[ Australian L2A1 ]
Hey guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
taking a look at an Australian L2A1
heavy-barrelled automatic rifle.
Not quite a light machine gun,
not quite just a rifle, something in between.
This is a pattern of the FAL, or L1A1, that was adopted by the Canadians,
and also by the Australians and the New Zealanders.
Although the British decided, "Nyah, we don't need that version."
The Belgians liked these. They were popular with some places but not with others.
The idea is basically you take the standard FAL action,
standard magazine, same cartridge - 7.62 NATO.
But you give it a heavy barrel, and you give it some sort of reasonably solid folding bipod,
and you can use it as a squad support weapon.
It is more capable of sustained automatic fire.
Production of the FAL in Australia took place at the Lithgow Arsenal.
They put the production tooling in place starting in 1958,
and they had the first year of significant serial production in 1960.
So this followed shortly after the FAL was put into production in Canada.
And the Australians did this with Canadian assistance.
There ... are differences between the Australian and
the Canadian and the British FAL rifles, or L1A1 rifles.
And ... this whole process was organised by what was called the Rifle Steering Committee.
And the idea was the main functional components of all of these
different national versions had to be interchangeable.
And they had to have tolerances and production quality control
that would allow them to freely interchange without any hand fitting.
However, there were various national preference items that could be changed.
So things like the configuration of the rear sight.
The Canadians opted for a dial rear sight with ... different apertures for different ranges.
Where the British and the Australians opted for a ramp rear sight like this,
with one aperture that you move for different range settings.
And a few other things, configuration of flash hiders,
configuration of bipod legs, perhaps furniture.
These things could be changed ... in different countries,
as long as the main operating parts stayed interchangeable.
So the heavy-barrelled version was substantially lower production than the standard rifle.
Lithgow would produce something like 220,000 L1A1 standard rifles,
and just under 10,000 (in fact 9,557) of the L2A1 heavy-barrelled version.
Interestingly, fewer than half of those, 4,000 and change, actually went to the Australian Army.
... The majority of them were actually exported to other clients.
In particular India and Malaysia both got over 1,000 of them.
Malaysia got something like 1,800 of the L2A1s.
And there were probably a dozen other countries that Australia exported these rifles to.
Papua New Guinea was one of the big ones.
Singapore got some, and a bunch of other smaller countries.
Ghana got some. New Zealand of course got its FAL rifles from Australia.
So Lithgow produced for a large area, especially ... sort of the Asian/Pacific/Island region.
Now before we dig into this rifle in detail,
I want to go through just briefly how these got into the United States,
because ... there are a couple of different ways that they did.
So, production of these rifles ran ... through the 1980s.
And in the early 1980s Lithgow ... actually produced a commercial version,
a semi-automatic only L1A1 rifle.
And they imported 158 of those into the United States
before the US import ban on this sort of rifle took hold.
After that 158 rifles came in, they also imported several hundred receivers.
So in this particular case, what we have is a Lithgow receiver
that was imported as just a receiver, that has had this rifle built up on it.
... And that construction was done before 1986,
so it was then converted into a machine gun and legally registered as such.
So that's the configuration of this particular rifle.
Now, let's take a closer look at it.
Since we were just talking about the exact status of this particular gun,
let's start with some receiver markings here.
We have SAF, which is a Lithgow Arsenal mark,
and then the serial number for the original receiver that this gun is built on.
... The 85 there indicates that this was a receiver made in 1985,
it is sequentially number 187,
JCB are the initials of the registrant who converted this into a machine gun.
And then Australia, so this is an original Lithgow production receiver.
I think it was imported by Onyx.
On the opposite side we have Rifle, 7.62mm, L1A1 A.
The extra "A" at the end is how the semi-automatic versions
that were imported from Australia were marked.
So this started off as a ... semi-auto rifle from Australia.
I think this is the remnant of the Onyx import mark,
which was removed when the rifle was built up,
which by the way is entirely legal to do.
We have our three position selector lever, safe, "R" is semi-auto,
and up in the front here we have full-auto.
That seven pointed star on the lower receiver here is the Australian final acceptance mark,
or definitive mark, and the broad arrow indicates military use.
So this lower was a military Australian-produced lower.
And we have the original rifle's serial number here on the right side of the lower.
So this lower assembly,
one of the main components that was built with this imported receiver,
this was originally a 1961 production L1A1 rifle.
That's "AD" there, it's a little worn.
So Australian again, sequential number 1771 of 1961.
Tracing that back through Mark Graham's website,
which is a very nice resource for this sort of thing,
this was actually an L1A1 rifle that was provided to Malaysia.
But, enough about the numbers, let's take a look at the L2A1 configuration itself.
Mechanically, the back end of the gun is basically identical to a standard FAL.
There is an interesting element to the Australian rifles here,
and that is in the controls.
We have a nice big magazine release, we have a manual bolt hold open,
and a folding charging handle.
The Australians decided that they actually didn't want the guns to lock open when empty.
And so these don't.
If we pull the magazine out, I can show you exactly why.
The FAL magazine has this tab right here at the back.
So when the follower comes all the way up to the top,
that will activate a bolt hold open.
And you can see how that would work on this, which is a Belgian FAL for comparison.
There's a little pin right there, and it's connected to this,
which is the bolt hold open lever.
So when the tab on the follower of the magazine pushes that pin up, it locks the bolt open.
If we look at our Australian rifle here, there's no pin.
So there's nothing for the magazine follower to push on.
The hold open lever itself is still here, and so it has functionality as a manual hold open.
If I pull the bolt open manually, I can then push this up and lock the bolt like that.
And then I can also use this as a manual release to close it.
But it doesn't function automatically.
That's one of those national preference sort of items
where this standard part is interchangeable, but the exact function varies.
We have a carry handle here, of course this was
fairly common on a lot of variations of the FAL.
Perhaps a little more useful on the heavy-barrelled guns that weigh more.
This, by the way, is a 21 inch heavy barrel.
Now the most distinctive part of the L2 pattern is the bipod.
And the way they designed this, the bipod doubles as the handguard.
So when the bipod is in this folded position, which, by the way,
is accomplished by two little tabs here,
which lock into these sort of locking surfaces on this wrap-around barrel piece.
When that's folded up, it functions as your front handguard.
A little wobbly of a front handguard, and really not ideal,
but it does reduce the bulk, ...
the idea of having to have a fold-up bipod and a handguard fitted on here.
And this is also well ventilated, because it's ... quite a ways away
from being in direct contact with the barrel.
So you got that going for it.
Now when this is unfolded, we have a spring
right there in the middle that's going to pop these out.
And the bipod has a fair bit of play to it. No pivot, a little bit of wobble, no pivot.
But it can rotate side to side like that.
We have basically the same muzzle device that was on the L1A1,
long slotted flash hider, bayonet lug, etc.
Now for magazines the Australians of course have an inch-pattern magazine,
so it's got a nice big lug on the front.
As opposed to metric which have a much smaller lug stamped in.
This is a separate piece added to the magazine.
And you'll notice, of course, that this is a 20 round magazine.
Well, they did develop a 30 round magazine for this pattern of heavy-barrelled FAL.
And in fact the British developed a 30 round magazine for their 7.62 NATO calibre Bren guns
which was compatible, interchangeable, with FAL rifles.
However, while the British continued to use a 30 round magazine for the Bren,
the Australians fairly quickly scrapped their 30 round L2A1 magazines.
For a couple of reasons, one was they found them to have reliability issues.
Having 10 extra rounds put a lot more friction in the magazine stack.
And having a spring powerful enough to push an extra 10 rounds
put more pressure on the bolt when the magazine was full.
All of these things together, it's not like the ... magazines won't run,
it's that they caused an unacceptably high incidence of malfunctions.
In addition to that, they found that the 30 round magazine
didn't give you a ton of space under the bipod when the bipod was deployed.
So the gun ... was less flexible,
it was more difficult to aim at an upward angle if you needed to.
The 20 round mags gave a lot better clearance.
And finally, in actual combat use,
the idea was this isn't really good as a light machine gun,
and they tried to discourage its use in full-automatic fire.
Instead it was recommended that this should be used as a semi-automatic rifle
that had basically an abnormally high capacity for sustained fire.
You could deliver something like 30 rounds a minute of sustained fire with an L2A1
for a much longer period than you could with a standard L1A1 because of its heavier barrel.
And the bipod gave it better support, better practical accuracy from a prone position.
And that's how they wanted these rifles to be used, not as pseudo light machine guns.
... In some places the problem with the extended magazine was they didn't like the ammo consumption.
In this case it wasn't quite that, it was they didn't like the heating,
and ... sort of the abuse of the rifles in a role that they weren't really quite cut out for.
So the Australians went back to just 20 round magazines.
That of course simplified some of the logistics,
it's the exact same magazine that was used in the standard L1A1 rifles.
I should also point out production of the L2A1 ran until 1982,
the L1A1 would run a bit longer.
In general this idea for a rifle of, "We'll take the standard infantry rifle,
we'll give it a heavier barrel and a bipod, and use it as an automatic support weapon,"
didn't work very well.
On the one hand you can look at this as the legacy of a gun like the FG-42,
which meets ... all of these criteria, and does so with a shorter length,
and a much better muzzle brake, and a few other different characteristics.
But, the United States tried this with the M15,
which was the support weapon version of the M14,
that was basically ditched before it even went into production.
The heavy-barrelled FAL like this was adopted by a number of countries,
but not very enthusiastically.
And they pretty much all found them to be not quite as useful as they had anticipated,
and transitioned over to more purpose-built machine guns.
In 7.62 NATO calibre this was often the FN MAG,
which came out at about the same time as the FAL.
So ... I think they're a cool relic from ... basically the 1960s period
of, "Hey, this might work," and then, "Oh, maybe it doesn't quite work so well.
Maybe we'll just go get some belt-fed FN MAGs instead."
They are of course obviously quite rare in the United States,
especially as transferable machine guns.
So, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.