South African R2
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look at a
South African modified R2 rifle,
which may look like a G3 to you from back there,
and that's because, well, it is a G3.
So to to start at the beginning a bit, South Africa uses R
as its designation for rifles. The R1 is the FAL,
which they purchases some, I believe, from FN,
and then manufactured them locally in South Africa.
The R2 was the designation for the G3 rifle.
The R3 was ... kind of a lesser-known one,
the R3 was a semi-automatic version of the FAL.
Basically, it was a standard FAL but with a blue selector lever
that rendered it semi-auto only, so a full-auto mechanism
but a semi-auto selector switch.
And those were issued to Kommandos, not Commando with a C like we would think of,
you know, Special Operations guys in the US, this is Kommando with a K
as in the Boer Kommandos, basically a territorial defensive group.
So National Guard Reserve, think of it that way. Those guys were issued semi-automatic only rifles.
When they went into combat, or when they deployed to combat, they actually handed in the rifles,
they had the selector switches swapped out and they fought, when on frontline military service,
they fought with select fire rifles, but in general they were only issued semi-auto.
Anyway, that's the R3. The R4 is the copy of the Israeli Galil and then the R5 and the R6
are short barrelled versions of the Galil, so that's the whole R designation pattern.
What we're looking at today is an R2. So this was used simultaneously with the R1.
The issue was basically that the R1 was a little expensive to produce and they needed more
guns than they had actually manufactured R1s,
so in the '60s and '70s South Africa purchased something like 100,000
surplus Portuguese manufacture G3 rifles. And that's what this is,
this one in fact was manufactured in October of 1966,
not sure exactly when this one was purchased by the South Africans.
But they got a big stockpile of G3 rifles and they used them as supplemental guns.
So the primary combat rifle for fighting troops was the R1, the FAL.
This was issued out to groups like the Southwest Africa Territorial Force,
the South African Air Force, the Cape Corps, which was a mixed ...
... we're gonna get into all sorts of weirdness here, because this was the apartheid government.
They had white units, they had black units, and they had what they called coloured units.
In South African parlance a coloured person was mixed-race. So the Cape Corps was a coloured unit, they had R2s.
And then when South Africa wanted to give military aid to other countries in the area,
often like UNITA, it would be R2 rifles. They weren't gonna give them the frontline R1s,
those are expensive and they needed them. But you know a G3 is really a very serviceable,
excellent combat rifle and so they used these to provide military aid to other groups.
Now one of the problems that they had with these guns was that the furniture, in particular the handguards,
did not react well to the heat and the ultraviolet exposure in Southwestern Africa,
and so they ended up having to come up with a replacement.
So I have a stock Portuguese G3 sitting right there out of line of the camera,
Why don't I bring that back and I will show you it compared to this South African modified version.
So both original Portuguese FMP marked G3 rifles, this is 1971, this is 1966 production.
This one is the original Portuguese style handguard and this is the replacement South African handguard.
So the problem these had was with the handguards in particular, something in here would shrink
and the handguards would become loose on the rifles,
and ... they were really looked down upon by the South African troops
and they called them (I don't know the word in Afrikaans), but they called them 'rattlers',
or 'rattle guns' because the hand guards literally would rattle on the fore end.
So this particular one doesn't, because its owner has stuffed a rubber grommet back in here to
make it a little more solid, but they needed some solution to this.
And so they actually worked with Garth Choate of Choate Machine and Tool
(I think I'm pronouncing that right, that's an American one, I ought to be able to pronounce that),
but anyway, they worked with him to come up with a new handguard design
and this is what they ended up with. So you can see that it comes a lot
farther back on the gun and it's also much wider in profile.
You can see that if we look at them from the bottom.
This one's, I'm sure, going to do a better job at protecting your hand from the heat of firing,
you know, sustained fire. And it's a different polymer formulation
and it was able to survive the climate here in South Africa.
In addition the South Africans also came up with a new stock for the rifles.
This ... is a stock based on the FAL or the R1 pattern and you can see that
with the rubber butt plate, the sling swivel down here, a little bit of a hump at the back,
and it doesn't have the pin holes or the sling bar that the original G3 stocks did.
So they retrofitted the R2 rifles, a lot of them, with those stocks.
Presumably the stocks on the original Portuguese guns had the same sort of problem.
The handguards did, although because the stocks are a lot thicker it may not have
shown as badly, but they decided to redo the stocks with their own pattern.
Also interesting to note that the new South African handguard actually has
an attachment point for an integral G3 bipod, along with, of course,
the cutouts for the bipod legs. I've seen pictures of a couple of these,
I'm not sure if they were ever actually used with bipods, but clearly they wanted that option.
So there's not really that much different, but it's kind of cool to take a look at the South African version,
their modification of the G3. This is one of those guns that you really don't see outside of South Africa.
So since I happened to be travelling in South Africa right now, and had access to this one
I thought it'd be a really cool gun to show off. A big thank you to the gun shop owner who
allowed me to borrow this to do some video on it.
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Thanks for watching.