Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
taking a look at a Colt M16A1 HBAR LMG.
It's an awful lot of acronyms, this is a heavy barrelled version of the M16A1.
So it has a full 20 inch barrel just like the standard rifle,
but it is a large-diameter heavy-profile barrel.
And the gun has been equipped with ... literally an M60 bipod.
Now this is a pattern that Colt produced not quite experimentally,
but Colt produced this for foreign export sales.
The idea was they would really like to sell a whole package of small arms
to a country whose military is buying stuff from Colt.
The AR-15 or M16 rifle is sort of the obvious best seller.
But what they'd really like to do is package that together
with some other guns that kind of go along with it.
So if you're going to buy a whole bunch of rifles for your infantry,
why not get them a light machine gun that's parts compatible
and works the same way, controls are the same.
Think of this as the RPK version of the M16 family.
So let's take a quick look at a few of the details on here.
Let's start by taking a look at the markings here, they are a little bit faint through the Parkerising.
But Colt M16A1, calibre 5.56 and the serial number,
I don't know if you can read it very well there, the serial number is 9.3 million and change.
Which is exactly what we would expect for this pattern of rifle.
Colt set aside the 9 million serial number range for
basically experimental and export contract guns.
... These were used in the 1970s and 1980s, my guess offhand
is that that number is going to date this thing somewhere around 1979 or 1980.
There are the rest of our Colt markings, again kind of difficult to see through the Parkerising.
And of course it has a three position selector switch,
as you would expect for something that is intended for the LMG role.
And there are a couple of markings on the barrel, it's a chrome-lined bore, as you can see there.
This has a bunch of features from the early M16A1,
so note things like the cylindrical handguard retaining ring.
The lack of a deflector right there.
The forward assist button is a tear-drop shape instead of the round button.
And of course we've got basic A1 sights.
The interesting bit of course is up here at the front.
So we have a plastic muzzle cap on there,
largely because it's still got the original ... bore paper in there.
Which I didn't want to take out, so we'll just leave that covered by the muzzle cap.
And what they did for the bipod was literally just use an M60 bipod.
So they are M60 legs and an M60 base here.
What Colt did was machine a sleeve to go on the barrel right there.
And you can see that it's cross pinned onto the barrel ... right there.
And then so this goes on first, then the bipod ... adapter sleeves onto that.
And the whole thing is simply held in place by the flash hider and its compression washer.
So if you take the flash hider off, you can slide the bipod right off the front of the barrel.
This has a little bit of pivot, not too much, but a little bit.
And of course you deploy the legs by pulling them back and flipping them down.
We still have a bayonet lug here on the rifle, although with the
bipod flange in there there's no way you could actually use a [bayonet].
But there wasn't any particular reason to take the effort to cut off the bayonet lug.
I'm sure Colt sold a few of these, but they never made any substantial contracts for them.
They were never able to convince any significant military force
to purchase these guys along with standard M16 pattern rifles.
So I know some of them were put together by the Colt Custom Shop over the years.
And a few of them have come out into the collector's market, including this one.
So it is registered of course. It's a fully transferable NFA piece.
And it's beautiful, ... it's been fired, but it's never been abused, never really been used much.
So, a very cool example of something that Colt had hoped to sell to people
but didn't really work out for them. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.