[ FAMAS F1 at the Range ]
Bonjour mes amis.
So this is courtesy of Woody's Weapons and Sienna Armoury.
And we are going to get a chance to do a little bit of shooting with an actual full-auto FAMAS.
Which I'm very excited for. I've never actually had the chance to do this before.
So I do have a semi-auto FAMAS, which I like quite a lot,
but the full-auto has a couple of interesting characteristics to it.
What the French decided to do is we have a selector switch up in the trigger guard here,
which has a "1" on the right side.
So if I flip the safety into that position it is semi-auto only.
If I flip it onto this side we have
Then we have a second control down here on the bottom of the stock which is "3" or "0".
3 is a limited three round burst, 0 is just plain full-auto.
Fire as long as you hold the trigger down.
So ... the idea with 3 round burst is always it is sort of a substitute for training.
If you don't have enough time, or enough experience,
to be able to properly control a full-auto rifle,
setting it to 3 round bursts, having it mechanically limited,
means your first round or two are probably going to be decent.
The third one you might get lucky, and then
you don't have to worry about 4, 5, 6 and so on going way up into nowhere.
However, to my mind it's always a subpar solution.
I kind of like the way that this has been done, where
if you need 3 round burst you just set it back here and leave it alone.
And then you have your selector switch and the trigger to be semi or burst.
Whereas if you are competent and capable with full-auto,
you set it to full-auto back here and just leave it again, and you have semi and full-auto.
Now part of the reason the French did this is the FAMAS, as a levered delayed blowback rifle,
has a substantially high rate of fire compared to other shoulder-fired 5.56s.
So ... the 3 round burst was not actually in the very early plan for the rifle.
In fact, the first batch of production FAMAS rifles didn't have the 3 round burst.
It was something that was added just after production began basically.
So we've got some ammo, we've got some mags, we've got a range, let's see how it handles.
Alright, ... semi-auto first.
It's nice, it's low recoil, it's very pleasant, it's the best bullpup. Fight me.
And 3 round burst. Let's see.
Oops, I have it set to full full-auto, not 3 round burst.
But that's still pretty darn sweet. So here's a 3 round burst.
And mechanically limited, so even when I hold the trigger down, all I'm getting are 3 rounds.
You can tell that's a pretty darn high rate of fire.
... It's supposed to be on paper about 900 rounds a minute. ...
I think that sounds reasonable.
I would have to actually put it on a high-speed video timer and check the rate of fire.
Which we're going to do, so I'll actually probably have [947 rpm based on one sample burst.]
the full auto rate of fire in the text right down there right now. [947 rpm based on one sample burst.]
But I don't know it while I'm saying this. [947 rpm based on one sample burst.]
J'aime beaucoup.
Let's see.
Alright, 3 round burst is fine, but ... I like actual full-auto where I can control it.
Ah, I only got two left.
Fortunately I have more
Il y a un autre chargeur.
Alright, I'm going to go for that little middle plate.
I really like that, it's a nice straight line recoil.
... Like you can see that the sights are nice and high elevated on the FAMAS,
much like on the AR patterns, which means the buttstock goes straight into the shoulder.
The ... recoil energy becomes a straight push into the shoulder,
and it really does not try to climb basically at all.
And I think I'm out now, nope, not quite.
The front handguard here is starting to get warm, not hot.
... The barrel is free-floated, which is a cool thing for the rifle in general.
This is plastic, it doesn't really have a heat shield in it.
You will often see French soldiers who are still using these,
ones who haven't transitioned over to the 416 yet,
will actually put a clamp on here and a vertical front grip, that's not uncommon to see.
And that's probably why. That plus perceived better controllability.
Now I'm out. There is no bolt hold open on the FAMAS.
There are occasionally questions about like,
"Why did they have a 25 round magazine but a 3 round burst? Like that doesn't add up."
Well the answer is: the magazine was designed to be as long as it could be without being curved.
I think because of tooling that was already in place at Saint-Étienne.
And then the 3 round burst, as I said, was added
actually much later in the development cycle of the rifle.
And at that point, they were thinking about, "What length of burst do we want?
2 rounds isn't enough, 4 rounds is too many.
There we have it, we'll split the difference and have a 3 round burst."
Alright, well I hope you guys enjoyed the video. This has been a tremendous amount of fun.
I like this thing even more in full-auto than semi, which I guess is probably an obvious thing, but.
Once again, a big thanks to Woody's Weapons and Sienna Armoury
for giving me access to come out and do some shooting with this guy.