Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, I am here today at the Royal Armouries' National Firearms Centre in Leeds in the UK,
and we are taking a look at the ... XL85 and XL86.
Now these are the version of the British SA80 rifle and light machine gun
just prior to their ... formal adoption by the British military.
And these are basically the guns that would be adopted and become known as the L85A1 and L86A1.
... If you've been watching this video series you know that these have had a very rocky road towards this point.
And even by this time the guns are still not particularly reliable,
although that's been pretty well covered up at this point.
So the major differences between this and the XL70 series of guns really lay in tolerancing and dimensioning.
They had come up with a number of problems that they tried to solve from the XL70s, and,
for example, one of the big ones was trying to prevent foreign material like
dirt and mud and snow from getting into the action of the gun.
We know that it doesn't really matter how much mud or gunk is on the outside of a gun,
it's when it gets onto the inside that it causes problems and malfunctions.
So, one way that they tried to limit the entrance of foreign material was to retolerance the body and the bolt carrier,
so that there was a tighter seal between the two and less space available for stuff to get in.
The other major change was actually to the magazine body.
If you remember from the XL70, the extension of the magazine well was actually a separate piece
welded onto the bottom of the main trigger housing.
And that was a particularly poor choice of a way to do that procedure.
What they did here on the XL85 was much better.
They made a single standalone magazine box, which was then inserted all the way into the receiver
(it included the stops and the lips and everything in there), ... and was then welded into the trigger housing.
That was far better. That allowed them to build the entire magazine body to the proper spec and tolerance,
weld it in and carefully control the feed angle of the magazines.
In addition, on the LSW a girder had been added out here so that the bipod could be attached at the front,
and a much heavier duty [flash hider] had been added.
Those were an attempt to solve the problem of split groups,
... when the L86 was fired in single-shot mode, semi- auto, it was a remarkably accurate gun, it was very good.
The problem ... was when you pulled the trigger on full-auto
your first shot would go to point of aim, and all the rest of your shots would be high and left.
... At 600 yards you'd be three metres off the target with your main group,
and that was really unacceptable for a light support weapon like this.
Now, this girder allowed the bipod to attach out here instead of directly under the middle of the barrel, that helped.
A lot of these things helped the problem, but they never really cured it.
So going back a step. Here is an XL70 with its welded on magazine ... well extension.
And here we have the XL85 version. So, much better. Let's take a look at this up close.
So you can see from the outside obviously there's no longer a weld.
And instead of being flat, the trigger housing stamping comes down and has these two little tabs,
one on each side of the magazine well. And you can see that they've made this flange wide enough
that you have a little bit of movement freedom,
so that you can position the magazine box exactly where you need it, and then weld it in place.
If we look at this from the top here,
there you go, you can see the top edge of this complete box dropped in.
That means that you can build it exactly to the right dimensions, get it all set on a jig, and then
mount it into the rifle itself. At the same time they have also flanged the bottom of the magazine well opening,
flared it out just a bit to make it a little bit easier to insert magazines.
So a couple of subtle Improvements made to the magazine well on the XL85.
And those would carry over onto the L85A1 rifles.
So one of the other ongoing problems between the XL85 and the final production L85
was simply a matter of quality control with the build staff at Enfield.
This ... actually also relates to why the rifle was adopted despite having
known ongoing issues that had to be kind of swept under the carpet.
The issue was at this point the British government was planning to sell Enfield,
privatise it, and pocket a large amount of money from the sale. [The full story is a bit more complex. ... ]
And the only way they could do that is if they could be sure that the Enfield factory complex
looked like a profitable operation to a potential buyer. Now British aerospace was interested
and would end up paying 190 million pounds to purchase RSAF Enfield.
But this deal was going on right about at the same time that the L85 was being adopted.
So it was known by the Enfield work force that the plant was going to be shut down, basically,
when British Aerospace took over. And ... the actual production was going to be shut down and moved to Nottingham.
And the work force was pretty sure that they probably weren't going along with it.
So there was remarkably low morale at Enfield when these guns were being manufactured at first.
And that certainly contributed to poor quality control.
At the same time the government had very strong financial incentive to adopt the rifle,
and make sure that a sufficient number of orders were being placed with Enfield
to make sure that the Enfield books looked really good and profitable.
There was going to be an initial order for 100,000 rifles, and then follow up orders for quite a lot more afterwards.
So those two things combined really helped sabotage the gun's success.
It was not being built well because the morale of the workers, the assemblers, was quite low.
And at the same time the government was highly motivated to make sure that it was formally adopted
as quickly and as widely as possible. That's never a good combination.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, learned another step in the saga of the SA80 weapons family.
I would like to thank the National Firearms Centre for allowing me access to these guns,
and I'd also like to thank ARES, Armament Research Services for making this trip possible.
Definitely check them both out, links are in the description text below.
ARES will be posting high-res pictures of these guns as the video goes up.
And of course the National Firearms Centre would be happy to schedule a visit
for you to take a look at these guns and everything else in their collection.
The next up in this series is going to be the standard L85 rifle, which we have a video on.
You can take a look, and you'll learn how ... how well this rifle actually did when it was adopted into service.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]