[ Belgian Gendarmerie FAL ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum and this, courtesy of DSA
and FN America, is my new Belgian Gendarmerie FAL.
You may recall a video I did a couple of months ago with a Belgian Gendarmerie FAL parts kit.
Well it's gone and now this is here, which is pretty cool.
So just a little bit of background here on the Gendarmerie.
If you're watching in Europe, I'm sure you're quite familiar with the concept.
But in the United States we really don't have
a comparative organisation to a European Gendarmerie.
They are a military organisation, they're a branch of the military.
... I think kind of like the [US] Coast Guard maybe actually.
Where they are administered by the same organisation that oversees the military,
they're considered a branch of the military,
but their day-to-day duties in peacetime are really much more civilian.
... The details vary between European nations,
but typically they do things like national police investigations, law enforcement.
Kind of like the Coast Guard does mostly civilian work during peacetime.
Like well they're intercepting smugglers, but they're also the ones
who are going to rescue you if you get stranded at sea, that sort of thing.
During wartime of course the Gendarmerie revert to a more military role,
they act as things like ... military police.
Kind of like the Coast Guard also takes a military role.
At any rate, the Belgian Gendarmes ... were equipped with basically the same equipment that the army had.
They are a branch of the military, they are expected to perform military duties in time of war.
And so starting in 1954 they adopted the FAL right alongside the Belgian Army.
Now much more recently they replaced their FALs with newer rifles, I think FN SCARs.
And when they did so, the first batch that they replaced
were actually traded back to FN, they traded in their old rifles.
Well that practice ended pretty quickly, and most of the Gendarmerie FALs
(by the way, at their peak they had about 17,000 members,
although not every one of those people had a FAL)
most of them were just outright destroyed.
But FN had about 400 of these things,
and they were sitting ... off in a warehouse or a container somewhere.
And someone fairly recently noticed that they were there,
and they're like, "Well, what are we going to do with these things?"
FN Herstal kind of has no use for FALs anymore, they're not a current product of course.
So FN America brought them into the US as parts kits, so no receivers, no barrels.
They left out a few of the other parts, which I covered in my parts kit video.
But once here, they are fantastic candidates for being built into complete rifles.
So of course to do that you're going to need a barrel and a receiver.
DSA makes both barrels and receivers, and they ... went ahead
and started making a version that is specifically for these Gendarmerie FALs.
It has ... a set of Gendarmerie FAL markings on it, and it's the appropriate type of receiver.
Let's go ahead and take a closer look at that real quick, and then we'll talk about the building.
The markings for a Belgian Gendarmerie FAL are a little bit complicated,
because the Gendarmes started buying FALs right when the Belgian Army adopted the rifle,
but they continued to buy them through the late 1980s at least.
And both details of the rifles themselves
and also details of the marking patterns changed over that period of time.
Now we didn't know exactly what the composition of all these 400 parts kits were,
and so what we ended up doing was using a very early pattern,
in fact the earliest pattern of receiver markings.
So this is "Gd" for Gendarmerie, and the serial number of the individual particular rifle.
And then "RW" is an abbreviation for the Dutch term for Gendarmerie, which I'm not even going to attempt.
And 1954 would be the date of production of the specific rifle.
So this one is dated from the very first year of production,
although my kit was actually a much later production kit.
It's a Type 3 receiver, there's no lightening cut here.
You can identify that because the recoil plate back here is squared off
to ... match up with the squared off receiver.
Ultimately any of the FAL receiver patterns will fit on these Gendarmerie kits.
Most of the ones that came in appear to have actually been Type 3s like this one.
And so the Type 3 receiver that DSA chose to make
is the most aesthetically appropriately fitting type.
So anyway, that's the marking that would originally have been
on the side of the guns from the early pattern.
The later patterns had the same basic information, but the formatting and the font changed a bit.
On the opposite side of the receiver right here
it would have had an FN Herstal manufacturer's roll mark.
Those are left off because that's all trademarked by FN,
and so DSA can't print it on their receivers.
Unfortunately there's ... enough bureaucracy
that it wasn't possible to come up with some sort of legal exception for these. But.
Now the one thing I really like about using DSA receivers is for ones like this
they put their official markings on the inside of the magazine well.
... Any ... receiver manufactured in the US
has to have the manufacturer's name and address and calibre and some other things,
and it has to be ... distinctively visible on the rifle.
So DSA put that on the inside of the magazine well,
where without a magazine in it it's really blatantly obvious.
But it's also very easy to simply store the gun with a magazine
and the magazine completely covers that and you are left with just the original style of markings.
... That's a really cool feature, and I'm really glad that DSA does that.
Now the one other thing I want to point out here is the selector switch.
In making this a semi-auto rifle, we put a semi-auto selector switch in it.
And ... you can get any semi-auto selector switch to put in here,
but this is a duplicate of FN's original semi-auto selectors.
Which have an "R" marking and this little beak to prevent them
from rotating past that pin into the full-auto position.
Now of course the internals on this are semi-auto internals,
so even if you put in a different selector without that beak
it's not actually going to work in full-auto.
FN did make some factory FALs that were semi-auto only, and this was how they did it.
The Belgian Gendarmes were not one of those groups.
So these rifles were originally fully-automatic capable
and they didn't have any sort of restricted selector.
But of course for the semi-auto build, we do.
Alright, so what goes into actually turning a parts kit into a complete rifle?
Well, obviously you're going to have to replace the missing parts.
Now two of those are a little more complicated than the others, one of them is the barrel.
The reason that the barrel is complicated is you have the gas block on it.
And the gas block is press fit in place, and then there are a couple of holes
drilled for cross pins to hold it in the correct position.
So it doesn't shift and ... you don't want to misalign the ports in the barrel and the gas block,
or else gas doesn't get into the gas system and then the rifle doesn't work.
So that's a little bit of a ... tricky process to do, requires some tooling.
And then of course you have to replace the receiver, now in the United States
the receiver has the same legal status as a complete firearm.
So yeah, you can get a parts kit mailed straight to your door without any regulatory overhead at all.
But the receiver is legally the firearm, so when you get a receiver
... well in this case I got one from DSA.
They are not in the same state that I am, so I would pay for it
and then they ship it to a dealer in my state.
I go to the dealer, I fill out a background check form, pick up my receiver, take it home.
Now for DSA, if you're going to have them do this process,
what you do is buy the receiver from them, and then you put it into a box
with your parts kit and you ship it back to them and they assemble a rifle on it.
They can supply all of the other parts that are missing from the kits.
Now the other thing that makes the receiver a little bit tricky
is the receiver includes the locking shoulder.
So on a FAL the bolt is a tilting bolt, so when it's in battery it is tilted back slightly
and the back end of the bolt is resting against the locking shoulder.
That's what keeps it from opening, that is the locking component.
Now the locking shoulder is a separate piece for a couple of reasons.
One is that it is heat treated separately, it's a different material and a different heat treat
because it has to be much harder than the whole receiver.
You don't want to have to harden the whole receiver to the standards
of the one piece that's actually taking the brunt of the impact.
Also having the locking shoulder separate means that you can use different sizes
of locking shoulder to ensure that the headspace is correct for every individual rifle.
So DSA actually has a really cool tool for doing that, we'll take a look at that in just a moment.
And here they are doing just that.
So this is a new American-made barrel with the original gas block.
DSA has this ... simple but really cool ... pneumatic tool ... to press the barrel on just like that.
So that's going to put the gas block on,
it lines up the gas port in the barrel with the gas port in the gas block.
Then they take it over to this jig where they are going to drill the two cross-pin holes.
So you can see that there are already holes in the gas block, what you have to do is
drill the matching partial holes through the barrel.
And then you can put a pair of pins in there that ensure that the gas block doesn't move.
So ... by the way, when we talk about jigs and fixtures for firearms manufacture,
this is the sort of tool that we're talking about, very purpose-built specific things.
So next step here another piece of very rifle specific tooling.
This is a receiver wrench, they are torquing the barrel down to the proper spec.
He's got a level there that ... has a couple of slots in it
so that he can ensure that the barrel is fitted nice and square.
And the importance of lining it up just correctly is to make sure that the gas ... port
is exactly at the 12 o'clock position so that the gas system lines up.
Now this is headspacing. That long punch there is actually a series
of basically pseudo locking shoulders.
So he's put a headspace gauge in the chamber.
That first locking shoulder wasn't the right dimension,
he's going to fiddle with this one a bit ... and there we go, that now fits and locks.
And so that tells him the correct size of locking shoulder to use.
Because there's something like 20 different ones that can be done.
Now he's got the locking shoulder in place, they're going to press fit it in.
You can see it's sort of that keyhole shaped part.
Very cool of DSA to actually film some of that process for us to see.
What you were watching there was in fact this rifle.
So after the last stage that you saw them filming, the rest of the rifle was assembled.
It was taken to finishing where it got this nice black finish on it.
And then the handguards, the furniture put back on and shipped out to me.
So what do you say we head out to the range and take it for a spin?
Well, I don't have any actual Belgian Gendarmerie kit other than the FAL,
but I do have this cool Belgian paratrooper jump smock, which seemed fun, so.
Out at the range. We're going to go ahead and give the FAL a little bit of a test run.
Well, that makes the spinner pretty easy.
I don't think they are really designed to be challenging for a .308. Certainly shoots nicely.
So in terms of features, characteristics,
the Gendarmerie FAL is basically ... pretty much a totally standard FAL.
Full length barrel, standard FN-style muzzle compensator, got a fixed stock.
Got [an out to] 600 yard zero on the iron sights, 200 out to 600, fixed charging handle.
These have semi-auto selector switches in them.
And of course the ... rest of the fire control parts and the receiver are also semi-auto. But.
What more can you say? It's a FAL, it's "the right arm of the free world".
There we go again.
And I'm out again. Perhaps the one downside is 20 round magazines.
Well, it's really cool that FN USA was able to bring in these parts kits.
It's obviously a real shame that they couldn't bring them in as complete guns.
But getting a brand new batch of beautiful ... not unused,
but most of them are in really nice shape, Gendarmerie Belgian FALs is super, super cool.
And a big thanks to DSA for stepping up to do receivers with the appropriate sort of markings,
and putting this one together for me.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.