Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company
taking a look at an FN FAL with an optic on it.
So today if you look for ways to put optics on FALs
you're gonna find basically some clamp-on Picatinny style mounts.
... Those are pretty sturdy, and they're definitely the only way to attach modern optics to a FAL.
However, that is not how the FAL was originally designed to include an optic.
So there are actually a whole bunch of different optical setups that have been used on the FAL
because it was adopted by a bunch of different militaries.
And at the beginning each military would come up with its own optics mounting method and its own optic to use.
So the Belgian military used scopes made by a company called OIP.
In fact the Belgians took the scopes off their old FN 49 rifles and put them on their new FALs.
The German army then came up with its own system.
There was someone at some point, possibly the South Africans, someone actually used an O.E.G.,
an Armson O.E.G. (Occluded Eye Gunsight) specifically built on a FAL top cover. That's pretty cool.
However by the 1970s FN was offering scoped rifles itself, and it was able to do this because
FN, as having become kind of an industrial conglomerate, actually had its own optics division.
So they made their own scopes and this is one of them.
So the starting point for this is the sheet metal top cover of the FAL. And on a normal FAL that's just a rounded top cover.
What they did to mount optics was actually design a different style of
top cover that has a larger surface area in it. To which they riveted a
heavy-duty scope base, and then mounted a STANAG pattern scope.
So there's no Picatinny rail anywhere on this, there're just two standard screw attachment holes.
And you'll find that as fairly typical for NATO pattern scopes through the '60s, '70s and '80s.
Just to point out here, the rifle that this is mounted on is an actual FN Belgian production FAL.
So this was imported into the US before 1989, and it is the correct configuration
to be a rifle that would have been shipped in this configuration from FN
to presumably, well, to typically a military customer.
Most notably it's got the late pattern muzzle brake device that FN developed.
And of course it also has the folding bipod, which is a nice beneficial feature to have on a rifle with a scope.
Now if I pop this open I can take the bolt out,
and then I can take the top cover out to show you. This is a pretty tight fit.
There we go. This may not be as sturdy as a solid, you know, as a bolted on piece of Picatinny rail,
But these are actually reasonably good scope mounts. Better than you might expect.
So you can see the outside of the rivets here, and then you can see where they go through on the inside.
There are a few different designs of these top covers, some of them have even more reinforcing than this one.
As for the scope itself, you will find this simply marked "FN" and serialised.
We have adjustable focus back here. It is 24mm at the viewing end
and it has a slight bell and it actually expands out to 28mm at the front end.
There is an elevation adjustment dial on top as you might expect, with a BDC cam, a bullet drop compensator.
So it's going to go from 100 out to 600 metres.
And it's worth noting that FN used the same scope for both the FAL and the FNC rifles.
On the FNC there will be a BDC cam here calibrated for 5.56mm cartridges.
That will be marked either "92" or "109" or "SS109" depending on the exact 5.56 loading that it was designed for.
So this one has no such marking and that indicates that it is in fact a 7.62mm NATO BDC cam.
We then also have a windage adjustment knob over here on the right side.
This is really pretty basic simple stuff on a typical scope.
Now you can find other manufacturer's scopes.
In fact typically very similar scopes, kind of the NATO standard was usually for a 4x power scope
that'll have a very similar profile to this.
There were a couple of 4x24s as well as this 4x28 pattern.
Hensoldt shows up a lot and so do other manufacturers, but this is the one that FN actually manufactured in-house.
So there is a tunnel through the scope base here, but it's actually meant more of a lightening cut than an actual
... ability to use iron sights, because while you can see the irons through there
it's not actually quite lined up with the iron sight. So it doesn't give you a very good sight picture.
So here's a view through the reticle. It's kind of a cool design, you've got a German post coming up from the bottom.
And then you've got a horizontal line with some indicator hashes that will allow you to determine range or windage.
Well, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. I know I personally really get a kick out of these old scoped Cold War battle rifles.
I think they're really cool. And they're also really quite rare in comparison to the base rifles.
So I like to show them to you guys whenever I have the opportunity to find them myself.
Hopefully you enjoyed this one. If you'd like to know more about this rifle, it is of course on Rock Island's auction catalogue.
And you can find out more about Rock Island themselves by taking a look at the links in the description text below.
There's one to Rock Island's Instagram page and one to their YouTube channel, so lots of good stuff there to check out.
Thanks for watching.