Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the
Kessler Auction House in Switzerland.
One of the biggest and best firearm auction houses in all of mainland Europe.
And I have the very cool opportunity today to take a look at a trio of prototype Swiss rifles.
These are ... the E22 and the C42.
They are the rifles that were produced by Waffenfabrik Bern in the competition
that ultimately resulted in the Swiss army's Sturmgewehr 90, which was of course a SIG rifle.
So there are two main primary rifle manufacturers in Switzerland.
One was Waffenfabrik Bern, which was a state run arsenal,
and the other was the SIG company, now called Swiss Arms.
And when the Swiss army wanted to replace its Sturmgewehr 57,
this large roller-locked 7.5 Swiss calibre rifle,
with something a little more modern, a little more modular,
and in a smaller calibre, they held an open trial.
And in 1982 the first troop trials took place.
And there ... was a rifle submitted by the Bern arsenal, and there was a rifle submitted by SIG.
SIG of course submitted the 541, which was ultimately accepted and won the trials.
Bern submitted this, and they actually submitted two different versions.
The E22 is in a 6.45mm new proprietary calibre that was being experimented with.
It was called the GP 80 and actually developed from the .250 Savage case.
It's an interesting cartridge, definitely.
It's one of those ones kind of like .280 British, not quite a full power cartridge,
but definitely a big step up from cartridges like the 5.45 Russian or the 5.56.
At the same time, recognising that this cartridge might not be the best solution for the army,
they also submitted the rifle under the name C42 in standard 5.56 NATO calibre.
And we have a rifle length in 6.45, a rifle length in 5.56, and a carbine in 5.56 as well.
... There are a bunch of things that the Swiss were looking for in a rifle.
One of them was modularity, and so these actually have quick detach barrels.
And they are actually really quick detach, it's pretty cool,
I'll show you that in a moment when we take these apart.
They were also of course looking for the Swiss tradition of marksmanship.
And that's ultimately really probably the single biggest factor that sank these guns,
is they just weren't quite as accurate as SIG's rifles.
However, there were a number of other problems.
... The disassembly wasn't as good, there's a part on here that's very easily lost.
... But ultimately they just didn't quite shoot as well.
And that's a really big deal in Switzerland.
So let's take a closer look at these, and we'll take one apart
because it's got some, well, rather novel bits of the mechanism inside.
So here the two lengths side-by-side,
obviously the carbine is a good ... 4 inches shorter than the full-length rifle.
This was of course intended for rear echelon troops,
and then people like vehicle crews or other folks
who weren't front-line infantry, who didn't need the full-length rifle.
Note that the full-length rifle is also equipped with a bipod.
And it has ... grenade launching capability on the barrel,
that's what that muzzle device is for, and of course a bayonet lug.
The carbine version can't launch grenades, doesn't have a bayonet lug, doesn't have a bipod.
None of those functions are really important for the carbine.
Now a bunch of these capabilities were specified by the Swiss military request for the rifles.
So, like with the SIG ... 541 and then 550 that were ultimately adopted,
all of these rifles have folding stocks, you can see that here.
There is a button on the bottom of the stock, if we push that in
and then fold the stock over, it makes for a more compact rifle for transit.
There is a full-hand trigger guard here, kind of like the Steyr AUG or the French FAMAS.
This is of course so that you can fire the gun using mittens or heavy gloves
without having to have a separate trigger finger.
And in fact the trigger on these rifles is remarkably good.
So if there were accuracy problems, that had to have been in the construction
or just the fundamentals of the design, because the trigger is really nice.
And here we have the 5.56 and the 6.45mm versions.
While in this camera frame this one looks smaller, these actually use the exact same receivers
just with a little bit of modification right up in here in the magazine well.
We have ... 20 round magazines I believe were standard for both.
And you can clearly see a substantial size difference between the two magazines.
The 6.45 cartridge was actually not all that high performance given its actual size.
It ... was 6.45x48mm and it fired a 97 grain bullet at 2,950 feet per second.
So looking at the front of the magazines you can definitely see,
not only is it slightly longer than 5.56 (there we go), it's also substantially wider.
And that's because it had a much larger ... diameter cartridge case.
Both of these are very typical nose-in rock-back magazines.
You'd get the same thing again on the SIG 550 that was eventually adopted.
Now if we look at the two different guns from the bottom.
I have these lined up, so you can see they are in fact the exact same length out here.
And what they did to make up for the difference in the cartridge lengths
is just vary the length of this button.
This is by the way the barrel removal latch.
And you can see on the 5.56 it's a little bit longer.
On the 6.45 it's just a little bit shorter to make space for a longer magazine.
Now let's take a look at markings, there are only a couple here and we'll start with this 6.45mm gun.
And these have an "E" prefix serial number in two places, the upper and the lower assemblies.
And the only other marketing you'll find on these is a "WF", that's for Waffenfabrik.
And that's in the folding-stock trunnion right there.
The 5.56 calibre guns all have a "C" prefix as they were the C42 rifles.
And I should have pointed out, there ... is a serial number on the bolt as well.
On the last one we saw it was worn off and hard to see.
And here's the carbine also in 5.56, so it also has that C prefix serial number.
Now a glance at the controls.
As we mentioned earlier this has a full-hand trigger guard, and it's not a bad grip.
There is a selector lever here which is going to rotate through four different positions.
We have "S" for safe and you'll note that the one position that is selected is the only one you can see.
That is single shot. (Some of these markings are pretty worn down here.)
This is 3 shot burst, there should be a "3" there, and that is fully automatic.
So you can kind of take your pick of whatever you like for fire control.
The magazine release is this very long lever here in the front of the trigger guard.
Pull it forward, pull the magazine out, that's pretty simple.
We have a somewhat complex rear sight here, which is actually pretty cool.
You've got your windage adjustment on the side for zeroing.
This is very much an element of Swiss marksmanship,
being able to accurately windage zero all the rifles.
And then this dial is your elevation adjustment.
You can see on the top here we can go from ... just under 200 out to 300.
That ... with the red 3, I believe that is the battle sight zero.
... Kind of set it here to use for everything.
And it can go all the way out to 500 metres.
The sight itself is of course an aperture.
However, if you need to use it at night you can flip it down,
and that gives you a notch sight with a pair of tritium illuminated dots on the side.
Either way, that's going to be used in conjunction with this fully hooded front post.
It is a flat topped post to make it nice and accurate.
And it also has a tritium vial in it, so you don't have a flip-up night sight on this.
Although you do have to flip over to use the night sight on the rear.
You have two sling swivels on the front: one here, one there, use whichever you like.
The safety is completely ambidextrous. So one on the left, one on the right.
The bolt release, however, is only on the left side of the gun. So.
The charging handle is of the reciprocating style on the top of the rifle.
And of course if I charge it, lock it open,
I can then push this up (just like an AR-15) to lock the bolt open.
And then to release it, snap it down, and it drops the bolt.
That's pretty much it for the actual use controls, now we have some of the disassembly.
First step of disassembly is of course going to be to remove the barrel.
This was kind of one of the big deals about this rifle was just how quickly modular it really was.
So to do that, we're going to lock the bolt open so that it's no longer locking in the barrel.
And then I just push this button right here,
hold that down, rotate the barrel and pull it out.
So this is my carbine length barrel.
Here is a full length rifle barrel from one of the other guns.
And I can just take this (I have to remember to push this button down)
and then drop the barrel in, and lock it in place just like that.
Now we've converted our carbine into a full length rifle.
Now you cannot use this to interchange calibres
because the magazine well and the bolt are different.
However, this wasn't intended to be calibre changing, the idea was just barrel length.
And that the army would accept one calibre or the other, not use both of them simultaneously.
And of course they did go with the 5.56 cartridge.
With the barrel out we can now continue our disassembly.
At this point we want to close the bolt because we don't want the recoil spring under tension.
So I can do that, since there's no magazine, just by pulling the bolt back and allowing it to go forward.
And then we have a button right back here in the back of the grip,
push that in and it allows me to pivot the rifle open.
And I can then pull the internals out of the gun.
Now that is one of the problems with this rifle, so let me show you that.
The charging handle locks into this notch on the top of the bolt.
So I put it in that position and there we go.
So that's how the charging handle works, and in theory that's a fine system
because it's captive when it needs to be, and then you take it out to remove the bolt.
One of the problems with this system is that Swiss soldiers
keep their rifles ... in their personal possession much more than most other countries.
And when they do that they're legally required, in many cases,
to keep the bolt separate from the rifle, which means they're taking these things out a lot.
And these ... charging handles are going to get lost all the time.
The anecdote I heard from one of the officers involved in the trial
was that with 100 of these rifles in trials,
they had to replace 30 of these charging handles because people lost them.
And I can totally see how that would happen with this sort of system.
Anyway, once we have that out we can take the handguard off.
Now this plastic handguard is held in place by a little metal hook
here on the bottom of the receiver, inside there.
So the way you remove it ... is actually to break the rifle open.
That pivots the hook up out of the way and then you can just slide it off the front.
There are these two lugs here that are held in place by these two tabs.
So there is the WF Bern C42 carbine completely field stripped.
We have basically a stamped ... and bent sheet metal receiver up here.
Same thing with the lower.
This presumably would have been a pretty cost-effective rifle to make.
Plastic furniture, it's pretty much modern in every way for the 1980s.
This would have been ... about 10 years before
the advent of some of the really modular systems that we see today.
So, just as the SIG 550 has had to be updated
to use modern optics and other accessories,
this would have been as well, had it been adopted.
If we look in here at the fire control group,
you'll actually see a lot of similarities to the Stgw 57, the previous Swiss military rifle.
It is hammer fired.
You'll note it has this piece, the white signifies semi-auto
and that can be flipped around to indicate rifles that are in a semi-auto only configuration,
as was done with the ... Sturmgewehr 57.
Not a whole lot else to show you in there.
It ... does have a 3 round burst ratchet mechanism, as well as full-auto, semi-auto, and safe.
As for the bolt, we have a two-lug rotating bolt system here.
This actually looks a lot like the Singapore SAR-21 comes to mind.
And in some ways the FG-42, although the firing mechanism isn't anything like the FGs.
We have an integral gas piston here,
it comes back and acts as an operating rod and a bolt carrier.
That's the pin right there that allows you to remove the bolt carrier from the operating rod.
The recoil spring is captive inside here, so this is the rear end of the spring.
This is a little rubber buffer that's just going to travel back and forth.
And when it fires, that compresses into here, so.
... It's nice that your main spring is compressed,
and you never have to deal with it flying away or anything like that.
Then there is a bolt lock here.
So the unlocked position for the rifle is with the locking lugs vertical like this.
And you want to make sure that it stays vertical while it's travelling and feeding
because if it starts to rotate during that process it won't be able to go back into the trunnion.
Which, by the way, the trunnion is the barrel.
You can see the cutouts here. This is very much like a two lug version of an AR-15 system,
where the trunnion is one and the same with the barrel.
So that is going to lock into place like that.
And when one of them rotates [45] degrees, the whole system is locked up.
Now when the bolt gets to the rear of its travel, this
bar right here gets pushed in.
That releases the bolt and allows it to cycle back and forth like this.
And when the bolt goes back, it's going to rotate into position like this.
(Sorry, I said 90 degrees, I meant 45 degrees for the locking.)
One of the interesting aspects of this is how this cam pin actually works,
because it's a bit different than on many other rifles.
So I can take this pin and push it out, and take the bolt out.
And you can see there they've actually machined this rather complex curved surface
into the body of the bolt itself.
So the cam pin sits right in here.
And as the bolt travels that pin forces it to rotate.
Note that at the beginning there is a short travel right here
that is straight before it starts to rotate.
That is for what's called dwell time, so during this time
the gas piston is able to cycle backward without actually forcing the bolt to rotate.
That increases the amount of time for gas to travel out of the barrel
and for pressure to drop before the bolt begins to unlock and then cycle backwards.
This big long guy here is the extractor.
And there is ... a plunger ejector right there on bolt face.
One last cool element here, there is a butt trap in the pistol grip.
And if we pull that off (this is the 6.45mm gun), we have this tool.
To be honest, I can't tell you exactly what it does,
but it will definitely work for adjusting your sights.
And then I assume there are a couple of other functions of this
for perhaps cleaning the bolt face, the gas ... piston, I don't know exactly what.
However, it's interesting that if we look at the 5.56 gun
not only does it have the same tool, however it is smaller.
So if I put those on top of each other you can see that they are different.
The smaller one's for the 5.56, so obviously some of these functions are dependent on calibre.
Which makes me think probably the bolt, chamber, beyond that I don't know.
And the 5.56 gun also has a stripper clip guide in the ... grip storage.
That slides onto the magazine just like this,
and then allows you to reload the magazine using stripper clips.
And you keep that in the grip of the rifle.
Having spent some time examining, and taking apart, and working with these three rifles now,
I can definitely see why SIG won this competition.
The SIG rifle is definitely a more user-friendly rifle.
I can't comment on the accuracy, I'll of course take the trial's word for that.
But definitely the Swiss army made the right decision on these rifles.
However, that of course means that there were only like
a couple of hundred, 200, 300 of these made in total.
So they are very rare rifles today, they occasionally
show up in Switzerland and basically nowhere else.
So I am very grateful to the Kessler Auction House
for letting me take a look at these and show them to you guys.
If you enjoy this sort of thing on the internet, please do consider checking out my Patreon page.
It's a dollar a month contributions from viewers like you
that make it possible for me to travel to places like Kreuzlingen
(I think I'm pronouncing that right), here in Switzerland and bring you guys cool guns like this.
Thanks for watching.