Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today
at the Rock Island Auction House taking a look at
some of the guns that are going to be for sale
in their upcoming May of 2017 Premier Auction.
And this particular one is one of those interesting
European 5.56 rifles from like the 1970s and '80s.
One of the guns that very few of them came into the US,
and so they are not very well known here. This is a Beretta AR70.
Specifically this is the commercial model, the 70/223.
Now this rifle is actually partially the result of a collaborative effort
between Beretta and SIG in the 1960s, from '63 to about '68.
Beretta initially wanted to get a contract to ... manufacture and sell Colt M16s,
Colt wasn't interested in providing them with a licence to do that,
Colt wanted to sell the guns internationally themselves.
And so Beretta started looking into doing their own development for the 5.56 NATO cartridge.
And they worked with SIG on it and this lasted, like I said, about 5 years, and then they parted ways.
Beretta then ended up developing the AR70,
SIG would produce the SIG 540 and then 550.
So there are some ... at least visual similarities between these guns, and that's why.
This was introduced in 1972, and it was adopted by Italian Special Forces,
as well as a couple of smaller militaries: Jordan and Malaysia adopted the AR70.
The ... general Italian military did not.
They were still using the Beretta BM59 at this point in 7.62 calibre.
When they did ultimately decide to switch to a 5.56 rifle in 1985 they held some trials.
Beretta entered an improved version of this rifle,
which would be adopted in 1990 as the AR70/90.
And basically what they did is they modernised it in several ways.
They changed the furniture around.
They added the capacity to take an optical sight, which was an important point at that time.
And they also replaced the magazine with a standard AR-15 style of magazine.
This is the original AR70 version.
By the way, the 70/90s never came into the United States in a civilian form
because they post-date the Bush assault weapons ban which would prohibit
foreign-made "assault rifles", basically modern black rifles, from coming in.
The AR70 was early enough that those were imported.
And so there are actually a couple of differences
between this and the military rifles, which I'll show you.
They do use a nose-in rock-back magazine,
unfortunately this particular example does not have a magazine with it, so I can't show you that.
But the rock-in magazine was replaced with the M16 pattern magazine in the 70/90 version.
Now, unlike most of the new 5.56 rifles we see today,
this is not just an AR-15 or AR-18 copy, more or less,
this actually has some unique elements to it.
So let's go ahead and pull it apart, and take a look at those features.
We'll start with the basics on the outside.
This is a stamped receiver gun, both the upper and lower are stamped sheet metal.
A lot of spot-welding holding this together.
That was a nice cost-effective way to manufacture these, and
unlike, say World War Two German rifles, the stampings are not all that complex.
So it's a pretty simple and effective technique.
Really the only markings we'll find on the gun are up here.
Pietro Beretta, it's a Model 70/223, made in Italy, and a serial number.
The original guns of course were select-fire.
The civilian ones here in the US are semi-automatic only, so we have a "1" and a "Safe".
This kind of operates backwards from what we would expect today,
because to go from safe to fire you have to flip this up.
Today we're very enthused with super ergonomic things where you just "baa", then fire.
Not quite the case on this from the '70s.
We have a bolt release here, very similar in function to the AR-15s.
And then this big ol' guy is the magazine release.
This rifle owes more than a few features to the AK,
and the mag catch is one of them.
On this side we do have a nice folding dust cover to keep that at least somewhat closed off.
And it has a little bevel on it, so as soon as you start to open the bolt,
the bolt hits that bevelled surface and pops it open.
And then there's a spring-loaded detent on the back that holds it shut.
We do have a pretty nice aperture rear sight here.
This dial on the left side sets your elevation, it is just a simple cam.
So we have ... 1, 2, I'm sorry I did it backwards,
1, we rotate this way for 200 and then 300 metres.
And the recognition that beyond 300 metres you're not hitting anything with iron sights anyway
because you won't be able to see it, so nothing beyond 300.
Zeroing is done with this screw adjustment for windage,
and by screwing the front sight in and out, so.
Now one of the differences between this and the military version of the AR70 is the gas block here.
On the military guns these would have a cut off for the grenade launcher.
You flip a little hood up, ... it cuts off the gas system
so that you're not over stressing your rifle when you're firing grenades.
Now, one would normally expect ... if you didn't have the cut off
to also not have the sleeve for fitting grenades, that's what this is.
However on the AR70 that's actually an integral part
of disassembly and holding the whole thing together.
So that's why the grenade launcher tube out here is still on the gun while the cut off is not.
We'll get to that in just a moment when we disassemble it.
As you can probably tell, there's a pin here at the front
holding an upper and lower assembly together.
We have a pin here at the back, which is our take-down pin.
So we'll start disassembly by pushing that out.
It's pretty tight, so I'm going to hit it with a punch.
There we go.
That pin comes out just like that.
We can then break the upper and lower apart.
Now here is where we start to see one of the unusual features about the AR70.
Normally you would have some sort of recoil guides and mainspring
in the back of the receiver behind the bolt.
The AR70 does not have that, it actually has a tensioning recoil spring.
So the bolt here is under spring tension,
but the spring itself is in this tube.
That means there is an extra step beyond just pulling the recoil spring out,
I have to disconnect it from the bolt. And we do that using this catch.
You would normally do this with a cartridge if you're in the field,
I'll just use my Universal Disassembly Tool here.
I'm going to pull that back, and then I can pull the bolt handle up and out.
Once I've done this, I have disconnected the bolt from the mainspring.
And it now just slides out of the back of the gun.
So there is our bolt and bolt carrier assembly.
Looking at this assembly up close, it actually is
another element that owes some of its design to the AK.
We have two big locking lugs, it's a two lug rotating bolt
instead of the typical AR pattern multi-lug bolt.
And then we have this hollow cutout up here, that is where the recoil spring guide rod goes in.
And then the bolt handle locks it in place right there.
We can take the bolt and firing pin out by pushing out this cross pin,
kind of like an AR-15.
Also a tight pin.
But you can see right in there, this cross pin holds the firing pin in place.
So once I pull it all the way out of the way, then the firing pin comes out.
And then I can lift the bolt out of the bolt carrier.
And there you have those three components.
Now let's go ahead and take a closer look at the front end of the rifle.
The front end has a pretty slick disassembly system.
We have a spring-loaded catch, right here, that locks the grenade launcher sleeve in place.
So I'm going to depress that, and then I can unscrew this sleeve.
There we go. Lo and behold, this is just an external sleeve
over a much smaller profile barrel at the muzzle.
And once it's off, we can just grab the gas block and slide it off the barrel assembly.
Now you can see the head of the gas piston sticking out.
And there is the back of it. And in order to take this out we have to rotate it 180 degrees.
I'm going to push the piston in.
There's a little locking tab right there that I need, ...
so there's the locking tab, and I need it at the 12 o'clock position.
And then ... this whole assembly comes off.
I probably should have taken the handguard off first.
The handguard is attached just by sheet metal spring tension, so it just pops right off.
Now we've got the gas tube, the gas piston, and the captive recoil spring.
And a naked barrel sticking out of the end of the rifle now.
Now there will always be questions about the pros and cons of having a spring at the front like this,
versus at the back where they typically are.
The benefits are things like this makes it much easier to have folding buttstocks,
if you want to have that, because there are no working elements in the back end of the gun.
So you can put on any style of stock without worrying about it.
The downside is that the spring up here
is going to get hotter than it would if it were in the rear of the gun.
And that may or may not be a problem, in this case it's probably not,
because ... for one thing this is a semi-automatic rifle.
This is typically a problem mostly on machine guns where you have a much higher rate of fire,
and these parts are getting much hotter than they would in a rifle like this.
Exactly how hot this spring is going to get inside the gas tube, it's kind of hard to say.
That spring is never going to actually be directly exposed to combustion gas
because of the piston head up here.
But it is inside this tube, which is ... going to kind of insulate it and keep the heat in there.
And ... on the other hand it's also going to
insulate it and protect it a bit from the heat of the barrel.
Overall I'm sure this is not a problem on this rifle.
It was kept that way on the AR70/90, so the Italian military didn't have any trouble with it.
If this were a light machine gun, it might be a different story though.
So these are actually really handy rifles, they are really comfortable to shoot,
they handle well, they are nice and lightweight, well balanced, they have pretty good sights.
They lack the modern amenities that a lot of people would expect in a rifle today,
things like Picatinny rails and a lot of modularity.
But when this was ... introduced in 1972, this really was the standard for combat rifles.
I think it would make a great addition to a collection of that sort of thing.
And if you agree and would like to have this particular one,
well, take a look at the description text below.
You'll find a link there to Rock Island's catalogue page which has their pictures, description, etc.
And if you're interested you can place a bid on it right over the web,
or over the phone, or come here live and participate in the auction.
Thanks for watching.