Hi guys, thanks for tuning into another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at Bear Arms up in Scottsdale, Arizona,
and we're gonna take a look at an accessory today.
We have a Rhodesian G3 handguard insulator.
Not exactly the most momentous huge thing,
but I think these are pretty interesting.
So when most people think of Rhodesian firearms
they think of baby poop painted FALs.
... The FAL was the standard long arm of the Rhodesian military,
and they did often paint them in that weird sort of yellow green
camouflage paint job, kind of similar to the Australians and their Owen Guns.
However, Rhodesia, especially towards the end of the existence of Rhodesia,
was kind of desperate for any guns that it could get its hands on. It was subject to international embargo and
short of arms. And ... there weren't exactly any major arms factories in Rhodesia.
So ... probably the biggest secondary rifle that the Rhodesians had was the G3.
Now this particular example is a PTR, a modern semi-auto G3,
but it's set up in the same pattern and the same basic furniture
that ... the Rhodesian version would have used.
So most of the Rhodesian ones were originally of Portuguese manufacture,
having come into the area by way of Angola.
And one of the problems with them is the front handguard. It's very thin, it's not that great at insulating.
So the South Africans would come up with their own way to fix this problem.
The Rhodesians didn't really have the same resources that the South Africans did,
and one of the things that they came up with was this handguard insulator.
So let me show you that up close.
So what we have here is basically a resin sort of (I'm pretty sure it's just resin),
two-part clamshell that clamps over the existing handguard.
So there is a little bit of texturing on the inside here so that this will sit nicely
up against the original hand guards, and then a pair of metal brackets that are
moulded into these on either side to clamp over the top of the original handguards.
They are held together by a pair of just very basic little machine screws.
There is a nut molded into the resin on the left hand, no, I'm sorry it's on this one, on the right hand side.
And that's all there is to it. They've got kind of this brownish glossy colour to them.
These are often not in very good condition, they are relatively fragile.
Let me show you one on the gun.
So conveniently on the G3 you can take the handguards off very easily, and so we pulled the handguard off.
You can see the pretty flimsy little original sheet metal heat guard inside the handguard.
And the whole purpose of this thing, is that that little sheet metal bit wasn't sufficient.
Like this whole thing would overheat pretty quickly and pretty easily,
and the Rhodesians wanted a way to have a better insulated handguard.
Now this one isn't tightened down super tight, in part because it's fragile and
the owner doesn't want to actually break it,
but it's a little curious to try and figure out exactly how this was supposed to be mounted.
There is a little bracket up here and you can put the handguard up in front of that and that'll limit its travel.
But it actually seems to be more likely that you would put this all the way on the back of the handguard.
So if we go ahead and mount this back on the rifle,
there.
(Pin through.) This can slide back to right there, and at that point
this mounting bracket hits this extension on the charging handle tube, that locks it fairly nicely in place.
You can pull back on it and it's not going to slide around. And that's
... for many people going to be one of the most comfortable places to be holding the rifle anyway.
Now I've never actually seen a picture of these mounted on a Rhodesian G3,
but then again there aren't a whole lot of pictures of Rhodesian G3s out there
from, you know, from the period when they were actually in use in combat.
So I do know for a fact that these came out of Rhodesia, so their origin isn't in doubt.
The question is why don't they show up more often?
And I suspect the answer is they weren't all that well made, they're fairly fragile,
and they probably just weren't very successful.
I suspect that someone got ... a government contract to make a batch of handguard insulators,
you know, someone in the military was complaining that G3 handguards got hot too fast, and what could they do about it?
And the government, you know, sent out a contract for, I don't know, a couple hundred of these probably, 500 maybe.
Got them in, tried them out, and discovered they're kind of fragile,
and they kind of slide around on the handguards, and they're not really all that great.
And maybe the problem wasn't as big as they had originally thought it was,
and so there was probably no further follow up. And you end up with these just still occasionally floating around.
Some broken, some still intact like this one.
So like I said, not exactly the most earth- shattering piece of technology here.
But I think it's ... really cool, just a little anecdote, a little bit of visibility into the state of Rhodesian
domestic manufacturing and arms necessities in the late '70s or so.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, big thanks to Bear Arms up in Scottsdale
for loaning me use of the handguard and also their model rifles to use for the video.
Bear Arms is a pretty awesome gun shop in general, and also an NFA dealer as well.
So if you're looking to have any sort of machine guns, short barrelled rifles, suppressors transferred,
check them out. They'll do you well. They're the shop that I go to for all that sort of thing myself.
Thanks for watching.