Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look
at the Bren gun in 7.62mm NATO.
This is a conversion that the British government undertook after, of course,
they adopted the FN FAL as the L1A1 self-loading rifle, using 7.62 NATO ammunition.
They had a lot of Bren guns lying around, no sense letting them all go completely to waste,
so let's try to convert some of them to use the new standard ammunition.
They actually contracted with FN to do the very first test conversion in 1954.
And then the British undertook their own conversion program in 1955 and '56,
building 1,500 of what were termed the L4A1 light machine gun.
Now, that was very quickly supplanted in service
by the L4A2, which is what we have here.
The visible distinguishing difference being these round magazine body supports
riveted to the side of the gun.
Now this would only be in service for a grand total of like 3 years
before it was declared obsolescent by the next version, which was the L2A4.
But during that time the British government converted 7,600 Bren guns
into this configuration, so they did see a fair amount of use.
This is largely during peace time, 1958 to 1960,
when there wasn't a whole lot of demand for large numbers of these things.
So, let's go ahead and take a closer look at it,
and I'll show you what they did to make this conversion.
Because it really is a more complex conversion than a lot of people think.
Alright, let's start on the left side of the receiver here.
All of these were converted from Bren Mark IIIs,
... that's the lightened, late World War Two version of the gun.
The original markings were lined out, this was of course 1945 original production.
And the new markings: L4A2, the stock number, and the Enfield logo added to the side.
They also added a big red, painted 7.62mm stamp to make sure that everyone understood
that this was a 7.62mm gun, and not a .303 gun.
Not that you can actually fit a .303 magazine in, but they didn't want confusion.
The barrel is similarly marked, the barrel matches the gun.
And in fact they also numbered the barrel catch, which is important for headspacing purposes.
This was converted in 1959, 7.62mm, and the serial number.
On the gun itself, the serial number is here on the back of the receiver.
The original serial number was lined out.
This was an "LB" prefix for Lightened Bren, as were all the Mark IIIs.
And we have a conversion date here, 1959, and an "A" prefix serial number.
And we have another of those 7.62 big ol' red stamps on the right side as well.
So you can tell from either side of the gun that this is definitely not a .303 gun.
Now a couple of other things that were changed in the process.
A new style of carry handle. It's not the most exciting thing, but there it is.
The barrels were given a new L1A1-style flash hider.
It's not identical to the L1A1, it's a beefier construction,
but they went with that instead of the old cone.
On the old Bren guns the barrel vents here, the gas vents, were exposed.
They added this sheet metal cover to the bipod assembly
just to prevent dirt from getting into those exposed holes.
A new rear sight was made, marked 7.62mm.
The front sight remains the same as on the old Mark III guns,
they recalibrated the rear sight to give proper range graduations.
And the rest of what we're going to be looking at is here in the magazine well.
So, a new dust cover (magazine cover) was made because this has been shortened slightly
by the ... manufacture of this new magazine catch block, or ejector block technically.
So I have a Mark II Bren to compare this with here.
And if you'll notice on the Mark II,
the back end of the magazine well is simply an integral part of the receiver.
Which makes sense, it was designed for the .303 magazine.
For the 7.62 conversion, what was used was a new pattern of 30 round magazine
that is ... interchangeable with the standard L1A1 rifle magazine.
... And by the way, these ... 30 round L4 magazines
are perfectly ... usable in L1A1 rifles, ... British pattern FAL rifles.
And the reverse is true, you could use the rifle magazines in the light machine gun,
which is sort of an obvious thing that you would want.
At any rate, this magazine is both wider and shorter than a .303 magazine.
So the back end of the magazine well has been widened out.
And you can see, ... it's a little subtle, but if you look at the wall thickness here,
and the wall thickness here, you'll see that this ... has been hogged out.
And I can't fit the 7.62 magazine in the original Bren.
In order to shorten up the magazine well, ... the receiver has been milled out a bit,
and a whole new block has been added here.
So, if you look at the feed lip supports down there,
you'll see that the back end has been milled away and replaced by this insert.
Which also houses the ejector, right down in there, and the magazine catch.
Now these two round body supports that are on both sides of the gun,
those are unique to the A2 pattern.
The ... L4A1 initial conversions didn't have them, and didn't need them.
However, what they found was that by using like the remnants
of the magazine feed lip support brackets here in the original guns,
the 7.62 magazines didn't feed totally reliably.
They needed to get the magazine a little farther forward,
and a little deeper down into the receiver to have it feed properly.
And they couldn't pull that off with these existing supports.
They had to move the supports down, and there just wasn't enough material here to work with.
So what they did is they milled them out entirely, and then created a pair of supports right in here.
And this is really well done so it's very hard to tell, but these are actually riveted in place,
and the outside support that they are riveted to is this.
And there's an example on either side, there's the round one on the other side.
So that's what's going on here. In order to get this to feed reliably
they had to substantially re-machine the inside of the magazine well.
And that's largely because they're converting from a rimmed cartridge to a rimless cartridge,
and that's not a really particularly simple thing to do.
It was easy to make the Bren in 8mm to begin with.
Of course the Bren evolved from the ZB 26, which was originally designed for 8mm,
and it took several years of work to convert it to rimmed .303 in the first place.
Taking the .303 guns and converting them back,
not making them from scratch for 7.62 NATO,
takes a bunch of work once again.
But they were able to pull it off, and these run nice and reliably.
If we take a look at the internals, the bolt carriers are identical,
it's really just the bolts that we have any change to.
So this is an Inglis Mark II Bren bolt, and this is our L4A2.
So if you look here you can see that this is marked 7.62mm,
where the Inglis has just normal markings.
And then really the only difference is a bit of change to the bolt face,
and a different extractor.
And that's to fit the different case heads of 7.62 NATO versus .303 British.
Now what's cool and convenient is the NATO calibre bolt
is essentially identical to the 8mm Mauser Bren gun bolts
that were manufactured by Inglis during World War Two.
So the early developmental work of this was done using basically leftover Inglis 8mm parts.
So just to recap, the original guns, the L4A1, was a conversion without
these magazine body supports, or feed lip supports, and they weren't fully reliable.
So the A2 is an improvement upon the A1 to give it full reliability,
and the A2s were all converted from Bren Mark III original guns.
There were, however, a bunch of Bren Mark IIs still in service,
and so the L4A3 designation was given to guns that had this exact same style of conversion done
but started off life as a Mark II instead of a Mark III.
This is a very British sort of nomenclature convention.
And then we'll talk about the A4 in a moment.
In 1960 the British government started looking into chrome-lined bores for these guns,
and discovered that, "Ah, that's kind of a thing."
And because of reduced wear they figured, "Well, we can get rid of the spare barrel
if we paid a little bit more for a chrome-lined barrel."
So they adopted chrome-lined barrels.
They designated this gun with a chrome-lined barrel to be the L4A4,
which rendered ... all the previous versions obsolete.
They would go ahead and ... convert 500 of these from old stock Brens,
and then they would convert ... 6,900 of ... these up
by fitting them with chrome-lined barrels and making them L4A4 pattern guns.
These would be used by the British military, more than Navy than the Army
(or the Admiralty than the Army).
They would also be sold to no less than four separate countries.
They sold these to Ghana, Nigeria, Libya and Rhodesia.
Which ... is a better record than the L4A2 here, which was only sold to Libya.
So, a little bit of foreign export sale, but really not very much.
This would be really supplanted in most uses by the FN MAG,
and then eventually by the L86 squad automatic weapon.
So, hopefully you guys enjoyed this look at one of the very last iterations of the Bren.
Thanks for watching.