Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're taking a look at
the world's coolest looking bullpup rifle,
the South African Vektor CR21.
This is a pretty recent bullpup, and it is
one of ... the bullpup designs that never ended up getting adopted by anybody.
So the story of this thing goes back to 1991
when development started at the Lyttelton Engineering Works.
This was a project that was being done for a company called Denel Land Systems,
which is a big ... industrial and arms producing company in South Africa.
And Denel ... basically they wanted a new rifle to be able to market.
Well, Lyttelton Engineering Works was ... already in the business of making R4 rifles,
the South African version of the Galil.
And so they figured, "Well, if we're going to make a new bullpup, let's base it on that."
So what you have here is really quite literally a Galil ... barrel, receiver and action,
everything except the furniture, stuck in this really futuristic looking plastic shell.
In fact, they designed the shell for its aesthetic look
and then stuffed a Galil action inside it.
This went through development for a couple of years,
... when it was completed in this form it was then presented to the South African military.
One of the cool effects of having it be really just strictly a Galil or an R4 inside
is that they were able to present this to the South African military as an upgrade package.
You didn't have to buy new rifles, all you had to do was basically buy the polymer housings,
and a little bit of money for refitting and modifying a few parts
and, presto, you can have the new, wave of the future, bullpup-style rifle.
And at this point, bullpups really still were looking like the rifle of the future.
Remember at this point Austria has adopted the AUG.
France is very happy with the [FAMAS], they've had that for about 10 or 12 years at this point.
The British of course have the L85.
There's actually a substantial number of bullpup rifles in military service.
Well the South African military took a look at this,
and they did some testing on it and they kind of actually liked it, it ran well.
Of course the heart of the system is an AK, a Galil, so not surprisingly it was a reliable rifle.
But they had plenty of R4s already,
and they didn't really have a whole lot of money to be dumping into a new rifle.
And there's some question as to how much of an improvement is this really?
Sure, it's shorter with the same barrel length, it does come with an optic.
In fact these never had iron sights, they are optics-only rifles.
But the South African military just didn't have the money to spend on this, so they passed.
Well, the next thing was ... Denel attempted to sell these to the South African ... national police,
who also whiffled and waffled a bit, and then passed on it.
The police units had just adopted the R5 carbine,
that really worked well enough, it's largely the same sort of gun.
It was even less appealing to them as a bullpup
because ... they already have carbines, so they passed on it.
Lyttelton then opened it up and tried to find some international military contracts for the gun.
And they didn't find anybody who was really interested.
And that's where the project ended.
So let's take a closer look at this.
You may recognise this from having been in the movie "District 9"
where they did use a bunch of these with white painted
(or white polymer, I'm not entirely sure on that), outer shells.
And there are some cool features to this, so let's take a look at it.
So of course this thing is primarily distinctive for its look, and you can't get around that.
And honestly that was a big part of the whole intention in the first place
was to make it look futuristic and cool.
So a couple of things to point out, it does have the whole hand trigger guard
like the AUG for example.
The magazines are still Galil magazines.
The magazine catch is basically still the same catch, so it's here at the back.
Magazines are a little bit tricky to get out,
you kind of have to hold the magazine catch the whole time.
These are ... 30 round, standard Galil mags are 35 rounds.
They did make a 20 round magazine specifically for the CR21.
See if I can get this one back in.
There we go.
I should point out the markings on the receiver are Vektor CR21.
That's pretty standard across all of them, and that's basically the only markings on them.
This is a right-side ejecting rifle only.
They did experiment with a prototype that could eject out the left,
but didn't end up building any actual production rifles that way.
So there's a shield here just to make sure cases don't go up at all,
and that's your ejection port.
You can see the bolt cycling inside there.
For controls, this uses a cross-bolt safety located at the front of the trigger guard up here.
So that's on fire, push that through,
and it's on safe.
Push it back through the other way for fire of course.
Standard trigger. Not a particularly good trigger pull, as is typical of a lot of military bullpups.
And then the selector switch is located back here on the buttstock.
And it is located on both sides ... of the buttstock.
Obviously one bullet is for semi-auto, three is not a burst, three is full-auto.
Based on of course the original Galil or R4 fire control group.
The charging handle is located on the left side, it's non-reciprocating.
... We'll take a look at the bolt in just a minute,
but basically this is just a rod that pushes the bolt back to cycle it manually if you need to do that.
One of the things that came up in testing was that
military forces wanted to be able to launch rifle grenades.
So they put a rifle grenade capable flash hider on there.
That's what this wire is, that's basically a retention spring for rifle grenades.
The civilian guns that were sold, the semi-autos, did not have this,
they had a similar flash hider, but without any of the gas sealing rings or that wire retention spring.
One thing that we cannot see without taking the shell off (which I'm not going to do on this),
is there's actually a big fibre bushing over the barrel up here
where the barrel is basically in contact with the shell.
That acts as an insulator to prevent the heat of the barrel when it gets hot
from melting the plastic shell. That's a thoughtful and good idea.
And of course the optic really does stand out on these rifles.
They never had iron sights, the original ones had built-in optics.
They later went to a Picatinny rail on top
when they were trying to get external sales for these guns, you'll see both versions.
See the Vektor logo on the front of the optic.
This is a fibre optic powered scope, so there is no battery in it.
There's no power for it, it just lights up.
And it's got kind of an interesting chevron style of reticle.
Now to disassemble this, to field-strip it, there's a little latch here
in the bottom of the buttstock and we're going to pull that forward.
There we go. Once that's loose, like so,
then we can come back here and pull off this top piece of the shell.
Like so.
And once we're inside here, then you can really obviously see the Galil parts.
So this is a standard Galil recoil spring assembly.
We can pull that out.
We can then pull out the bolt and carrier, which are obviously basic Galil or AK parts.
And then looking at the receiver you can see all of the classic AK elements in there.
This little end cap has been fitted on,
this is held in place by a pin which is integral to the rear sling swivel.
And that just acts as a rear cap on the receiver.
These are milled receivers.
There's a connecting rod for the trigger that connects the basic, standard, unmodified
Galil trigger mechanism up to the trigger on the front.
The charging handle is right here.
It doesn't have a spring in it because it gets pushed forward by the bolt carrier.
And what they have done to modify the bolt carrier is to
cut off the actual handle and weld on this little lug.
This lug is what the charging handle pushes on.
So again, all the charging handle does is just push this back to cycle manually.
When you're firing, you have the gas piston up front
running off of a gas block and a gas port in the barrel, just like on the original Galil rifles.
You can recognise the ... front section of the milled receiver. It is still 5.56 of course.
And everything else is a little bit less exotic than the outside shell makes it look.
I can show you how that runs: obviously this handle is connected straight through to that rod,
pushing on that lug on the bolt carrier.
So, basic AK operating system.
In total Lyttelton originally built 200 rifles,
of which 40 were semi-auto, and the other 160 were select fire.
And then they built parts for another 200, ... the outer shells and that sort of thing.
... Ultimately in 2008 the whole project was sold off to a company called Nobleteq.
Parts, whatever rifles were left, everything.
Virtually all of the original full-auto rifles were converted to semi-auto.
I'm pretty sure that was done so they could be sold on the South African civilian market.
Nobleteq also then went and built guns out of the remaining parts that they had.
A few of these have come into the US as parts kits which were then completed, like this one.
Of course as a parts kit, ... while it's a completely alien-looking rifle, it's a really easy gun to build
because internally it's ... almost all straight Galil.
So ... if you can get the really distinctive parts,
completing the rifle is actually not that difficult.
Anyway, regardless, they are still quite rare
because they only made a couple of hundred in the first place, and
not very many of those have actually trickled into the United States.
So a big thanks to the rifle's owner for letting me take a look at this one and show it to you guys.
Hopefully you enjoyed the video, if you did make sure to tune back in tomorrow
for another cool Forgotten Weapon.
Thanks for watching.