Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Rock Island
Auction Company where we are taking a look at
the weirdest of the Valmets. This is a Valmet M82.
And these were actually mostly commercially imported
mostly into the United States, and almost all in 5.56 calibre.
And they were ... brought into the US between like 1982, as the designation suggests, and 1986.
Of course in 1986 the Assault Weapons ... Import Ban took effect,
and this sort of thing was no longer able to easily come into the country.
However, the development of this rifle goes back a little bit earlier,
it goes back to 1978 when the Valmet factory decided to try and produce
a specialty compact version of the rifle for paratroops.
Or maybe, presumably, anyone else who needed a particularly compact rifle.
Now the Finnish Defence Forces did have folding stocks on some of their rifles,
and a regular Valmet with the stock folded is basically the exact same length as this thing.
So there is some question as to how interested the Finnish military would have been in the first place.
And turning a normal rifle into a bullpup like this, because that's exactly what this is,
this is a Valmet M76 in a fancy urethane stock, doing that has some substantial downsides.
Now apparently the very first ... batch of prototypes was made with wooden stocks
instead of the urethane that they ended up using commercially.
They were made in 7.62x39 based on the updated RK 62 rifles,
and they were rather quickly rejected by the Finnish military.
How quickly I don't know, but I can bet it was a pretty short trial period.
Now the one thing that is recorded in a bunch of sources
is that apparently the front sight had a tendency to hit paratroopers in the face.
That would be a bad thing when they were jumping, or otherwise moving around with the rifle anyway.
Definitely a bad thing.
And then just a lot of the handling characteristics
I think would render this unsatisfactory from a military perspective.
So why don't I go ahead and pull it all apart.
We'll pull it out of the stock and show you
what exactly they did to a Valmet to squish it into this thing.
There are some bullpups out there that are really cool,
and have slick features for ambidextrous handling.
Whether it's forward ejection, or bottom eject,
or being able to swap which side the cases eject out of.
The Valmet M82 is not one of those, this is only set up for right-handed firing.
And for about three different reasons.
The safety sticks out the right side of the gun.
The bolt handle sticks out the right side of the gun, and slams back and forth.
And the sights are actually offset on the left side of the gun.
So you can just forget about using this left-handed.
Underneath this is still just a standard Valmet M76 action and system
that has been shoehorned into this stock.
So things like the magazine release are the same,
but with this minor change that the ... extra little tab
on the magazine catch has been removed just to make it a little bit lower profile.
These do use standard Valmet magazines, which this is not one of.
This actually I think is a 40 round AK mag.
This is a 5.56 AK magazine that has been ground on a bit and modified to fit the Valmet.
Which is not uncommon, Valmet magazines are quite rare.
They were originally imported in both 15 and 30 round capacities in 5.56.
So this one appears to lock in place,
I have used converted AK mags in other Valmets, and they usually work fine.
But just so you know, this isn't the standard magazine for this gun.
Nothing has been changed with the bolt handle, it still sits up here and cycles just like an AK.
The safety lever is also left in its original position,
but this little lever has been added to it so you can engage the safety like so.
Or like that.
I'm going to remove this right now. This unscrews, and you have to
(whoops, there we go, that came off),
you have to take that out in order to remove this thing from the stock.
So we'll just do that now.
You do have a bit of a cheek rest built into this side of the stock.
And they helpfully put a piece of hard plastic (I think) onto the side of the top cover.
Doesn't do a whole lot for insulation, but it does at least mean that ... your face isn't on sheet metal.
So I guess that's a little bit of a help.
The stock is a single moulded piece, polyurethane I believe, or urethane.
And it has pistol grip moulded into it.
They have relocated the trigger forward, we'll take a look at that in a moment.
They have also put that same sort of plastic cover over the gas tube
because it's a lot closer to your hand now,
and they decided that they should probably insulate that.
And there's this nice bit of checkering to give you some grip on the front end of the gun.
As you can see here, the sights have been offset to the left
so that they kind of line up with the cheek rest and your face.
We've got the rear sight, and it is still an aperture which is nice.
And the same thing with the front sight.
It's interesting to note that the front sight block also has this kind of neat
multi-port muzzle brake / flash hider / thing built into it.
That's also wide open on the bottom, which seems to be the opposite of what you would want.
But not entirely clear I suppose on what the design intent was there.
Normally a Valmet would have its serial number and manufacturing marks
on the side of the trunnion here, but of course
this is sitting under a stock now so you can't see it.
So instead they moved the markings to the ... rear sight block.
So we have Valmet, Made in Finland and the serial number on the rear face.
And it's a little hard to see them, but on the front face it has the model and the calibre.
So M82, and calibre 5.56mm.
Disassembly is mostly like an AK, or at least starts like an AK.
We're going to take the dust cover off, it's nice and tight as a Valmet dust cover should be.
Then pull out the recoil spring and guide rod.
Pull the bolt handle back, pull the bolt out,
and the whole bolt carrier assembly.
Like the regular Valmets, the gas tube is also detachable there, so pull that off.
And at this point you would also need to take the safety lever out, which we've already done.
Now to get the receiver out of its stock, we have to remove this big ol' screw at the back.
This just threads into the rear trunnion where you would normally have a stock.
I suppose this does qualify as a stock.
Anyway, that screw comes out, it does have a washer on it as well.
Now there's a little hook at the front.
However, if we ...
can lift ...
this out ...
there we go, and separate the stock.
The channel there for the trigger connecting rod, right there.
Anyway, we can pull the stock off.
These stocks, by the way, are a bit fragile. So if you have one of these, be careful with that.
So there's the new front end assembly.
You can see the little pin there, that's going to lock into the front of the stock.
It has a little metal reinforcing bracket right there.
Pretty ordinary gas block on there, although it doesn't have a front sight attached to it.
This has been added, a little clamp around the barrel, and your trigger.
I have engaged the safety, so the trigger is not going to actually release.
But that trigger is connected to this rod, which comes back here,
and is then pinned into the remains of the original Valmet trigger.
... Or rather it's a new piece that replicates the trigger there.
It bends out of the way of the magazine and everything.
This rear sight block has been added, pinned in place.
The front trunnion is pretty much normal, the receiver is totally normal.
In fact, it's normal enough that it has all of the regular markings, so the serial number's on there.
The Valmet marking is there on the back.
These are standard Valmet receivers that were simply built into this bullpup configuration.
Still got the holes in here for the original trigger guard,
the bolt hole for the pistol grip, all that sort of stuff.
And that's pretty much it, the internals are identical to a standard semi-auto Valmet.
So as I said, about 2,000 of these were imported into the US in 5.56.
They are definitely the weirdest of all of the Valmets, they are not exactly a practical rifle,
but they're a pretty cool, interesting and unusual piece of rifle design.
So especially for folks who are really into bullpup rifles, this is
one of those bullpups that was developed in the 1980s.
People thought the whole bullpup concept was cool,
and maybe they didn't think it all the way through.
There are some good ones from that era, but the rifles converted like this are not the good ones, so.
Anyway if you would like to see Rock Island's detailed high-res pictures of this,
or their description, or their value estimate, or anything like that,
you can head on over to their website.
... They have a catalogue page specifically for this rifle.
You can get there by way of the link to ForgottenWeapons.com in the description text below.
Thanks for watching.