Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
with the very last version
of the BAR to be manufactured.
Now the BAR, the Browning Automatic Rifle,
of course saw its first use in 1918 in World War One
with the American Expeditionary Force in France.
And the US Army would continue to use it
until it was eventually replaced by the M60, of all things.
And a bunch of different European, and frankly worldwide, militaries really liked the BAR.
Now after World War One there was a licensing agreement that was set up between Colt and FN,
where essentially Colt got the rights to sell the BAR,
as well as a lot of other of John Browning's ... designs, in North and South America.
FN got the right to sell those things in Europe.
And so we predominantly see like the World War Two use of the BAR,
aside from the US military, what we're mostly seeing are FN developments,
because of the European countries that bought this gun from FN.
Colt did make sales, they did a lot of the same sort of development that FN did.
But we don't see those guns in a military context because the US didn't adopt them,
and the South American countries that did buy them
weren't generally involved much in World War Two.
Now in 1930 FN came out with the FN Model 30.
Which is essentially this pattern of BAR: pistol grip, but with a fixed barrel.
They iterated on that in 1932 with the FN-D,
that is "Démontable", or detachable, ... it had a quick change barrel.
And I have an entire video on the FN-D.
Just for comparison's sake, that is the FN-D.
Now, after World War Two these licensing agreements pretty much fell apart.
Colt wasn't really selling the BAR after World War Two.
FN did put it back into production, specifically the FN-D pattern,
and they started trying to go after those South American markets
that they thought might be ripe for sales.
And they did one final iteration on the design in 1954
after NATO adopted the 7.62 NATO cartridge.
So before this, the FN-D was available in .30-06, 8mm Mauser and 7mm Mauser.
But of course once NATO adopts the 7.62x51 cartridge,
there's going to be potentially a lot of interest in ... an FN BAR in that calibre.
And in particular the Belgian Army used FN-Ds,
and they were part of NATO, and they needed to transition to the new cartridge.
And so FN produced what it called the FN-DA1 in 7.62 NATO, and that's this.
So let me show you the few different changes
that they made from the original FN-D to this.
Now, I'm not going to go through all the improvements that were made up until the DA1 point.
If you're interested in those, I would suggest
checking out my video on the FN-D, which I will link at the end of this one.
Start with the markings here, they are a little bit hard to read.
But this is Model DA1, 7.62 NATO. This one was manufactured in 1958.
FN - Fabrique Nationale D'Armes de Guerre, Herstal, Belgique.
This is serial number A 416.
And the gun appears to be matching, at least the barrel, the trigger group and the receiver all match.
Now between the FN-D and the DA1 there are really four primary changes.
And the most practical of them is of course the change in calibre.
The original FN-D used a 20 round mag that is sized for .30-06 or 8mm,
depending on the calibre that it was originally ordered in.
Well, 7.62 NATO is quite a lot shorter, it's 12mm shorter than .30-06.
And so you ... don't want to try and put a short round in a long magazine,
or you will inevitably have feeding trouble.
And FN did not want to try to redesign the whole
complicated, expensive receiver design to accommodate a shorter magazine.
So they sort of took the easy step and they just put a spacer
in the ... back of the magazine well, the front of the trigger group.
And the new magazine that they decided to use [for] 7.62 NATO
was predictably the FAL magazine, designed by FN.
So the perfect magazine to use, obviously.
If we compare fire control groups here: we have the .30-06 one here, the .308 here.
On the .30-06 you can see there are a
number of important features on the very front of the fire control group.
You have the magazine release down at the bottom.
And that matches the magazine catch notch right here on the FN-D mags.
You then also have a tab here that catches the follower,
and that lifts up when the magazine's empty, that acts as your bolt hold open.
And we have the ejector up here.
Now on the 7.62 NATO version, well, the FAL magazines have a catch way up high here.
So they had to completely redesign the linkages for the magazine catch
so that it works up here, instead of down below.
And then you have the same bolt hold open for when the magazine's empty.
You can see it's been extended forward.
And you can see that the ejector has also been redesigned.
I should also point out that the fire control mechanism
remains the same in the DA1 as it was on the D.
So it has a fast, a slow, and a safe setting, no semi-auto specifically.
Next up is the barrel release latch, this is a lot less substantial but still a change.
So on the original FN-Ds you had a rather large, easily accessible, lever here.
Push that down, and then you can use the barrel handle to unlock the barrel.
Well, apparently this was too easy to accidentally bump.
On the DA1s they made that a much more difficult lever to actuate.
That lever is now recessed into the front handguard.
And so you kind of have to reach in and poke it very deliberately,
not something that's going to be accidentally bumped any more.
By the way, I do want to point out that this would have originally had a muzzle nut
or a flash hider (just a simple conical flash hider) on it.
The previous owner of this gun put this particularly awful after-market device on there,
so I went ahead and took that off for the video because it is definitely not historically correct.
Change number three is the rear sight.
The original FN-Ds used a notch sight, and the DA1s use a rear aperture sight.
I think that's definitely a nice improvement.
Other than that, the sight's exactly the same.
Same range: it's the same leaf, they just replaced the open notch with an aperture.
And last but not least, they changed the bipod.
So the DA1 bipod actually has a wider stance, larger feet, and little spikes
... on each of the foot pads.
And that's going to definitely make it a more stable gun,
and easier to get a good secure footing with the bipod.
And if I set the two guns up bipod to bipod,
you can see that the DA1 has an inch or two wider stance here.
And you can see how much ... more ground resistance you get out of those enlarged foot pads.
Oh, and lastly lastly, I should point out the carry handle actually changed to a polymer material
of a slightly different design, as opposed to the original wooden handles.
The Belgian Army was a prime client for FN with the 7.62 NATO guns,
they did also sell them, I believe, to Israel.
Now Israel had purchased a bunch of FN-Ds in 8mm,
and they did convert those to 7.62 NATO using this same system.
But I believe they also bought FN-DA1s.
And then there were a number of smaller contracts to a wide variety of different countries.
Ultimately this didn't exit production until 1967.
So a pretty impressive lineage, that is in fact just about exactly 50 years
of actual production life of John Browning's original BAR.
Or, of course, the iterated versions of John Browning's BAR.
And of course this isn't the end of the BAR system because the FN MAG
(adopted in the United States as the M240),
is essentially the same gun with the action flipped upside down and belt fed.
So these are really quite scarce, especially in the United States.
This particular one is of course registered,
and it is registered as a pre-1986 dealer sample.
So hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.