[ M8C Spotting Rifle ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
with a really cool gun, that is also a gun accessory,
that I've been wanting to take a look at for quite a long time.
This is an M8C Spotting Rifle.
And it is designed specifically to be an aiming device
for the M40 106mm recoilless rifle
that the United States ... designed in the 1950s.
So the deal is this is a .50 calibre semi-automatic rifle.
Now it would not normally be on a tripod like this,
the previous owner set it up on this so that he could actually shoot it.
Normally this would be bolted to the top of a recoilless rifle.
But of course a tripod's a little easier to take to the range.
A little less expensive as well.
The reason that this thing exists, ... you might think,
"Well, it's a giant recoilless rifle, why don't you say put sights on it? Or put a scope on it, even better."
Well they did put a scope on it. In fact if you want to see a whole video
on the M40 recoilless rifle I have a video on it, including some shooting.
So I'll link that at the end of the video, you can check it out.
But the problem is the recoilless rifle, especially a big one like 106mm,
has an incredible amount of back blast and firing signature.
And when you touch one of those things off everybody knows it for a long ways around.
And if you touch one of those off in a war zone,
you are going to invite a lot of return fire on yourself.
And so you want to make sure that you hit with your very first round,
make a hit and immediately relocate.
Well, how do you ensure that you're going to make a hit at long range?
A scope's one thing, but what if you could instead
also mount a rifle like this to the top of the recoilless?
Set this up so that it ballistically matches
your recoilless rifle ammunition, your high explosive anti-tank rounds.
This you can fire off, ... yeah, it's a .50 calibre rifle,
so in terms of rifles and pistols and such it makes a lot of a big boom.
But in terms of anti-tank weaponry at 1,000 or 1,500 yards
(and 1,500 yards is the maximum effective range of
both this and the recoilless), nobody's going to notice it.
So what if you take this and fire some tracer-spotter ammunition to confirm your zero,
or figure out exactly how you need to adjust your zero,
re-aim, and then fire off your recoilless rifle round.
That is the purpose of this.
So let's take a closer look at it, I'll show you how this thing works
(... this foot long cylinder is actually a self-loading .50 calibre rifle),
and what sort of ammunition they used, because it's not standard .50 BMG.
Let's start with some markings here, this is "Rifle, Spotting, Calibre .50, M8C".
It is interesting that that "C" is clearly added after the fact.
I have been unable to find any reference to earlier versions,
an M8 or an 8A or an 8B, so I'm really not entirely sure what to make of that.
But these were manufactured by Springfield Armoury, which at the time
was an actual US government-owned arms design and production facility.
Got our serial number there.
These are hammer fired, so there is a hammer sear mechanism inside this box.
The trigger is this [wire]. This originally would have been a ... long cable
running down to the actual recoilless rifle.
... The recoilless had a big plunger trigger,
and pulling it back would fire the spotting rifle.
And pushing it forward would fire the recoilless.
So the gunner could get in position on the scope
and keep an eye on the target, fire the spotting gun ... with his hand on the one single trigger.
Make any adjustments, and then his hand was right there on the main trigger already
when he was confident to make his actual 106mm shot.
The whole point of this thing is to make (potentially repeated) spotting shots.
So if your first shot's not on target, you adjust and try again
until you are confident that you're going to make a hit.
So this really needs to be self-loading, you don't want to have to manually reload it between shots.
They had two different magazines for it: a 10 round, which is this guy,
and a 20 round which we have here in the gun.
The magazine release simply pushes this whole yoke forward,
and then we can pull the mag out.
There are a pair of locking catches front and back.
Now you may be looking at this and thinking,
"That doesn't quite look long enough for .50 BMG." And you would be right.
This is a dummy .50 BMG cartridge, and it is too long to fit in that magazine.
This is the cartridge that is actually used by the M8C Spotting Rifle.
It is a shorter case, 12.7x77mm, as compared to 12.7x99 for the machine gun cartridge.
It actually has a heavier bullet at nominally I believe 817 grains,
and a muzzle velocity of 1,750 feet per second.
Now why such a relatively low muzzle velocity?
Well, this is ballistically matched to the 106mm projectile.
Because if ... your two rounds don't have the same trajectory,
then using one to spot for the other is not going to be all that practical.
These each come with a cardboard protective tube over them
because the standard ammunition was spotter-tracer.
It actually has a three part trace, so it starts out with a white tracer/primer,
and then goes to a yellow trace, and then a red trace at the end.
Tracing distance is about 1,500 metres,
which is the maximum effective range of the recoilless rifle anyway.
And then when it impacts the bullet actually detonates.
So the idea being you get a puff of dirt, or rock, or grass, or whatever,
you have a way to actually see your impact at 1,000+ metres.
The cardboard is because these projectiles are relatively fragile actually.
They have a lighter jacket on them than a standard .50 BMG
because they're being fired at significantly lower velocity.
Just a warning out there - if you are a ... .50 cal hand loader, be very careful.
Don't load these things over about 1,750 feet per second,
because they're not designed to go that fast
and they may go kaboom earlier than you really want them to.
And there you can see this fits in that magazine very nicely.
The basic functioning of the gun is very simple: you've got a charging handle,
you've got a bolt that reciprocates back and forth.
These are gas operated, so we've got a gas block here.
That's going to vent your excess gas.
This is a short-stroke piston.
And when this fires that piston is going to be pushed back,
it's going to give the bolt a kick which is enough to fully cycle it.
To disassemble it, I just take the rear end cap off.
But before I can do that, I have to take the two recoil springs out.
... They have little locking tabs holding them in place.
And these are really annoying springs because they are really quite long,
and you can see that this one's kind of kinked up here.
There you go, you can see this spring has been bent a couple of times.
It's a little tricky to get them into the bolt here without them kinking.
So there's one.
There's the other one.
Now we have a little latch right here, I'm going to pull that out.
And then I just have three locking lugs that hold this end cap on.
We've got a fibre buffer there to absorb the impact of the bolt.
Now I have to remove the bolt handle to get the bolt out.
You can see there's a cutout there, what I do is pull this out
which then allows the bolt handle to slide back.
All I'm doing there is pulling that plunger back, unlocking it from there.
And then I can pull the bolt and bolt carrier out of the tube.
So there's the bolt and bolt carrier.
These are a couple of bolt guide lugs.
You can see they are wasp waisted there, they are actually held in place by the two recoil springs.
And they serve to hold this bolt in the correct orientation here.
With those out I just pull the bolt back.
Looks actually a lot like an FAL bolt doesn't it?
It is a tilting bolt design. So this is the unlocked position.
When it hits the breech face there, the back end here lifts up.
And that's your locking shoulder, which locks into a shoulder in the receiver tube.
It's a remarkably simple gun, still a few good safety features in it.
We have this, which ...
acts as an automated firing pin retractor.
So you can see that tab sticking out the side here.
When the bolt locks, that tab gets pushed across right there.
And it unlocks the firing pin, allows the firing pin to go forward and fire.
When the bolt carrier starts to retract, that ...
pulls over to this side, and it automatically retracts the firing pin.
So right ... there, it pulls the firing pin back
to ensure that there can't be an out of battery detonation.
And that piece is just a really simple little flat wedge.
Once I take it out, I can remove the firing pin.
There we go. And the firing pin's got that slot going through it for that wedge.
So that's your firing pin.
If we look into the receiver here, we've got our ejector right there.
And behind it, right here, is our locking shoulder.
And there's the whole thing, that's how simple a self-loading .50 calibre rifle can be.
Now granted, it's not .50 Browning, it is a substantially less powerful cartridge.
But still the whole thing fits into a pretty darn compact tube,
and I think it's a really neat example of no frills engineering.
As I said at the beginning, I've been wanting to take a look at one of these for a long time.
It's really a cool, economical, very simple mechanism to do a very specific job.
I do also want to point out the magazines for these things
are one of the more common items that I have seen people post pictures of and try to identify.
Because what on earth is this a magazine for?
... These mags actually show up at places like gun shows a lot more often
than you would expect, given the rarity of the actual Spotting Rifles.
And they're basically good for nothing other than use in a spotting rifle,
so they are not really worth much on their own.
Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.