[ Slovenian SAR 80 ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today
by gracious invitation of Polenar Tactical,
and we are taking a look at a Singapore manufactured,
Slovenian issued, SAR 80 rifle.
That stands for Singapore Assault Rifle 1980.
There are two different places that we have to go to really pull out the history on this rifle.
And the first is the Sterling Company in England.
Now this rifle was actually designed by an employee of Sterling, a guy named Frank Waters.
And well basically the Sterling Company wanted to be marketing a
5.56 calibre military pattern rifle that was economical, cheap to manufacture,
and something suitable to market to a lot of not top-tier militaries.
Sterling was very interested in countries like for example
the South-East Asian markets, countries like Singapore.
Now Sterling would end up getting a licence to manufacture the AR-18 rifle from ArmaLite.
And for that reason Sterling never put the SAR 80 into production,
or the prototype, the design that would become the SAR 80.
They never put it into production because they were able to make the AR-18 instead.
However in the late 1970s Singapore ... well, let's step back a bit.
1965 the Republic of Singapore is formed as an independent country.
In 1967 Chartered Industries of Singapore, CIS,
is formed to do some domestic arms manufacture.
Singapore wants to equip its own military, they start by buying a batch of like 3,500 M16s.
But they want to manufacture something domestically, just for basically the self-reliance factor.
So they are looking for a design and they approach Sterling
about licensing some sort of design from Sterling.
Well Sterling wants to make money on this, ... Sterling can't sell them the rights to make the AR-18,
but they can sell them the rights to make this.
So in 1977 Waters ... and Sterling put together a few prototypes,
send them off to CIS in Singapore for some testing.
After a little bit of revision the guns are accepted, and CIS starts production in 1978.
The first customer for these guns is the Singapore Army, they take their first deliveries in 1981.
And then CIS starts looking around for other export customers, and they don't find a lot.
But they do find a few, these would include the Central African Republic, ...
Croatia, Papua New Guinea and Slovenia.
In total about a little over 80,000 of these rifles were manufactured for
all of those various export clients put together.
So let's take a closer look at this. It is essentially an AR-18 clone,
just without some of the specific features that were still under patent by ArmaLite at the time.
You can really see the Sterling legacy in this design,
if nothing else from the ... crackle paint finish on the receivers.
That was a finish that was adopted at Sterling for the Sterling submachine guns
that they found to be a cheap and durable and effective finish.
And so that's what went on the SAR 80.
We have standard STANAG magazines, AR-15 pattern magazines.
This is one of the mags that was originally issued with this particular rifle in Slovenia.
And it is interesting to note that it, and the other ones - I have a couple of others here,
are all actually dual-purpose magazines, also cut with a slot for an AR-18.
That paint finish makes it a little bit difficult to read the markings on the lower receiver here.
But we have a serial number, this one's in the 38,000 range.
Calibre 5.56, and the designation of SAR 80.
And the only other markings here are the selector markings: safe, semi and auto.
This rifle has been down-converted to semi only to be legally owned here in Slovenia.
So it's not actually automatic, but you can still see the marking on the receiver.
In fact if we look closely, this pinhole is now filled with a screw,
and it's empty on the opposite side. That was originally the pinhole for the auto sear,
which was removed as part of its semi-auto down conversion.
Both fixed buttstocks like this one, plastic in this case,
and also side-folding buttstocks were developed by Waters.
Singapore decided to go with the fixed buttstock, and that's also what Slovenia got.
We have a two position rear aperture sight, one for long range one for close range.
Windage adjustment is done on the side here.
The front sight is just a plain round post with a couple of big protective wings.
And this can be threaded in or out to adjust elevation.
They have a very basic birdcage flash hider on the front.
This is sort of a bolt-on front sling-swivel adapter.
This is often missing, nice to have it on this rifle.
Bayonet lug, this takes a standard M16 pattern bayonet.
There is a four position gas regulator, it has settings for 1, 2, and 3,
for normal, more gas, and a lot more gas.
And then it also has a zero setting ...
right there ... to turn it into a manual repeater, presumably for launching rifle grenades.
Both the upper and the lower are made of stamped sheet steel.
This is a very simple, economical gun to make.
So for disassembly we're going to start by pushing out the rear pin, right there.
That allows me to pivot open the lower receiver.
I'll go ahead and pull out the front pin as well.
Typically for disassembly you wouldn't do this,
you'd leave them connected just because it's simpler.
In this case it's easier to get one [half] out of the way so I can show you all the rest.
The buttstock is held in place by this big screw onto the back of the stamped sheet metal lower.
That's your fire control group. This does have a last-round bolt hold open right there.
And you can see that the follower of the magazine lifts it right there,
so that's how the bolt hold open engages.
There is however no bolt release, so to release it you simply have to
pull the bolt handle back slightly and let it go forward once you have a loaded magazine in there.
As I mentioned before, there would originally be an auto-trip up front,
but that has been removed as part of making this semi-auto.
Big magazine release right there, but it works just like an M16 magazine release.
Moving on to the upper we have a rather clever, but still pretty simple,
system to retain the recoil spring so that it doesn't pop out when you disassemble the gun.
That is this little spring-loaded button, I have to push that in ...
and that releases the recoil springs.
So we have two parallel guide rods and two recoil springs there attached to this large plate.
With the guide rails gone I can just lift the handle out.
When the guide rails are in place, they hold the bolt carrier down far enough
that the edge of the handle can't come past the edge of the receiver.
So some really simple, efficient engineering tricks that went into making this.
There is our bolt carrier. This is a very simple
standard AR-18 style bolt and carrier, there's the cam pin.
Back here you have the firing pin retention pin.
I'll leave this together, it's identical to an AR-18 bolt.
If you want to see how that comes apart, check out my AR-18 video.
Next up at the front end, the lower handguard is essentially permanently in place.
It's held in place by the gas block.
The upper handguard comes off by just pulling it backwards and lifting it up.
It's held in place by two pins back here that are spring-loaded.
So again, really easy to take off.
Without it, the lower handguard rattles a bit.
But you can only take this off by taking off the gas block.
Underneath the handguard there we have a Tokarev-style gas system.
This is basically exactly what was used on the AR-18.
So it's a three-piece gas system, so I can pull (there we go) I can pull the long piece off.
Then we've got the actual piston head.
Then we've got this, which is the adjustable gas block.
So the gas port is right there in the bottom, connecting to the barrel.
And then this has 1, 2, 3 increasingly large ports.
And those line up when this is in the gun with your 1, 2 and 3 numbers.
There ... are little notches here,
and this locks in like so to the pin on the front sight/gas block.
These holes are simply the vent holes, so once the gas piston has come back that far
any remaining gas pressure is vented out there, instead of over-pressuring the piston.
The upper receiver is a really simple piece of sheet-metal stamping.
Just a couple of little welded inserts in there to keep things lined up.
This is just bent around and welded into the rear trunnion which houses the barrel.
You got three holes up at the top here.
The middle one is for the gas piston to come back through and push the bolt.
The outer two are for the recoil-spring guide rods.
And there you go, there is the whole SAR 80 field stripped.
The one other really cool thing I have here that I want to show you is this,
which is the original Slovenian magazine pouch for the rifle.
So open this up, Velcro lid at the top.
And inside we have storage for four of these AR-15/AR-18 magazines.
All four of them have that dual purpose cut there.
Then we also have, if I can get it out,
there we go, this really cheap plastic oiler bottle.
... You can see the distortion in it there,
but there's two compartments with little oil applicators.
Threaded thing at each end.
And then the pouch itself has a shoulder strap.
And it has a belt hook
that you open by pulling down on this tab, pushing that tab over, that unlocks it.
And you are strictly told not to bend this up more than 30 degrees, or it will just snap off.
The Slovenian military in the early/mid 1990s did not exactly have a whole lot of money to throw around.
But that is the original magazine pouch.
Oh, there are two pockets here. To be honest I'm not sure what was supposed to go in them.
Chartered Industries of Singapore, CIS, is a neat, interesting company.
They are also the company that produced the Ultimax light machine guns
designed by Jim Sullivan with a constant recoil system.
They had a lot of innovative development going on.
In 1988 production of the SAR 80 ended, it was replaced by the SR 88,
a somewhat improved new pattern of rifle.
Ultimately for the Singapore Army these were replaced by the SAR 21,
a particularly interesting bullpup rifle, which I also have a video on.
So I'll link that at the end of this video.
For Slovenia these guns were used primarily by the Territorial Defence Forces,
although they were never hugely popular.
There weren't a ton of them here, although I don't have exact numbers unfortunately.
And into the 1990s the majority of Slovenian armed forces
continued to use Yugoslav M70 pattern AKs instead of these.
Still, very interesting that this is one of the few export clients for the SAR 80.
It's a neat rifle, it's a very economical rifle.
I will also point out that Bloke On The Range has a video entirely about
the patents involved between this and the AR-18 as an interesting case study
in how patents work and how patents affect a gun design like this.
So you should definitely check out that video if you'd like to ... know more of the nuance
around how does one just copy a rifle, or perhaps not copy a rifle.
You can also (I've got all sorts of extra references here),
you can also check out Bloke On The Range's videos from Lynx Brutality here in Slovenia
where Bloke brought another SAR 80, not this one but one of his own,
and shot it in Lynx Brutality. So you can check out his experiences running it in the match.
Hopefully this was an interesting video for you guys.
Thanks for watching.