards
where the difference in sight calibration is actually going to be apparent was pretty minimal.
So probably wise on their part to not bother with the extra work to try and recalibrate the sights.
The final and probably most complex part of the conversion process is a new ejector block.
That's this bit at the back of the Bren gun magazine well.
It has of course the magazine release catch, and it also has the ejector down in there.
That, right above my finger right there, is the ejector.
So the ejector has to be re-profiled to fit 7.62 NATO.
And this whole block has to be ... longer so the mag well is a little bit shorter
to properly fit an FAL magazine instead of an original Bren gun magazine.
Now I happen to have a British L4A1 conversion here along with our South African one.
And so we can see a couple of the differences in these ejector blocks.
Unfortunately the South African one is extremely tightly fitted,
and I don't want to break anything, so ... I can't take it out of the gun for you
or else I'd show ... just the ejector block.
But you can see here on the South African gun the magazine ... catch is actually off centre to the left.
On the British conversion it is centred.
The British have added a section of basically
magazine stop into their ejector block here.
You can see that ... the ejector block goes to there,
and that bit of curved metal is part of the ejector block.
The South Africans did not do that that.
This is all part of the receiver itself, and they didn't mess with that on the ejector block.
And we can see some differences here looking in the [back] of the magazine well,
difference in how that ejector is actually formed.
And lastly, if I take the bolt out the one other change they had to make
was to put 7.62mm extractors into the bolts.
And so you can see that's electro-pencil marked 7.62.
The bolt is a straight British .303 bolt, including a .303 calibre bolt face.
But that properly profiled 7.62 extractor
is enough to hold the cartridge on the bolt face and have it run reliably.
So really not that many changes that they had to make to these guns to convert them to .308.
The Bren gun conversion program in South Africa ultimately wasn't all that successful.
Now part of their problem was they were working with guns that were already
a couple of decades old and had seen various amounts of service.
When the British convert their Bren guns to .308, they were able to put them through essentially
a general factory refurb first, so that they are essentially working with new in the box guns.
The South Africans couldn't do that, they didn't have access to ... British facilities,
or because of the embargo they didn't have access to that much at all.
So they start with guns that are in a wide range of conditions.
Some are pretty good, some are really clapped out.
And so as it worked out, essentially every one of these conversions had to be hand fitted
in order to make sure that the parts fit the various states of wear
of the ... base guns that they were going into.
And then after the conversion some of the guns worked really well.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the conversion system, it was well done.
But some of the guns were just too worn and didn't work well, they had a lot of issues with runaway guns.
And of course once you get these guns into the field they continue to get used more,
and now the maintenance requirements expand.
And once they are all hand-fitted conversions, they are not ... parts interchangeable really.
And so this became really a significant logistical overhead for the South African Defence Force.
So this wasn't really that successful of a project for them.
And it is one of the factors that directly led to the development of the SS-77
new South African general purpose machine gun.
So its very cool to have access to these, it's really cool to look at them.
This is one of those examples of do the best you can with what you have,
sometimes it'll work, and sometimes not so much.
Anyway, a big thanks to DSA for giving me access to this and their L4 to show you and compare.
Hopefully you enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.