Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today, courtesy of
Sienna Armoury and Woody's Weapons, we are able
to take a look at a ... Polish Beryl rifle.
This is of course one in a series of Polish small arms
projects that were code named after chemical elements.
So this is developed from the Tantal, tantalum,
and its code name was Beryl, as in beryllium.
Now the story of this really involves a lot of the story of the wz.88 Tantal.
So I had a video on the Tantal, actually two of them, just recently.
If you're interested in the whole in-depth story, check out those videos.
The short version is the Tantal was developed as Poland's answer to the 5.45 AK-74
without needing a licensing agreement.
However, it came right at the end of communism and the Warsaw Pact.
And very shortly after the Tantal was adopted the Warsaw Pact fell apart.
Poland would leave the Warsaw Pact in 1991,
and immediately work on gaining admittance into the NATO alliance.
Well, if Poland's going to be in NATO, they're going to need a rifle in 5.56 NATO.
That sort of small arms compatibility is just as important to NATO as it was to the Warsaw Pact.
So, ... as things are falling apart politically in Poland,
there is a small arms project that goes into the works to convert the Tantal to 5.56.
And that would result in the not formally adopted wz.90 and 91.
The 90 being a rifle, the 91 being a carbine.
But it never got to completion really,
the project was mothballed in the early '90s and kind of set aside.
Meanwhile, the political machinations continue,
until in 1995 ... Poland's acceptance into NATO is really quite clear,
and the ... government starts a program
to ... finalise a 5.56 infantry rifle, and this would be the Beryl.
Now, fortunately for the Poles,
they have this previous work from 1990/1991 already basically sitting on the shelf.
And so they're able to bring it back and push it all the way through to finalisation fairly quickly.
The first formal ... testing of prototypes of the Beryl
is done in December of 1995 in Radom, in Poland of course.
The rifle is formally adopted in May of 1996, and deliveries begin in 1997.
This is in fact the only 5.56 NATO calibre AK
specifically developed for military applications, for military adoption and use.
And it was able to be developed relatively quickly
because there's not that much difference between it and the Tantal.
So let's go ahead and take a closer look, and I'll show you
what they kept from the Tantal, and what they upgraded and changed.
And I should point out that this is an early pattern of ... Beryl.
They did make a bunch of updates to it, and we'll talk about those as well.
First off, I apologise, but I don't have an appropriate magazine for this rifle to show you.
However, it would look essentially just like an AK-74 mag.
The body is basically identical,
the follower is designed for the case taper of 5.56 instead of 5.45,
and these would be black, or later, translucent.
But I don't have a magazine specifically for this Beryl.
We can take a look at the markings here it is Beryl [US import mark], it is calibre 5.56.
We have circle 11, a factory marking from Poland.
This ... particular one was manufactured in 2000, and there is a serial number.
"Poland" here is a US import marking.
This is a registered, post-sample, post-1986, dealer sample machine gun.
So it had to be imported with the relevant markings, which include that,
as well as the name and location of the importer themselves.
The Beryl is essentially just a Tantal with a different stock, handguard, and barrel.
So let's start at the back of the gun with the stock.
The Tantal of course had one of those really terrible single-strut wire side-folding stocks.
With the Beryl they made a number of improvements to it.
They have two struts now so you can actually get a bit more of a cheek weld.
These are coated in rubber so that in extreme cold or extreme heat like, say, Iraq or Afghanistan,
you won't hurt yourself with the exposed metal of the stock.
Also so in the cold it doesn't stick to you, which would be unfortunate.
They also went ahead and strengthened and improved the stock folding latch.
Instead of the style of button on the original,
which is basically the same as the Romanian and the East German stocks,
this now has a button on the side
which is inspired or simply copied from the SIG 550.
So push that in and you can fold the stock, you can see how that works right there.
There is no latch holding this in the folded position,
so to unfold it, you just grab and snap it open.
We have the same dust cover retaining latch that the Tantal had.
This is perhaps one of the least effective elements of the gun.
What I have heard from people who use it is that
it makes disassembly annoying, which it kind of does,
and it apparently also doesn't do a very good job of actually keeping the dust cover on.
The point of this was for the use of rifle grenades.
The significant recoil impact of firing a rifle grenade on a standard AK
will tend to pop the dust cover off, and this was intended to prevent that.
Both the Tantal and the Beryl are designed to be capable of firing rifle grenades,
so that was kept on there.
We have the same distinctive sort of dog-leg safety lever as the Tantal.
And as with the Tantal, this safety lever is simply for safe and fire.
Controlling the actual fire mode is done on the other side.
We have the same fire selector mechanism from the Tantal here.
So in this position it is in full-auto, flipped back one position is semi-auto,
and then all the way back here is 3 round regulated burst.
Note that unlike the Tantal, this has a pair of levers so that from a firing grip
you can manoeuvre the whole thing.
The Tantal just had one lever, which made it a little bit tricky to manoeuvre with.
This has a standard magazine release on it like any other AK.
One of the product improvements later in the Beryl's life would be to increase the size of this
to make it ... basically extended, and easier to hit.
The rear sight is basically a standard AK 1,000 metre tangent rear sight.
However, we do have a tritium vial in there to give it some luminescence at night.
That rear night sight is used in conjunction with this front night sight.
So what we do here is we can pull this wire out of the way,
see if I can get this,
and lift this guy up and over,
come on, there we go.
That snaps into place on the front sight post, and it has another tritium vial there.
So you can line that glowing dot up with the glowing dot on the rear sight,
and that allows you to have at least some capability of accurate fire in the dark.
The handguard here has been reformulated, it is now all black polymer.
The Tantal had this interesting sort of reddish-orange colour to it,
and the shape has been changed a little bit to give you a front hand stop essentially, right there.
Like the Tantal, this differs in takedown from the standard AK-74.
The retainer plate here actually holds on both the upper and lower handguards.
So, if you flip this lever down you can pull off the handguard
without having to disassemble the back end of the rifle.
And that was originally done on the Tantal and maintained here on the Beryl
so that you could add an under-barrel grenade launcher
without having to fully field strip the rifle.
Which sounds like a good thing unless you think about it and you realise,
when on earth are you trying to like quick attach an under-barrel grenade launcher?
Kind of an odd thing, but OK, whatever, they had it on the Tantal
so you might as well just leave it for the 5.56 conversion thereof.
And then the last element that really changed was the barrel.
Of course the barrel on the Beryl has to be 5.56 instead of the 5.45 of the Tantal.
And more substantially they significantly redesigned the muzzle device.
So on the Tantal the muzzle device was quite substantially long
to properly support a rifle grenade, and that led to a relatively short barrel.
On the Tantal it was 423mm long.
Well, on the Beryl, by redesigning the muzzle device to still support a rifle grenade,
which this does, but make it a lot shorter,
they were able to extend the effective rifled length of the barrel out to 457mm
while at the same time maintaining the same overall length as the Tantal.
Which is why this stock is ... still obnoxiously short,
which was a requirement to fit all of the rifle storage racks that were in Polish military service.
As with the Tantal, ... it was going to be like more expensive to try and rebuild
all of those rifle racks in barracks, and depots, and armoured vehicles, and everywhere else,
than to just accept a stock that was a little uncomfortably short.
I should also point out that the rifling in the Beryl barrel is a 1 in 9 twist.
So it can ... accurately shoot both the 55 grain M193 early pattern of ammunition,
as well as the heavier 62 grain ammunition that NATO actually adopted as 5.56 NATO.
This doesn't seem like that big of a deal,
except it's interesting that there was actually at least one Polish deployment to North Africa
where Polish troops were being supplied by the French.
And the French at the time were still using the FAMAS, which uses only 55 grain M193 pattern ammo.
So by having a 1 in 9 twist barrel, they were able to effectively utilise ammunition
from French supply just as well as they could use standard NATO pattern 5.56.
We'll do a quick bit of field strip here just to show you the internals.
There's really not much different, in fact there's like nothing different from the Tantal.
If you look down in here, you will see the same 3 round burst mechanism that's in the Tantal.
This is a substantially different trigger group from the standard AK.
For example, the hammer and trigger springs are separate components.
On the regular AK, they ... had the hammer spring do both jobs,
which is cool, that's a nice efficient design.
But it also makes the fire control system more difficult to disassemble and reassemble.
The Poles decided to split those into two separate springs,
not quite as efficient of a design, but a lot easier to actually take apart.
And that becomes a little more relevant when you've got all these extra bits in here
for the 3 round burst that the regular AK-74 did not have.
Alright, so the updates that were made to this rifle over the course of its service use
were fairly numerous, and they make the rifle look substantially different.
The folding buttstock was replaced with an extendible or collapsing buttstock,
presumably to be a little more forgiving with using armour or not armour,
as well as being able to collapse to the annoyingly short length of this original buttstock
so that it would still fit in those same rifle racks,
but then could be extended to be a little more comfortable for shooting.
The safety lever was given an extended finger pad so ... as a right hander
you can ... disengage the safety without breaking your firing grip.
Perhaps most notably, a dog-leg style Picatinny rail was added over the top of the ... receiver cover
to allow the use of modern optics, electro-optical sighting devices.
Huge improvement there, it still leaves a pretty darn high cheek weld,
but it's a lot better than using the iron sights on the Beryl.
And a lot of these improvements were the result
of Poland deploying forces to both Iraq and Afghanistan,
and getting first-hand combat experience with them.
And troops coming back and immediately saying things like,
"Look, we need modern optics on these rifles."
And these sorts of improvements were made.
A few more changes would be gradually introduced.
Today the rifle is used with transparent magazines.
The muzzle device has been changed to a bit more of a bird cage style.
There was a formal update, designated a 2004 pattern, in 2004.
And then the Beryl actually continues to evolve to this day.
Most ... recently in 2019 the rifle was licensed for production to Nigeria, of all places.
Nigeria had been using Type 56 Chinese AKs in 7.62x39,
they wanted a new production, more modern rifle.
And what's interesting is they adapted the Beryl to 7.62x39.
Which was really pretty easy because the original legacy of this rifle in the Tantal
was the idea of basically taking an AKM receiver and chambering it for 5.45.
Where the AK-74 had substantial dimensional changes to a lot of the parts, including the receiver,
that make it more difficult to convert back to 7.62, the Beryl does not.
And so Poland was able to kind of have an upper hand in competition for a Nigerian service rifle
by having a rifle very easy to switch back to the original M43 Soviet calibre.
So, that's a pretty darn recent development of course,
they are being manufactured in Nigeria, and equipping the Nigerian military.
As well as of course equipping the Polish military as it deploys all over the world.
Polish deployments for Iraq and Afghanistan are obviously finished at this point,
but the rifle got quite a bit of good service use,
and was generally very well liked by the troops who had them.
They found them to be very reliable, there were of course some complaints
about high cheek weld on the optics, but overall it performed very well.
It is a modern effective iteration of the AK. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.