Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're taking a look
at a fantastically cool French sniper rifle.
One that I never thought I would actually
get my hands on here in the US.
However, a ... small number of them have been imported,
and so they are now available to people.
This is an FR-F2, and that stands for
Fusil à Répétition Modèle F2
The French really liked using "F" designations.
Kind of like in the US military we have a lot of "M"s,
M1s, M2s, all different sorts of items designated M1.
The French have a whole bunch of things designated F.
... For example with the F1s, you have the FR-F1 snipers, you have the FAMAS F1 rifles,
you have the F1 grenades, and so on and so forth.
Anyway this is an FR-F2, and it is a squad sniper rifle chambered for the 7.62 NATO cartridge.
Now when the French developed the FR-F1,
which I will say is mechanically identical to this, they are essentially the same gun,
... the short version is this is an FR-F1 re-barrelled to 7.62 NATO, and given a new front end.
Well, when the French were developing the FR-F1,
they actually looked into using the 7.62 NATO cartridge.
At the time they hadn't really come to a final decision
on whether France would join the NATO Alliance,
and so they experimented with NATO cartridges.
Ultimately chose not to join the NATO weapon standardisation,
and went with their own 7.5 cartridge.
However, by the late 1970s things had changed a bit.
The adoption of the FAMAS in 1977 in 5.56 was leading to a phase-out of the 7.5 cartridge.
The AA-52 machine guns had already been converted over to 7.62 NATO as the AA-F1.
(There's our F again.)
And it was clear that without the MAS 49/56 rifles the 7.5 cartridge was obsolete,
and it made a lot more sense to convert the FR sniper rifles to 7.62 NATO.
So, the Saint-Étienne Armoury, or MAS,
began working on ... once again testing 7.62 calibre FR sniper rifles in 1980.
They specifically started working on what would become the FR-F2 in 1984,
and it was formally adopted in 1986.
So let's go ahead and take a closer look at it.
And I'll show you what's going on with this thing,
because it's got a lot of really interesting features.
As I've said before: the French copy no one, and no one copies the French.
And there's some pretty unique stuff on here.
Let's start with a little bit more about where the FR-F2s came from
because these guns were never actually manufactured as new firearms.
Every single FR-F2 started its life as an FR-F1.
There were only 6,000 FR-F1s originally manufactured.
They were produced in the late 1960s, '66 / '67 production began, and ended pretty quickly.
A run of 6,000 rifles for a major arsenal like this does not take more than a couple of years.
So by the time the 1980s roll around and they decide they want a new sniper rifle,
the production tooling is gone, the production line is long shut down.
And so what they decided to do was just bring in the existing F1s,
because they actually really didn't need more of them.
And everything except the barrel was going to be in just perfectly good condition,
most of the other stuff doesn't really wear out.
And so they brought in 3,500 of the 6,000 FR-F1s
and simply upgraded them to FR-F2 pattern.
When they did this they milled off the original markings,
which is why we've got a little scalloped depression right here,
and instead of FR-F1 calibre 7.5, they re-marked them FR-F2 calibre 7.62 N for NATO.
The original serial numbers remain on the guns.
So MAS is
Became GIAT, owned by Nexter, and then eventually shut down.
And all of the serial numbers for the ... FR-F1 and 2, are F prefix
(because the French really have a thing for that F prefix designation),
and then a five digit serial number with a leading zero.
So there were no new serial numbers issued.
This is in fact one of the late production FR-F1s that was then converted to F2 configuration.
And the only other mark actually on the rifle is the US import mark
right there on the ... bottom of the receiver, just behind the magazine.
The back end of the guns remained exactly the same as on the FR-F1.
So there's a very simple safety here that just flips down.
And how's this for a complicated safety mechanism?
When the safety's down, the trigger can't go far enough back to fire, presto, done.
And to disengage it, as a right hander it is super quick and easy,
you simply flip it up out of the way.
At the back we have a rotating sling swivel here.
... There isn't a recoil pad of any kind here, but we have a solid plastic butt plate.
Note that it is sort of slotted in place, because the gun came with adjustment spacers
so that you could extend the length of pull if you wanted to do so.
And to do that you take this screw in the back, and it's just threaded through this plug.
So take the screw out, and you can add spacers in.
There is also a cheek rest here, which is removable.
It is simply held in place by these two pins on the inside,
which drop into these sleeved holes.
And there are two versions of this. There's the short one, which is this,
and there's a taller one for scopes that are larger.
Speaking of the bolt it's really quite simple, straight bolt handle,
rotates 90 degrees, so it stays out of the way of our scope here.
And this is essentially a MAS 36 action.
Now it doesn't use MAS 36 parts, they're not interchangeable,
but the basic design was built on the MAS 36 system.
There is really only one small bit of disassembly: I can take the bolt apart.
So step one is take off the cheek rest.
Then I'm going to pull the bolt out the back.
... Pull the trigger to depress the sear, and then the bolt can come out.
Being based on the MAS 36 this has two rear locking lugs there,
big flat spring extractor up there, cutout for a fixed ejector.
To disassemble it further we have "M" for
and "D" for
So I can take this, press it in, rotate it 90 degrees.
And the striker spring and its guide come out.
We can then drop the firing pin.
And fairly similar in assembly to the Arisaka actually, the Type 38 / Type 99 Arisakas.
That's the complete bolt assembly, that's all there is to it.
So it's a very simple, easy to work with, mechanism.
We have a 10 round box magazine.
The magazine release is a little bit unusual.
When you push here you are actually lifting up this end of the magazine release,
which allows us to drop the magazine.
That's the magazine catch right there.
It holds 10 rounds, double-stack double-feed magazine.
They have these rubber base plates to protect the bottom of the magazine.
Pop that off, and it's actually very similar to a 49/56 magazine.
The front end here is where all the changes happened.
So obviously the barrel changed, they went to a 7.62 NATO barrel.
Same length, 600mm, 23.6 inch.
A relatively light profile barrel, not a pencil weight barrel, but a fairly light barrel.
The intention here was for this to be more like a sniper rifle than a designated marksman's rifle.
And it was not intended to be able to deliver significant, sustained, fire.
If you do that the barrel will heat up, and the point of impact will shift.
This was designed for a balance of handling, and portability, and first-round accuracy.
So that's the barrel hiding under all this stuff.
We have a new bipod. This bipod
is attached on a sleeve right here that actually sits over the barrel.
And ... in effect the gun is actually hanging from the bipod when it's up.
So we can push this button in, which allows me to rotate the bipod leg down.
And with the gun on the bipod, I have a significant amount of
freedom of movement here without moving the bipod feet.
So I can rotate this way, I can rotate the gun clockwise and counter-clockwise like that.
You can also extend the bipod legs out that far.
And to retract them we just push up on there, slide the bipod back in.
So if you need the bipod taller you can do that.
There are some nice little rubber feet on the bottom of the bipod to give it some traction, right there.
Now the most distinctive feature here,
which is this plastic shield on the entire front end of the gun.
That's certainly the thing that gets the most notoriety,
and it's really pretty immediately visibly evident.
Well, this is a thermal shield. When these were developed in the 1980s
we were seeing some of the early really common use of infrared night vision in military circles.
This is roughly the same sort of period when you would see, for example,
the US military introduce ... night camo.
That actually worked really well against first generation night-vision devices.
The idea here is because this has a relatively thin barrel,
it doesn't take very many rounds for the barrel to heat up.
And once it heats up it stands out really obviously on night vision.
And so you can prevent that by shrouding the whole thing
in this lightweight polymer sheath.
It also prevents any mirage from affecting the shooter's vision through the scope
because all the heat and hot air is trapped inside this shield.
And that is why we have this sort of soft rubber gasket at the front.
The barrel's free-floated in here, you can see ... I'm moving the shroud around it.
But this keeps hot air inside, which again prevents it from being visible under night vision,
and doesn't actually impinge on the barrel.
Interestingly, where the FR-F1 had backup iron sights
(very big, gross backup iron sights on the barrel),
on the F2 those iron sights have been ... repositioned on this plastic thermal shroud.
So there's our rear sight,
and there's our front.
Those aren't intended to be sniping sights,
the idea is they're basically emergency backup irons, or in this case: plastics.
Note that this can be adjusted for windage,
because it's fitted in there in a little dovetail mount.
The F2 continued the use of the adjustable, tunable muzzle device that was on the FR-F1.
This now has three ports in it because it is three groove rifling,
and you can unscrew this locking bar and adjust the muzzle device
for both length in and out, and so that the slots line up with the lands and grooves in the barrel.
And that's a way to help tweak the best bit of accuracy out of the gun and its ammunition.
Also interesting to note that on the bottom here of what is
sort of it's a hard plastic thermal shield,
there is a rubberised flat pad here which allows you to ... rest the rifle
on what could otherwise be fairly slippery surfaces, and get some traction.
And this is just a little piece that pops on and off.
Got the front sling swivel right there.
Lastly, but not least, let's take a look at the optic up here.
This is a quick detach optic, so if I take that lever back I can slide this right off.
We have three attachment surfaces, here, here and here,
that slide onto a three part, very proprietary, rail on the top of the receiver.
And this is of course again a carry over from the original FR-F1.
This is the same optic that was developed originally for the MAS 49.
For its use on the FR series rifles, essentially the only thing they did was take
the windage graduations and make them twice as precise.
So ... basically they divided every click into two clicks
so that you got approximately 2 MOA clicks, that's like 3cm at 100 metre clicks.
They are by today's standards extremely gross adjustments,
but that was the scope from the FR-F1.
For the FR-F2 they made two changes.
First was they changed the bullet drop compensating cam
from 7.5 French to 7.62 NATO, obviously.
And that BDC is calibrated from point blank out to 800 metres in 50 metre increments.
And by the way, the dash 04 here indicates that this is the version of the scope that was used on the FR-F2.
The 04 is the 7.62 NATO cam, the 03 version,
right there, is the FR-F1 version.
Which simply means that it's got those windage adjustments made more precise.
And by the way here, both the eye cup on the back
and the sun shade on the front are removable.
This one's tight, I'm going to leave it on because I like having it there.
And if you need to, you can rotate it around ... if you're trying to shoot in to a close angle on the sun.
Anyway, the other change they made was to ... basically split the scope mount.
So we have our rings on this sort of funky proprietary base,
which then attaches with a pair of screws through this.
Which is ... a Weaver-style rail, so it can take either Weaver mounts,
or with these screw spacings, you can fit STANAG-style scopes or rings.
Mechanically, the internals of the scope itself remained unchanged.
This is, believe it or not, all of a 3.85x power scope with a very heavy German post reticle.
It is totally 1940s technology, it is essentially a mildly improved German ZF4 scope.
But this is actually what was in use with the FR-F1 in 1986,
and it would continue to be used on the FR-F2 until 1995.
And in '95 the French Army replaced this with the Scrome J8,
which was a fixed 8x power magnification scope.
We'll talk about the J8 in a separate video if I'm ever able to get my hands on one.
Those are extremely difficult to find,
they were only ever basically used by the French Army, and frankly they're not a very good scope.
But they are what was chosen for the military contract.
Now the FR-F2s were used by more than just the French Army,
it was also used by other branches of the French military.
And so you would have some other scopes that ... saw service.
The Gendarmerie for example used like 3-12x power Schmidt & Bender scopes,
as well as a couple of versions of 10x power fixed Leupolds.
The French Navy Commandos used a 1.5-6x power Schmidt & Bender, and so on.
... Actually it was the French Army had the, I'll say it, the worst scopes kind of possible on these guns,
and yet they remained remarkably capable rifles.
The FR-F2 was the standard French sniper rifle from 1986, when it was adopted,
until approximately 2019 / 2020.
In 2018 the French started a ... testing regime to find a new rifle to replace it.
They wanted something specifically self-loading.
And ultimately they chose to adopt the FN SCAR Heavy in 7.62.
And so that has been replacing the FR-F2 as the standard French sniper rifle.
To be honest, I think I'd rather have the FR-F2 myself.
And what do you know, I actually do have this one.
So if you're interested in these, they are available in the US.
A little bit of Googling will bring up where you can find them.
And, well, I think we need to take this thing out to the range,
because I've wanted to get my hands on one of these for a very long time now.
So stay tuned tomorrow, we'll take it out to the range.
And then coming up I'm going to be using this beauty in Desert Brutality,
in some real on-the-clock competition. So we'll have that in a week or two.
Thanks for watching, hopefully you enjoyed the video.