Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I am Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look
at a monstrous .50 calibre rifle. This is a Serbu BFG-50A.
The "50" of course stands for the calibre,
which is .50 Browning machine gun, or .50 BMG,
that is 12.7x99mm in metric.
The "A" is for automatic because this is a self-loading rifle,
which distinguishes it from Serbu's previous .50 cal,
which was the BFG-50 which was a single-shot bolt-action rifle.
I'll let you figure out what the "BFG" stands for.
Now, ... the original BFG-50 went into production in the late 1990s,
I think 1999, although I didn't ask specifically.
Development of this rifle began in 2008, and it took about
three years to get it to the point of actually being ready for market.
... The first ones were shipped in late 2011.
And, it's funny, I actually I asked Mark Serbu
(because this is not so much a company as it is one guy with a couple of employees),
I asked him, "What was the market for this gun?
You know, was it intended for the military? Was it intended for target shooters?"
And he kind of laughed and he told me, "Oh, it was intended for Mark Serbu."
That ... his company builds a variety of unusual and unorthodox sorts of guns.
One of the others that they're most well-known for is the Super-Shorty,
which is a little tiny two shot pump shotgun.
He basically builds guns that he thinks are cool, that he'd like to have.
And then apparently his tastes are such that stuff he likes tends to sell.
At least well enough to keep the company in business.
So that's who the BFG-50A was made for, it was made for Mark Serbu.
Apparently he did actually get some military interest very early on in the development,
or in the marketing of this. The military ordered two guns,
he was basically unable to supply them in time to meet their requirements.
And so there hasn't really been any further US military interest.
The US military of course ended up adopting the Barrett.
... There are only a couple of American self-loading .50 cal rifles,
there's basically this and a couple iterations of the Barrett.
And there's a lot in common between these, especially in form factor.
If you just set this and a Barrett next to each other you'll notice a lot of similarities.
The stock, the receiver, tend to look about the same.
They both use AR pistol grips. They both actually use the same magazines,
we'll touch on that in detail in a moment.
However, there is a significant difference, and that is the Barrett is a short-recoil operated gun.
Which means that the barrel actually reciprocates
about an inch back into the receiver as part of the cycling process.
The Serbu has a fixed barrel, and this contributes to it having generally much better accuracy
than the Barrett for all the reasons you would expect.
If the barrel is moving, it's not going to return to exactly the same position after every shot.
When you have a fixed barrel, that's not a problem.
So, this is a fixed barrel gun, and it very interestingly
is a direct gas impingement gun, a true direct gas impingement.
So let me go ahead and open this up, and I'll show you exactly how it works.
One of the first things that struck me when I ... started handling this
was how remarkably smooth the bolt throw is.
If I didn't know better, I would think that like
there were supposed to be two recoil springs, and one of them was missing from the gun.
I know that that's not the case.
This ... particular example is basically Serbu's demonstration model.
It is fairly old and it has had several thousand rounds through it,
and according to Mark Serbu what has happened is the
hardened recoil guide rod has actually worn a little bit on the spring,
and the spring profile is kind of D-shaped now instead of round,
and that's made it just incredibly smooth.
Now when I get back to this point, you can actually feel the amount ... of resistance
increase right here (I don't know how well you can quite see that),
right here we hit the hydraulic buffer that cushions the end of the bolt throw.
So that happens at the very end.
We have a fire control group here that is AR-15.
So just exactly like you would expect on an AR, we have safe, we have fire.
This is a hammer fired gun, uses an AR pistol grip. Simply a matter of, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
These parts are available, they're very well proven, so why not use them?
As for magazines, we have a nose in rock back style of magazine.
This is in fact interchangeable with early Barrett magazines.
Now apparently at some point here Barrett made a little bit of a tweak to their magazine design,
and new Barrett magazines are not directly compatible with the Serbu guns, but early ones are.
Serbu does make magazines, so you'll see the follower on this one is marked Serbu.
This is a 10 round capacity magazine.
The bipod is pretty darn simple. It's just got a little bit of pivot here.
And then the legs themselves are spring-loaded,
you can lock them into the downward position to use.
Or you can lock them either forward or back for stowage, whatever you prefer.
There's a little better view of that muzzle brake, a big four chamber sort of brake.
Nothing else particularly fancy there.
This is the gas block with the gas tube.
Now, to talk more about how this works, let's go ahead and take it apart.
Disassembly is a little bit unorthodox in that we start by removing the bolt handle.
And you do so with a method that's not really used anywhere else.
On the very front of the bolt carrier we have a spring-loaded plunger,
right there, and what you actually have to do is push that in,
and that will allow you to pull the bolt handle, right there, out of the gun.
See if I can do this.
There we go, that's in, and
now you can see that the bolt handle has come slightly out. I can pull that out.
Now we can take the back end off the receiver, and take everything out through the back.
So next up we have this cross pin.
Take that off. And now there's just a little bit of residual tension in the recoil spring there.
And we can pull
this guy out. So that
is your hydraulic buffer to push in at the end of travel.
And beyond that, like, that's all it is.
It's just a plug for the end of the receiver, holds the butt pad and the hydraulic buffer.
Next up, pull out the recoil spring, there's quite a lot of recoil spring there.
And then I can pull the bolt assembly
(there we go)
out the back.
So mechanically the way this works is gas is tapped off the barrel here, comes into this tube.
That tube simply vents right here. That's just an open, hollow tube.
It does have a few gas rings around the outside of it to minimize leakage a little better,
to reduce the rate of leakage.
But ... the bolt nests over that tube right here.
So the tube sits right in that. And when you fire, gas comes venting out of that tube into this blind hole,
which simply pushes the whole bolt ... carrier assembly backwards.
While we're up here, I want to mention one thing about the chamber, which is sitting right under there.
The BFG-50A does not use the standard military .50 BMG chamber,
it uses a proprietary chamber that Serbu developed that's a little bit tighter,
at the throat and at the base, that he found gives better accuracy.
He said it's not quite ... like the full-on precision shooter's really tight match chamber,
It's in a way kind of like a .50 calibre wild, an intermediate level of chamber.
But that helps him improve accuracy over something like a Barrett.
Now, when this thing's actually in the gun, the recoil spring sits on the side of the bolt carrier like that,
and its guide rod reciprocates through when the bolt travels backwards.
This guide rod is hardened by the way, nitrided.
We have a three lug triangular rotating bolt.
He actually originally developed it with just a single plunger extractor,
but found that it just didn't really quite work well enough,
went ahead and added a second one. So dual plunger extractors.
I apologise, this thing's a little dirty because I went out and shot it, and I haven't cleaned it.
Anyway, as the bolt carrier pulls backward it's going to run a cam pin here,
rotate the bolt, unlock it, just like you would get with an AR-180 or AR-15 style of system.
Now there's one particularly cool little feature here, and that is this pin on the bolt itself.
Now you'll see there's a little recess in the bolt carrier that that pin drops into.
And ... if the gun's working that pin does nothing at all.
The purpose however, and according to Serbu this is an idea
he got from actually a Daewoo light machine gun, is that should the cam pin break
then you would be in a situation where theoretically
the ... bolt carrier could come all the way forward
which means the firing pin could protrude like that, and the gun could fire.
But without the cam pan it might not actually rotate and lock,
and the last thing you want is a .50 cal firing out of battery or firing unlocked.
And what that pin does is ensure that if the bolt hasn't rotated fully into the locked position,
that pin will hit the front of the bolt carrier
and prevent it from going far enough forward to allow the firing pin to protrude.
So that is a very simple passive safety system, that's really a good peace of mind sort of thing
for a manufacturer for sure, and also for a shooter.
Now to continue taking this apart, what we need to do next is remove our firing pin retainer.
There's a little plunger right here, I push that down, and then I can rotate this around.
... There we go, that comes out, so that just retains the firing pin.
Firing pin comes out, that's quite a large firing pin.
And then we can ...
there we go, and we can pull out the cam pin.
You'll notice this, right here, is not quite symmetrical, so that it can only go in the correct way.
Three big rounded locking lugs.
The one part on here that is apparently the most prone
to breakage over time on these guns is the extractor.
They can go a couple thousand rounds, but there is a tremendous amount of force on that extractor,
and that is the weakest point in the system.
There's our bolt carrier, basically just a lot of mass to slow the initial opening of the gun.
A couple of quick material notes.
To remediate some of the issues with the extractor, the extractors are currently made of S7 tool steel,
which is a remarkably tough steel.
The firing pin, in order to prevent problems with slam fire.
The potential of this rather ... large firing pin detonating a primer when the bolt closes.
Well, this is made of titanium, and so it's actually extremely light, very strong.
And that's one of the cool uses of titanium in firearms is to make light but strong firing pins.
Now we can go ahead and disassemble a little more.
There are two pins here that hold this lower assembly on.
Pop those out.
And they are both captive.
So there is our lower assembly. While we have AR-15 parts that you can see from the outside,
some of the stuff on the inside is not straight AR-15, obviously the hammer is not.
We have dual hammer springs in here to make sure that that's got enough oomph
to ... get that firing pin moving and detonate a .50 BMG primer.
But that's about all, the rest of that.
I can't quite fit everything on screen at once because this has a very long receiver and barrel assembly,
but there is your field stripped Serbu BFG-50A.
Alright, I can't let the opportunity to try actually shooting this go, now that I have it in my possession for filming.
So ... when I got this I actually like don't have a good .50 cal appropriate scope lying around,
so I went ahead and put my machine gun optic on it.
I figure I'm not actually going to be shooting this for groups today,
because it's really hot and I don't have any really good precision ball ammo for this.
(And, hey, I'm not really that great of a shot anyway.)
But we are going to shoot it to see just how smooth and comfortable it is.
Because that is ... one of several claims that Serbu makes as to why their gun is better than others.
So let's do that.
It is a tremendously smooth bolt.
Now this is their demo gun that's had several thousand rounds through it,
and that's smoothed it out quite a lot. Man, it is nice to run that bolt.
So let's see if it's equally nice to shoot. Here we go.
Alright.
There's a lot of concussion to that, but the recoil is actually not tremendously bad.
Like, ... with this red dot it comes right back on target remarkably quickly, so pretty darn cool.
The goals that Serbu had in developing this rifle were light weight and soft shooting.
Which kind of don't tend to go together.
As well as simplicity of manufacturing and design, and they've pulled that off pretty well.
The weight of this guy is 23 pounds.
We'll compare it to the Barrett because that's really its only real easy comparison.
There are a couple different versions of Barrett, they vary a bit.
They have 3 inches more barrel than this, this is a 26 inch barrel,
typically the Barrett M82A1 is a 29 inch barrel.
But the Barrett weighs 30 pounds where this weighs 23.
So successfully reduced the weight substantially, like 25%.
It is definitely a simpler gun, there are a lot fewer parts.
Part of that is things like choosing to have a fixed barrel.
Without having the barrel move, you have a lot fewer parts to work with.
The direct gas impingement system is a very simple system
that requires very few parts, none of them moving.
And this is a remarkably smooth shooting, comfortable ...
comfortable as far as any .50 is comfortable to shoot.
It's interesting with these, you have a combination of felt recoil,
namely the gun kicking into you, and also felt concussion
which is the shock wave that comes out of the muzzle of these things.
This has of course a fairly chunky muzzle brake,
not quite as big as a Barrett, although the efficiency may be
better or worse, I'm honestly not sure.
Also it has a hydraulic buffer in the back
to cushion the end of travel of the bolt carrier, which is a good thing.
That helps reduce the felt recoil, but this increases concussion.
So ... you've got a trade-off going there.
These are remarkably accurate guns. I've seen reports of sub-minute of angle shooting with these,
which is something you don't typically get with a Barrett, largely because of its reciprocating barrel.
The fixed barrel really contributes to a much more accurate gun.
So, I would like to give a big thanks to Mark Serbu for loaning me this.
This is his demo example of the ... BFG-50A that he sent out here for us to do some filming with.
So hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]