I'm Ian, and today we're going to take a look at rifles made in Egypt, specifically, military rifles made in Egypt.
We have the Hakim, the Rasheed, an air rifle trainer version of the Hakim, and of course an Egyptian AK.
So, we'll take a look at what the Egyptian military has used over the last couple of decades,
and explain how they work and why they're interesting.
So, to start with, let's take a look at the Hakim.
So the Hakim is a licensed copy of the Swedish AG-42 Ljungman rifle.
These are a direct gas impingement rifle, meaning that gas is tapped off the barrel and runs directly to operate
the bolt carrier. There's no piston or other mechanism involved.
These were manufactured in the early 1950s. The Egyptian government contracted with a
Swedish manufacturing firm to help them set up the plant in Egypt where these were going to be manufactured.
And where the Swedes made them in 6.5 Swede, the Egyptian Hakim rifle is actually manufactured in 8mm Mauser,
which was the standard calibre of the Egyptian armed forces at the time.
So a few oddities of the Hakim.
It has some elements of the early version of the Ljungman, and some ... elements of the late version.
It has these small serrated pads like the first variant of the Swedish rifle.
A little bit difficult sometimes to get a grip on, but you do also have the
... stripper clip base here that you can use to operate the gun.
However, they do have a muzzle brake, very much like the late version of the AG-42.
The Egyptians also used a manually adjustable gas system,
so you could control the amount of gas that was being directed to the action.
This is important in Egypt because there are a lot of conditions with sand and dust obviously,
as well as generally poor quality of Egyptian ammunition, made an adjustable system a real advantage for them.
So, to take a look at how this works,
this is actually a very cool cutaway gun that allows us to see the entirety of the operating mechanism.
So we have our barrel here. Out in front is just a nut that holds on the front band.
It looks like that's a little mechanical, it's not, all it does is hold this on.
Moving back, we have a gas port in the barrel and the gas regulator. ... There are 8 positions to this gas regulator.
And the lowest one actually lets no gas at all through, so that converts the rifle to single shot.
Obviously we have a chamber, and then the interesting parts of the gun back here in the action.
Like the Ljungman,
this has a tilting bolt, so the very back of the bolt here drops down and locks in place when the rifle is in battery.
And when ... the bolt carrier first moves back it unlocks the bolt,
and lifts the back end of the bolt up before cycling backwards.
As with the Ljungman, the way you operate this
is to pull the bolt cover forward.
It will snap in place and lock itself to the bolt,
which then allows us to pull the whole assembly back,
and allows access to the magazine well. These are fed by stripper clip through this guide.
They did have detachable magazines, 10 round capacity, but soldiers were not issued spare magazines.
The magazine was detachable for maintenance and cleaning and that sort of thing,
reloading would be done by stripper clip.
So this top tube is the port where the gas comes back to operate the mechanism, and then we have the barrel below it.
In order to ...
One other thing that the Egyptians did here that the Swedes did not, is they put a cover,
or a sort of a safety, on the magazine release.
In order to ... release the magazine you have to open this up, and then push it forward
to release the mag.
That way, when you have the magazine in and this locking lever all the way forward,
you can't accidentally bump it and drop the magazine. Which is important when you only have one.
So, in order to cycle the bolt forward, we'll put the gun in fire position.
You simply pull the cover back against the rear of the receiver, that will unlock the bolt,
and spring tension will push it forward.
You do need to be very careful with this gun, as it will eat your thumb like nobody's business.
Like so.
Our hammer is located right down inside here. You can see it coming up,
see the hammer operating right there. That hits a two-piece firing pin.
The front part does have a spring, so it's not a full floating firing pin.
As with the Ljungman if you want to open the bolt and keep it open,
to reload or to do something else and not run the risk of having it slam on your finger, put the rifle in safe.
That will disengage the latch that allows the bolt to detach from the cover.
[Hakim air rifle trainer]
So when the Egyptians decided to build the Hakim, they also needed a trainer to go along with it.
Because you don't want to have the new recruits out there blasting away 8mm before they know how to shoot.
So they actually bought training air rifles made to basically duplicate the handling of the Hakim.
And these were actually manufactured by Anschutz, whom we know of as a manufacturer of very high quality target rifles.
This ... looks quite a bit smaller than the Hakim, this is actually weighted and weighs as much as a full-size rifle.
This is very heavy for an air rifle, you don't expect it till you pick it up.
But you can see it has a rear block here that looks very much
like the rear block of the Hakim. It doesn't do anything, it's just there to duplicate handling.
And the stock's built the same way. The way that these function,
we have our piston here on the bottom,
this cocks the gun,
... and it also opens our loading port. You can see this lever, what you do is drop a pellet in,
(these are 4.5mm, which is .177 calibre, still a standard pellet size today),
you drop a pellet in, and then push this lever back,
which rotates your pellet into alignment with the barrel and the air cylinder, and makes it ready to fire.
Very simple. Once you fire and re-cock the gun, it opens this back up for you automatically.
So, these are a neat piece of history,
not a whole lot more to say about them. No real operating system to this, it's just an air rifle.
But you don't see them around all that much.
[Rasheed]
So during the 1950s, during the Cold War, Egypt was under the influence of the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc.
They were very interested in arms development that was going on in the Soviet Union.
Egypt actually bought a number of SKS rifles and Czech Vz.52 rifles,
played around with them some, and decided that they could manufacture something equivalent themselves
since they already had this factory put together to build Hakim rifles.
What they came up with was the Rasheed.
This has a lot of elements that look very, very similar to the Hakim.
Obviously this rear block, bolt and dust cover arrangement.
It has the same type of gas regulator, same action (this is also a direct gas impingement design).
Obviously you'll recognise the bayonet, straight off the SKS.
And the one thing that the Egyptians had realised by the time that they built the Rasheed
was that this goofy operating system of pulling the cover forward and back from the Hakim was
not really the greatest idea out there. So when they went and started building the Rasheed they put a typical bolt handle on it.
No more of this connecting and linking and snapping and thumb crushing going on.
However, they maintained basically the same design through the rest of the gun.
So these rifles are chambered in 7.62x39mm, standard Russian calibre. Same thing that you'd use in an SKS or an AK.
They disassemble very much the same way.
So again we have this magazine safety. These guns were also issued with a single magazine
and intended to be reloaded by stripper clip.
So to remove the magazine we pull this safety back, and then push forward,
and the magazine can drop out.
Our safety mechanism is once again located on the very back of the receiver.
Over to the left is fire, to the right is safe.
And for disassembly we put it in the centre,
and that allows us to pull out this rear block, which is basically just a miniature version of the same thing from the Hakim.
Our dust cover comes off the back. You can see on this
there is no longer any spring-loaded hook to connect to the bolt carrier itself.
All that's in here it's just a dust cover and a spring guide.
Since we now have an even smaller operating mechanism, we again have
two springs nested one inside the other. There's a recoil guide in here that we saw, and there's also a short
... spring guide inside the spring here. This is to prevent the spring from kinking or binding.
Once we have the cover off,
the bolt comes out the back,
and this again is functionally identical to the Hakim and the Ljungman.
It's a tilting bolt, again just like the Tokarev rifle or the FN FAL.
A cup in the front of the bolt carrier catches gas from the gas port.
And that's about all there is to that.
The only difference here is that we now have this bolt handle to pull the bolt back and forth.
This is non-reciprocating so you pull it back when you want to run the gun, but when you're firing it doesn't move.
Front end of the gun is identical to the Hakim.
We have a multi-position gas regulator here, with just a tube inside that runs to this point,
provides gas directly from the barrel into the bolt carrier and blows it back. It's called direct gas impingement.
Front of the gun we have a bayonet,
derived right off the SKS.
Not very many of these guns were made, about 6,000 total. About 2,000 of those were imported into the United States,
so they're fairly rare here.
But this is a real cool example of a gun in 7.62x39 that isn't around very much.
And this is kind of the transition from Egypt using the 8mm from early on,
to their full-on basically membership of the Eastern Bloc when they transition to AKs, so.
[AK-47 / AKM]
So finally, just like the Czechs didn't use the Vz.52 very much, the Egyptians didn't use the Rasheed very much.
They ended up transitioning to a basic AK.
The Soviet Union provided a lot of assistance in setting up the factory to manufacture these.
Egyptian AKs actually were built on surplused Russian tooling, so very high quality guns.
They do have a fairly distinctive buttstock on the folding guns.
Other than that, the Egyptian AK is just like everybody else's AK, no functional differences, no modifications.
And this ended up being a very effective rifle for the Egyptian Army out in the desert.
Really everyone who's used an AK pretty much anywhere likes it, so.
So this is what Egypt went on to use until, basically, to this day.
So I hope you have enjoyed watching, learned something about the history of Egyptian arms.
I would like to think that with the change in government over there
we might see some more surplus of their weapons, but I'm not going to count on it.
I'm sure there's some interesting stuff there, but
I don't expect we'll ever be able to see it unfortunately, so.
Thanks for watching, and I hope you enjoyed it.