[ Are There Any Good Bullpup Conversions? ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another "Ask Ian" Q&A on Forgotten Weapons.
I'm Ian McCollum, and our question today comes from John on Patreon, who says,
"You've covered your fair share of strange conversion firearms.
Have you ever come across a bullpup conversion that was actually useful and not a kludge."
Now before I get into this, I wanted to allay the idea that I simply don't like bullpups.
So I've got two of them up here, I was going to film this video just with the FAMAS.
I figured, "I love the FAMAS, that shows that, right?"
And I realised, well no, if I just put the FAMAS up
people are going to go, "Ah, he only likes that because it's French."
So I have two cool bullpups here that I like, and they're not the only bullpups that I like,
the VHS and the FAMAS.
However, my answer to John's question is a very simple and unequivocal no.
I have never come across a bullpup conversion that isn't crap.
... All the conversions are garbage.
The Polish MSBS "Grot" rifle was developed from the ground up to be
convertible between a bullpup and a standard configuration rifle.
And in bullpup configuration it's fine.
I did have a chance to do some shooting with it
both in standard and bullpup configuration side by side.
And frankly, standard configuration, it's significantly nicer than set up as a bullpup.
But that I don't consider a conversion,
because ... the engineering department had a chance to figure out
how they were going to make it a good bullpup from the ground up.
The problem with the conversions is they are by definition kludging things together.
If a gun is not designed as a bullpup there are a couple of elements
that it simply is impossible to properly address if you're going to turn it into a bullpup.
And these would be the sights, the trigger and the ejection.
So if a gun is designed as a bullpup
some accommodation generally has to be made for the ejection port,
unless you're just willing to have the rifle only be usable one-handed, which is generally right-handed.
And that does happen, the SA80 is probably the best example of a bullpup
designed as a bullpup that simply cannot be run left handed.
But short of that, you're going to have to come up with some way
to make the rifle interchangeable from hand to hand.
Even if it involves switching out some parts so that you can only shoot it from one shoulder,
but you can at least pick which shoulder.
The FAMAS allows you to swap back and forth,
the VHS allows you to actually shoot from either shoulder.
You can swap the ejection port either way,
and you can also shoot from either shoulder, it's a really good set up.
And then you have the occasional designs that have forward ejecting or downward ejecting.
Again to accommodate this need for the ejection port.
In a standard rifle the ejection port's way out in front of the gun,
and it doesn't matter which side it's ejecting out of
because it's not actually going to interfere with the process of shooting it.
When it comes to triggers, the trigger in a bullpup is generally a lot further away
from the actual striker or hammer than in a conventional layout.
That's not necessarily a problem. You can have ... really good bullpup triggers,
but it requires a little more care
in designing that trigger mechanism than in a standard configuration rifle.
And when you take a standard rifle and convert it into a bullpup,
you are by definition having to kludge some sort of long trigger linkage,
and those are inevitably always poor quality.
Because if you want it to be not poor quality you have to do things differently,
you have to do it from the original design.
Which, again, as a conversion by definition it's not in the original design.
Lastly, you have the sights.
The sights ... 30 years ago would have been a bigger deal than they are today.
Today it doesn't really matter if you don't have iron sights on the gun,
if you can mount an optic it's pretty much good to go.
It's nice to have iron sights, both of these do.
And the thing is ... if you have a standard configuration rifle and you convert it to bullpup,
... it's almost impossible to retain use of the sights
because they're physically on the wrong part of the gun now.
And one of the problems you get with the conversions is often
the piece that is now available to mount a sight to
may not actually be very solidly connected to the barrel. ...
And if your sight is not really ...
stably connected to the barrel, you're going to have a hard time holding zero.
So a lot of the ... commercial ad-hoc bullpup conversions for things like SKSs or bolt-action rifles
sometimes the optics mounting points are kind of sketchy.
There have been a number of bullpup conversions that were military or pseudo-military,
the Valmet M82 comes to mind.
These are actually all AK conversions.
But the Valmet M82 ... it's sort of a ground up conversion
except it's deliberately trying to use the action of a standard M62 or M76 rifle,
and the M82 bullpups suck.
The Vektor CR21 bullpup conversions look really cool, but they basically suck too.
They're not particularly good, definitely what I would call a kludge.
So I know there are others. I thought about trying to go out there
and actually tally out all of the bullpup conversions,
and I realised it's not really feasible because there are so many of them.
And they are all in fact crap for all the same reasons which are what I just went over.
Largely ... you can't rebuild the ejection if you're just converting a gun.
And you generally can't get a good trigger if you're converting standard to a bullpup.
So that's the answer I've got for that one, John.
Hopefully I didn't hurt too many people's feelings out there.
I've ... shot a lot of the guns that I've been talking about here.
And just no, they're just not very good.
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Thanks for watching.