This thing makes quite the authoritative sound when it cycles.
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company
looking at some of the guns that they're selling in their September of 2016 Premier Auction.
And one of those guns is this Barrett M82A1.
This is probably the best known .50 calibre "sniper rifle" (touch on that in a minute), out there.
Not forgotten by any stretch, but I think widely misunderstood.
And so I wanted to take a look at this, and see if we can cover some of the misconceptions about this rifle.
Now, I want to start by saying this is a really cool rifle. These are very impressive, they do their job extremely well.
It's just that their job isn't exactly what a lot of people probably think it is. This isn't really a sniper rifle.
Now ... a sniper we typically think of as someone who's going to shoot a high value enemy target at very long distance.
A sniper doesn't need a .50 calibre projectile to do that,
a 6.5, or .30 calibre, or maybe a .338 will do the job really quite well
out to almost any sort of range where you can actually get a clear line of sight at your target.
So, what the .50 BMG brings to that equation is bullet mass, 5 times as much as a typical 6.5 or .30 calibre bullet.
And that's not really important for shooting a person.
If you're going to shoot a person a normal, plain, solid lead bullet will do the job just fine.
Or if you're super tactical, super precise, a lathe turned solid copper bullet will do the job great.
However, if you're in the military, you often want something other than just plain lead.
You want more stuff to happen downrange at the target, and so a big projectile,
like that of the .50 BMG, allows you to remove the lead and put in something else interesting.
.50 BMG is an excellent platform for things like incendiary, armour-piecing or explosive projectiles,
just because they've got the space for it.
Remember this cartridge was designed for anti-tank and anti-aircraft use,
where you need armour-piercing to get through armour on light tanks,
you need explosive rounds to actually have an impact on aircraft, you know a little
.30 calibre or .50 calibre hole in an airplane doesn't necessarily do anything to that airplane,
but if you have an exploding projectile, then you've got lots of shrapnel inside, say, the wing, where you hit it.
And maybe you'll hit a control line or hit a fuel tank. You can do a lot more damage to an aircraft that way.
So, that's what this cartridge was designed for originally.
Now, when Ronnie Barrett got into it...
Actually, Ronnie Barrett has a really cool story.
It strikes me as a story that was a lot more common 100 years ago, and doesn't really happen that much today, which is unfortunate.
The story with Ronnie Barrett is he was actually a photographer,
and he was out doing some cool photo shoots apparently of, like, a Vietnam era river patrol boat.
And it's cruising around getting pictures, and there is a pair of .50 calibre M2 machine guns on the bow.
That really struck Barrett, that was really interesting. He looked at those and kinda got this interest in,
"Well, I wanna shoot a .50 calibre rifle."
But at the time, and this is the late 1970's, there really aren't any options for rifles in .50 BMG.
The M2 heavy machine gun was out there, but if you wanted to use that cartridge
in just a semi-automatic rifle because you wanted to shoot a really big freaking bullet
at something, maybe something a long distance away,
your options were pretty much to take World War Two era stuff and rebarrel it.
So the options out there were things like the Russian PTRS or PTRD,
the British Boys anti-tank rifle, the German Panzerbüchse 39.
You'd have to find one of those, and they're expensive guns to begin with,
... some of them are destructive devices legally, some of them aren't.
But you'd have to find one, and then you'd have to find a gunsmith,
... typically get an M2 machine gun barrel and turn it down and ... recut threads on the chamber area
to fit whatever other type of action you were tying to use.
This was a lot of work, and it was a pain in the ass, and really expensive and difficult.
And what Barrett got this notion to do was build a civilian semi-automatic rifle for the .50 BMG.
And there really wasn't anything out there at the time.
So, he sat down in his garage and kinda sketched it out. Didn't have any engineering background.
Just like, frankly, many of our really impressive historical gun designers started out with minimal or no engineering background.
Barrett came up with the idea, took it to some shops to get some help, and ended up setting up a
kind of seat of your pants manufacturing centre in his garage, in his house.
Of course Barrett apparently got the advice, which I'm sure lots of people have heard today that,
"You know that idea seems OK on paper, but if it was really gonna work someone would've done it by now already."
That's kind of a poisonous idea because, I'll tell you what, there's lots of great ideas out there
that will work fantastically that nobody's actually done yet. There maybe been some people who thought of them,
but those people just assumed that they must not work because no one's done it yet. And so they didn't.
Well, Barrett's in that boat, he's pretty sure that this idea is cool and it's going to work great.
And so he puts his own money into developing this rifle.
And by 1982 he has the M82 in its initial form, starts shopping around, sells a lot of them commercially,
sets up at gun shows, sells them to people who are interested in actually being able to use,
say, the surplus .50 calibre ball ammo that's out on the market in a rifle that isn't a machine gun,
and that isn't some weird converted old World War Two anti-tank thing.
Eventually he makes his first big break in 1989 when he sells 100 of them to the Swedish military.
In 1990 the US military starts buying them, and from there it just grows.
Now what's interesting is these were not purchased as sniper rifles.
In fact the two roles that these where purchased for are anti-materiel, which is being able to destroy, say,
light armoured vehicles, or radar installations, or other things that are fragile and delicate
that you want to break from a long distance away. Farther away than you could break them with, say, a .223 or .308.
Again, you're taking advantage of the large payload of the .50 BMG, and for a military purpose
you're going to load that thing up with AP, or incendiary or Raufoss exploding projectiles.
The second, interestingly, is Explosive Ordnance Disposal. So ... say you're out in a battlefield in Iraq,
and there're IEDs out there, there are old shells that failed to explode, and how do you get rid of this stuff?
Well it's dangerous, if you've got an explosive out there that you know is live and you don't know how old it is,
you don't know maybe there is some guy waiting to trigger it when you walk up on it, how do you get rid of it?
Well, you can shoot it. It's a lot less dangerous to sit back and shoot the thing and just blow it up with it's own explosive,
than to send a guy up there to try and defuse it. That's risky, who wants to do that?
Well the problem is some of the really big stuff like 155mm artillery shells. The outer casing on those things is
pretty darn thick so that it makes good shrapnel, and so that it doesn't get damaged when it's fired itself.
Well, they're too thick to detonate with a .223 or .308 rifle unless you're kinda dangerously close.
Well the kinetic energy from a .50, once again the extra payload of that bullet,
lets you effectively detonate those shells from a much ... longer distance where it's actually safe.
So that was one of the primary uses of these rifles in military service, is explosive ordnance disposal.
Pretty cool. Now do they get pressed into use as sniper rifles against people?
Absolutely, but they don't quite have the accuracy for it, which I think is a big misconception about these rifles that people have.
In practical fact ... the Army doesn't have a precision .50 calibre cartridge. They've got special sniper ammo for the .308, but not for the .50.
So with standard ball ammo you're gonna get about 3 minute of angle groups, so at 500 yards you're going to have a 15 inch group.
Simply because that's the best that the ammunition can do, the ammunition isn't
precise and consistent enough to shoot better than that.
It doesn't need to be for an M2 machine gun anyway.
Now if you use the best possible ammo you can find, you can cut that group size about in half.
And a Barrett M82 like this is gonna give you about a 1.5 minute of angle groups.
That's not because the Barrett's badly built, it's because it's semi-automatic and there's a lot of moving parts ... in there.
You can see the sights, whether you have the iron sights or a scope, they're mounted on this upper frame.
Well this is a short recoil gun.
The barrel moves when you fire, and the barrel's not directly connected to the sights. Things like that.
Things like the semi-automatic action means you're not going to get exactly the same fit of the parts on every shot.
That contributes to lesser accuracy. ... Again, these were not intended to be shoot one hole at 2,000 yards type of rifles.
They're designed to give you semi-automatic firepower with a very large projectile.
And that allows you to do things at long range, but shooting one-shot groups isn't really one of them.
When the Army was actually looking for a sniper rifle in the .50 BMG cartridge, Barrett joined that competition.
And they actually presented a bolt action rifle for that competition, which is what you would expect.
A bolt action rifle is what will give you the precision to get really small groups at really long distances with any cartridge.
Well the result of that trial actually was the Army decided they actually didn't really need a .50 calibre sniper rifle,
presumably because really a .338 or a 6.5 or .30 calibre will do that job just fine without having to weigh 30 pounds.
But the troops really liked the firepower of a semi- automatic .50 BMG, and there were some uses for that.
So the Army ended up kinda scrapping the sniper idea, and going with an anti-materiel rifle instead.
This one in fact.
So mechanically the Barrett is a short recoil, rotating bolt action.
Which means every time you fire the barrel is actually going to cycle back.
Let's see if I can do this here, there we go.
What that does is keep the bolt and the barrel locked together for this first bit of rearward travel,
which allows the pressure in the barrel and the chamber to decrease to a safe level before the bolt
unlocks and opens. It will then cycle the rest of the way back,
eject the old cartridge, chamber the new cartridge. This is a pretty typical operating system.
It's just on the Barrett it's really big compared to every other firearm where you see it.
... So the Barrett is built on this military pattern which is kind of cool actually,
it's an interesting change from what you typically see on .50 calibre rifles.
It's a very heavy grade sheet metal ... folded upper and lower assembly.
And the upper and lower are held together by a pair of pins, one back here, one back here.
These are very simple cross pins, all they're there to do is prevent the two pieces from coming apart.
So to disasemble it, I'm going to start by pulling the magazine.
This is a 10 round, double stack magazine.
It is in fact empty. Now I pull the two pins, that one and there's that one.
And then to take it down I need to pull the bolt back far enough to disengage it from the trunnion,
and then I can just lift the upper assembly off the lower.
(Pull that up, and then.)
There we go, very simple.
Removing the bolt is not difficult, I simply grab the bolt and remove it.
The recoil spring is wisely retained in the back of the stock.
This needs to have enough power in the recoil spring to help manage
the really quite immense kinetic energy released when you fire this thing.
So you don't want this springing out at you when you disassemble the gun.
It makes excellent sense, especially in a military setting, that they would make that a captive piece.
And while we're looking at the bottom half of the gun, lets take a quick note of this.
This is your sear, so when I pull the trigger what I'm doing is lifting this up.
We will get to the bolt assembly in just a moment and you'll see how that connects to the firing pin.
Alright, there is our bolt assembly.
There is a locking lever here to prevent the bolt from rotating when it's not locked up, which would cause it to jam up.
It has a very interesting triangular bolt head, we see that on the Australian Leader T2 which is actually
kind of from around the same time period. You'll also see it on the Winchester Model 100, which is rather earlier.
So in order to move the bolt head you actually have to depress this lever, then we can push the bolt head in.
And there's a set of cams on the inside so that when the bolt goes in it has rotate.
What that does is when this fully chambers, that last bit of chambering pushes the bolt in,
and rotates it so that it has the these 3 lugs locked into the barrel trunnion.
Now there's a firing pin running inside the bolt, and we have two parts that work it here.
We have this lever which re-cocks the firing pin.
It is actually fully cocked right now, so in order to dry fire it you would simply push on this surface right here.
That'll go up, it'll release the firing pin
like that.
And when the bolt is locked in place, you can now see the firing pin protruding through.
Then when the gun cycles, this lever is going to catch in the receiver and it's going to be pulled back, like this.
What you're going there is actually re-cocking the firing pin,
hear it click, locked back in place and ready to fire again.
So this is a short recoil action, which means when you fire the bolt is locked into the barrel.
And it's going to stay that way through the first bit of travel.
Now that this way this unlocks is with this unlocking arm.
So this is sitting in a recess in the lower receiver of the gun, and when the bolt starts to move this piece is held in place,
which forces it to pivot forward like that.
Once it gets all the way forward, now it's no longer protruding below the bolt, and the bolt can run backwards.
But, in the process of pivoting forward that arm pushes this rod forward.
And when the bolt is locked in place,
like this,
this rod is flush up against the back of the trunnion.
So as this rod pushes, it forces the back of the ... bolt carrier to push away from the bolt head,
which forces the bolt head to rotate, which unlocks the action.
We can actually see that working here in the upper. So I've got the bolt in place and locked.
And when it fires, this lever is ... going to catch, this whole assembly is going to
recoil backwards which is going to push this lever forward.
And you can see as I push that lever forward, it forces the bolt [carrier] backwards.
(Push the bolt back into battery there), lever goes forward
bolt [carrier] comes back.
When it's all the way back here, now the bolt is unlocked and it can travel freely on its own, and that's when the gun cycles.
Now you saw the main spring in the rear of the lower, there's also this pair of springs in the upper.
And these are the return springs for the barrel, as well as the springs that put tension
to slow down the actual recoiling impulse of the barrel. So when you fire, the barrel reciprocates that far.
It's got this buffer in here, which is just a fibre or a hard rubber buffer, to prevent it from slamming metal to metal.
But it's going to do that (boy, the springs on this are really stiff),
and ... that, together with the recoil spring for the bolt, gives you a substantial amount of recoil reduction.
One of the problems of most .50 BMG rifles is that they kick insanely hard
because you're putting out, like, 14,000 pounds of muzzle energy.
And one of the real advantages of the Barrett compared to the bolt action target rifles, is that it absorbs a great deal of that energy.
Barrett also developed, well he wasn't the first person to design a muzzle brake,
but he put a very effective muzzle brake on these guns.
They're kind of obnoxious to be next to, but that makes them much more pleasant to shoot.
One last thing I want to touch on, the Barrett comes in its military configuration with iron sights.
Now these are intended to be back ups because you're probably going to have a scope on the thing,
you're almost certainly going to have a scope on the thing.
But this really gets at the actual military purpose and the roots of this gun, which is not necessarily extremely
long range precision shooting. It's shooting a heavy bullet at stuff that you want to stay a decent distance away from.
So a lot of that mission can be accomplished with iron sights
should you have a problem with the scope or really should you not have a scope.
So this is adjustable from, I think, 100 or 200 yards out to 1,500 yards.
It flips up, and it works exactly like a typical iron sight.
You wouldn't see that on a civilian precision shooting rifle because the goal of making
a very tiny hole at very long distances cannot effectively be done with this style of rear sight.
Thank you for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video. I hope I didn't make too many people sad.
There are probably some people out there who are emotionally dependant on the idea of a Barrett being
an extremely high precision gun. It's not, that doesn't take away from what it actually is.
To my mind knowing the actual truth about something really lets you appreciate it in reality, instead of believing in myth, so.
Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it, if you would like to own one of these things yourself,
of course they are not NFA regulated, they are available to anyone who can own a regular firearm.
And if you think that needs to be you take a look at the description text below,
you'll find a link there to Rock Island's catalogue page on this rifle.
You can take a look at their pictures and their description, and if you're interested in it
you can place a bid over the phone or on-line or come up here to Rock Island and participate in the auction live.
Thanks for watching.