"The French copy no one, and no one copies the French." Except, it would appear, the Serbians.
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we have the cool privilege
of taking a look at a Zastava M93 Black Arrow.
This is a .50 calibre anti-materiel rifle
developed by Zastava in Serbia in the 1990s.
And right off the bat I'd like to say a big thanks to Zastava USA
for sending me this one to do some filming on and show to you guys.
Now the concept ... began in the early 1990s, 1991 development began,
and that was when Zastava was still known as the Red Flag Institute,
and the concept was, well, an anti-materiel rifle.
... Probably the best way to think about it is something that could be an alternate weapon
for engaging what you would normally engage with an RPG.
And so we're talking about things like, theoretically, low-flying aircraft,
but more likely small aircraft parked on the ground.
Communications or surveillance-type equipment on the ground,
think radio hardware, satellite dishes.
Light armoured vehicles, things like armoured personnel carriers, or trucks, or jeeps.
And the idea, the plan, was that a .50 calibre bolt-action rifle
could engage this sort of target to about the same range as an RPG could,
but do it with much greater accuracy.
RPGs ... have some accuracy issues at long range, where this could be a much more effective weapon.
This is of course a much heavier weapon than an RPG launcher,
but the individual ammunition is much lighter and much smaller.
And so you could also have a longer duration of engagement
with troops that had a couple of these things, as opposed to RPGs.
I think the RPG comparison is really an interesting and enlightening
way to consider the utility of an anti-materiel rifle.
Now when this was originally developed,
it was chambered for the 12.7x108mm cartridge, that is the Soviet .50 calibre.
That was chosen because the Yugoslav (at the time) Army
had DShK heavy machine guns mounted on a lot of their tanks.
That machine gun uses the .50 Soviet cartridge, and so it would make sense.
That was in the inventory, we'll use that cartridge.
Now production has expanded to both that cartridge and the 12.7x99,
which is the .50 Browning cartridge, that's what this one is.
The ones that have been imported into the US are all .50 Browning
because the Browning cartridge is available here,
the Soviet 12.7 Dushka cartridge is basically unavailable here.
The rifle has a 33 inch barrel,
it weighs in also at 33 pounds, that's like [15] kilos.
It's a little heavier in 12.7 Soviet, at like 36 pounds.
This is a hefty, heavy rifle, just barely under 6 feet in overall length.
So it's a lot of gun to carry around, but it fires a nice powerful cartridge.
I have seen differing claims on exactly what the military testing of this rifle was.
It has been clearly used by the Serbian Army and the Yugoslav Army.
But I'm not entirely sure ... how it was formally acquired.
I have been told that it actually never passed formal military testing,
and yet clearly they are in military service.
So I don't know exactly what to tell you on that account.
They were used in some of the conflicts in the Balkans.
And then they've also actually been sold commercially and seen use in a lot of
recent small-scale conflicts in places like Yemen, Syria, Middle East, North Africa.
So these guns are out there, they get around,
in addition to just being part of the modern Serbian Army.
Now mechanically, mechanics are where I think this rifle gets really interesting.
I was told by Zastava that this rifle was based on their M70 bolt-action Mauser sporting rifle.
And ... that's true as far as basically the front of the receiver and the locking lugs go.
But the rest of this rifle is a copy of a French FR-F1,
which I think is a fascinatingly interesting twist of events.
So, I happen to have an actual FR-F1 here.
So we're going to bring the camera up close, I'll show you how the M93 was designed,
and what is and is not taken off of the FR-F1.
Alright, let's start at the back end of this beast of a gun, and work our way forwards.
First off, we have the shoulder stock.
There is a bit of a sort of soft recoil pad on the buttstock, the rest of this is ... a hard plastic.
Allegedly there are recuperator springs in these two tubes
that will absorb some of the recoil impact from firing.
But I will tell you that I can't make those things compress.
So if there are actually springs in there, they are extremely heavy springs.
Next up we have a basic pistol grip.
Honestly, not the most comfortable thing I've ever handled,
it's got some relatively sharp edges on it there.
Moving forward to the trigger, we have a basic simple trigger. It is not adjustable in any way.
The safety is simply a little blocking bar that comes down behind it
which prevents you from pulling the trigger back.
That safety was taken directly from the FR-F1, which has exactly the same thing.
And it was put on there because the FR-F1 was largely derived
from the MAS 36, which has no safety at all.
And the French did want a safety on their sniper rifles,
so they put in just a very simple safety like that, which Zastava copied.
Alright, moving forward a bit, ... you can actually see the receiver markings here.
Got a carry handle we'll talk about in a moment.
But Zastava in Serbia, and the serial number back here.
And then markings added for US import.
Zastava Arms USA, Des Plaines, read the owner's manual before using, etc. etc.
Actually it is kind of interesting to look at the owner's manual,
because at least part of it has clearly been translated from a Serbian military manual.
Because it gives you instructions on things like
how to properly shoot the rifle from a trench position,
which isn't the sort of thing you normally get in a commercial precision rifle manual.
Anyway, the gun comes with a pair of 5 round magazines
with this rather unusual magazine release on the side.
So that's got a spring under there, push that down, magazine comes out.
That little slot is what locks the magazine in place. This is double-stack magazine.
Unlike many of the .50 calibre rifles out there, this is not a Barrett magazine.
And it's not compatible with Barrett magazines.
Holds five rounds.
I have seen some complaint from soldiers in the field
that these tend to drop out in use, and I can kind of understand that.
That's a relatively small locking catch for a magazine that's
going to be holding a lot of ammo and undergoing significant recoil.
In case you're curious about where that unusual magazine release comes from,
well, it comes from the FR-F1, right there.
The French used this style basically because the FR-F1 again is derived from the MAS 36,
and to some extent the MAS 49-56 series.
The 49-56 has side latching magazines because of its original design ancestors
which didn't have space for a rear-mounted more traditional magazine release.
At any rate, ... (be gentle with this), with the FR-F1 as well you push that down, lifts up the latch.
On a .30 calibre magazine like this, that locking latch is much larger
relative to the mass and size of the magazine, and it holds the magazine just fine.
I'm going to take the bolt out in a minute,
but we're going to finish the rest of the outside of the rifle before we get to that.
This is a relatively recent production M93,
and it has just a big Picatinny rail that is screwed onto the top of the receiver.
However, the early versions actually copied the FR-F1 style of scope mounting,
which was basically a dovetail right here.
And it's a cool, quick-detach, proprietary scope mounting system.
It works quite well on the FR-F1, but it was not sufficiently strong for a .50 calibre rifle.
And so that was replaced by Zastava at some point in production.
I don't know if it was early or relatively recently,
but it was replaced with just a standard Picatinny rail.
They gave the M93 a big ol' carry handle, which is much appreciated.
This is a heavy rifle, there's no particularly handy way to carry it except this handle,
which is nicely put at the balance point of the rifle, which by the way, is right over the bipod.
It's interesting, this will balance sitting right on its bipod legs,
which is convenient in some ways.
It's also not the greatest for, say, absorbing recoil.
But it does allow the shooter to traverse without moving the gun very much.
So there are pros and cons to that.
The carry handle, by the way, will only lift up horizontal then it locks in place,
so that it doesn't hit a scope that you might have on there.
The bipod legs here are fixed in place, this bipod doesn't come off.
What you do is push this lever down, and then you can fold the bipod down
like so, it locks in place here.
There's no pivot, there's no swivel, there's no movement at all to the bipod.
If you want to extend or retract the legs, you have a knurled basically a locking screw here.
And the leg itself is spring loaded, so you can unscrew this and then let the leg extend,
or push it down to whatever position you want, and then tighten it back up.
Perhaps you saw this coming by this point,
but that bipod is taken straight from the FR-F1, which also has no pivot or rotation.
It has exactly the same style of bipod foot there, and the same style of
unscrew this
(there we go)
and then you can extend or retract the bipod legs.
And then tighten them down to lock them in place.
Guess what you're about to see next?
The FR-F1 has this nifty, flip-up, detachable, emergency backup iron sight.
Yup, so does the M93.
That flips up there.
You can see the screw right there, if you undo that
you can actually take the rear iron sight off, they are detachable.
Now on the M93 there are actually little tritium vials inserted,
two back here, and one on the front sight,
so that you have luminous sights that you can use in the dark.
That's something that the FR-F1 did not do.
And moving forward to the front sight we have the same sort of thing, it folds down.
... Frankly that looks a little spindly to me for a .50 cal sight.
I have also read accounts of these sights having some durability issues in the field.
But this is also detachable,
it has a screw right there, just like the rear sight.
It has a tritium vial in the centre to give you a luminous dot at night.
And of course, it is once again taken directly from the FR-F1.
The muzzle brake here, however, is not copied from the French.
The ... FR-F1 has a muzzle brake that can be adjusted
to basically match the vent holes in the flash hider with the lands and grooves of the rifling,
which is cool, and it's adjustable for accuracy.
On the M93 Black Arrow what's more important
is using the muzzle brake to actually control felt recoil, because it is a massive rifle.
So, it has a big ol' two-chamber brake on it, and it is removable.
So you'll notice this is a little bit loose.
I can come in here, lift this pin up to unlock it,
and then pull that pin out.
And after quite a lot of threading, I can take that muzzle brake off.
So if I want a different pattern,
or it needs to be repaired or anything like that, so that's a cool feature.
Now let's take a look at the bolt.
We have a long straight bolt handle with a nice, perfectly round knob on it.
Might look familiar.
However, this has very much a Mauser-style extractor and locking lugs at the front.
And a bolt release that is straight off of a Mauser.
Lift that up, we can take our bolt out.
And here is where we do have a fundamental difference between the FR-F1 and the M93.
So as I said, this is a Mauser-style locking system.
We have our two main locking lugs up here, safety lug back there.
The extractor is this big long extractor on the side.
The FR-F1, like the MAS 36, actually has two rear mounted locking lugs.
And it has an older style of extractor that's simply dovetailed into the side of the bolt.
However, the firing pin systems are identical.
So to disassemble this, we're going to push this pad in and rotate it 90 degrees.
And then the rear plug comes out.
There's our FR-F1 rear plug.
Then we have a firing pin spring, there's our FR-F1 firing pin spring.
Then we can take the firing pin and slide it out the back, there's our FR-F1 firing pin.
So Zastava has copied ... basically the front end of the bolt from Mauser,
but then very much stuck with the FR-F1 pattern for the back end of the bolt.
Which is fine, this is actually a much simpler system than a Mauser bolt.
It is equally reliable, it's equally effective, it's just a lot faster to disassemble,
and a lot cheaper and easier to manufacture.
Note that we have a pair of gas vent holes here in case you have a ruptured cartridge.
Same as you've got on the FR-F1.
So there's the M93 bolt taken apart.
One thing I will point out, there's a little feature right here,
this sort of hook on the back of the bolt plug.
... This was added very early in MAS 36 development
when it was realised that without that hook
you could actually disassemble the bolt while it was locked in battery.
You could take the bolt plug out,
the spring and the firing pin could then fall out, and that was a problem.
So this hook interacts with the receiver,
and prevents the bolt plug from rotating when the bolt is locked in battery in the gun.
So that's definitely something that if you're going to copy the MAS 36 or the FR-F1
you want to take that feature as well.
So there's the hook on the FR-F1 plug.
The M93 was originally issued in the military with an ... 8x power by 56mm ZRAK scope,
which was not widely acclaimed.
Basically, it was a scaled up version of the scope that they had on rifles like the M76 snipers.
Fortunately, the Picatinny rail today allows
... anyone to mount any very good quality optic that they like.
Zastava says this will do 1.5 MOA with good quality ammunition,
which I'm in no position to refute or substantiate.
I am not a good enough shooter, and I haven't had a chance yet to take this out and
do any sort of substantial shooting with it, so can't really comment on that.
The question that remains to me that I was unable to find a good answer for is
why the FR-F1 of all the things that could have been copied?
And given that they chose to use the Mauser locking lug system anyway,
where did the FR-F1 influence come from?
Zastava was not willing to admit that this was in any way copied from the FR-F1,
they said this came from one of their Mauser sporting rifle designs.
So they aren't telling me. ...
I guess the FR-F1 is an excellent precision rifle,
if you want to copy something, you are not really going to go wrong copying the FR-F1.
It just seems a rather unusual choice to pick.
Because as I said at the beginning, typically no one copies the French, but here we are.
A small number of .50 BMG (Browning Machine Gun) M93s were imported into the US in the early 2000s,
so there have been a few of them floating around.
However, Zastava USA brought in a more substantial batch just last year in 2019,
and so if you see them around and available now, that is the reason.
... Zastava is eager and happy to make commercial sales,
and so they brought some of these in to put on the market.
Anyway, a big thanks to Zastava USA for sending me over this one.
I unfortunately have to return it,
but not before I take it out to the range, which we are going to do tomorrow.
So stick around, and we'll see how this actually handles in some live fire.
Thanks for watching.