Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I want to take a moment today
to talk about the idea of updating
and modernising the G3 rifle.
Because this is something that's actually been done
by a couple of different countries.
And I think it raises some interesting questions
and some interesting opportunities.
So to start with, back in the 1950s when ... 7.62x51mm NATO ...
was the predominant military rifle calibre for NATO and the West,
there were really only two widely used rifles.
You had the G3 from HK, made under licence in a number of other countries as well.
And, of course, you had the FAL from FN.
Now in addition to that there were a handful of other .308 calibre rifles.
Obviously the US chose to use the M14, but virtually nobody else did,
unless we gave them M14s for free.
And then there were a few other rifles, like the Italian update of the M1 into the BM 59.
The Swiss had the Sturmgewehr 57 in 7.5, which is pretty close to 7.62 NATO,
but nobody else used that rifle except for the Swiss.
If you look at ... rifles that were in widespread use, say more than five or six countries,
it's really only two, it's the G3 and the FAL.
Now in the 1970s NATO would adopt the 5.56x45mm cartridge, and
most of the countries that were using the G3 and the FAL
would go ahead and transition to something in 5.56.
But most of them would go ahead and keep their old 7.62mm rifles
for the home guard, or the reserve, or whatever they happen to call it in that particular country.
In particular, Norway and Sweden did this.
Now there were also some countries that never did really update to 5.56,
and that kept their 7.62 rifles as their main standard infantry rifle.
And ... like the G3 tended to be the longer lived, more successful, of the two designs.
The FAL certainly had a lot of adopters, the entire British Commonwealth being one of them.
... You have to give them some real credit, like that's a lot of countries
using the FAL in a lot of different climactic conditions.
But we see the HK really, I think, being objectively the more successful of the two rifles.
It was used in a wider variety of environments for a longer duration,
and remains in service with a few countries still today.
Now the next question that comes up though is,
let's say you are a country like Sweden
that has replaced its standard infantry rifle with the FNC in 5.56.
But you still have G3s in the reserves, or the Home Guard.
Or Norway is in a similar situation, (but not with the FNC...).
What do you do with those G3s?
And there have been a couple of interesting, and I think very successful, programs
to modernise the G3 in a way that we never saw with the FAL.
So what I have here today are sort of clone rifles.
This is a decent clone of a Norwegian AG3F2,
which is the current iteration of the G3 in Norwegian Home Guard service.
And this is an approximation of a Swedish Home Guard AK4 Charlie, AK4C, or AK4D.
Now this one is a rifle I built for myself as a shooter,
so it's not quite exactly like the Swedish pattern.
The Swedes did not adopt the Magpul grip assembly.
The Swedes also did not move the charging handles to the right side for lefties.
But the stock and the handguard here and the optics rail are
pretty much exactly the pattern of what the Swedes did,
and so that's why I've got this out to discuss.
What I find interesting here is
there have been a couple of different ways to modernise the G3.
And I think they really make a lot of sense.
We see today the 7.62 NATO cartridge kind of coming back a little bit,
or like getting those sort of interested looks from a lot of military services
because they are concerned about the widespread adoption of body armour
that 5.56 may not be as well suited to defeating.
And they look to 7.62 and say,
"Ah, we can have some pretty good armour-piercing 7.62 ammunition
that can defeat this modern body armour
in a way that our current issue rifle maybe will have trouble with."
So I think the Swedes have done this best, but ... let's take a look for a moment
at the different priorities that different countries have had.
So if we start with the Norwegians here.
They wanted to make the rifle more compact.
So they started with the AG3, which is basically just a standard G3 rifle.
They then had the F1 pattern where they added an optics rail to it.
They then have the F2 pattern where they add a railed front handguard,
as well as replacing the stock with a collapsing stock.
And this is a way to make the rifles more compact,
which is a requirement that we see fairly widespread.
A lot of countries look at the G3 and they're like, "Well, you know, it's a big long pike of a rifle."
It's not actually that big or long,
but compared to a collapsing-stock 14.5 inch barrelled M4 type rifle,
yeah, it is a long and kind of cumbersome rifle.
So, you can reduce the overall length by sticking on a collapsing stock.
However on the downside, that collapsing stock is still a really long length of pull,
because it's the same as the original G3 stock.
And it's a substantially less comfortable cheek weld.
But, hey, it does make the rifles more compact for transportation,
storage, carry, and that sort of thing.
Now the other thing that the Norwegians have done is they went ahead and added an optics rail
(which is a really good idea), to put proper modern sighting systems on these rifles.
I think that's an essential, maybe the most important,
part of any sort of continued usage of a G3. (Or a FAL for that matter.)
But give it a way to use modern optics, like that's where all of our
real development in military small arms technology has been.
So if you can't put it on the ... old rifles, you're wasting a lot of potential.
So what they chose here is a Brugger & Thomet tri-rail that clamps onto the G3.
There are mounting points on the G3 receiver
that are suitable for taking a clamped on style of optic.
However this is maybe not, in my mind, the best option. You've got a lot of material here.
More so than you would on, say, a Swedish pattern where they just opt for a single top rail.
You are adding about a quarter inch of extra ... height over bore to have this clamp-on rail.
And there's a lot of screws in this thing that have the potential to come loose.
So you've got to clamp them down properly.
When you mount the rail you have to make sure that it is in fact actually exactly level.
The front handguard is kind of the same way, there are a bunch of
set screws built into that B&T front rail to keep it properly tight and in place.
Now they've gone with the ... Aimpoint CompM4 as an optic.
I have an M4s on here, which has the battery on the bottom instead of on the top.
But it's essentially the same optic.
I think that's a pretty good choice,
and I think it's a choice that comes largely from the fact that Aimpoint is based in Sweden.
So it's kind of an easy, natural choice for the Scandinavian countries,
and it's a fantastic optic.
So, what they put together is like, they've got the modern optics on there,
they've shortened the overall length.
But I'm not sure they've done it in the best possible way
because that collapsing stock is still kind of sketchy.
And I'm not necessarily convinced.
Like the clamp-on rails are the easier way to go, but I'm not sure that they are the best way to go.
So now let's consider the Swedish pattern.
The Swedes actually did their upgrades of their Home Guard G3s in two separate iterations.
And the first thing they did was convert them from the AK4 to the AK4B.
And they did that by adding an optics rail on the top of the receiver.
However, unlike the Norwegians opting for a detachable non-permanent clamp-on solution,
the Swedes took the guns all back into armourer's shops and actually welded on top rails.
And I think that's a much better solution, it's lower profile,
it uses less material, and it is not subject to screws coming loose over time.
I think it's a much more bomb-proof sort of solution.
And it's interesting to me that they did this in two phases, ... and they weren't connected.
Like before they had any plans to do anything else to the rifles,
they went ahead and put optics rails on them.
It was then only later that they went ahead and ... modernised the rest of the gun.
And they did that by adopting a stock manufactured by Spuhr, as well as a handguard.
Now some of the rifles have the Spuhr handguard, some don't.
I believe it's the Charlie model does not.
The Delta model, which is intended to be a marksman's rifle, does
so that you can add other stuff onto the front of the rifle.
But what this stock does is really fix a long-term ... ergonomic problem
that's existed with the G3 since it was first developed.
And that is you've got this hump at the back of the G3 receiver.
And in order to get your eye down low enough
to have a nice low line of sight over the charging handle tube,
you need to drop the cheek level here.
But in order to not have the rifle recoil with this chunk going straight into your orbital,
you need to extend the length of pull, and
so the G3 length of pull is really kind of awkwardly long.
In fact, if I hold this up behind the Spuhr stock,
which is adjustable and can actually get shorter than it is now,
you can see we've got almost two full inches reduced length of pull with the new stock,
as well as raising the line of the cheek substantially.
So this stock is actually optimised to use an optic.
Which the Swedes also did, they use actually the same thing,
they also use an Aimpoint CompM4 on these rifles.
I only had one of them, so I had to pick which rifle to put it on, but same thing goes on here.
This stock gives you both a nice cheek weld for it,
(where with the Norwegian version
you've kind of got a bit of a chin weld going on to get your head up that high),
and this reduces the length of pull to a much more comfortable level
that makes the gun a lot more controllable in full-auto.
As well as a lot more comfortable to shoot and less fatiguing in semi-auto.
Part of this is simply the weight of the rifle which is not trivial,
given that it is a 7.62mm full-power rifle.
The weight is leveraged a couple of inches back towards you, because the length of pull is shorter.
And that may not seem like a lot, but it actually is noticeable when you're handling the gun.
So in addition to the Swedes, the Portuguese Marine Corps
has also adopted these same changes to their G3s.
And I find it interesting that ... this is not a one-off,
this is several different countries that have
chosen to make these specific modifications to G3s.
And decided at that point that the rifles are still
suitable for modern, basically front-line service use.
I think there's a lot of element of that interest in the heavier cartridge today,
specifically because of body armour and because of its barrier penetration capability.
And I think it's pretty interesting that the G3,
frankly, of all the rifles that were in use as 7.62 calibre main battle rifles,
the G3, to my mind, is by far the most suitable to remain on the battlefield today
with a few upgrades like these.
I think it is a very simple system, it is a very reliable system,
it has a fixed barrel, it doesn't have a gas system.
It's a very accurate rifle with a properly made barrel and properly assembled components,
more accurate I think than the FAL ever was.
We never really saw that much in the way of sniper versions of the FAL,
but we do see that with the G3.
I think it's a platform that's capable of better mechanical accuracy than the FAL.
And it's just dirt simple to use.
It's an early style of modular gun, the stock is a simple module,
the grip assembly ... is a module.
And the trigger unit is another sub module within the grip assembly that can be easily removed.
The handguard is a single pin easily removed system.
This is a rifle that I think flies under people's radar ...
as to how modernised it can really become.
And so I think it's pretty cool that there are countries out there
that are looking for ways to keep the G3 in active service,
and really bring it up to the standard of any other modern rifle, just in a heavier cartridge.
So anyway, I don't have any particular other point to this.
I thought it was interesting to look at the configurations that
in particular the Scandinavian countries are using with modernised G3s.
So hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.