Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the National Firearms
Centre, part of the British Royal Armouries at Leeds,
and we are taking a look at an Australian submachine gun.
In fact the last military Australian submachine gun that was actually produced.
This is the F1, and it was adopted in 1962 to replace the Owen gun.
Now the Owen was a remarkably ugly, and remarkably successful
submachine gun design that came out of Australia during World War Two.
I have a separate video up on the Owen.
So if you're interested in that, I recommend taking a look at that video for all the background.
It'll be linked at the end of this one.
At any rate, the Owen was getting somewhat long in the tooth, and the Australian military was looking for a replacement.
And so they designed a new gun that would be a little bit cheaper to manufacture,
but they wanted to try and keep the best aspects of the Owen. And
well, ... after we take a close look, we'll talk about whether or not they succeeded in that.
But they, of course, kept the very iconic top ... mounted magazine design.
They ... actually kind of adopted a lot of the elements of the Sterling submachine gun.
So this gun would be produced from 1962 until 1973, and they would make in total about 25,000 of them.
So really not all that many in the grand scheme of things.
The gun would be in service until the 1990s, when it was ultimately replaced by a version of the F88,
the ... Austeyr F88, basically a Steyr AUG that was adopted by the Australian military.
So at that point, as with so many things the Austeyr was intended to replace both
the rifle and the submachine gun in a single ... bullpup, you know, compact rifle package.
And it did that, replacing the F1 and the L1A1, the Australian FAL.
So, let's go ahead and take a closer look at how this thing works.
It is a simple blowback action, but it does have some unique elements to it.
Our markings on here are on the side of the pistol grip assembly.
Actually not the firing assembly itself, which is removable,
but on the extension that's welded onto the receiver to contain the trigger group.
And that's just simply Submachine Gun, 9mm, F1.
And then a serial number there.
... Honestly, I haven't seen enough of these to know exactly what the serial number progression is,
and there's not much information written on them.
My suspicion is that 73 is the year of manufacture, and they restarted the serial numbers each year.
But I'm not a hundred percent sure on that.
The other side has our selector switch which isn't actually in a position there, (there we go).
So that's the safe position, that is the fire position. It then has a progressive trigger,
so pulling back just this far will fire in semi-auto. And you can actually hear the disconnector clicking there.
And if you want to fire in full-auto you just pull the trigger all the way back.
We have some writing up in here.
There are two pins that hold the actual fire control group in place. Those pins just push right out.
However, you have to rotate them into the free position instead of locked, so that's locked,
that is free. And in that position we're able to just push these pins out.
We'll get to disassembly though in just a moment.
The charging handle is pretty typical, it is non-reciprocating.
Charge the gun back, close the charging handle, which then blocks off this slot in the side of the receiver.
Prevents dirt from getting in there.
The gun does have a nice inline design. The ... receiver tube runs straight into this stock.
Handles fairly nicely. In typical kind of Commonwealth preference
there is a sling swivel on top of the buttstock, you'd see that on the Owen gun as well.
The rear sight is a fixed aperture. However, it can fold down like this, flush on to the receiver
to prevent it from being damaged.
That's almost a necessary thing ... as thin and flimsy as this rear sight is.
I would ... expect this to be very prone to damage.
If you are wandering through the jungle in Vietnam, which by the way is where these things were used,
I think it would be very easy to catch this on something and bend that,
especially this little top bit with the aperture, if not knock the whole thing out of canter.
Interestingly, instead of being mounted somewhere out on the muzzle, the front sight is mounted to the side of the magazine well.
On the one hand that reduces your sight radius to something about a foot,
if not a little bit less than that, 400mm or less.
On the other hand, this is a nice easy place to put the sight that allows it to be at the proper elevation,
without adding, say, a front sight tower sticking off the front of the gun.
So you know, with decisions that one might disagree with on gun design like this, there's almost always a rationale.
We may not agree with that rationale, but they're never done randomly.
And so the decision was made to put the front sight back here where it just adds to the mass of the magazine well.
Speaking of which, the magazine release button is on the left side here. Push in, pull the magazine out.
These guns use standard Sterling magazines. They will also use the Canadian made Sterling pattern magazines,
which don't have these cool rollers in them. And they can actually also feed from Owen gun magazines, apparently.
Which makes sense if you're replacing the Owen, it allows you to still use some of the magazines that are in service and in inventory.
The Stirling mag, which is what it was really intended to be used with and primarily used with,
is a fantastic submachine gun magazine. It is double stack, double feed,
the rollers give it a very nice smooth operation, and it ... will hold 34 rounds.
At the front we have a bayonet lug on the side of the gun.
There's a sling swivel of course, but then we have a ... lug for the ring on the bayonet
and a locking lug. This will hold a standard SLR FAL pattern bayonet.
You can remove the ... barrel by pressing in this button and unscrewing this front assembly.
Unfortunately, this one is really tight and I don't have the wrench on hand to do it,
so we're gonna leave the barrel in place, but we will go ahead and disassemble the back end of the gun.
Start by taking the buttstock off. There's just a nice easy catch right there.
Rotate the buttstock about 45 degrees, it comes off with the recoil spring.
Pull the bolt out of the back, very simple bolt.
Then we've got the trigger assembly to remove.
As I mentioned before, we rotate both of these pins to the vertical free orientation
and then the pins can just be pushed out.
If you look at this pin you'll see it has two flats cut into it,
that's how it manages to be removable in one orientation and fixed in the other.
Once those pins are out, then we can just pull this
(there we go), we can pull this assembly out. You'll notice they did in fact, just use an FAL grip on this thing.
Along with probably the trigger guard, and I think the trigger itself.
Or at least the bottom half of the trigger is taken from the Australian FAL.
Once we have the grip out you can see how it works here.
When I pull the trigger back just a little bit, it drops this sear just enough to release the bolt,
and then trips it back up through the semi-auto disconnector.
If I then pull the trigger the rest of the way it's going to pull this down and hold it down.
The receiver itself is basically just a tube with a bunch of, you know, all the stuff welded on to it that you need.
There's the locking interface for the rear end cap, the latch for holding it in place,
charging handle, retained by that, rear sight, magazine well, we've got our
basically frame for holding the fire control group in there.
... I didn't mention this before, this is just a very simple basic hand stop
to ... give you some warning before you pull your hand back under the ejection port.
... Since it feeds from the top, it ejects right out the bottom. There are good reasons to do a top feed design like this.
For one thing you do get a bit of a bonus and an assist from gravity in both feeding and ejection.
It's harder to get a case stuck in there when the whole bottom is open and gravity is going to pull cases down and out.
It also makes it harder for dirt and debris to get into the gun.
You know if you have ... an ejection port on the side, dirt can get in and it'll sit in the receiver tube.
If it's literally pointing down ... any dirt that goes in tends to fall right back out.
And then lastly having a top mounted magazine has some advantages and some disadvantages,
this is something that always comes up. A top-mounted magazine has the benefit of
you ... can go nice and low prone with the gun, because you can have a long magazine without ... hitting the ground.
It also means you don't have a magazine sticking out the side where it could interfere with brush
or anything else that you're trying to walk through.
The downside, of course, is that it does interfere with your centre mounted sights.
So sights on this sort of thing have to be offset to one side.
One of the curious questions to me that I have not yet been able to find an answer to
is why the Australians offset their sights to the right of the gun instead of the left.
This is great for a left-handed shooter like me, but it's a little bit awkward for
right-handed shooters who have to roll their head a little bit over the side of the gun to line up on the sights.
The Australians are the only country that I've ever run into, at least that I can recall running into, that have done
... right side sights. Basically left-hander sights. And it's not just the F1, they also did this on the Owen gun.
Everybody else who has ever done offset sights puts them on the left side,
which is more convenient for right-handed shooters who make up the vast majority of any military force.
So, if you happen to know why the Australians did this I'd love to find out,
otherwise I will probably have to go to some place like Lithgow and ask the people there.
The bolt for the F1 really doesn't have anything particularly new or innovative or different about it.
It is just a big heavy mass. It ... is longer than ... a lot of submachine gun bolts,
but it's not necessarily that much heavier, because it has a lot of hollow space in the back where the recoil spring nests in.
It does have a fixed firing pin. It's actually going to be like this when lined up in the gun.
Feeds from the top, extractor on the bottom,
kicks cartridges out downwards, of course.
... Apparently part of the idea with the F1 was to have a lower rate of fire than the Owen.
The Owen wasn't all that fast, the Owen was something like 700 rounds a minute.
The F1 is allegedly more like 600. To my mind that difference isn't really significant, but apparently it is true.
I haven't actually fired an ... F1 and I do always take printed rate of fire numbers with a grain of salt,
because there are a lot of factors that can go into those.
There's the whole thing field stripped.
Again, pretty basic simple submachine gun, so.
Well, let's go ahead and talk about how it actually handles, and how this qualitatively compares to
the other submachine guns that are out there.
From the sources that I found it appears that, while these were originally intended as front-line combat guns,
in Vietnam (which is the primary place where they were actually used in combat), they were fairly quickly
replaced by American M16 rifle and carbine variants which were preferable to a lot of the soldiers.
And these kind of got relegated to a sort of secondary usage, guys like drivers.
And to my mind looking at one of these, and admittedly without having fired one,
I think they managed to lose a lot of sort of the special sauce that made the Owen such a really fantastic gun.
The top mounted magazine they have retained, which is good for what it is.
However the sight radius is quite a bit shorter, which doesn't help things.
I think the progressive trigger is a mistake. I don't think those have ever been really all that effective,
... they are not preferable in my mind to a selector switch, especially a simple three position selector.
If you want to have semi-auto, just take your safety switch and give it three positions, a safe, a semi, and a full.
I think that works better than having this sort of progressive trigger pull idea.
They lost the major element that made Owen gun so incredibly reliable, which is
basically this split in the gun where the bolt is up in the front,
but it is very specifically and very effectively segregated from the recoil spring in the back,
which allows it to really be very resistant to ingress of dirt and debris.
And the F1 here gets rid of that in favour of just a very simple typical open tube design like a Sten or a Stirling.
The grip is fine, the stock is fine, the inline design is fine.
The rear sight I think is a problem, much too easily damaged there.
And overall, I don't want to say this is a bad submachine gun. Everything I've been able to find out,
everything I've discovered from handling it, it's a perfectly adequate, good submachine gun.
It's just not in that upper echelon of really great submachine guns like the Owen was, so.
At any rate, I'd like to give a big thanks to the Royal Armouries for allowing me to pull out their F1.
These things are pretty rare to find outside of Australia these days, so it was a really good opportunity for me.
If you're interested in visiting the Pattern Room, well, the Pattern Room Collection which is part of the NFC today.
They are open by appointment only to researchers, not to the general public at large.
But if you contact them via their website, which is in the description text below,
they'd be happy to chat to you and make an appointment to arrange a visit for whatever research you're doing.
Thanks for watching.