Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum and today we are going to take a look
at the Egyptian Rasheed rifle.
This is a gun whose ... history
goes back to 1941 in Sweden.
Where a design engineer by the name of Eric Eklund
developed a semi-automatic true gas-impingement rifle for the Swedish military.
They adopted it in 1942 as the AG-42 Ljungman and proceeded to put it into production,
issue it out to the Swedish army, and I think they made about 30,000.
I'll do a video on the Ljungman at some point here separately.
But that's our basis, now let's transition over to Egypt, where the country is being ruled
by King Farouk I through World War Two and in the years afterwards.
Farouk was not a very popular King.
He was very rich and liked flaunting it in a country that was not particularly rich at the time.
But among his many faults, he was also apparently a pretty excellent marksman
and he was very interested in modernising the Egyptian army.
And as a result ... between him and his successors,
Egypt was a pretty interesting country for small arms in the years after World War Two.
Farouk wanted semi-automatic rifles, and he talked to
kind of all the major players in Europe about this after World War Two.
He talked to the French, the British, the Swedes and the Belgians.
Now among other things, Egypt would go ahead and order a pretty large number
of Belgian FN 49 rifles in 8mm Mauser.
That was the standard military calibre for Egypt at the time.
And then he was also looking to manufacture a rifle domestically.
So after talking to the British and the French and the Swedes,
apparently one of the elements in his decision-making process
was that the French and the British both had very definite colonial interests in North Africa.
The Swedes really didn't care, they had no particular interest in what Egypt was doing politically.
They were just interested in making a commercial industrial sale.
And so Farouk ... was in the process of arranging to purchase rights and tooling
to manufacture the Swedish Ljungman rifle in 8mm Mauser, manufactured in Egypt.
Now in early 1952 Farouk was overthrown by a military coup,
and Colonel Abdel Nasser came into power.
Now Nasser's government was obviously very critical of Farouk's government,
they changed a whole lot of things.
The country's national foreign policy shifted from a westward-leaning one to a Soviet-leaning one.
But one of the things that Nasser didn't change was the interest in modernising the military.
And in September of 1952 that contract with Sweden officially went through.
Egypt gets its tooling and it starts producing 8mm Hakim rifles like this one.
You may notice a few of the similarities between these two guns.
Well, the Hakim here is basically a Ljungman in 8mm
with an adjustable gas system and a big muzzle brake on it.
The Egyptians would manufacture nearly 70,000 of these and used them for a while.
But as I said, Egypt was starting to shift to a more Soviet-focused foreign policy.
And that would impact their military supply,
so the Soviets started supplying Egypt with military goods as well as other aid in the 1950s.
In 1955 or '56 the Egyptians got their first batch of SKS rifles, apparently 8,000 of them.
Egypt was also using semi-automatic ... Vz.52 rifles from Czechoslovakia.
Those would have been in 7.62x45.
But the whole semi-automatic, intermediate cartridge,
wood stocked, milled receiver rifle was very much a thing in Egypt at this point.
In 1959, after the Suez crisis, the Soviets send another 8,000 or so SKSs to Egypt.
And Egypt would eventually start producing its own AK
under licence with the assistance of the Soviet Union.
However, fast-forward a few years more to 1966
and production of the Rasheed starts.
And the Rasheed is that Egyptian Hakim scaled down,
simplified in a couple of ways, and scaled down to 7.62x39
... essentially to complement the use of other semi-automatic rifles in Egyptian service.
So let's go ahead and take a closer look at this and see how it works.
Because there are very few actual true direct-impingement rifles out there.
The Rasheed is a really cool rifle, it's got all the elements of
an early Cold War battle rifle, although in a small calibre.
We've got a wood stock, milled receiver, this is actually a rifle that has a detachable magazine.
So there's a magazine security catch here.
You flip that back and then push it forward, and you can pop out the magazine.
It's a 10 round magazine, note that right here we have an Egyptian army mark on it.
However these rifles were not issued with spare magazines,
they were intended to be reloaded with stripper clips.
And they use the same stripper clip as the SKS.
And speaking of the SKS, the Rasheed has a bayonet extremely reminiscent of the SKS.
These are folding-blade style bayonets, and in fact SKS bayonets will fit in here.
The attachment hook on the muzzle is interchangeable,
however the muzzle ring diameter is different.
So if you have an SKS bayonet it'll sort of fit in like that, but you can't actually deploy it.
If you have an actual Rasheed bayonet on here you just pull this forward,
hook it over the muzzle and there you go, one fixed bayonet.
Mine has a bit of orange grease on it, that's not rust it's just grease, please excuse that.
There is a muzzle nut on here that can come off.
I believe those were intended to be used with potentially rifle-grenade launchers
and/or blank-firing adapters for training.
I have never actually seen either of those accessories, all the ones I've seen
just have the muzzle thread cover on them there.
We have a hooded round post front sight there, this is adjustable for windage back and forth.
And there is a hole in the top of the sight hood so you can get in there
and thread the ... front sight post in and out to adjust it for elevation as well.
This is the gas regulator, we'll look at that up close when we take the gun apart.
We have a rear notch-style sight with ... range markings out to 1,000 metres in Arabic numbers.
There is our stripper clip guide. And the charging handle here is one of the main elements
(other than calibre) that was changed from the Ljungman and the Hakim to the Rasheed.
So this has just a very standard charging handle on the right side,
as you would normally expect with a normal rifle.
For reference sake, the Hakim carries over the old Swedish system
where you push the dust cover forward, you then pull it all the way back.
... Theoretically you engage the safety, pull this all the way back,
you can then load through stripper clips, put the safety back on fire,
and when you tap this back the bolt slams forward
with a terrifying amount of force that will really do a number on your thumb.
And I can certainly understand why when they decided to do some modification to this design,
they looked at that SKS bolt handle and went,
"That seems really simple and easy, let's just do that."
So this does lock open on an empty magazine by the way,
so that you can load a stripper clip of 10 rounds into it.
The safety is this lever on the back, the left side is fire,
the right side is safe and that blocks the trigger.
Basic disassembly here is pretty easy, you take the top cover,
slide it forward a bit (it's under spring tension there).
You then move the safety lever to the centre position and you can just lift this safety block out.
Then the top cover and its main spring.
This is actually multiple springs nested together,
we got a ... small one on the inside, larger one on the outside.
I can then slide the bolt and carrier right out of the back of the receiver here.
This is a tilting bolt gun, so when it goes into battery
the bolt is just going to drop down slightly like this.
This surface back here is its locking surface, just like a FAL or an SKS.
So that's the locked position, that's the unlocked position.
We can lift this out ... there we go, and it just kind of slides out of the bolt carrier.
These are supposed to have spring-loaded firing pins, mine is missing the spring here.
And it's also broken, I'll take this apart in just a minute so you can see.
This is one of the more fragile bits, the firing pin inside.
Next I'm going to take the handguard off. There are normally two screws holding the nose cap on.
My rifle is also missing the top screw, so I'll take that one out.
There we go.
Extend the bayonet to get that out of the way.
That slides off, and then we'll lift this up to get it out of the way as well,
the handguard lifts up and slides forward.
There are two holes here and two pegs in the stock that hold the handguard in position.
Now I mentioned that this is a true gas impingement design.
And what I mean by that is there's a gas port in the barrel right here
that's going to tap gas off the barrel into this tube.
We do have a multiple position adjustable gas system here.
Those little notches are your adjustments for low, medium and high amounts of gas.
And then there's also a notch over here, rotate it over to there
and it actually cuts off the gas completely, which would be for using rifle grenades.
Now gas comes down this tube, much like an AR system,
it exits here, this is just an open gas tube.
And that nests into this matching cup on the bolt carrier.
However, unlike the AR that cup is just a blind hole.
So it sits like that. And when gas blows down that tube
it just literally blows into this hole, which pushes the bolt carrier back, which cycles the action.
The AR-15 has an internal gas piston system, which is why it has gas rings and such.
There's nothing else involved in this, it's just pure direct gas impingement.
Next up, we can take the fire control/magazine well assembly out.
There are three screws: here, here and here.
We'll pull those two out.
This one's kind of halfway retained by the magazine catch.
But, there we go.
Looks kind of like an SKS fire control group right there.
There's your magazine catch, hammer, sear.
When you pull the trigger it's going to pull this sear back, which will release the hammer.
Hammer goes forward under pressure from the hammer spring right there.
This is your disconnector, so when the bolt cycles this is going to get pushed down,
which re-engages the sear so that it only fires one round at a time.
And if we look in the receiver, you'll see ... there is this lever here.
That connects up to that little protuberance right there.
So when the bolt comes backward it pushes that down,
which in turn pushes this lever down,
which trips the disconnector.
Incidentally, the way that this kind of interesting safety mechanism works
is with this little foot right down here.
So when I rotate the lever, I'm rotating this thing.
If we go back to our trigger mechanism here,
when I pull the trigger the back end right there, lifts up.
And what's going on here is that in the [fire] position
the safety looks like this and it doesn't interfere with the trigger.
When I rotate this over to the [safe] position,
the safety is now rotated such that it's on top of
that trigger ... extension tab and won't let the trigger go up.
So that's how the safety works.
There is really not much else going on in the receiver here, it's just kind
of your classic old-style milled receiver. There are some marks on the side.
We have an Egyptian property mark, this one's kind of badly stamped.
We have a year of production, that's 1968.
We have a serial number which is four digits.
The importer has electro-pencilled the serial number in our numerals,
so these are the same, 6608, that is 6608 in Arabic numerals.
These were made in '66, '67 and '68, with like 50% of production being in 1968.
So they picked up steam as they got to the end of production there.
It is marked Rasheed with two "e"s. You will sometimes see this spelled r-a-s-h-i-d.
7.62mm, and this says "Made in UAR".
Now there are two questions here, first is why is it in English, second is what the heck is the UAR?
It's in English, because English was sort of the prestigious language of diplomacy.
You see that ... earlier in Iraq's history,
... a lot of places, they would mark guns in English if they're considering selling them for export.
And it just makes the guns look a little more polished
when they have English markings, or at least that's what people think.
Anyway, UAR is the United Arab Republic.
This was formed in 1958 as a political union between Egypt and Syria.
It lasted all of 3 years before Syria decided to leave in 1961.
However Egypt continued to ... use that name until 1971.
So these were made in Egypt outside of Cairo,
but they are still marked UAR for the United Arab Republic.
And this says basically "Made in ... UAR" in Arabic.
So you have got the markings in both Arabic and English.
Anyway, there's the whole thing field stripped, one Rasheed carbine.
Alright, I want to talk about production numbers for a moment,
and we're going to get a little bit into the weeds here.
As I said, the Rasheed was manufactured from '66 until '68.
After '68 they realised it was just a lot more effective, efficient,
to just make more AKs and they cut off production of these.
The question is how many did they actually make? And there are a lot of numbers bandied around.
Now, George Layman's recently published book on the SKS actually has a bunch of
really good information on the Rasheed despite the fact that it's not an SKS.
But it sort of falls into the form factor, and it's really cool that he included this in the book.
Now, he has an Egyptian contact who says that [8,263] Rasheeds were manufactured.
I suspect that that is almost correct,
but I think there's one little misunderstanding in there.
The fine folks over on Gunboards, the collectors there,
have a running serial number database on Rasheeds, with both year and serial number.
And what you'll find there is the serial numbers run up to just shy of about 8,400.
Which fits perfectly with Layman's number of 8,300 and change.
However, there are absolutely no serial numbers on that list that are under 1,000.
So this makes me suspect that the serial numbers started at 1,000 (or 1001),
and they ran up to Layman's number of [8,263].
Which would give us a total of [7,263] actually produced,
and that fits in line with all of the other available data.
So that's ... a hypothesis on my part, I don't have any specific documentation to back it up.
But just based on everything that is out there, that's what I think we're looking at for production.
Now Egypt would lose about 3,500 of these rifles in the Six Day War and in the Yom Kippur War.
About 1,300 in the Six Day War and another 2,400 in the Yom Kippur War.
The remaining approximately 4,000 of them
would stay in Egyptian hands, until they were eventually sold into the US as surplus.
That's where this one comes from, as are most of the others that we find.
That also fits, you will see numbers out there that
like 5,000 were produced or 5,000 were imported into the US.
I think the number is actually about 4,000 were imported into the US.
And they are the remains of what Egypt had after it lost a bunch of them in a couple of wars.
Now in Egyptian service these were not issued to front-line army troops.
These were made specifically for the District Ward Reserve Army, effectively Egypt's National Guard.
And it makes ... more sense that they would issue those guys with a semi-automatic rifle,
... in theory you'd give them something that's a little cheaper to make than the standard infantry rifle.
In this case the Rasheed was almost certainly more expensive
to manufacture than ... the Maadi AKs.
At any rate, we pretty much know how many they made, we know the time frame they made them,
we know they were also making AKs at the time.
There may just have been an element of, "This is a domestic production gun,
we already have the tooling for the Hakim, we might as well scale it down."
And that's certainly what they did, they scaled down this tooling to make these guns,
might as well put it to use.
So that is the story of the Egyptian Rasheed.
However, there is one additional tangent to it that we'll get to in a separate video,
and that is the fact that Egypt would get rid of the tooling
after they were done producing these, and they would sell it to Iraq.
And Iraq would make its own version of the Rasheed, so we'll cover that in a separate video.
For the time being I hope you enjoyed this one.
Thanks for watching.