Hi guys, thanks for tuning into another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Rock Island Arsenal Museum.
... In fact not just in Rock Island, Illinois, but literally on Rock Island.
This is a big arsenal complex, still an active US military arsenal.
And they have a really cool small arms museum here
that they have graciously allowed me to do some videoing in.
So what we're looking at today is an extremely cool
and very weird piece of firearms technology.
This is Winchester's entry into the [1962] SPIW program,
... the 1962 program, rifles were delivered in '64.
SPIW stands for Special Purpose Infantry Weapon.
And the genesis of this whole program really goes back to 1952,
when ... one guy in the US military,
published a report looking at the ... lethality of rifle and machine gun wounds.
Like, how effective are these weapons?
And what he found was that 90% of ... the wounds caused by rifle
and machine gun fire were caused at 300 yards or less.
And 80% of those wounds were caused at 200 yards or less.
And the conclusion that he came to was that
the accuracy of a particular rifle or machine gun is basically irrelevant.
There's this very long tradition of marksmanship in the US Army,
and what this report was finding
was that this is all basically a pointless exercise in winning matches,
and doesn't really have much relevance to war fighting.
The issue was it didn't matter if you had a 1 minute of angle rifle or a 5 minute of angle rifle,
what actually determined whether an enemy was hit or not
had nothing to do with the accuracy the weapon.
It was all about how long was the enemy exposed, and how much of them was exposed.
Some guy stands up in broad view and stays still, he's going to get hit.
... In that exact same situation, even if the soldier has an absolute laser beam of a rifle,
if the enemy only exposes a small part of himself and only for a very brief time, he's not getting hit.
And so this report, the Hitchman Report,
found that we could double the dispersion of any given infantry weapon in US inventory
and it wouldn't have any impact on that weapon's ability to cause enemy casualties.
So this really flew in the face of Ordnance Department
tradition, and thinking, and doctrine, and everything.
But what the report suggested was that
the US military should develop a system that basically builds in more dispersion.
And this led to what was called the SALVO program, which ran from 1952 until 1960.
And SALVO looked at a couple of different solutions.
They looked at duplex and triplex cartridges, where you have
one cartridge case with two or three bullets in it, that all fire as one.
That was the really simple solution, and that was actually
the solution that was recommended at the end of this program.
But that wasn't all, they also looked at small-calibre high-velocity cartridges,
because this was before the 5.56 cartridge, before the M16.
... In fact they did testing with a T48 full-auto US-made FAL rifle
that had been re-chambered for basically 7.62 NATO
necked down to .22 calibre with like a 41 grain bullet.
And they found ... even it wasn't really all that practical or beneficial in full-auto.
And then they also experimented with flechette cartridges,
where you have basically a 10 to 15 grain little dart that's fin-stabilised.
And they tested this in project SALVO
by stuffing a bunch of these things, like 30 of them, into a 12-gauge shotgun shell.
And they were testing with a Remington 11-87.
Now, the result of SALVO was nothing entirely conclusive.
The formal ... recommendation at the end was that
the US actually develop a duplex 7.62 NATO cartridge and issue it.
But that never happened, largely I think because
how on earth do you win at Camp Perry with duplex cartridges?
You can't - so it's not going to happen.
However, the program continued into a second phase, and that was project SPIW.
... Well, there's a significant time gap between the actual testing of the SALVO rifles,
which was like 1956, and the order for SPIW rifles which was in '62.
And most of this time was taken up with Advanced Armament Incorporated, AAI,
trying to develop an effective single-shot flechette cartridge.
They had kind of liked what they were seeing with these flechettes loaded in a shotgun shell.
But the problem was they were low velocity, you're talking 1,200 or 1,300 feet per second,
it's shotgun velocities.
And they wanted to try these at like hyper velocity.
So they were ... aiming for 4,000 feet per second,
which is like 1,300 metres per second. Really, really fast.
And it took AAI a long time to figure out how to do this effectively.
So, there were two ways that they could look at these flechette cartridges.
One was to have a sabot at the front that pulls the flechette,
and one was to have a sabot at the back that pushes the flechette.
And the one at the back was the much simpler technical solution,
the problem was that meant all of your gunpowder had to be behind
... the sabot, which was in turn behind the flechette.
And this made for a very long cartridge. Too long, the Army wasn't willing to accept it.
So instead they had to come up with a way to develop a puller ... sabot,
that held the nose of the flechette and pulled it down the barrel.
The ... advantage here, I should say, is they were able to basically pack the gunpowder
around the body of the flechette, and that gives them a much shorter cartridge.
In the end they would develop something that was pretty similar in length to the 5.56 NATO cartridge.
However, it took like five years of development to do this
because they had to get the tension of that puller sabot just right.
If it was too loose, if it didn't grip the flechette hard enough,
the sabot would blow off in the barrel and then you'd have like bits of debris left in the barrel,
and your accuracy obviously went all to zero.
If you had it too tight, either it wouldn't release properly
or, ... interestingly, ... when they started approaching 4,000 feet per second,
(which is really, really fast in case you don't have a concept for this),
they actually were having problems with snapping the flechettes in half in the middle.
Like, the puller would be under so much pressure and such an instantaneous g-force
that it would actually snap the flechette in half, and only pull the front half out the muzzle.
So they finally managed to find the right equilibrium, the right tension, the right materials.
They went for it was like a glass/nylon hybrid sort of strange material.
They finally got it working in 1962.
And that is when the Army actually put out a request for project SPIW rifles.
And ... now finally we have got to the rifle that we're looking at today.
Four different companies were given contracts to develop these rifles.
They were Winchester, which is what we have here.
Also Harrington & Richardson, probably as like,
"Well, you didn't do so well with the M14, maybe you can do this better."
Springfield Arsenal, the government arsenal, and also AAI themselves got a contract.
And the requirements for this rifle were pretty optimistic.
So all the usual stuff: it had to be light weight, it had to be handy, it had to be safe,
it had to eject cases in such a way that it wouldn't interfere with shooting
or with the guy shooting next to you.
It had to, what else? Maximum overall length of 40 inches.
All the normal stuff you'd expect, easy to disassemble.
And then more substantially it had to carry a minimum of 60 rounds of point target ammunition.
By which they mean flechettes, or
whatever other futuristic thing the companies decided to come up with.
And it also had to carry 3 rounds of area effect ammunition.
These rifles had to be built with grenade launchers built into them.
And in fact knowing that this would irreparably destroy the balance of any rifle,
as it entirely has done here,
the requirement was specific that the grenade launchers had to be removable,
but could not be removed at the discretion of the rifle's user.
So Private Snuffy was not allowed to take the grenade launcher off of his rifle,
but the armourer had to be able to do it in case they wanted to.
So with that requirement set up, Winchester came up with this rifle.
Let's take a closer look at it.
We'll start by taking a look at the rifle portion of this combined weapon.
This uses a three lug rotating bolt, and it used a ... short-stroke gas-tappet action in order to cycle.
So that's going to be hidden up here under the stock.
The catch for the drum is actually right here.
And in order to release the drum you push forward on this lever.
And it actually uses the trigger guard as a flat spring to provide tension for that.
Also you can flip the trigger guard out of the way for shooting with gloves.
These rifles were required to have three-position selectors.
They had to be capable of semi-automatic fire, three-round burst,
(well, actually burst, they didn't specify how many rounds),
full automatic, as well as a safe position.
So this is your three-round selector.
You heard it click, this is kind of a weird finicky selector
because this rifle fires from an open bolt in three round and full-auto,
and from a closed bolt on single shot.
And then it has a manual safety located up here.
That's safe, and pulling the button forward is fire.
There is also another button up here, and this is kind of an interesting solution.
There's only one trigger for both the rifle and the grenade launcher.
And the way you distinguish between the two was
when you wanted to fire a grenade you had to hold this button down while pulling the trigger.
As long as you did that, it would fire a grenade instead of the rifle.
So kind of an interesting and not necessarily a bad idea or a bad way to do that.
We have a grenade launcher sight mounted on the side of the rifle.
And that'll pivot down for various ranges, this had to be effective out to 400 metres.
And the rifle was actually also expected to be combat effective out to 400.
Unfortunately, I'm not entirely sure how to disassemble this one.
I know it's this lever which comes up, and then we can almost take this top assembly out.
But the trigger gets stuck, and I don't know.
We spent a substantial amount of time, a couple of us here behind the camera and also myself,
trying to how to get this out, and we just weren't able to figure it out.
So we're going to be leaving that on.
Now the other thing that made this rifle kind of unique,
and that was commented on in the trials,
was it had what they called a soft recoil system.
Which basically apparently ... comprises a second housing inside the action.
And the ... recoiling components reciprocate ... first in this housing, and then with it.
The point I think is just to soften the recoil, to take up a bunch of the recoil energy
before the bolt actually hits the back of the receiver
and transmits that energy to the shooter.
The idea is to make it flatter shooting, softer shooting.
Apparently it didn't really work very well,
and even when it did work, technically speaking, it didn't actually help much.
So, unfortunately, that's all I have to go on about that
because we aren't able to take it apart.
So the recoil operating section of the action you can see right here.
And note that the bolt is staying in place with the barrel.
And if you look at the muzzle when I do that, you can see the barrel reciprocating backwards.
And then the second phase of the recoil has a really stiff ... force you have to overcome.
If I'm understanding this right, if I look inside there it actually looks
very much like an FG42 or an M60 sort of system to me, I think that's what's going on here.
And I think (there we go), I think what we're overcoming there is the firing pin spring.
So this all comes back, like so, when it's open.
And it is a three-lug bolt up in here, but they are very small lugs.
And there it is back in battery.
Now in addition to the grenade launcher, the rifles had to be able to mount a detachable bipod.
And so Winchester went ahead and basically put an old BAR bipod on this.
You can loosen that, pivot these legs out, ...
tighten that back up. You can see this is technically removable with a pair of screws.
And they don't stay in place.
Now I know you guys want to see the grenade launcher section here.
What makes this really interesting is that this is actually a blow-forward grenade launcher.
It's chambered for the 40mm High-Low pressure grenades, like the M203 and the M79.
The M79 was actually adopted right during this time, in 1960.
So this ammunition was just coming into the military system
when they were doing this development work.
Now the way this works is we actually have a blow-forward ... barrel
inside the receiver section here.
So this is a spring-loaded feed ramp.
That's going to pop open like that.
You can then load a cartridge
in through one of these two feedways, either one I believe.
Then it will feed up into here, and you lift this up,
which allows the barrel to slide backward and chamber a grenade.
You can then go ahead and load two more, one into each side.
That gives you your three rounds of required area target capacity.
And then when you fire, this thing is recoil-operated.
So I believe the idea is that when you pull the trigger, the barrel is going to tend to stay in place,
... and/or be pulled forward by friction of the projectile moving down the barrel.
While the rest of the gun is going to want to go backward from the recoil.
And that results in this whole thing cycling forward.
There's a spring inside here that is old, and the whole thing is stiff,
so it shouldn't normally stick like this, I don't believe.
Tension from this is also holding it in place.
But when you fire ... the rifle is going to recoil backward,
this is going to get pulled forward.
It will, somewhere in there, eject the empty 40mm case.
I suspect it just falls out
because the case on one of these grenades is a lot shorter than the overall length.
So the case fits [through] here, where this will hold a full cartridge in position.
Winchester was kind of specific that they designed this to have a low bore axis
without having to have a straight-line stock. They wanted the traditional style of stock.
So they made sure to mount the barrel as high up in the receiver as they could.
And there isn't any extra hardware above the barrel.
So you're able to have a sight that's actually not that tall,
and the barrel pretty much comes back into your shoulder.
It's kind of interesting to me that this is very clearly a
commercial sort of rifle sight that they were able to find and adapt with a new aperture there.
Then the front sight is this big ol' shark fin type design.
In testing it turned out this is really pretty much a terrible gun.
There was only one aspect of this that survived past the initial round of testing,
and that was the blow forward grenade launcher.
Which would go on to be further developed for the next iteration of Springfield Armory's SPIW rifle,
which then consequently went nowhere.
So ultimately all of this disappeared.
But it's certainly a really interesting look at what the US military had in mind in the 1960s,
and it's a fantastically cool rifle. ...
I've said sometimes that you have practical and you have cool,
and they're kind of inversely proportional to each other.
This is an entirely cool rifle, and turned out to be completely impractical in the field.
The balance is awful, the reliability was bad,
the grenade launcher idea is neat, but this would have been a nightmare in the field.
But, that doesn't make it any less cool.
Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
A big thank you to the Rock Island Arsenal Museum
for allowing me to get my grubby hands on this thing and bring it to you guys.
Thanks for watching, and stay tuned for more Forgotten Weapons.