Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Rock Island
Auction Company, where we are taking a look at
an immaculate example of a 50.63 FAL. That is a FAL paratrooper rifle.
Now the FAL was introduced in the 1950s, and it wasn't until the early 1960s
that there was a folding-stock version made available,
because this actually took a little bit of development on the part of FN.
The thing is, on a standard FAL the recoil spring goes down into the stock, kind of like an AR-15.
So if you want the stock to fold (there we go), you've got to put the recoil spring somewhere else.
So FN had to come up with an alternative design.
And to this day of course, if you have a folding stock on a FAL,
your internal components are not interchangeable with a standard rifle.
So, ... in fact let's right now take a look at what they did to make that change.
We'll go straight to the good stuff here: to disassemble this guy we have
the improved pattern of lever release.
Of course on the early FALs the takedown lever was up here and pivoted backwards.
The problem was that had a tendency to wear, and under load from something like
a rifle grenade you could actually pop the rifle open when you didn't mean to.
So the second pattern lever is down here.
Lift that up, and the receiver halves are going to slide apart.
(Get the sling out of there.)
Now normally at this point you could just take the charging handle and
pop the bolt out the back of the gun, but that doesn't work here.
Normally you would also have that little monkey tail, or rat tail,
sticking out from the back of the bolt.
Well, on this one the recoil spring is located inside the dust cover up here.
So the bolt and the dust cover are going to come out as a single unit.
That ... pulls out ... just like ... that.
If we look inside, there's the recoil spring.
If I pull this back slightly,
I can separate the bolt and carrier from the top cover and the recoil spring.
In order to have this work effectively in a reduced overall length
you'll notice there are actually two springs here,
one smaller one nested inside a larger one.
In fact, the smaller one has two parts with a guide rod in the centre.
The bolt is a standard FAL bolt, but the bolt carrier is not.
It's got this contour at the front to fit into this contour in the top cover.
(This top cover is also not standard.)
There is ... a hole for the recoil spring here,
and there's no tail coming off to interact with a recoil spring down in the stock.
The top cover here has been reinforced at the back
because, well, the regular top cover wouldn't have any pressure being put on it there,
but this one of course does with the recoil spring being connected to it.
And by the way, if you want to know what an unfired gun looks like, this is pretty much it.
I don't know the consignor, I don't know the actual history of this rifle,
but just looking at it, I'm pretty sure that bolt face has never been fired.
And you can see ... just a little bit of a circle there where the gas piston impinges on the bolt,
but it hasn't even had the finish worn off this.
I don't think this rifle has ever been fired.
So that's the mechanical change on the inside.
And the whole purpose of doing that was so that you could get a side-folding stock.
So the stock on here has a really nice tight lock up.
It's one of the few ... folding stocks in general that rarely has wobble to it.
You can see there's a lot of engagement here in this latch that holds the thing in place.
And then in order to fold it,
you have a little button down here on the bottom.
And what you have to do is actually push that button laterally down that direction,
and it's going to pull this little locking block out of the way.
Once that's down, then
you have to actually pull the stock down against a spring, and then it can fold.
Once it's in the folded position you don't have to pull it down,
but you do have to engage that button in order to unfold it.
FN redesigned the rear sight for this paratrooper rifle.
Remember this was designed for the military.
The fact that some of them were sold on the civilian market as semi-autos in the US
was not the original intention when FN came up with this.
So this pattern of rear sight here is completely fixed.
It has a 250 yard zero,
which means zeroed out there, they are going to be a little bit high up close.
But basically you can just hold on your target out to about 300 metres.
And FN was assuming that a paratrooper isn't
really all that likely to be shooting much longer than that.
There are a pair of nice big protective wings here,
and those are ... a fairly distinctive pattern, so you can kind of recognise these at a distance.
These get a shortened barrel, that's of course the other big deal.
Make the gun small enough that when you've got the ... stock folded
you can actually take it ... crosswise out the door of a paratrooper's airplane
making sure that it won't get caught and pin that guy inside the airplane
which would be embarrassing and problematic.
So the barrel on this I believe is 17 and 3/8 of an inch.
It then gets the standard muzzle device,
so it's still capable of launching rifle grenades just like a regular pattern rifle.
And it still has a standard handguard on it, including bipod.
So ... in a military sense you can make this select fire, give it the bipod,
and you still have sort of a pseudo-light machine gun there.
Note that the handguards are not actually black.
This is an actual FN production original gun.
And when these were made, when they were imported, they actually came in with a
very dark greenish-brown sort of colour to the handguards.
We are quite used to seeing these folding charging handles on the FAL.
This was actually developed specifically for the paratrooper rifles
just to have one less thing that could get snagged on parachute web gear,
and all the other crap that paratroopers have when they are jumping out of airplanes.
And lastly, you've seen this sling kind of getting in the way so far.
But you can't have the sling on the stock if the stock is going to fold,
or else your sling's going to ... have weird configurations to it.
So they put the sling on the fixed portion of the buttstock here.
The front sling swivel is just the standard one
pivoting around the barrel in front of the bipod.
And lastly, the receiver does not have a cut for a carry handle.
Because I guess they just didn't feel like putting one in there, decided paratroopers don't need it.
I do want to take a moment to look at the markings here.
Because this is one of the 1,375 "Para" FALs that was originally imported into the US
back in, I think it was back in the early '80s, maybe even late '70s, when these first came in.
So markings on the receiver here are Cal 7.62 NATO, in parentheses .308.
Obviously they have a two position selector switch: safe, and repetition, that's semi-auto.
This is pinned so it can't go forward, there is no "auto" marking on it.
And the receiver internally is not capable of housing full-auto parts.
On the right side here we have the importer's name, Howco Distributing.
And by the way I take it back, this rifle has been fired.
Or at least this receiver has, because you can see the markings from ejected brass.
But boy, it sure has been cleaned extremely well.
And then here's maybe the most interesting part,
especially for a few of you guys in the audience,
Fabrique Nationale Herstal, Made in Belgium,
"FN .308", and a serial number.
By the way, all the ... FAL Paras that came in
were in a single continuous serial number block,
and that is S 159 5840 through S 159 7214.
So ... a total of 1,375 of them.
They took a while to sell because the price for one of these from the original distributors
was like you had ... a 50% premium to get a Para model over a standard FAL.
And even the standard guns were really quite expensive.
So originally I was saying in the '80s it's like $1,100 to get a standard FAL,
and it was like $1,800 to get one of these Para FALs.
So they didn't import a whole lot, but they stuck around and were available
for sale for a long time until they were finally all moved.
Anyway, the one thing I want to point out here is nowhere on this gun does it actually say "FAL".
Which is a seemingly very trivial distinction
that will actually have legal implications for some folks out there.
So if that applies to you, you know who you are.
Before we wrap this up I should mention that "50.63" thing, like where does that come from?
Well, FN had a designation, a model number, of the standard FAL that was 50.00.
That just indicated a regular FAL rifle.
They then had other variations with different suffixes.
So, for example, the 50.41 and 50.42 were heavy barrel patterns.
The 50.61 was a long barrel rifle with a folder.
So the standard full-length barrel, but this pattern of folding stock and these internals.
The 50.63 is what we have here, which is the shortened barrel and the folding stock.
And there was also a 50.64 which was just identical to the 61,
standard length (full length) barrel, folding stock,
but it had an aluminium alloy lower which made it just slightly lighter weight.
The "Para" FAL, as it was called, was actually a really successful product for FN,
these were very popular.
And they were reasonably popular here in the US too.
Probably would have been more so, except for the significant extra expense,
the premium that you would pay for one of these over a standard fixed-stock rifle, so.
It is certainly not common today to find them in as gorgeous a condition as this.
As you saw inside, I think this one's basically unfired.
So if you would like to add it to your own collection, if you've been looking for one of these,
well, take a look at the description text below.
You'll find a link there to ForgottenWeapons.com,
and from Forgotten Weapons you can link over to Rock Island's catalogue page on this guy,
and take a look at their pictures, their description,
their price estimate, and all that sort of stuff.
Thanks for watching.