Can you hear that? I can hear it.
That's the sound of every former British service member cringing at the mere sight of this rifle.
And it's so loud you can hear it over the internet.
Thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I'm here today at the Institute of Military Technology
taking a look at this L85A1 British bullpup rifle.
Now this is, probably more so than any other firearm in current service, a giant scandal of plastic and metal.
We'll start with a little bit of the history of this rifle, and then we'll go into why it became such a hot potato of an issue.
These were originally developed in the 1970s.
And the British government knew that it would need to replace ... the FAL, the L1A1, with a new small-bore rifle.
And they were looking at a whole bunch of different options. They considered everything from 4mm up to 7mm,
and the early versions of this rifle were actually developed in a proprietary 4.85mm cartridge.
And one of these days I'll get my hands on some of those prototypes and we'll bring them here to show you.
But as it turned out of course NATO decided to adopt the 5.56 round developed in the US,
and so that became the obvious de-facto cartridge to use.
So the rifle was redeveloped, or tweaked, to accommodate the 5.56 NATO cartridge, and it was then adopted.
... The development process really was in the late 1970s, ultimately adopted in 1985 as the L85A1.
And there was also a companion ... light machine gun, the L86A1, which was intended to be a squad automatic weapon.
It's basically the same gun, but with a longer barrel,
and in theory it was to provide more sustained fire, had a bipod, that sort of thing.
Now the British went with a bullpup here, and a lot of people are going to say,
"Ah, they just took the bullpup they had right after World War Two and used it."
Actually they didn't, the EM-1 and EM-2 bullpups (the EM-2 having actually been adopted as Rifle Number 9 by the British
just after World War Two and then very quickly unadopted, which is a story all its own),
that rifle shares nothing with the L85 except the basic bullpup concept.
If anything the EM-2 was basically a .308 bullpup G43.
This is basically a bullpup AR-180, and we'll pull it apart in a minute.
Now after these were adopted they went into production at RSAF, Royal Small Arms Factory, Enfield.
These were actually the last gun to be developed and produced at Enfield. And, unfortunately, the quality control was pretty spotty.
Now production did eventually move to a new facility at RSAF Nottingham, and apparently the QC was a little bit better there.
They had a lot of new machinery that they were using for production, but by that point the damage was done.
This rifle was not a reliable gun in pretty much any circumstances. It had problems.
And ... they managed to kind of bury these and overlook them, and it wasn't that big of a problem.
For the government anyway, not necessarily for the guys who had to carry them.
It wasn't that big of a problem until Desert Storm.
And the British had a substantial combat contingent in the ... initial invasion of Iraq,
and the guns really performed poorly in the sand.
And there was a report that was written detailing all of these problems and submitted to MOD
in the aftermath of Desert Storm. And it got leaked to the public.
And this document basically said, "These guns are a piece of junk, and they never work,
and you got to do something to fix it." And of course when this leaked to the public it was a huge scandal.
Well, the MOD ... (Ministry of Defence) didn't make things better by initially completely denying all charges.
"Everything, it's all fake. Can't trust any of it."
But it wasn't fake and it stayed in the news. And then finally they came back and went,
"Well, OK, maybe it's not fake. But it's certainly not official". Which it was.
And that didn't take either, and a little while after that they had to come back and say,
"Well, OK, it's not unofficial, but it's only like semi-official." Which it wasn't really either.
They just kept stonewalling this problem.
And finally in 1997 they couldn't stonewall it any longer and they had to do something.
And they actually hired H&K to basically redesign and rebuild the rifles.
Now there was of course consideration for just scrapping them entirely at that point and adopting a new rifle,
presumably the M16. That was turned down basically because of cost.
They figured it would be substantially cheaper to fix the existing guns than to just buy entirely new guns.
And there were some things that they had specifically wanted with this bullpup style.
Primarily they wanted to replace the Sterling submachine gun and the FAL rifle with a single weapon system.
This is the part of the same rationale that the French used when they adopted the FAMAS.
The idea being if you have your combat rifle this short by making it a bullpup,
you can effectively substitute it for the submachine gun, which you know, a normal submachine gun is gonna be
it's gonna be about the same overall length when you're using it because it's not a bullpup design.
Whether that works in practical reality is another issue.
That was part of the reason they wanted a bullpup, so they decided to stick with the L85.
Now a lot of people joke about the fact that the British had to hire the Germans to fix the gun.
Well, it's worth noting that at the time that this happened,
HK was actually a subsidiary owned by a British company, Royal Ordnance.
So while yes, HK is a German company, they weren't actually German owned at the time.
They were actually British owned, which gives that choice a little more ... makes more sense with that in mind.
So the Germans at HK went through the rifle. And they came up with just a couple things to fix, namely everything.
In the rebuild they either replaced or redesigned the bolt, the gas piston, the gas block, the front trunnion,
the hammer, all of the springs, pretty much all of the pins, the magazine release, and the furniture,
and the charging handle, and probably a couple other things that I've forgetting about.
They basically kept the receivers as a shell and replaced everything else inside them.
And from 2000 to 2002 they rebuilt about 200,000 of these rifles into what became known as the L85A2 configuration,
for the cost of about 92 million pounds.
... You know, the problem here is because these guns had so many reliability problems to begin with,
they will probably never overcome that reputation.
You know, they had far more problems than the M16 did in Vietnam,
and yet still to this day we hear about the M16 being an unreliable piece of junk
because of some limited issues that were actually pretty easily fixed in the early days of Vietnam.
Well, the L85 had much more substantial and severe problems to begin with.
And even though the A2 appears to be a pretty darn good gun now,
its reputation is dead forever ... because of how bad the A1 was.
So we'll take a look at some of the external differences here between this, which is an A1, and the A2.
But first a couple of the things to consider, reasons why the British didn't necessarily like this rifle, the British soldiers.
It is a bullpup, it makes no accommodation for left-handed shooting.
Most bullpups, like the Steyr AUG, the French FAMAS, the military ones, they can be switched to left-handed operation.
The L85 cannot. It's right-handed and if you are a lefty, tough cookies, you'll learn how to shoot as a righty.
So not ... not a lot of sympathy there.
The scope that ... is on these is a 4x power scope called the SUSAT, which is I believe
Sighting Unit Small Arms, Trilux, and it's a really heavy scope.
It's like a 2 pound scope and base. All of the windage and elevation adjustments are done externally.
So it's a very rugged scope, you could probably drive a tank over this thing and it would survive.
But with the scope and with a loaded magazine this rifle is almost the exact same weight as an FAL.
You would think part of the idea of going to a lighter calibre rifle would be to have a lighter rifle.
They didn't. It's basically like carrying a FAL, except all of the weight's in the back.
So on full-auto it tends to bounce around more than a non-bullpup 5.56.
The magazine release on these guns,
I'll ... show you here,
the magazine release is completely unprotected.
And because you have to shoot this right-handed you're carrying it like this,
which means the mag release is between the gun and your body.
Which makes it pretty easy to bump it on web gear or anything that you happen to be carrying.
And one of the regular complaints about the rifle was that it was way too easy to accidentally hit the mag release,
drop your mag without realising it, and then when you need the rifle, you have one round in the chamber and that's it.
Not a good thing to have happen.
So I think that pretty much covers the external stuff.
Let's go ahead and take a closer look at this, and I'll show you a couple of the other changes, and then we'll take it apart.
Alright, so one of the most distinctive ... differences between the A1 and the A2 is the charging handle here.
When HK redesigned the gun they replaced this with a plastic charging handle that's kind of comma shaped.
And the reason was when it's fully cycled backwards it acts as a shell deflector.
That was one of the whole litany of problems with the rifle is the ejection pattern
changed radically as the gun heated and cooled.
So they fixed part of that by having a deflector to kick the shells into a predictable pattern.
Now other controls here on the side.
We do have a manual hold open here.
We have a dust cover which pops open when I charge the bolt. If I pull the bolt all the way back and then,
yeah, push this down I can lock the bolt open.
On the other side here we have this little button which acts as a bolt release. So if I push that I believe it's up,
down. Push that down, drops the bolt.
We also, in an interesting choice, we have the selector lever back here on the bottom of the receiver. ...
"R" for semi-auto and "A" for fully-auto. That's kind of a stiff thing,
you're kind of going to end up picking a mode and leaving it there for that.
Now here's that unprotected mag catch that I mentioned
It really does kind of stick out, and it really is pretty easy to accidentally drop a magazine.
So the A2s have a bit of a shield around that mag catch to make that less likely.
Trigger up here, of course. And then this is our cross bolt safety. So this is currently on fire.
If I push that in, now it's on safe.
Flip it over, safe to fire. Now because this is a right-handed only gun, that's a reasonably,
reasonably ergonomic control. Although I think troopers often wanted to be able to use this thumb to do it instead.
Now taking the rifle apart is fairly simple. We'll start by pulling the magazine out.
And then there are two main cross pins, these two, that I need to push out like so.
That needs a little persuasion.
There we go. And a second pin right there, that one I can get with my thumb.
Put that over. These are both captive pins, which is nice. Pull them out, and then the lower assembly
pivots off the gun.
I should point out here something I keep meaning to mention and keep forgetting.
One of the other, other, other problems with the A1s was that the furniture actually broke a lot.
Especially in cold weather, but even in warm weather. This stuff was not high quality and would break.
So we have our trigger mechanism here, with the actual bits back there, you can see this long trigger connecting bar,
right there, to connect the trigger back to the actual sear.
Then the upper receiver is basically a copy of the AR-180.
So we have a pair of dual guide rods, and the bolt actually runs on steel guide rods.
It doesn't actually run on the receiver itself, which is a good idea.
That was part of the basis of the AR-180 design is you could make a pretty cheap bent steel upper receiver,
and you didn't have to worry really about wear on it because you'd have the bolt running on these guide rods instead.
Now on the AR-180 each of the guide rods has a recoil spring. The SA80, or the L85, here
(by the way, SA80 means Small Arms 1980, and it's the name for the family of this and the L86),
these have a single recoil spring in the centre here, as opposed to a pair of them.
And this guide rod and recoil spring assembly is held in place by this rear cross pin.
So that pin is currently pulled back far enough to release the lower, but keep the springs in place.
I hold on to it and then pull
that pin the rest of the way out. Now we can release the guide rods.
Once the guide rods are out then the bolt can come out. Going to pull the bolt handle back to this circular cutout,
handle comes out, and then
push the bolt out the back.
Disassembly of the bolt itself is very much like the AR-180 again.
... Basically to get the bolt out you have to take the
cam pin out, to take the cam pin out you have to take the firing pin out, and to take the firing pin out
you have to take the firing pin retaining pin out. So we'll start with that retaining pin.
You would normally do this with the tip of a cartridge, I just have a punch instead.
So that pin comes out, then the firing pin comes out the back.
Then I can pull the cam pin here.
... You can see the little hole there, the cam pin is held in place by the firing pin like that.
Now the bolt comes out. This is a multi-lug rotating bolt just like an AR-15 bolt, except machined slightly differently.
And there is our AR-180 style bolt body.
There you go. Not a particularly complex bolt.
About the same as the AR-15 in terms of complexity and the number of parts that you've got lying around when you're done.
Thank you for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
L85s are quite hard to come by here in the United States because they were never available as a commercial option.
There was some talk about bringing in some semi-automatic ones, which was quashed by
the 1989 US assault weapons import ban, so there aren't any here.
The British attempted to make export sales of these, but for obvious reason didn't make very many.
So it's very cool to be able to take a look at this one at the IMT.
They were gracious enough to let me pull it apart for you and ... show you how it works.
So if you're interested in doing more small arms research here, do definitely get in touch with them and make an appointment.
They're not generally open to the public, but they are available by appointment.
If you like seeing this sort of thing on-line so you don't have to travel anywhere,
well I would appreciate it if you might consider checking out my Patreon page.
It is the subscribers there who make it possible for me to travel to these places, find these guns and bring them to you.
Thanks for watching.