Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island Auction house.
I'm looking at some of the guns they're going to be
selling in the December of 2015 Premiere auction here.
And I wonder how many of you guys realise that
the French actually mass issued almost 100,000
semi-automatic rifles during World War One.
This is an example of one of them, this is an
RSC Model of 1917 rifle, and in total the French built
and issued about 86,000 of these guns during the
First World War. A lot earlier than most people think
we had military designed semi-auto rifles.
So, the French don't get much respect for small arms design,
but they ought to. Between 1894 and 1913, the beginning
of the war, the French actually went through testing
of nearly 20 different self-loading rifle prototypes.
Some of them were better than others, this was a period
where the French had adopted the first, ... well they
developed smokeless powder, they had adopted the first
small bore bolt-action repeating rifle, ... that was in 1886.
Within ten years they knew that that wasn't going to be
at the forefront of technology for long, and they really
needed to be investigating self-loading rifles.
So they got right into it. Now this was a period where the metallurgy, and the understanding
of how to design semi-automatic rifles really hadn't matured yet. So every country in the world
(or every country that was looking at self-loading rifles) was going through a lot of different prototypes
trying to find something that could function effectively with the full power ammunition of the day.
Now the French ... one of the experimental rifles that they worked on, it was designated the
A6 Meunier rifle (for its designer, Meunier). That one was actually a pretty darn good rifle on its own,
and what's interesting about it is that it was designed around its own proprietary ammunition,
a 7mm Meunier cartridge. It was rimless, it was quite powerful, it was a quite modern round.
However, as with the rest of these prototypes, the French kind of abandoned them when
World War One started looming, figuring that you didn't want to be testing out an experimental
rifle and changing things up right on the eve of war. Better to stick with, even if it's a lower tech rifle,
stick with the one you have, the one you know, the one you can produce quickly. So as World War One
continued longer than anybody thought it would, the French realised that we really need to get back
in the game here and get something semi-automatic, and they actually built a thousand of
those A6 Meunier rifles and issued them, along with their own proprietary ammunition.
But this really was kind of a stop-gap measure while they tried to develop a semi-automatic rifle
that would use the standard 8mm Lebel ammunition that they were already supplying for all of their other guns.
Now that rifle that they were designing was the RSC Model of 1917, which we have here.
It was actually adopted in mid 1916 and then it took until April of 1917 to actually get it into mass production.
Really not bad, not a bad time frame at all, considering the
stresses on the French economy during World War One.
So RSC stands for the initials of the three designers, or
co-designers, of this rifle, Ribeyrolles, Chauchat and Sutter.
They are also three of the guys behind the Chauchat
light machine gun (or automatic rifle).
They put this together on pretty darn short notice, it was May of
1916 when it was actually ... the prototype was finished and enough testing had been done and it
was formally adopted, and then by April of 1917 it was actually in mass production and
examples started arriving on the front lines for soldiers to use.
Now it ... used a five round clip of standard 8mm Lebel ammunition.
Unfortunately, because this thing had been in development during the first part of 1916,
that was the same time that a totally different group of people was working on developing
the 5 round clip for the Berthier bolt-action rifle, and the two groups apparently
didn't really talk to each other because they ended up with two separate clip designs.
So the RSC 1917 does not use the standard 5 round Berthier clip.
Now they would rectify that in 1918. They updated and fixed a number of issues with these rifles
and redesignated a Model of 1918, but that didn't go into production ... basically right until
the war was over. So these 1917 guns use a very rare clip. There were some
reproductions of them made a number of years ago by some guys in Europe.
Today, it's difficult to find clips for these rifles. However what you would do ... well, we'll go into the loading in a moment.
What you have here is an 11.5 pound rifle. So kind of heavy,
especially by today's standards. But not bad for the first
mass issued semi-automatic rifle in military service.
They were renowned to be quite accurate. They do have
a fixed barrel, they use a ... long stroke gas piston operating
system. And they were issued out 16 rifles per company.
Given ... basically to the guys who could best exploit them. So, company commanders,
guys with particularly good marksmanship skills, the people with the fighting
spirit who could really ... who would appreciate and make good use of these rifles.
There was never enough production, and I don't think the French ever anticipated there would be
enough production, to make them standard issue for everybody.
So they put them where they would do the most good.
So one last little anecdote before we move in and look at the internals of this rifle.
The French military had this kind of operating policy of fixing problems and updating weapons
by supplying kits of parts to the troops in the field. So you know, if you needed to replace the
butt-stocks, well they'd send out kits of parts that you could replace onto existing rifles to
move from the old version to the current version.
And it's funny that when the RSC 1917 was proposed and adopted it was actually adopted
under the guise, the story, of actually being an upgrade kit for an 1886 Lebel rifle.
Now you look at this thing, you may wonder how on earth do you convert a Lebel to
semi-automatic action. The answer is you really don't, the only parts that this thing shared with
the Lebel were the butt-stock the fore-end and the fore-end hardware, the bands.
In fact it's funny, if you look at this, the middle band is actually underneath the handguard here,
because the Lebel did not have a handguard, so the middle band was designed to
be right in contact with the barrel. This rifle does have a handguard, so they just slapped
it down on top so that you didn't have to have a new barrel band made. At any rate, you'd basically
take the wood off of a Lebel rifle, throw the Lebel rifle away and then put the wood onto this RSC rifle.
Now they did some cool things in the process, for example, the Lebel had a tube magazine under
the barrel, the RSC uses that exact same channel in the the fore-end of the stock as the gas
piston channel, so ... it's kind of clever the way they are able to at least reuse a couple parts.
But yeah, the idea that this was a conversion kit for a Lebel was kind of a joke.
Alright, so as I mentioned, this is a long stroke gas piston
operated gun, so we have a gas piston that is running
from here, (this is our gas plug, which we'll take a look at in
just a moment) all the way down the tube that would have
been the magazine tube in a Lebel, down to here.
At this point it comes out and this is actually a cover
plate over the operating rod. Think of this as very much like the operating rod on an M1 Garand,
it's actually quite similar. Then the op rod comes out here,
it expands to this large plate which covers the ejection port
and that is what operates right here.
We have a rather large rotating bolt that locks.
Now one of the problems with this rifle was that it does
still have this big open channel behind the bolt, and
predictably mud and dirt and crap got into the guns here
and caused malfunctions. From there it can drop down
into the firing mechanism, gum up the firing mechanism,
not good. Now I mentioned that they did change a bunch
of elements on this rifle and updated them in 1918.
One of the things they added was a sliding dust cover
that would close off this open slot. So that was a good
improvement. Now one other element of this rifle is we do
have a manual hold open. I can lock this little tab into
that cut-out on the op rod, lock the rifle open. The 1918 rifle
another one of the improvements was making this automatic.
So when the rifle was empty it would lock open, so
that as the shooter you knew that you were empty.
Now to reload this what we do, it's kind of counterintuitive,
we take this magazine cover, pull it down
slip a clip into that and then close the magazine cover
on top of it. This doesn't eject clips, they don't drop free,
when you fire the fifth round and open this up, only then
does the empty clip fall out. We have a follower
mechanism under here and when I start to close
that you can see that's our follower mechanism.
It's spring loaded, so it will lock open here, but then,
there we go, it puts a nice amount of pressure on
the cartridges to feed once the cover is closed.
So yeah, this isn't a terrible stop-gap idea, it does
keep the bottom end of the action clean and free of debris.
Not exactly a fast reload by today's standards though.
Our sights here are standard Lebel rifle sights. The barrels on these guns were actually Berthier
rifle barrels, simply because in 1917 they were no longer manufacturing new Lebels, but they were manufacturing Berthiers.
So they just took Berthier barrels to use.
As is typical on this style of sight we have this kind of cut-out here in the front handguard.
The reason for that is that your battle sight zero is
this, with the sight folded all the way forward. We have an open U notch here.
If you want to shoot at very long range you leave the sight
standing up and
if you want two, three or four hundred yards ...
I'm sorry 400 to 800 yards. You've got the notes here ... marked on the side of the rifle.
That's when you use the sight down in the rear, your battle sight is all the way forward.
So you'll notice this is marked MAS 1917.
1917 is the date of manufacture, the 'S' stands for Saint-Etienne. The manufacture of the parts for these guns was broken up between
all the different state arsenals, but Saint-Etienne is the arsenal that actually assembled all of these
(or almost all of them). Now for disassembly,
what we want to do, this is a little bit wonky,
undo this ... take this tab, push this tab down, and then we can
unscrew the the rear end cap.
There's no spring in here to pop out, the mainspring is actually in the gas piston,
down under here. So now, what I'm going to do is ...
drop the bolt, and then I pick up
(See if I can show this to you better.)
I'm going to pull the bolt handle out and that will allow me to separate the bolt and its handle from this operating rod.
there we go
Now our bolt will come out the back.
So this is a six lug rotating bolt,
we can rotate it a little farther and pull it out.
This is a matching bolt to the gun, which is nice, unfortunately this one has a clipped firing pin.
So it is not currently in fireable condition,
but that shouldn't be that hard to replace.
So what happens is while the bolt is cycling, it's in this forward position,
(that pin is dropped down flush)
And then, when it closes, the bolt rotates 90 degrees, locks in place,
(you can actually see the locking recesses in the receiver),
and then the hammer strikes this firing pin, fires the rifle,
gas is vented out the bottom of the gas port, comes back, hits the gas piston, the gas piston
pushes back here,
which is connected to the bolt handle,
drives the bolt back, that forces the bolt head to unlock and then the whole thing cycles and loads a new cartridge.
Now, it is
relevant for us to take ... a closer
look at this gas port, because in 1935, a
bunch of these rifles were converted into straight pull bolt actions and issued out to reservists.
For whatever reason they didn't trust them with semi-autos, I suppose. But not all of these guns are
functional semi-autos anymore, as far as I can tell, this one is. Let's take a closer look.
Alright, the gas port design on this is actually kind of cool and clever. The center stud right there with a vertical hole in it,
that ports into the barrel. And then you can see that there is a hole in
this outer circular sleeve right back here. That hole leads to the actual gas piston.
You then have a plug,
right here, the inside of this is threaded and this screws down
onto that stud and this has two holes in it, one on either side, and you can see that it actually has
a relieved area in the middle, so right up here is
wider and this is wider and that forms pretty much a gas seal.
Gas is vented into this centre area and that allows it to go from this vertical port
into the gas piston there, without blowing directly onto the face of the gas piston.
So, in theory, that should do something to help prevent gas piston erosion.
In practice, these did have problems with parts breakage, the bolt and the op rod breaking.
The metallurgy of the time, they just didn't quite have
self-loading rifle mechanisms up to par yet.
Thank you guys for watching, I hope you enjoy the video.
I hope you learned something about the RSC here.
Certainly a lot of people don't realise that the French were actually the first country to mass issue self-loading rifles to the military.
They beat the M1 Garand by about 20 years into major field service, and
with a remarkably good gun, considering it was something designed and built under the stresses of a wartime economy.
So, if you would like to own this one yourself, it is of course coming up for sale here at Rock Island,
this is an auction house.
If you take a look at the link in the description text below, that'll take you to Rock Island's catalogue page on it.
You can see their pictures and their description, and you can set up an account online, and it's pretty easy to place a bid.
So, thanks for watching, good luck if you decide to try and make this your own.