Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the Institute of Military Technology
taking a look at some of their unusual and experimental firearms.
We have a really cool one here today.
Now this is a British Farquhar-Hill semi-automatic rifle.
I had a chance to shoot one of these many years ago, and it was
one of the very first videos I did for Forgotten Weapons.
And I have regretted ever since that I didn't have a better camera,
and wasn't able to take the gun apart and really show you how it worked.
Or for that matter, figure out how it worked for myself.
Now we have that opportunity, so I will be splicing in some of my shooting footage from that original video.
That's why the shooting footage is much lower quality, but it's really cool and this is an awesome gun.
So the backstory here is this was developed by two guys working together.
A guy named Moubray G. Farquhar who was a financier type,
he was the money in the deal. And he came from Aberdeen or Aberdeenshire.
And a guy named Arthur Hill who was the gunsmith. He was from Birmingham and he was the technical side of the project.
Originally this was patented in the UK in 1908 and in the US in 1909.
And in its first version under that patent it was actually a long recoil gun.
Clearly Farquhar and Hill, one of their primary considerations was poor quality ammunition,
because the two different designs they came up with are both very safe, and very adaptable to overpowered ammunition.
So long recoil is a very safe system, like the Remington Model 8 or the French Chauchat.
But in 1911 they ditched that system, and they went to a gas piston system instead. But it's a unique gas piston system.
... So I have this rifle here, I also have a second one, a sporting model of the Farquhar-Hill, which is in better condition,
and we have taken apart. So I'll be able to show you exactly how this works in a moment.
But basically what happens is you have a mechanical valve inside here. You have two separate main springs.
When you fire, gas is taken off of a port here, and it pushes a gas piston back a couple inches.
And the gas piston moves to about this point and then locks in place.
So at that point the bolt has just started to unlock, and at this point any excess pressure
cannot move the gas piston further back. So excess pressure is forced to vent out the barrel.
Thus, no matter how high of a charge you have in the chamber,
... the amount of energy pushing back on the gas piston is pretty much constant.
Might go up or down a little bit, but you're not going to be able to
just blow the gas piston out by having an extra high charge in the chamber.
At any rate, once the piston moves back to here it locks. At that point the bolt is moving backwards,
... not under a direct connection from the gas piston.
And that's where this is different than most guns. Typically on a gas piston the piston hits the bolt.
Either, in a long stroke system, they're permanently connected, like on an M1 Garand,
so the piston moves all the way back with the bolt.
Or in a short stroke system, like for example an AR-180,
the piston just moves a short way and then stops and the bolt moves under residual energy.
In this case, the piston compresses a spring, and then the other end of that spring moves the bolt. So it's buffered in a way.
And you ... won't get transmission of all the pressure from the piston onto the bolt.
So it's very safe system, and it gives it this kind of interesting unique recoil impulse
where "buffered" really is I think the word that applies. The recoil impulse is delayed slightly,
and it's softer because there's this intermediary spring kind of mediating everything that's going on.
Now beyond that we have a two lug rotating bolt system here on this side, which you'll see in a moment.
There's a big cam track that operates the bolt to rotate it.
This is the military version. Now this ... design started in 1911, in 1917 it was formally adopted by the British military.
They thought, "OK, we can make some use of this. We can give it to airplane pilots."
I don't know if they were planning to use them with ground troops, but it's possible.
And 100,000 of them were ordered in 1918.
But kind of like some of the late development stuff in World War Two,
by the time production was actually ready to get started, the war had ended and the order was cancelled.
So ultimately very few of these were manufactured. The sporting gun is serial number 5, with a couple of mixed parts up to 15.
We're talking a couple dozen of these, tops, not more than that.
The military gun is unique for having a wood vertical front grip.
This is actually kind of reminiscent of the Chauchat, and that maybe where it was coming from.
They may have wanted to allow fire from the hip, marching fire, like they had intended with the Chauchat and the BAR.
And then it had a large capacity magazine. This is a drum magazine, catches front and rear.
It's a drum that holds 19 rounds, these are in .303 British calibre which is what you would expect for the British military.
(And let's see if I can get that back in there from here, there we go.)
I've actually seen a piece of the original web gear intended for these,
it's a curved pouch or holder that sits on the belt and holds three more of these drums. So
the trooper would have had one drum on the gun, three more on a belt. Maybe a second pouch of,
you know, 4 through 6. A fair amount of ammunition.
And they're a really comfortable gun to fire. They are a bit awkwardly long,
but as a self-loader in World War One these are really cool.
We do have this bolt carrier and dust cover simultaneously that is going to cycle back.
This locks open. And we actually have two ways to close this. We have a release here that drops the bolt.
Or in classic early automatic rifle design, you can pull the trigger
and drop the bolt. Either one works. If you pull the trigger to do it, your next trigger pull will fire the rifle.
Now we also, interestingly, have this spring catch here which allows me to disconnect the bolt from the gas piston.
So there is our operating rod and gas system. And now the bolt
(it's locked open there), now the bolt is just free to move as it will.
This allows you to use the rifle as a manually operated gun.
It's also kind of nice for disassembly because I don't have to worry about maintaining spring pressure on this.
Now the drum here has, as I said, catches on the front and the back. Pull that out.
Now this might have gotten more intricate had it actually gone into military production,
but the way this is made right now (and this is drum number 60,
right there), is there's actually a ... back plate here, and a front plate here.
And then the body of the drum is a piece of sheet metal that is wrapped
(you can see that the surface isn't very smooth), that's just been wrapped around the front and back and folded down.
There's a lip around the whole edge. And held in place with two screws at this end, and two cotter pins at the other end.
Now we have a dummy cartridge in here, and a coil spring in the middle that provides the motive force for this.
And we have this catch on the back of the magazine.
That allows you to open and close the magazine, there we go. There's a little arm right here.
That arm holds the cartridges in or allows them to come out.
So when you're loading the magazine, you load it up, and then you engage that switch.
And then you can put this magazine away, you know, in your web gear or wherever,
without cartridges coming out despite the fact that it has no feed lips.
Then when you're ready to use the magazine, you take it out, you insert it into the rifle,
and the feed lips are built into the receiver here.
So you take this, we have a front guide rib that runs right in there. Lock it into the rifle, and then
run that lever up. That will allow the first cartridge to come up into the feedway and fire.
The important point here is if you have a partial magazine and you want to remove it,
you have to remember to turn the magazine off to capture the cartridges in the mag before you take it out.
Or else all your cartridges will go flying out under spring pressure, as I may have discovered when I was shooting one of these.
The rear sight is kind of interesting, we have a regular battle sight peep, right there.
And then if you want longer range, you can flip this entire assembly up like that, and then you have
a windage adjustable
aperture sight on the back there. This one's pretty loose, that's why it kind of flops around.
This poor rifle has seen better days.
Lastly, in a true first of tactical modularity,
the vertical pistol grip can be located in any of these five
holes, wherever you would like to screw it in to best fit your shooting technique.
Alright, here we have a sporter version of the Farquhar-Hill, which just means that the stock and the magazine are different.
This has a fixed 5 round mag instead of a drum.
I have the screwdriver in it so that we can operate the gas piston.
The way this works is we have our gas port up here. We have a gas piston right here.
The gas piston pushes a little plunger plug here which is sitting on the outside of this operating rod,
and on the inside of this large diameter spring.
We then also have a small diameter spring back here running inside this whole assembly.
So, if that's not complicated enough, I'm going to go ahead and put the bolt carrier on without the bolt.
Alright, so now I have the bolt carrier in place. And I can cycle the gun manually, like this,
and I'm just compressing this small diameter spring.
So when I fire it, the gas piston here is going to come back and it's going to push this plunger until it goes into this block.
When it goes in, the face of the gas piston is going to push on this spring,
which is going to push this locking catch down, and it's going to lock this plunger in position.
Right there, see that catch? Now our gas piston is free and clear.
We now have this plunger locked in place by this latch,
and it's acting as a fixed position off of which this spring has compressed and is pushing on
the operating rod and thus the bolt here.
What we've really accomplished by doing this is effectively created a valve
where gas pressure in the barrel is able to push the gas piston back to this point.
Once it hits here and locks, any additional pressure vents out the barrel and thus does not cause the bolt carrier to move faster.
That's going to prevent the bolt and the bolt carrier from being over accelerated,
slamming into the back of the receiver and damaging the gun.
As a side effect, it also means that the recoil has this kind of soft, buffered feel to it,
because this gas piston is not physically connected to the operating rod.
They are intermediated by this heavy-duty spring.
Now at this point this thing's kind of sitting at a balance point.
If this were actually cycling, this would ... have been pushed back with a lot of force,
and it would have accelerated the bolt and carrier and they would continue to travel rearward.
Right now, this spring is in tension against that spring and it's holding this in position.
As soon as I continue to pull this backward, I'm relieving tension on this spring,
and ... this is going to release the catch.
There you go, did you see it pop up right there?
Now this cycles backward. When it reaches the end of the travel
this inner spring is pushing it forward to load a new cartridge
And now you can see our plunger, right here, moving forward.
So as I close the bolt, that plunger goes all the way forward,
and now it's back in contact with the gas piston ready to fire a second time.
Hopefully that made sense. This is a really whacky one-of-a-kind style of system here.
Now the bolt is a two lug rotating bolt. This roller runs in the cam track in the bolt carrier.
We have a pivoting extractor here on the side.
This is, well, it's the bolt. So if I put this into the rifle,
When it's in the rifle the bolt runs like this.
It's going to (it's stuck on the hammer, there we go).
When the bolt locks it comes forward, forward, forward, and then
this cam track, you can see the inside is hollow,
right there.
(There you go, you can see it better there.) That hollow section controls this roller.
So when it gets to the end of travel that roller is pushed up like that, which locks the bolt.
Now it's also interesting to point out that as the bolt carrier begins to move rearward,
this cam track is going to force the bolt [down]. Before the bolt can start moving, it has to unlock,
so it's going to come down. When it hits this position it's now on this curved track,
and that's going to give us some primary extraction,
where the bolt is still in the process of unlocking but it's going to pull the cartridge out just a couple millimetres, like 2mm.
And It's got a lot of leverage to it when it's doing that.
What this does is that has freed the static friction of the cartridge inside the chamber,
so that when the bolt then goes to moving directly backwards it doesn't have to fight the static friction to rip the case out.
... Without that primary extraction you'd be much more likely to have the extractor
either break or tear through the rim of the cartridge.
By giving it this extra leverage, where it's got a lot of force to move the cartridge just a short distance,
that helps make the extraction much more reliable.
This is a really pleasant gun to shoot, I'm actually very surprised by it.
The recoil is really gentle and the dual spring setup that
Farquhar came up with for this gun works really well. This dumps the brass out just [bloop], right into a nice pile.
Ejects cleanly, loads cleanly, I'm really impressed with this gun.
Thank you for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video,
I've been wanting to get my hands on a Farquhar-Hill ever since I did that first shooting video.
And thanks to the Institute of Military Technology I finally had an opportunity.
Not just this one, but this one and the sporter as well.
So we can actually finally take a close look at how these work internally.
And that really is the mission of the Institute of Military Technology is to preserve this history,
and use it to educate people so that we don't lose track of it.
It is a collection that is not totally open to the public, but it is accessible by appointment.
So if you're interested in doing research on this type of material, definitely contact them and arrange a visit.
I can pretty much guarantee you'll enjoy it, there's a fantastic collection here.
And of course if you enjoy seeing video like this, consider checking out my Patreon page.
It's a buck a month from subscribers there that makes it possible for me to travel
and bring you guys fantastic old guns like this one.
Thanks for watching.