Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we have a very cool chance to
take a look at a Model of 1918 French self-loading carbine.
Called the RSC typically in the United States after
the three inventors, Ribeyrolles, Chauchat and Sutter.
Called the FSA 18 or Fusil Semi-Automatique in France.
Now, the 1918 was only produced in really
quite small numbers, like 4,000 of them.
And it was an improvement upon the Model of 1917 self-loading rifle,
which was produced in much larger numbers. 85,000 or so of these
were actually made and issued during World War One, starting in 1917.
This was the first self-loading rifle to see substantial combat use.
And it had some problems.
One is, of course, that it was really much too long for practical use in the raiding and trench combat of World War One.
Now the original rifle here is basically the exact same length as a Lebel rifle.
When they started modifying the gun and came up with the improved 1918 pattern, one of the main things they did was shorten it down.
The other thing that they did that was of particular importance was to simplify the gas system.
So these guns actually kind of ... would go on to have a heavy influence on the development of the M1 Garand.
The trigger systems are very similar, the gas system is actually also rather similar.
And the problem is in the 1917 you had a very complex process to disassemble and strip down the gas system.
Which is kind of required for cleaning it if you're shooting corrosive ammo, which of course in World War One they were.
On the 1918 they massively simplified this system, and it's a far easier gun to take apart.
So we will be taking apart the 1918 gas system out here.
While we're looking at the external side of these guns, I will also point out the other substantial modification
was the change in the clips that were used to feed these.
So the original 1917s were being developed at the same time that the M16 Berthier
update was being developed, but by two different groups of guys.
So both design teams wanted a 5 round capacity, but they came up with different styles of clips independently.
So the Berthier that went into large scale service in 1917 had its own 5 round clip
which was produced in large numbers and would be used after the war.
The 1917 [RSC] rifles had their own different style of clip, not interchangeable.
And they rectified that with the 1918. So when they were starting to build 1918 carbines,
they designed them to use the existing standard Berthier clip and solve that logistical issue.
Now when these carbines were originally issued, ammunition was supplied in clips.
So you didn't have to try and find...
Well, assuming your ammunition supply was OK, you got clips with the rifle [ammo]
they were disposable clips, you use them once just like Berthier clips, and then just discard them. And we'll get to that.
We're going to take these out to the range today as well and we're gonna do some shooting.
And we found some interesting things with the clips, so stick around for that.
Before we go out there though, let's take a closer look at this 1918, and how its gas system works.
So the main markings on the 1918s are going to be on the left side of the receiver here.
And we have Manufactures Nationales, MAS.
Various parts of these guns were made by different arsenals.
Tulle made a lot of the parts for the RSC rifles, but they were assembled by MAS.
And then interestingly, I've seen several 1918s now and they're all marked in the same way.
(... Let's see if we can get the light on this just right, yeah.) So we have an original marking here,
These were ... almost certainly made as 1917 receivers, so they're marked Model 1917.
And then over-stamped with an 8 to turn them into a Model of 1918.
And then this 1919 date has been added in a slightly different font. So I think what would have happened is
the receivers were all originally ... converted from 1917 receivers, because
the receiver itself doesn't really change very much between the two models.
Then when they were actually assembled it was 1919 before that happened.
These guns really did not get into service during World War One.
And you'll notice that the serial number down here is pretty much the same font as this year marking.
So I think this was added when the guns were actually built, by which point it was 1919.
If we look under the handguard on the barrel there are a couple more markings that are relevant.
This is of course the barrel marking, so this was a 1918 manufactured barrel by Saint-Étienne.
Then over on the other side we have our manufacture and inspection stamps, and the F prefix serial number.
This is just over a thousand. They made about 4,000 of these guns,
they did recycle some parts from earlier 1917 rifles, of course, besides just the receivers.
So you'll occasionally find them with things like 1917 op rods with serial numbers that are far too high to have been 1918 production.
Then on the bottom of the barrel we also have ... a couple other little marks. The relevant one there is the 11,
and that is a month marking. So this was November of 1918 that that barrel was installed.
So let's look at how the '17 and the '18 differ, and we'll start at the butt end and we'll work our way forward.
So interestingly the 1918s actually have a shorter butt stock than the 1917s.
The butt plate is slightly different in design. You'll notice it's kind of nicely rounded here,
and it's simpler, it's just a piece of bent sheet metal here.
We can tell that ... this stock in particular, the short one, isn't cut down because we can see the serial number on it.
Here's the 1917 stock, and so you can see the spacing between
where the serial number was applied and the end of the stock. And then if we look at the 1918,
so this is a little tricky, but there's one little remnant of the serial number right here.
You can see where it originally would have been, so there's the prefix
and the number was right there, and you can see this is the same spacing.
So this stock was actually manufactured to be a little bit shorter to help make the gun handier.
Moving forward we have a ... distinctive difference on the bolt handles here.
What's interesting is I think this is the early style of bolt handle, this is the later improved style.
But some of these changes were done after World War One and were ... retrofitted on guns,
and I don't have good information on what happened exactly when. So this 1918 still has the early model of bolt handle,
it's a little bit more difficult to take apart than this one. But other than that, no substantial change.
There were a couple different versions of bolt hold-opens, the early
1917s didn't have any. This is commonly referred to as the third pattern.
It is an automatic bolt hold-open. When the gun's empty it will lock open, like that.
This hook locks into the operating rod, right there. This has the same style of automatic
hold-open to it.
They also changed the magazine locking system.
So in order to reload these guns, or load them, what you do is grab this by its little
textured section here, and you open it all the way up.
There's a follower in here that we're kind of camming out of the way. When we close this cover
this follower is spring-loaded and pushes cartridges up.
You then put a clip in here, just slide it in the bottom of the gun, and then snap this shut.
Now on the 1917 this is held shut by this little spring-loaded tab locking over that little bar.
And you can see it snaps in there, and it was good enough - but apparently not good enough.
Because one of the things that they changed on the 1918 was to make this substantially stronger.
On the 1918 we now have this whole extra added spring-loaded plunger, locking lug sort of thing there.
It still works the same way,
you still grab this, snap it open,
put the clip in, and then close the cover. But this is going to hold the cover shut much more securely.
Both of these styles of rifle had upper handguards.
This is something that was only added to the Berthiers in the 1916 upgrade,
but they did add it to both RSCs. Although the 1918 has a handguard that comes all the way back to the receiver,
where on the 1917 it's only located from the rear sight forward.
So this is definitely an improvement, this makes it easier to handle the gun without burning yourself.
And then also the rear sights changed. So this is pretty much a standard Lebel style rifle rear sight,
this is pretty much a standard Berthier style carbine rear sight.
As with the Lebels, on the 1917 your battle sight zero is ... with the sight folded all the way forward,
that's a 250 metre zero.
With the sight back like this, you're going to go from 400 up to 800.
And then you stand the sight up to do anything longer than 800.
On the 1918 carbine that forward flip has been done away with, and we have a rear sight that is
graduated for 2, 4, 6, 8 and 1,000 metres.
Moving all the way up to the muzzle end of the rifle, we have two different nose caps.
This is the standard nose cap from a Lebel or a 1915 pattern Berthier, and a standard bayonet lug attachment as well.
The 1918s have a slightly different model. This has the curved stacking hook instead of the straight one.
This was added to a number of different French rifles, mostly Berthiers.
The colonial Indochina and Senegalese Berthiers both use this sort of curved stacking rod,
and they were occasionally also used by cavalry or alpine troops.
I think the idea was this was a little bit less likely to get hooked on random stuff,
whether it's your gear or brush that you might be going through.
So you would see this come out in the trials Berthiers, and Lebels after the war as well.
But they put it on the Model of 1918 guns
And then of course the gas system has been changed, so the gas plugs here are in slightly different positions.
And we will take a look at the gas system next.
One other slight detail here. This bolt hold-open is held in place by a screw on the 1917 pattern guns,
but it was replaced ... with a cross pin going through it right there on the 1918 guns.
Now the owner of this particular one has added an E-clip under here because this pin was rattling.
But we can see this pin on other examples,
for instance on the cover of one of the Gazette des Armes
there is a 1918 with that same style of pin. And it looks like on this one they have
... a corrugated washer underneath it to provide some tensioning.
Now, why exactly they changed that to a pin? I am not sure, but they did for some reason.
So the improvements to ... the 1917 pattern gun were actually done by only two of the three designers.
Ribeyrolles and Sutter did the upgrade from the '17 to the '18.
Louis Chauchat actually died in September of 1917 and did not have a part in this upgraded rifle.
Here are the two different clips. This is the original 1917 pattern clip,
and this is the 1916 pattern Berthier clip that would be adopted with the late RSC rifles, so.
Honestly, I think the 1917 clip is a better design. It holds these cartridges ... in a little more stable manner.
... They don't seem as likely to fall out.
Now this is a post-war clip, and it's possible that it's been used a bunch and that the originals
right out of the packaging were stronger. As I said, these were supposed to be disposable clips.
So the fact that we are reusing them today, they're already beyond their design tolerance.
But that's the design there.
There was only really very slight modification to the inside of the receiver of the rifles to adapt from one of these clips to the other.
Now the way that this gun actually works is that there's a gas port in the barrel here. Gas comes out,
it's going to get redirected 90 degrees back to a gas piston that runs down the length of this handguard,
it's going to emerge out from underneath this cover, right here,
into an op rod that also acts as a cover on the ejection port, and
connects to the bolt right here.
This is functionally very similar to the M1 Garand where you have an op rod
connected to the spring, comes out the side of the stock basically, and then is connected to the bolt.
So disassembly begins by removing this brass plug.
This gas port is interesting in that you can see the hole into the barrel right there.
And then what this plug does is take gas in that side, comes up this hollow tube, and then spits it out these two
... opposite holes venting 90 degrees the other way.
So those holes are located [there], one of them just dead ends, and the other one goes into the gas port right there.
Now with the gas port out we can take the nose cap off, that's a simple matter of pushing down on the tension spring,
that rotates up and comes off.
Then we're going to take off the rear barrel band.
Then we can take off the handguard, this comes off just like a Berthier handguard. There we go.
Next up, in order to remove the gas system we have to remove the op rod, and in order to remove the op rod
we have to unscrew it from the bolt handle here. So there's a little wire spring.
You can see from all the denting how this has been done over the, well, century that this rifle has been around.
What I have to do is push that spring into the centre of ... that handle.
and then I can unscrew it. So it's kind of one notch at a time.
This is why this was the early version, and they improved it later on.
If we get this, there we go, once we get it a few turns in then that spring gets held inside.
Alright, bolt handle is off.
Now we're going to pop off this dust cover.
Just lift it up gently there.
This was set up to use the tip of a bullet to do, that's why it's got that semicircular hole.
And it's held in place by these two little hands right there, so we can take this off.
Now we have the full length of the operating rod exposed,
and what I'm going to do is lift it up, pull it back slightly, and ...
the op rod will pop out of its connection to the gas piston.
... off of the bolt stub, and you can see this lug at the front
locks into this lug on the back of the gas [piston].
We're almost there. Now we're going to take off the magazine cover.
Unlock that first.
So that screw comes out.
Now this is one of the tricky bits, because we have a follower locked inside the magazine there.
We need to ...
So we have two little feet here wrapped around the follower, and we also have a couple of
basically plunger ends that are inside this sheet metal cover to prevent it from coming off. But we need to get it off now, so
there we go, alright. So this sheet metal cover came off.
One quick point of interest here. This is the 1917 magazine housing or cover, this is the 1918.
So you can see at the back. We have this little sheet spring as opposed to this much more heavier duty
retaining hook. And then they also reinforced the front end of the 1918.
Where the 1917 just was held in place by a screw and one little finger right there,
on the 1918 they have the screw in front and then two metal bars that are going to lock into the receiver.
So those hook into these two little recesses right there.
So apparently it seems that the magazine housing was probably the biggest source of problems other than the gas system.
So they reinforced it front and back.
Alright, so we are ready now to remove the gas system from the gun, having taken off just these couple of little bits.
At this point, however, it is pretty easy. We're just going to pop this down,
and
this slides (put that back in).
This is the handguard and the front gas tube and the recoil spring assembly.
It slides off of this pivoting assembly.
You can take this off by removing the bolt lock but we're not going to get into that today because it's not really necessary.
And back here this is identical to the 1917, it's the front end that's different. So once this is off,
then we can pull the handguard off of the front gas tube.
We can pull the gas piston itself out. This is much simpler.
Now it's also worth pointing out that this guy has a removable plug on the front.
So if you're just cleaning this in the field you don't have to go through everything we just did.
You ... take out this screw, you take off the bolt handle,
the op rod, and then you can take the gas piston and spring assembly out the front of the system.
So it's a little simpler, you don't have to take the whole handguard off.
... And that's an improvement over the 1917, which had no such option.
So there's a better view of the gas block in the gun.
... You can see the gas port pretty clearly now, and our gas plug
threads into that.
So when this is fully assembled it's going to be like that. Gas is going to come out here and get redirected backwards into
this tube. Where it will immediately hit this gas piston.
Alright, so ... this isn't a completely disassembled 1918, but that's the front end all the way disassembled.
And I think that's as far as we're going to take this apart today. The back end is actually mechanically identical to the 1917.
One of the other features added to the 1918, which unfortunately we don't have on this specific example, was a rotating dust cover.
The back end of the receiver here had this open slot for the charging handle,
and that was obviously a source of debris getting into the guns in the 1917 pattern.
So ... it's a cool two-part sliding cover that you can close that then opens automatically when you fire.
These are the two mounting screw holes for it, but as I said, unfortunately it's been removed on this example.
However if we refer once more to Gazette des Armes, you can see pictures here of the dust cover
closed on top and then opened on the bottom.
One of the interesting aspects to the history of these guns, both the 1918s and the 1917s, is that
allegedly, apparently, in the '30s the French military still had some of these things in service
and apparently they re-issued them to colonial troops.
And they deactivated the gas systems ... in the 1917s, I think, by hammering a pin in through the gas port.
The gas port on the 1917 is built a little differently, and you could do that without having the pin go straight into the muzzle [bore].
But they may have either just discarded these gas plugs, which would certainly render the gun manually operated.
Or done something else to disable their semi-automatic functionality.
I guess in theory this is because they didn't trust colonial troops to have self-loading rifles.
It's possible maybe these were meant for police type organisations where, you know, for more political reasons
they didn't want or didn't trust them to have semi-autos, they wanted them to have manually operated guns.
With the gas system deactivated in this way, the ... clip feed still works but you have to manually cycle the bolt for each shot.
Now everything I've read says that the French did this in the '30s,
I've yet to actually see an example of the guns deactivated that way.
I suspect that's because the guns that are available in North America came back
primarily after World War One before any of that work was done.
These 1918s were also apparently issued out to some French units in the late 1930s.
Whether they were intact to begin with, or rifles that had been deactivated and were then reactivated,
isn't entirely clear. But apparently there were some French units that had these, especially border guard type guys.
So they briefly sort of saw service in World War Two. I don't know of any accounts of any actually being fought with.
Instead they were issued out, and then surrendered and collected up after the armistice.
So I think the 1918s that are in the US came back after World War Two in fact for that reason.
The main combat action where the 1918s saw actual use was the Rif War
in Morocco in the early 1920s, and apparently they worked quite well there.
Now just because we could with the 1918 design, we reassembled this without
the lower handguard on it. So you can actually see exactly what's going on here.
So we have gas coming down here, and that's going to push on this piston,
which compresses the spring, pushes the bolt and the bolt handle all backwards.
All of the way back to there
(disable the hold-open), that then cycles forward,
uncompresses the spring and it's ready to fire again.
This is really a much better system than the '17. It's all the same basic mechanical operations,
but it's been redesigned in a way to make all the parts actually accessible.
We know the receivers for the 1917 here, and the 1918 here, are basically the same.
So there's a question of what did they do to change between using RSC clips
and Berthier clips? And I think we can get a pretty good idea by looking inside.
So if we look in the 1917, there is a rectangular bar right there at the back of the receiver.
That bar is clearly set up to fit right into this corner of the clip and lock it in place,
and then ... this back surface of the clip sits flush on the back surface of the receiver,
just like that.
Now with the Berthier clips they were not able to do quite the same thing.
You can see that bar is gone because there's no similar style of notch in the top of the Berthier clip. ...
I believe what's happening is that the Berthier clip is sitting like this.
So the Berthier clip has two angles, two surfaces on the back. I believe now this one is loose in the 1918,
it's not in direct contact with the rear of the magazine well.
This one is. We also have the little magazine catches for use in the Berthier, and you can see that
there is a groove which already had to be in there for the follower, or for something.
I think actually that was just cut in for the little pin for the original magazine catch, but
leaving that groove gives you a place for this little catch to sit,
and then that clip can sit right in there and fit and function.
So in theory, it would actually probably be fairly easy to convert
an RSC clip gun to a Berthier clip gun by removing that little bar in the receiver.
And as a matter of fact, we know that they did make 1917 carbines where they would take the original long rifle,
cut it down, change the gas system to the 1918 pattern, change the guns to use Berthier clips.
The ... distinctive feature that remains that indicates that they are actually converted rifles,
is that they have rifle rear sights instead of carbine sights. So some of that was definitely done.
In addition you can see the arms here of this, this is like the follower housing assembly,
and on the 1918 here they extend a little bit farther back than they do on the 1917.
These arms have a definite purpose, they are to support the front end of the clip. ...
So if we go back to looking at the clips, you can see that the Berthier clip is slightly shorter in this dimension
than the RSC clip.
If we put an RSC clip right in, you can see right here
that that front edge of the clip is nicely supported.
If we try to put the RSC clip into the 1918 gun it won't fit, because the clip's too long.
The Berthier clip, however, fits in quite nicely.
And in the 1917 the Berthier clip is not fully supported at the front.
So if you were to convert this without lengthening these,
I expect this clip would be loose and probably not feed reliably.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed this look at the 1918 carbine in comparison to the 1917 rifle.
A big thanks to Paul who owns both of these rifles, and was willing to let me take them apart
and take them out shooting and bring you guys this cool footage. So thanks Paul.
And if you enjoy seeing this sort of thing on-line, do consider checking out my Patreon page.
It's support from viewers like you at a buck a month over there
that makes it possible for me to travel, find guns like this, and bring them to you guys.
Thanks for watching.