Hey guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island auction company.
Now this gun by the time you see this video has already sold,
but it is a very cool literally one of a kind gun,
and I didn't want to let it get away without getting a video on it.
And it's a pretty good example of the sort of unusual and interesting things
that come through auction houses like Rock Island.
So, this is a conversion of an AR-180,
and is a prototype rifle developed by guy named Ross Rudd, R U D D.
Mr. Rudd was born in Toronto in 1915.
But when he was just 2 years old his family emigrated down to the US,
they moved to Springfield Massachusetts, took up residence there.
And Rudd was interested in firearms design from a very early age.
This is cool anecdote about him, where you know,
a lot of people as kids like "I'm gonna write to an astronaut" or "write to a sports guy",
and you know, ... ask them something and you get this cool hand written letter back,
and as a kid that's really neat to have that piece of communication from someone you look up to.
Well, when Rudd was 16, he got the idea for a better bullet design.
And he sent this idea off to the US Ordnance Department,
and got a letter back from none other than Townsend Whelen who had evaluated his idea,
wrote him back and politely explain why it was completely infeasible.
But was impressed with Rudd's idea, you know, in his diligence, in following-through on it,
and invited him down to the arsenal ... Springfield Armory gave him a tour.
That was Rudd's equivalent of getting a letter back from, you know, a basketball star.
Anyway, when World War II broke out Rudd ended up moving to Chicopee Falls,
and went to work for the Savage company where he would work for a couple years.
He was involved in manufacture of the Lee-Enfield rifles for British contract
as well as the manufacturing the simplification of the Thompson gun.
He had something to do with that which makes sense,
considering where he would go later with some of his ideas.
... He after a couple years ... he was actually ... he joined the US Army Air Corps,
was in the in the Air Force for a little while.
After the war he got into aeronautical engineering, but still weapons related,
did some weapons designed for like the Comanche helicopter in the 1970s.
And then ultimately what we're getting to here is in the early 1970s,
he finalized an idea for a new firearm locking system,
created his own company called Rudd Arms.
And not to work designing as ... well isn't an independent inventor this time.
He started with a pistol, but then adapted his design to a rifle as well,
and that's what we have here, is he's one of a kind experimental conversion of an AR-180.
So let's take a look at the system he came up with.
As an experimental gun, this is a little bit incomplete,
you can see here it has no handguards on it.
However that's actually valuable for us to note, because there's no gas system.
What Rudd came up with was a delayed blowback operating mechanism,
that would work both and pistols and in rifles.
So what we have here is an original standard factory AR-180 lower
and Rudd's own handmade upper.
I've said this before, but I'll reiterate it,
if you are an arms designer and you want people to know that you made something
a really good way to do that is to put your name on it.
And Rudd certainly did that in nice big letters here.
So at the time he had moved in Northridge California and that's where this was constructed.
Now the interesting bit is inside here,
note that it's also missing it's charging handle, but we won't let that stop us.
I'm going to pop this and pull this pin.
And we'll get rid of the lower assembly because it's really not relevant.
Now with the upper I'm gona go ahead and pull our bolt carrier out
beacuse this is where the magic happens.
So Rudd's system here uses a bolt in the center here and a bolt carrier
in his pistol design he had a bolt and in place of a bolt carrier he had a slide
like you would expect on a pistol.
But rifles don't have slide, so you have the second part here.
There is an angled surface at the back of the bolt,
and there is a recess cut in the top of the receiver.
And you can actually see it here this is not ... totally unlike the ... locking recess in a BAR.
And you can see that screwed in place, so that he can replace this locking plate.
He can harden it properly and then if it wears or if there're problems
or if you want to retie it, because this is experimental,
you can pull that plate out and replace it with a different one.
So the idea is when the guns in battery,
this triangular wedge is locked into that recess in the the upper receiver.
When you fire, this starts to push back and it's going to push against the upper receiver
which is going to tend to push this down.
Now the breech face can't move forward like it does here,
instead the bolt carrier is going to slowly move backwards once you fire.
So this comes just slightly backwards until this is all the way down
at which point the bolt carrier is free to reciprocate backward,
extract the empty cartridge and, you know, do whole cycle.
What Rudd did is engineer this to the point that ...
it's actually ... to me, the closest ... analogy would be H&K's roller delayed system,
because we've got the same idea here,
with the angled wedge here is at just the right angle, so that this will unlock slowly enough
to let chamber pressure decreased to a safe level before it actually pulls the brass out.
So if this angle is too steep, the bolt won't cycle.
Most of the energy will just be absorbed into the upper receiver
and nothing will move fast enough.
If this angle is too sharp, the bolt will open very quickly.
And potentially when pressure in the brass case is too high as it's being extracted
and ... the case will explode.
Same thing applies to H&K's roller locking,
... if their wadges at the wrong angle either one of those things will happen there as well.
So.
But what Rudd did was adapt this with a single angled surface into a rifle as well as pistol.
So I can take his pulled apart very easily.
The recoil rods act to prevent the bolt from coming out,
but I can tip that up
And is there is bolt mechanism.
The firing pin is held in place by one of these pins,
so it won't go too far forward or come out the back.
This looks like it started as an AR-18 bolt carrier but has been heavily modified,
it's got a firing pin transfer right there.
One of the cool elements of this is because of this tipping system,
if the bolt isn't up and in battery, the firing pins don't line up.
So when they do, the firing pin will come forward.
But if this is even down a little bit ... you can see even there the firing pin moves,
but it's not long enough to actually protrude out the bolt face.
And when it's all the way down, the firing pin just ...
they don't line up, and so you can't fire out of battery.
So, that is the entirety of Rudd's delayed blowback rifle design.
And as with many things, it's simplicity really kind of is an indicator of its quality, I think.
I've have not had a chance to shoot this, and I won't on this filming trip.
But someone is going to end up with this rifle
and it would be really interesting to know how reliable it works,
and like what the bolt velocity is when it goes backwards.
It's ... in a way it's too bad that
Rudd wasn't able to find a company interested in further development on this
because this is the sort of system that really does potentially have some future to it.
Unfortunately for Rudd as an independent entrepreneur,
the firearms industry as a particularly difficult one.
His pistol was set to like premiere and release in 1983, and they had big plans,
they want to like the first 2,000 pistols we're gonna be made with titanium slides,
and then they'd introduce ... you know, they go to steel after that,
and introduce aluminum later and he had big plans for it.
And unfortunately he was just unable to find any major manufacturer
who's willing to take on the project.
There's a lot of investment required in developing a new firearm for production
and he never did find a company that was willing to bankroll it.
So with his pistols, only one prototype was ever made as far as I know,
and there is actually a old video up on YouTube that was moved over from VHS tape
of Rudd himself demonstrating his pistol.
So I'll link to that at the end,
I'd love to get my hands on it myself for a video.
But until that time, you can check out Mr Rudd himself explaining it.
And of course, there is this one rifle as well.
So hopefully you guys enjoy the video.
This rifle has already sold.
But of course Rock Island has all manner of cool stuff coming up in their April premier auction,
you can check it all out on the catalog through their website.
Thanks for watching!