[ Project Lantan ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at
Works 11 in Katowice, Poland, taking a look at
an incredibly rare, almost one of a kind
there were only ever two of these rifles made, this is the Polish Lantan project.
Now of course Poland named all of its small arms development projects
after elements and minerals, so this is named after lanthanum.
And this was a project from the mid to late-1970s
where Poland was planning to build a modular multi-purpose small arms system.
Something very much akin to the Stoner 63 system.
Where they would have one universal receiver design,
which they could then interchange different barrels, different feed systems,
different buttstock type systems.
The idea being you could build anything from a PDW with a short barrel and a magazine feed,
to a standard infantry rifle like this,
to a light machine gun where you had a magazine feed perhaps on the top
but with a longer heavier barrel,
to a vehicular mounted gun where instead of a buttstock you had spade grips or a solenoid,
to a belt-fed medium or heavy machine gun
where instead of a magazine feed mechanism you had a belt feed mechanism.
I should point out before we go any further,
the buttstock on this was originally a developmental foam
or rubber design that has completely disintegrated.
So what you're seeing here is just the original sheet metal skeleton
underneath the buttstock with some residual foam debris on it.
Unfortunately that's just disintegrated over time.
But the first part of this development that was done was actually in ... 1973 to 1975,
when the Military Technical University in Warsaw developed a brand new cartridge for this.
The Poles weren't going to be happy with plain old boring obsolete 7.62x39,
they wanted something that was more efficient and more effective.
And what they came up with was a 7x41mm cartridge.
It fired a 118 grain bullet at about 2,530 feet per second.
So something a bit more powerful than 7.62x39,
and something that had a bit of a flatter trajectory, really not a bad cartridge overall.
That cartridge development was done by about 1975.
Then gun drawings went into the works.
By 1977 the rifle drawings were complete and two rifles were made.
This is Lantan number 01 right here.
They never did manufacture the belt feed mechanism,
it was drawn up but never actually produced.
And well, let me show you what the experimental status of this project looks like.
And then we'll talk about ... what happened to the project after this stage.
The first thing I really want to get across is this is an early prototype system.
So in this we can see the fundamental mechanics of what the Poles had in mind,
but this is far from a final product.
So this particular pattern comes in at just under 40 inches long, 13 pounds, that's 5.9 kilos.
It's a massively inelegant execution of this system, and that's because it was the first one.
It is a rifle like this that you use to get the experience
to slim the thing down, to make all the parts lighter.
To figure out where you need the mass and where you can get rid of the mass.
So I don't want people to look at this and think that
this was the final iteration of this project, it absolutely was not.
So first off the magazine, this was manufactured from an original Polish standard AK magazine
that was made longer for the larger cartridge, and wider front to back for the larger cartridge.
Alright, so here are the three different relevant cartridges side by side.
This is our 7x41mm Lantan.
This is 7.62x39.
And this is the 5.45x39 that the Russians were already working on at this point.
Ballistically the Lantan cartridge was 118 grains travelling at 2,350 feet per second.
And it's worth pointing out that it is physically longer than either of the Russian cartridges.
Lantan is long enough that it will not fit in a standard AK mag.
Now this is actually a grenade launching mag intended for blanks,
but you can see there's your overall length with 7.62x39.
The Lantan cartridge doesn't fit at all.
So when the Poles developed their own magazine they essentially
copied ... all the features and design elements of the AK magazine,
they just made it longer so that the Lantan cartridge will fit in there.
And then if we compare that to 7.62x39,
you can see that there is quite a lot of free space left in the front of the mag.
It's interesting you ... would really have a hard time distinguishing this
as a non-standard AK mag if you had it just by itself.
You might look at it and go, "Something seems a little bit odd about that."
But it so perfectly duplicates the design elements
of the Kalashnikov magazine, it's really quite surprising.
You can see what they've done is actually taken an original AK mag
and spliced this front section on to make it longer.
Now much of this rifle is fundamentally an AK.
It's a long-stroke gas piston system. The bolt looks just like an AK bolt.
The magazine of course looks like an AK mag. The magazine release is AK. The grip is AK.
The barrel, the front sight block there is AK.
That's the flash hider off of one of the Polish AKs set up for use with night vision.
We have an AK rear sight that is ... riveted onto the upper receiver there.
And in fact we even have ... rear trunnion tangs that are very reminiscent of the AK.
What is not AK is primarily the idea of a separable upper and lower receiver.
It also has a quick change barrel,
but that's less fundamentally different than the idea of having an upper and a lower.
So the way that this is disassembled is with a split pin here at the front.
Functionally we have a fixed charging handle here on the side.
That's going to cycle our bolt back and forth, you can see it's a rotating bolt there.
... We'll pull it apart there in just a moment, but it is fundamentally an AK.
Now the way that the upper and lower hook together is with a set of basically locking flanges and tabs.
So there's two tabs on this side, and two tabs on that side.
Oh, as part of this redesign there's no longer an AK style safety lever,
instead we have a three position selector lever on the left side of the receiver.
So this actually is a little bit more ergonomic than the typical AK controls.
Anyway, disassembly.
With this pin removed, I can then slide the upper and lower apart.
There we go.
I will say that ... the assembly and disassembly methods
for this rifle have not been finalised as of this prototype,
because this thing takes about 12 hands to put back together.
You can see that the recoil spring kind of popped out here on us.
It is not captive kind of in any way,
and you have to line this up with the back plate of the receiver when reassembling the gun.
It can come slightly out of whack like that and hang up on things.
It's still very kludgy in that regard.
But there's our recoil spring and guide.
In the upper I can now pull the bolt carrier back.
We have a throwback here to the classic submachine gun designs
where I pull the charging handle out at the back of travel.
And then I can pull out the bolt and carrier.
This is also the gas piston, you can see up at the front here it looks just like an AK gas piston.
Slightly different style to the parts here,
but we still have the pinned loose connection to give it some flexibility when firing.
And then a bolt carrier, this is another one of those elements that
with further development of the system would be made much more economical.
And ... an AK bolt right there.
The bolt carrier here has a pair of grooves right there,
and it runs in a pair of rails welded into the upper receiver.
These are very similar to the rails that are welded into the ... receiver of a traditional AK.
You can see we've got our ejector here, again very similar to the AK.
We have a front trunnion riveted in place.
The sheet metal receiver has kind of been hammered to form here around the ejection port.
The front handguard appears to almost like literally
have been made out of a piece of tyre or a conveyor belt.
It's a piece of relatively thin rubber that's just riveted onto a sheet metal frame.
And then of course we have the barrel removal.
So on this, ... we want to rotate this up.
That allows me to remove the barrel.
I could take the handguard off at this point.
The handguard is just loosely held in place by these two tabs.
And then there's a hole right here ...
which links up with this pin on the gas block.
I can take the barrel the rest of the way off.
And at this point I can push this ... button in,
and then rotate this lever down.
And in the downward position I can pull out the gas tube.
So there's a rotating pin in here, you can see it right there,
with a semi-circular notch cut in it.
(This is very tight.)
There we go. So you can see right there there's one semi-circular cutout.
So when this lever is in the horizontal position
it locks both the barrel and the gas tube into this big chunky front trunnion.
This front trunnion almost is more reminiscent of a PK trunnion than an AK trunnion,
but they both have the same basic idea.
We've got four rivets on this side, two on that side,
and you can see how the sheet metal receiver here
is pressed in (just like an AK) into grooves in that front trunnion.
So the idea was ... this is your universal receiver.
And onto this you can bolt a belt feed system, a magazine feed system,
a fire control group with a pistol grip, a fire control group with a solenoid,
a fire control group with spade grips, and then any sort of length and profile of barrel that you want.
Hence Stoner 63-ish.
The gas block here is pretty standard, just taps gas up into the gas port there.
We have an AK front sight block.
And then this particular one has the flash hider from a Polish night-vision equipped AK.
If we look at the lower receiver, first off there is the residual skeleton of the stock.
It's really too bad that this stock has just completely disintegrated with time,
that's some sort of foam rubber material that just did not survive.
Looking at the fire control system, it's sort of AK-like,
but doesn't use any AK parts except perhaps the hammer spring there.
So it's a basic three position selector switch: safe, semi and full.
Auto-trip right there, not a whole lot really going on here.
This is obviously ... more or less taken after the AK lower.
You've got your pins for all the moving components.
Right here are all the fire control components.
These are your four tabs for assembling the upper to the lower.
And it is serial numbered.
In fact I didn't point that out, there's the only marking on this: Lantan 01, the very first.
Looking at this from the front you can see that we have a pretty massive front trunnion here.
With the sheet metal receiver folded down into these two grooves at the bottom, riveted in place.
So your front trunnion comes all the way back to here,
and you've got ... two rivets on that side, four rivets on this side holding it into the sheet metal receiver.
After two rifles were produced, well, the Soviets got wind of what was going on
and the Soviet Union completely and thoroughly quashed this project.
They did so primarily on the basis of the ammunition.
The Soviet Union of course had just recently a few years before
adopted the 5.45x39mm cartridge.
They really wanted to sell the Poles a licence for AK-74 production,
and they wanted the Warsaw Pact to all standardise on that new cartridge.
And if you weren't going to do the new cartridge, you at least had to stick with the old 7.62 cartridge.
The idea of going to your own novel new cartridge was simply unacceptable.
And so that was the end of project Lantan.
The Poles would end up developing the Tantal instead,
essentially reverse engineering the AK-74 to avoid having to pay a licence
and avoid Soviet controls on their export sales of the system.
At any rate, that's a story for another video. In fact I have a video on the Tantal.
If you're interested in it, I'll link to that in the end cards here.
Lantan was the short-lived intermediate cartridge really cool Polish system.
A big thanks to Works 11 for giving me access to Lantan number 1.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.