[ CRS .22 Berthier Trainer ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look
at a really cool and pretty scarce
.22 calibre conversion of the Berthier carbine.
This was manufactured by a company called
Manufacture d'Armes des Pyrénées Françaises
And it was manufactured specifically for the French National Police,
... and we'll see this on the gun, at the time known as the
later named the
And these were manufactured in the 1950s.
So the thing is the French Gendarmerie and the French Police
had a lot of Berthier carbines at their disposal well into the 20th century.
Of course these guns had been used as army equipment as late as World War Two,
and they continued as sort of the second-line arms.
After semi-auto rifles were introduced into the Army
and the MAS 36 took over as the Army's second-line rifle,
well, the Berthiers, ... especially the Berthier carbines, carried on as essentially police arms.
And the
and they wanted a small calibre rifle for use by prison guards.
When I guess they wanted to shoot you, but only a little bit.
And so, hence we get a .22 rimfire conversion of the Berthier.
Berthiers were easily available to do this with.
So these are, by the way, easily distinguishable by the magazine conversion down here.
So let's go ahead and take a quick look at how they did this conversion,
because there's one particularly interesting detail
that I'm a little bit surprised I haven't seen in any other .22 calibre conversions like this.
As I said, the easiest way to recognise, to distinguish these guns
is the protruding magazine well here.
Because of course the original 8mm Lebel magazine well was not going to be of particular use.
Unique converted this to use a 5 round magazine
out of one of their other firearms, I believe it was the X11, a semi-auto pistol.
So we've got our 5 round magazine there.
The magazine catch is just a simple spring-loaded latch that pulls backwards like so,
and it just hooks under the bottom of the magazine.
All of the original markings were milled off,
you can see they've just cut a big ol' flat there on the side of the receiver.
And they have been remarked .22 Long Rifle,
and
And SN is
This little block we'll look at a little more closely in a moment, but this is essentially a bolt stop.
These carbines were made essentially in both 1892 and M16 pattern,
which is to say both with and without an upper handguard.
This of course is one without an upper handguard, this is an 1892 pattern.
And there appears to have been no particular reason to do one or the other
except for what was readily available for conversion.
There is really no need for an upper handguard for heat protection
on a .22 with a 5 shot magazine.
The rear sight has been slightly re-cut.
So the steps are a little bit different right in here,
and it's specifically been sighted for 50, 100 and 150 metres.
Other than that, the sight is the late M16 Berthier pattern of "A" sight.
And of course as such it retains the M16 style of sight picture,
which is a very wide square rear opening
but with a new front sight put in place.
Now the front sight is the same style as the M16.
So again, a very wide square block with a little notch in the centre as a precision aiming point.
This allows you to get a quick sight picture with the large block,
and something very precise with that small little notch.
This notch is actually cut a little deeper and a little more clearly
than you'll typically find on a military M16 pattern, which is kind of nice.
And then this whole thing is mounted way higher than the original Berthier front sight.
In fact what they've done is turned down the barrel and pressed on a new front sight block
to lift this front sight blade up nice and high.
The blade itself is windage adjustable there,
but they didn't ... really adjust the height of the rear sight.
The calibrations are a little different, but the rear sight's at the same place,
the front sight is way higher.
Which would make one wonder how would ... you line up the sights properly?
The answer is in fact the really clever part of this conversion.
It's a little difficult to see there, but what you have there is the back end of the barrel,
which of course was originally big enough to hold an 8 Lebel cartridge.
It has been ... re-tubed with a .22 calibre barrel.
And what they did is actually drilled the barrel deliberately at an angle.
So the .22 calibre barrel comes out
at the very bottom of the original 8mm barrel, instead of being centred in it.
So essentially they started in the very middle at the muzzle,
but then the bore actually drops down (I'm exaggerating it here),
but it drops down like that to the point where it comes out at the breech.
And the reason for that lies in the firing mechanism.
This is a spare bolt head here.
And by angling the barrel they were able to not have to change the bolt body at all.
So they cut the firing pin in the bolt body off.
So the firing pin comes to right here,
where it then hits a separate rimfire firing pin in the bolt head, right there.
And that is set up with a blade like you would need for a rimfire firing pin,
but this is located in the very centre of ... what was the original barrel.
Well, because the barrel has been cut at ... a slope,
the ... rim of the .22 cartridge
is going to be sitting right in the centre of where the original barrel was.
So hopefully that made some sense.
It basically allows them to have a minimal effort of conversion
to go from centrefire to rimfire, which I think is actually really clever.
There is an extractor built into the bolt head here as well.
Originally on an 8mm Berthier the bolt head had locking lugs.
On this .22 conversion it simply locks
using the bolt handle right here, which is perfectly adequate for a .22.
You may also notice that they have milled off the top of the cocking piece.
And that is also because of this angled drilling of the barrel.
Because that requires you to essentially aim the gun at a steep downward angle
(because the barrel's not like this, the barrel's actually angled essentially like that),
the rear end of the cocking piece now interferes with the sight picture.
So just milling the top of that off solves the problem,
and it's still a lot easier than having to do
a more significant alteration to the firing mechanism in order to go to a rimfire system.
So I have taken out the two screws that hold the trigger guard
and the magazine assembly in place, we can pull this out.
And what we have here is essentially the back half original from the standard Berthier
with the trigger, the trigger spring,
the ... clip release is still in here although it doesn't do anything now.
And then MAPF has added this big block to the front of the trigger guard.
So what would originally have held ... a clip of 8mm Lebel
is now a block that is machined to hold our 5 round .22 magazine in the correct orientation.
They have added a spring-loaded ejector here
so when the bolt goes forward to chamber a cartridge it just pushes that down out of the way.
When you open the bolt to extract a cartridge the ejector pops up,
and will then hit the cartridge and kick it out of the gun.
And that's going to run right there in the bolt head.
And they replicated the original sort of claw here that locks this into the front of the receiver.
There has been a little bit more stuff added to the receiver here just to help support the magazine,
and provide the proper sort of feed ramp.
And you can see a bit of that down in there.
But in general it's a very simple conversion, and really not much to it.
It's a clever way to design something like this.
There is one other little tiny mark on ... all of these.
And that is here just at the back of the barrel, and that is "SNTA".
And ... that's essentially a property mark for
Basically the National Police's weapons and vehicle administration.
So the part of the organisation responsible for things like firearms.
That is essentially a ... police property mark there.
I mentioned we would take a closer look at this.
Well, that is the bolt stop that holds this all in place.
Normally with the Berthier you would just take out the screw here
that connects the bolt body to the bolt head. You could then rotate the bolt out of the way.
Well, this is no longer a rotating bolt so that doesn't quite work.
Instead, we're going to pull this screw out.
Right, so that comes out.
And then we can pull this block out, very simple.
Just chopped a hole in the receiver for it.
Now I have to take this screw out to disconnect the bolt from the bolt head.
And then that open hole in the receiver gives me a place where I can rotate the bolt head.
(There we go.) Disassembly is a little complicated on this.
And I can take the bolt head out.
And then I can take the bolt body out.
You can see down in there the end of the firing pin that has been cut off.
It would normally come all the way out.
And it then interacts with this secondary firing pin,
which is spring-loaded by the way, for safety's sake.
That goes in like so.
So there is, all the way field stripped, the CRS .22 conversion of the Berthier.
A grand total of only about 800 of these were originally made.
They are all serial numbered: this is, as you saw, a relatively late production one.
And they went into ... service in 1954,
and I suspect they were all made ... approximately in 1954.
This would not have been a particularly difficult conversion to tool up for,
there weren't a lot of them made, they would have been manufactured very quickly.
And then Unique went on to doing other things.
They would remain in police service for some 50 years.
It wasn't until 2005 that they were officially taken out of service,
although I know some of them are still in Gendarmerie armouries in various places.
But ... in 2005 when they officially came out of service at least some of them, like this one,
did make it onto the civilian market, where they're an interesting and popular arm
primarily in France with sport shooters and collectors.
So I think ... this was a really cool opportunity
to take a look at ... a bit of a different .22 conversion than we normally see with the Berthier.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.
Thanks for watching.