I got a box from FN USA.
So what's in it? Well, let's have a look.
That looks like a FAL.
In fact this looks like a FAL parts kit.
That's quite a lot of FAL parts.
And FAL handguards.
Aah, and a FAL bayonet with a fancy purple frog.
You know what that means? That means this is not just any FAL parts kit.
This is an actual Belgian Gendarmerie kit.
[ Belgian Gendarmerie FAL Kits ]
I suppose this opens up a number of questions like what did the Belgian Gendarmerie use?
And why did FN America send me a parts kit of it?
So let's start with what the Gendarmerie used.
The Belgian Gendarmerie are sort of a hybrid between military and police force,
similar to the Gendarmerie you'll see in other countries around Europe.
And they were equipped with essentially the exact same rifles that the Belgian Army used.
So the Belgian Army in 1954 adopted the FAL as the M1 rifle.
And ... the early M1 pattern rifles had a few distinctive things.
They had a wooden buttstock. They had actually a stripper-clip top cover.
The M2, which came later, the ... army would order FALs in '54, '55 and 1960.
And they would upgrade some of the early M1s to later M2 pattern.
The M2s have a solid top cover, it does not use stripper clips.
And they went to a polymer furniture.
The Gendarmerie used both of these patterns as well.
Now this particular one is an M2, it's the later pattern. It's the more prevalent.
For what it's worth there is also an M3 FAL in Belgian service.
That's the paratrooper version with a shorter barrel and a folding stock.
There is also the M5, which was used by the Gendarmerie.
And that is a FAL outfitted with essentially a blank-firing tear-gas grenade launcher.
So that's something that's a little bit different here, that was a specialised item.
And one of these days I'll get my hands on one of those and we'll do a proper video on it.
But what we have here is an M2 that went to the Gendarmerie.
Now why did FN America send me this thing?
The answer is someone was going through the warehouses in Liège at FN in Europe,
and discovered that they had about 400 of these Gendarmerie rifles still sitting in storage.
They are guns that had been turned in by the Gendarmerie
when they upgraded to newer and better equipment.
And the Gendarmerie didn't really use these rifles much, they didn't have a lot of cause to.
But they carried them quite a lot. So these are guns that are in
well, were in mechanically really quite nice condition, but have a range of finish wear.
Some quite a lot of finish wear, some very little.
This one has a decent bit on handguards, we'll take a look at that in a moment.
But trying to figure out what they could do with these rifles,
FN decided that the best thing they could do would be to ... cut them up into parts kits
and ship them over here to the US for us.
So FN is bringing in 400 of these kits.
They are parts kits, which means per import regulations they don't have receivers or barrels.
And in this case that's the upper receiver on a FAL, the lower receiver here is
not a regulated part in the US.
And then in an abundance of caution, FN's lawyers decided
to pull out a couple of additional parts, namely the gas pistons,
the magazines, and the muzzle brake or flash hider.
And the reason for that is there are laws in the US that dictate that you cannot
assemble a rifle like a FAL with more than 10 foreign made parts.
And so if you're going to build one of these rifles, you have to replace
some of the original parts with American made ones.
FN's lawyers just wanted to basically pre-empt that decision
and pull out a number of the parts to begin with.
So I don't think there's any particular need for that.
But the ones that they have pulled are ones that are
frankly going to be the cheapest and easiest that you would need to replace
to legally manufacture a semi-auto build on one of these anyway.
The gas piston's hidden inside the gas tube, you can't see it.
The muzzle device is easily replaceable.
And of course magazines, you would use an American made magazine, that counts as three parts.
922(r), that sort of parts count assembly law is worth a video all on its own, another day.
So as guns that were carried a lot but not really fired all that much,
you can see the handguard here has a whole bunch of scratches and nicks and bruises on it.
These are bipod cut, but the Gendarmerie never used bipods on the guns.
For what it's worth (here we go), they are also ... cut for carry handles, and they did use carry handles.
So the carry handle is one of the parts that comes with the kit.
The same sort of wear on the buttstock.
To my eye this looks really quite nice, but it does have some wear on it.
Compare that however, to the bolt assembly,
and you can see there's really very little wear on the bolt face there.
This is a gun that really has not been fired much at all.
Similarly there's very little wear here, this is where the gas piston
is going to impinge on the bolt carrier and you don't really see any wear there.
When these get used a lot, you'll see a ... ring there with all the finish worn off, so.
These are all standard full-length rifles, not folding stocked, they're not Paras.
Let's see, what else do we have? Oh, of course the bayonet which I mentioned before.
This is the sort of socket style of FAL bayonet.
And that purple frog is something distinctive to the Belgian Gendarmerie.
So that's really cool, that's a way to distinguish this from a standard army rifle.
There would have also been some Gendarmerie-specific markings on the receivers,
really the serial number prefixes, but of course we don't have the receivers,
so we don't have any of those parts to see.
The slings that come with them are the original slings. Very similar to British slings.
And then some neat stuff like this, not a particularly common feature on metric FALs.
We have a complete oiler cleaning kit stowed in the pistol grip here.
So these were made with both plastic tabs like this one, as well as wire tabs.
This one's got plastic. Not sure if that's the same across all of the kits that FN America has here.
Really quite sad, this is the barrel, it's in really nice internal shape.
But that doesn't matter because it's been saw cut off the back.
It does mean you do get the gas block though.
FN is going to be selling these kits here in the United States.
But they're not just directly selling them,
they're actually setting up a raffle for the opportunity to purchase a kit.
So you have to enter and then they'll draw winners.
They'll be doing three separate raffles and there will be a third of the kits each time,
because they anticipate that there will be a lot more demand than there is supply
with just 400 of the things coming in.
And what I like about that is it prevents the entire stock from being purchased up by speculators.
You get drawn in the raffle, you get to buy one kit.
So ... it's really annoying to see something like this where they come in really cheap,
are immediately all sold, and then they show up on GunBroker the next day for 3 times the cost.
I'm sure you guys probably feel the same way about that.
So what FN has set up prevents that from happening.
Certainly some of them will show up on GunBroker for triple the cost, but they're going to be one-offs.
If you want to get a kit to actually build it, which I think is a really cool opportunity,
and that's what I'm very excited to do with mine here.
And by the way, there are some things in the works for barrels and receivers for these.
Nothing is finalised so I can't really talk about them yet, but cross your fingers,
hopefully there will be some good options there.
What is directly available now are barrels and receivers from DSA.
The appropriate receiver for this gun would be a Type 1 FAL receiver, the very earliest pattern.
DSA doesn't have any available right now with the exact proper style of markings,
but they do have the right style of receiver.
Anyway, if you go to FN America's website you can see their raffle entry.
If you want one enter all three times and hopefully, best of luck, you'll have a chance to get one.
Cost is 900 bucks (or 899) for what you see here.
I left some of the small parts out of this photo just because they weren't going to show up on camera.
But it is, as I described previously, a complete kit
less flash hider, gas piston, receiver, barrel and magazines.
It does include the locking shoulder, strongly recommend you not reuse the locking shoulder.
Those are intended to be one-time use parts.
Once it's been installed it's fine,
until you take it out and then it's not appropriate to reinstall back into a rifle.
And that's how you do the head spacing and
standard procedure on building a FAL is you get a new locking shoulder regardless.
So, hopefully this is interesting to you guys.
I am excited to in the next few months hopefully get this built up into a complete rifle,
so that we can take a look at the original OG FALs.
Thanks for watching.