[ Armalite AR-10 (Portuguese & Sudanese) ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video episode on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today in Tombstone Territorial Firearms in Tombstone, Arizona.
And courtesy of the owner, we're taking a look at a very cool rifle
that he's had on the rack here for a little while.
This is a Portuguese contract AR-10.
These were one of the very early AR-10s that were manufactured.
The design of the AR actually started in 1954
when Eugene Stoner was hired by the ArmaLite Corporation,
which was at that point this very small little tiny kind of subgroup of Fairchild Aircraft.
... Their intent was to work with aluminium and develop small arms production.
They didn't actually really intend to manufacture anything themselves.
What they wanted to do was develop the concepts, and then licence or sell them out.
Well, Eugene Stoner was hired on very early as the chief engineer.
And he brought a whole lot of cool ideas to the company,
one of them turned into the AR-10.
So ArmaLite manufactured a very small number.
These early ones are called the 'Hollywood ArmaLites'
because the company was located in Hollywood at the time.
And they actually competed in US military trials along with the T44 and the T48,
which would eventually become the FAL and the M1A back in 1956, 1955.
The AR-10 faced a real uphill challenge competing in those trials.
It was ... radically different from everything else that was available at the time.
It was very light, the layout was totally different, fibreglass furniture,
lots of aluminium on it, even titanium on some of the early guns.
A very forward-thinking gun, and US Ordnance has always been pretty stodgy.
So it was a real uphill battle to try and get them accepted.
The AR-10 was actually doing quite well in trials until it had one catastrophic problem.
The barrels on the very early guns were actually this interesting idea,
they were a composite (I think composite's probably the best term for it),
a combination of aluminium and steel layered.
The idea being they wanted to reduce the weight of the barrels as with everything else.
The early AR-10s were about 6-6.5 pounds.
Unfortunately the barrel wasn't all that well proven out,
it was still prototype and under development, and one of them actually blew up.
A round went out through the side of the barrel during one of the tests at Springfield.
And that was kind of the one nail in the coffin that the Ordnance Department needed
to get this thing effectively thrown out of the trials,
so they could stick to the guns that they knew and they were comfortable with.
Ultimately that did it, that was it for the AR-10 in the US.
However, ArmaLite was working pretty hard to market these guns across the world.
They actually hired Sam Cummings as one of their sales reps.
You might not recognise the name, but he was the man who started and ran Interarms,
which was responsible for just an incredible amount
of arms import and trade through the middle of the 20th century.
Cummings was able to successfully sell the gun to several other countries.
And in 1957 ArmaLite signed a 5 year ... licence contract
with a company in the Netherlands called 'Artillerie Inrichtingen'.
(Probably butchered the name, I apologise to all the Portuguese [sic] out there.)
And AI (as I'll call them)
went on to make several batches of these guns for a variety of different countries.
The first ones were made for the Sudanese government,
they are of course called the Sudanese AR-10s.
... They are the first version: very early, very light.
There were then a group of transitional guns that were made for a couple of small countries.
There were a lot of very, very small contracts: 100, 200 guns.
The Italian Marines had some of these, Guatemala bought some, Nicaragua bought some.
But the final big contract made by AI was actually for Portugal.
The Portuguese Paratroop Corps adopted the AR-10 as their formal official service rifle.
And AI made all of the guns, several thousand of them in 1960 and '61.
And this is an example of a Portuguese AR-10.
Now originally these were select-fire guns.
They were in Portuguese service for about 15 years, they were run pretty hard.
They saw a lot of use in Africa in Angola and Mozambique.
And they were pretty well liked, they were successful guns.
A lot of the guys using them there liked the fact that they were shorter than a FAL or a G3,
and lighter, and fairly comfortable to fire.
Once they finally left Portuguese service a lot of them got imported, ... some to the US,
and some to the other English-speaking countries: England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.
Ultimately a lot got destroyed.
Some of them got imported eventually into the US
and converted one way or another into semi-auto only.
So that's what has been done to this one.
The receiver does not have a pinhole for a full-auto sear.
Alright guys, so we've been looking at the disassembly
and the history of a slightly different gun.
Today, thanks to Alex at TFB, I actually have a Sudanese contract Dutch AR-10.
It's a little bit different, but functionally the same.
Some of the things like the gas regulator are different on this gun.
But it's pretty cool, this is one that actually has a Sudanese unit mark on it.
And this one is actually a registered full-auto,
so we can do a little bit of experimentation with the actual full-auto capability of the AR-10.
It's a pretty light gun, and you know what,
I'll be interested to see just how controllable it actually is.
So, start with a few rounds semi-auto.
This thing has a pretty substantial kick to it, it's a light rifle firing a big cartridge.
So full-auto is going to be a little bit interesting, let's give it a try.
I think with enough practice you could hold this on a target.
But it really takes some concentration and focus,
and I think in a combat situation it's pretty much useless.
You're definitely going to be a lot better off hitting anything with semi-auto than full on this.
Like I said, it is one of the lighter full-auto .308 shoulder rifles.
So I think I have a few rounds left.
One more burst for you.
Alright, I think it can be a little bit misleading to some people
watching an AR-10 in full-auto like this.
It looks like I'm doing a pretty darn good job of controlling it, the muzzle's not climbing.
Well, that's because of the straight-line design of the action and the stock.
The recoil is pushing straight into my shoulder and not forcing the gun way up into the air.
However, there's still a ton of recoil coming from .308 in high ... rate of fire full-auto.
And you can see here, ... I've kind of lost control of this gun and it's starting to push me back.
But it's still pointing in basically the same direction.
When you ... do a mag dump in full-auto,
you kind of hang on, and when you pull the trigger your whole world
goes a bit grey and fuzzy until the magazine is empty and the gun stops firing.
You ... can control it, but you can't necessarily
change your point of aim, or choose what you're shooting at mid-burst.
You kind of pull the trigger, hang on, point it at the target and hope for the best.
It's an interesting experience, to say the least.
Argh! - Fantastic Matthew, thank you. - Whoo!
Alright, so the Portuguese AR-10 disassembles the same way as any other AR basically.
We've got two push pins that hold the upper and the lower together.
Now unlike most ARs, these are actually quite tight.
There we go. Leave that one captive in the receiver.
At that point, once we've got the one out, ...
the gun breaks open just like you'd expect with any AR.
Now I'm just going to go straight through to taking out the front pin as well.
(Alright.)
Right, so now we've split the rifle into the upper and the lower.
Go ahead and take out the magazine, which I probably should have done first.
This is the classic early waffle 20-round aluminium magazine.
These were intended to be disposable: after you emptied them you just threw them away. ...
So the fire control group in these early Portuguese AR-10s
is totally different from what you'd expect in a modern AR-15 or 10.
We have a big chunky hammer here.
And the hammer spring is actually this coil spring up alongside of the hammer,
kind of reminiscent of an FAL actually.
The other controls are much more similar to a regular AR.
We have a bolt stop here, you can push it down to lock the bolt open.
And when the bolt is locked open (on an empty magazine for example),
you can push the top to drop the bolt.
Our magazine release [has been replaced with a modern one for shootability].
And our selector lever over here is also the same, of course originally a 3 position safety.
One thing I want to point out is the furniture
on these early AR-10s was actually made out of fibreglass.
It's relatively fragile stuff, it's actually pretty impressive
that the furniture on this particular gun has actually survived this long.
You'll notice these two look different.
This is not the very first original style of furniture,
this is a third pattern of fibreglass buttstock where they added this sling swivel.
But it is still an original Portuguese AR-10 stock.
Another thing I want to take a closer look at is the buffer tube,
because it's also quite a bit different than a modern AR.
So there's a little plunger that holds it in place, just like a modern one.
And when we let that down ...
So this is our buffer tube and spring, and anyone who's pulled apart a regular AR
will recognise that that is a buffer, sort of, but it kind of works different.
So this reciprocates just like that.
And that is what prevents the bolt from bouncing when it closes.
This gives us kind of a reciprocating mass.
This is the equivalent to, in a modern AR, of having the back of the buffer
filled with a metal powder or reciprocating weights.
So, they did it quite a bit differently on the AR-10s.
When we move on to the upper, obviously one thing that jumps out here
is it does not have a charging handle in the back like a modern rifle.
Instead it has this trigger-shaped charging handle in the carry handle.
On the very first of these AR-10s this was just a charging handle, pull back to pull the bolt.
One of the upgrades they did on the Portuguese contract, after learning from the Sudanese ones,
was they made this actually a forward assist.
And you have to push it down in order to actuate the bolt.
And pull it down like that, then it slides forward,
unless I push it down again,
and then I can actually use it as a forward assist. That's kind of cool.
There is a two-part telescoping cover behind the charging handle
that serves to seal up the receiver when you have the bolt open.
And pulling the bolt out is very simple.
Because we don't have a charging handle back here we can just pull the bolt out the back, piece of cake.
Alright, so when we pull the bolt and carrier out of the AR-10
you can see it functions exactly the same as a regular AR-15.
It really is exactly the same thing scaled up.
A few subtle changes we can point out.
It doesn't have any serrated cutouts for a forward assist.
Since the forward assist is actually built into the charging handle
it does have one cut right up here.
And that's what interacts with the charging handle for that.
The gas rings interchange with a modern AR-10.
Many of the other parts are actually very similar.
This gun was originally missing some components,
and one of its owners retrofitted a few modern AR-10 parts to fit it.
The cam pin, the firing pin, and actually the extractor
are modern AR-10 parts that have been slightly fitted in order to run in this gun.
It's also worth pointing out that the bolt carrier ... and bolt are entirely made of stainless steel.
That's how they did the very early ones.
Obviously you can see that the
screws here are nicely peened in place so that they're not going to walk out.
That's about it for the bolt carrier, it's just a big AR bolt carrier.
Now when we look at the receiver you can see we do have a range adjustment dial on the rear sight.
Windage on the rear sight has to be adjusted by drifting the whole sight back and forth.
So range is easy,
then again windage you're not really going to be messing with in the field very much.
You can see we have our fibreglass handguard here, pretty distinctive design and shape to that.
Couple of cooling cutouts. These are very often found cracked and broken.
Oh, I should mention, we do have a dust cover.
Again very similar to a modern AR, works the same way.
Now up front we've got some interesting stuff going on.
For one thing we have this huge muzzle device,
which is there primarily to function as a grenade launcher.
This is the bayonet lug. The bayonet handle actually sits up above the barrel.
And then we have a little mounting bracket right here.
That's actually for the grenade launcher sight: it snaps in there and then folds forward.
And of course we have an adjustable gas system.
On the very first AR-10s, the Sudanese guns, they did not have this.
But when they went and added grenade launching capability, they threw on a regulator.
So three positions, one of those positions is completely shut off for firing grenades.
The other two are for running the gun in standard and dirty conditions.
So the adjustable gas system here is designed to be operated with a ... cartridge.
This is an 06 not .308, but same difference.
We push down the little detent (there we go).
Just rotate this ... into a new position, just like that.
The sling swivel gets in the way a little bit there.
There we go. So one normal, one fouled, and one for shutting it off entirely to launch grenades.
So of course we also have a pretty distinctive muzzle device out here.
It's interesting to note (I don't know if we can get it on camera very well)
but the inside of the front of this device is actually threaded
so that you can insert a blank firing adaptor.
Thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
Just like to throw another shout-out to James at Tombstone Territorial Firearms.
He runs a really cool shop, you'd never expect a shop this cool in a town this small.
So if you're ever in Tombstone checking out all the cool sights in town,
all the Old West memorabilia, definitely stop in at Tombstone Territorial.
You'll find something cool in here. Thanks for watching.
[ Continued ... ]
Now, you and everyone else out here today
has been warning me, to a frightening level,
about actually pulling the trigger on one of these in full-auto.
- You know, it's the only machine gun I've ever shot that's not fun.
It's fun to watch other people shoot it.
But I did take it to a machine gun shoot where an experienced machine gunner,
who owns things like an M2HB, big boy stuff, shot one and it nearly knocked him over.
And he was saved by a friend, who actually grabbed him by his back and helped him out.
Ever since then I've been hesitant to take this gun out.
But being as how you're very experienced behind the sort of thing,
we're looking forward to seeing you do it.
- Alright, well so I guess this should be entertaining for you guys.
- I think his batteries are dead, he actually used to say things from the movies.
- So this is your shoulder thing that goes up, and it makes the gun more evil.
- Yes. - It does ... I don't know what, it does something.
- If you set that setting to setting 3, the bullets track children.
- Yes, they do actually. - Excellent.