[ CETME-L Handguards ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today I just want to
take a quick look at one of the early features
of the Spanish CETME-L and CETME-LC rifles,
and that is the lower handguard.
When production first began through the ...
first couple of series of CETME-L production,
they used a different handguard than what we typically see today.
So this is one of the early pattern handguards,
and this is what they would later change to.
So let's take a closer look at this,
and I'll show you what changes they made and why.
The first thing to point out here is the very much grey colour of this handguard.
That's not a weird camera artifact,
it is in fact much more of a grey colour than the green of most of the CETME-L furniture.
However, that being said, CETME-L furniture was made in many different batches.
The colours were never kept standardised,
they changed a lot over the course of manufacture.
So having matching colour everything on a CETME-L is not actually really a thing.
But again, this is much more grey than green.
Anyway, it fits the role of what you would expect the handguard to be.
It's fairly slim, it's not going to take up a lot of space.
It's the widest part of the rifle, but not by a whole lot.
It gives full length coverage all the way out on the barrel,
so you're going to effectively protect your hand.
And it's certainly understandable why this would be accepted
as the standard handguard for the rifle.
Taking it off the rifle we can get a look inside,
and you can see there's a thin little metal heat shield in there to protect your hand.
And we can see this, and right there
you have the fundamental two problems with this early handguard pattern.
The first is that the material is fragile, and they broke quite a lot.
Which is why this one's broken.
Secondly, they're not actually all that great at insulating the hand from the heat of the barrel
if you're putting a lot of ammo through the rifle.
For basic semi-auto shooting - not a big deal.
But if you're going to start mag dumping with these things,
and they were of course all full-auto in Spanish military service,
(the ones in the US generally speaking aren't),
but if you're going to be mag dumping, this thing's going to get hot pretty quick.
And the Spanish army decided that they wanted something
that was going to do a little bit better job protecting the hand.
And thus we get the second pattern of handguard.
This is going to do a couple of things, first off you can see
that it is holding the hand much further away from the barrel.
We've got a little bit of air space in this guy, we've got a lot more airspace in this.
Note how you've got these big openings in the polymer there,
that's to create an airspace in there that's going to be ventilated.
It's all insulation to protect your hand.
The heat shield in the second pattern is substantially thicker.
They went ahead and cut the actual polymer handguard section back
to be about two-thirds as much as on the original handguard.
That allows them to leave the front end vented to help cool the barrel down faster.
And I think they decided you're not really supposed to be putting your hand
way out at the end anyway, regardless of what current doctrine is.
These are rifles from well before 2000.
And so you end up with a handguard that is
going to do a much better job of actually protecting your hand from the heat.
It is also a handguard that is much more rugged and much less likely to break.
The polymer is a better blend of polymer,
it's also much thicker, it's much more robust, and it's actually simpler to make.
You can see that on the early handguards there's a whole bunch of rivets in there.
You can see them on the bottom, like 8 rivets in there to hold the handguard together,
to hold the two pieces of the polymer together.
And with the revised second pattern you've got one moulded piece of polymer,
one bent piece of sheet metal, and just 3 screws holding them together.
Alright, so not exactly earth shattering changes,
but this is pretty typical of what happens to firearms
as they get through the initial stages of production.
And the users and the manufacturer start to recognise things that work
and things that don't work quite so well that didn't come out in some of the early testing and trials.
And so both the ... army and the Guardia Civil in Spain used the CETME-Ls and CETME-LCs.
The army replaced all of their handguards with this newer pattern.
The Guardia Civil did actually keep some of the old pattern in service,
and ... you can find photographs of them with the Guardia Civil from time to time.
So, for people who are interested in having the early pattern of handguard,
apparently 200 of them came into the country along with all of the parts kits.
And we're talking I think 30,000 parts kits total.
Like the Spanish surplused a ton of these things into the US a few years ago.
But only a couple of hundred of the early pattern handguards.
And for good reason, I can certainly understand why there weren't a lot of them still around.
At any rate, MarColMar, the company best known for making the CETME-Ls,
had them for a while, they're sold out.
I think they're now available on the secondary market,
and I think actually Numrich still has them, so the classic source for firearms parts.
Anyway, a big thanks to BrowncoatNerd for sending me this handguard.
He has a small YouTube channel and he did a couple of videos on these handguards.
And he's actually I think the one who broke this handguard,
and went ahead and got himself a second one because having it broken bugged him.
And then he decided to send me the broken one to do a video on.
So anyway, I appreciate it. I think it's a cool extra piece to have for a rifle like this
and figured it would be worth pointing out to you guys.
Hopefully you enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.
Thanks for watching.