Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today up in Toronto, Canada,
taking a look at, appropriately enough, a
Canadian C1, actually a C1A1, FAL rifle.
Canada was the first country to actually adopt and start
production of the FAL as a military rifle, and they did this back in the mid-1950s.
So the 7.62 NATO cartridge was actually formally standardised in January of 1954, and that same month
Canada purchased 2,000 FAL rifles from the Belgian factory at FN.
And they ... bought these to do extended troop and field trials with.
Now there were two different patterns, they had the EX1and the EX2.
The EX1 had iron sights, the EX2 had a single power non-magnifying optical sight,
the same type that you would see the British experiment with.
Basically the same sort of sight that had been on the EM-2 rifles.
Now the Canadians took these guns and they did a bunch of testing on them.
And they used them as part of their process to actually develop production in Canada.
So in June of 1954 Canada acquired manufacturing rights from FN for the FAL rifle.
And then they would need about the next 18 months to get the rifle up into production.
Now you might think if they have ... the whole technical plan for the rifle, the whole technical package,
it would be a fairly easy thing to just make the tooling and get going.
Well, the problem was what they received were first angle projection metric drawings,
and what they actually needed to work with were third angle projection inch pattern drawings.
If you're not familiar with different projection angles that's a topic beyond the scope here,
I suggest you check out Google and educate yourself on what those differences are.
That's an in-depth machining thing. At any rate,
... the Canadians were the first ones to convert the FAL from metric drawings to inch pattern drawings.
And when you add in all of the tolerance stacking that has to be done as part of that,
that was a substantial effort and it took them about 18 months to do.
In the process they would build, well, once they had their drawings complete,
they built a series of 20 toolroom rifles to do testing on.
And they would run as much as like 16,000 rounds through each of those rifles, and
we actually have one of those toolroom rifles right here.
So we'll be taking a look at some of the details on this when we look up close at the standard C1A1.
At any rate, the C1 pattern was finalised, they were happy with the drawings, happy with the production line,
and it was standardised in late 1956. An order was placed by the Canadian government for 72,755
C1 rifles, as well as a couple thousand C2s, which we'll look at later in a different video.
Of those, 8,242 of them were actually C1D rifles for the Canadian Navy. One of the details here is
during their trials process the Canadians decided that they didn't want the standard infantry rifle to have a full-auto capability.
They didn't see that as an effective use of ammunition, ... they didn't see it as being a controllable, usable rifle in full-auto.
They wanted to restrict that to the light machine gun variant.
So they changed the selector and a few of the internals on here so that the C1 rifles are semi-auto only.
They can be converted back to full-auto, or could be by the armourers,
but as issued they were semi-auto only. The exception was the C1D rifles for the Navy.
... The Navy didn't want to be hauling around light machine gun sized versions of the FAL,
so instead they opted to have full-auto selector switches on their standard C1 rifles.
Anyway, that's a bit of a subtle detail.
So let's go ahead and take a closer look and see what distinguishes the
standard C1 from any of the other FALs that are out there.
Let's start with the markings. On the left side of the receiver: Rifle, 7.62mm FN C1A1.
This is actually a fairly late production gun, by which point they had gone through all of the A1 upgrades,
which we'll talk about in a minute. On the other side we have C.A.L. which is Canadian Arsenals Limited,
that is the name given to the government-owned company that actually did the manufacturing here.
This was all set up at the old Long Branch Arsenal, and this one was made in 1968. It is a fairly late production gun.
As you can see from its serial number here, 8L2330. The way they number these the L was always there,
they had a four digit serial number here and then the eight was a series number.
So this would actually be gun number 82,330 - beyond the initial contract.
We also have a pair of destroyed markings here you can just barely make out. These originally were marked "OPP",
because ... in addition to military use, these rifles were actually issued out to the Ontario Provincial Police.
And that's how this one came into private hands. When the Ontario Police replaced them
they went ahead and opted to sell the guns. And so there's a long story,
they actually wanted to sell them outside of Canada, and so a dealer who
was in Canada made an arrangement with a dealer in England to to buy them up.
And so basically they got surplused to England so that they'd never come back to Canada.
And then the English dealer and the Canadian dealer immediately turned around and re-imported them into Canada
and sold them privately here. That didn't go over well with the authorities,
but it was legal. And that's how this rifle got here. And that's why the Ontario markings...
I'm not sure if it was the Ontario Police that destroyed the markings like that before they
surplused the guns, or if that was done before they were re-imported. But neat story.
Now looking at some of the other aspects of the gun. The Canadian C1s, of course,
were going to see substantial use in very cold conditions up in northern Canada, and so
... one of the things they were concerned about was making sure that they could be used in the Arctic.
And that included a provision to be able to remove the trigger guard here,
like so, and replace it with a bolt-in winter trigger lever.
Unfortunately, I don't have one of the winter triggers here to show you,
but that is why the Canadian C1s have this removable trigger guard right there.
The Canadians also wanted to be able to recharge the guns with stripper clips without removing the magazine.
So they use a stripper clip guide top cover here. These use standard 5 round NATO pattern stripper clips.
The rear sight on the C1 is one of its most distinctive features.
They wanted a sight that would fold down out of the way, they didn't like the original Belgian design
that had the sight always sticking up and able to get snagged on things.
And then they decided to go to ... an adjustable aperture sight where you rotate through
from 200 out to 600 metres. So 500, 400, 300, 200.
The 200 metre aperture is a little bit bigger and then, of course, they vary in height
to adjust for elevation commensurate to the different ranges.
The front sight is also fairly distinctive because it has these sort of dog-leg front sight protector wings out there.
That's different with the Canadian guns, but it's not as immediately recognisable as that rear disk sight.
It does have a many position adjustable gas system.
Out at the very front we have what would be considered sort of a standard inch pattern
flash hider unit capable of taking a bayonet.
The Canadians also opted to take carry handles on the rifles. This is a C1A1 pattern carry handle, plastic,
we'll take a look at the original wooden pattern in just a moment.
And of course ... should have mentioned, the serial number is also down here,
on the upper receiver as well as on the fire control group.
Another change that the Canadians made was to extend the magazine release,
so it spans across the entire width of the receiver. You can see the whole thing moves there.
This is in contrast to the original pattern.
This is a more typical Belgian FAL type, where you just have a little narrow magazine release over here.
The Canadians had a wider one, that makes it easier to operate with gloves
and a little more conducive to left-hand operation as well actually.
We have a two position selector switch here.
You can see that because of this lever the switch can't be rotated around to full-auto.
It's funny, one of the big debates in the committee that was designing, or finalising, these rifles
was whether or not to have an "A" on the full-auto position for the selector.
You know, it's funny what turns into a big argument. Because some people were saying well the rifles are only semi-auto,
we don't anticipate actually converting them to full-auto, so why do we want to have the "A" marking?
And then other people are saying well if we do convert them to full-auto, nobody will know
where the selector's actually supposed to go for full-auto if we don't have an "A" marking there, so.
... I think tempest in a teapot pretty well sums up that.
These have the [vertical] breaking lever and a nice smooth rounded gripping surface here.
Apparently early in trials they had problems with the more textured surface, ...
... the button that protruded more actually catching on paratrooper's web gear,
and they had a couple instances of guys unintentionally having the guns break open
while they were in midair and dumping the bolt and bolt carrier out, which would definitely be a problem.
We have a folding charging handle here, that's a departure from the standard Belgian pattern of fixed charging handle.
A lot of the features on the Canadian guns would go on to be present in other inch pattern FAL rifles used by the British,
the Australians, the New Zealanders, because the rifle steering committee that the Canadians set up
was used to try to standardise these rifles between all of the UK [Commonwealth] militaries.
And lastly we have a wooden handguard here basically without vent slots in it.
Alright, I think that pretty well sums up the standard pattern of C1 rifle, so now let's take a look at that prototype gun.
There aren't a lot of changes here, and most of them are subtle, but the most obvious one is the rear sight,
we'll get to that. There's also a definite difference in the charger loading.
But let's start with the markings.
This is simply identified as a rifle 7.62mm C1.
Also made by C.A.L., and this one's dated 1955.
So this is before the C1 was actually a standardised final pattern for the Canadian military.
Our serial number and proof marks are here on the front of the receiver.
That is toolroom number 10, out of 20 that they made as toolroom guns.
We can see the same widened magazine release here.
That prototype charging handle up here, it's very similar, but it's not quite the same.
You'll notice this one sticks out a little bit more away from the handguard. When they finalised the rifle
they cut the profile a little bit more, a little bit sharper,
so that it pretty much runs straight into the handguard.
That I presume is there to prevent anything from accidentally snagging this and flipping it out.
This has an early pattern of larger, more conspicuous, checkered take down button.
(Allows the rifle to break open at the rear.)
That was, of course, changed to a lower profile, smooth button.
The folding rear sight is still something that they definitely want. And on this toolroom gun
they actually had a single aperture sight gun (flip it over there so you can see it),
with a dial adjust for elevation.
And to be honest, I find this actually to be a much better sight picture than the dial sight that they ended up adopting.
The front sight is also a bit different from the adopted standard with these two diagonal, but straight,
protector wings. They would change that to the sort of widened dog-leg pattern for eventual adoption.
And they had a couple of cooling slots in the barrel. It's interesting that on this particular rifle,
the front slot has actually been filled back in leaving those two open.
Drain holes on the bottom. The drain holes would remain in the standard guns.
This prototype has the ... smaller profile and wooden carry handle that would be adopted.
This is basically identical to a standard C1 carry handle,
and those were replaced fairly quickly by the plastic handle that you saw on the other rifle.
There's the plastic handle for comparison. So it's definitely bigger, it's a lot easier to get a good grasp on.
The bolt is blued here instead of being Parkerised.
And then by far the coolest thing about this is these two little nubs on the front of the receiver.
These are for a stripper clip, because this didn't use standard stripper clips,
this used a 10 round (although they did also make a 5 round version), horseshoe stripper clips.
So this thing
sits right in like that,
and presto, allows you to load 10 rounds in at a time.
Pretty cool, also really a lot less convenient to package and carry around than 5 round stripper clips.
Not really a surprise that this thing didn't make it into the final version, but really cool to see that here in use on
the prototype gun. There's a locking latch there.
As is typical for pretty much any new large production rifle,
over the first few years of production they would find little problems,
little tweaks, that needed to be made to the production to improve things.
Fix little problems that hadn't been evident in the early testing.
And that's true with the C1 as with any other rifle.
So ... over the first couple of years they ended up chrome lining the bores,
they changed the carry handle which we saw earlier, they made a number of
small changes to the exact bore dimensions, the rifling dimensions,
the bore diameter, to increase longevity and increase accuracy.
And then maybe the probably most substantial one would be that they changed the firing pin.
They had some problems with the ... single piece firing pin breaking,
leaving the tip of the firing pin jammed in the front of the bolt face, which would lead to slam firing.
So they ... fixed this by replacing it with a two-piece firing pin,
and that was one of the major changes that led to the designation of C1A1,
indicating that improvement, that upgrade.
So as I said at the beginning, these would serve the Canadian military into the 1980s,
as well as groups like the Ontario Provincial Police even longer after that.
So, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Big thanks to Movie Armaments Group for giving me access to their standard
C1A1 as well as that really cool toolroom example. So, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.