Penguin Brutality t-shirt available from Varusteleka:
https://varusteleka.com/en/products/forgotten-weapons-penguin-brutality-t-shirt
The Aly & Kaufman AKB-23 is a set of parts that allows one to use a Brownells BRN-180 upper to create an SA80 / L85 lookalike. It’s a very clever adaptation, based on the fact that the original British L85A1 was essentially copied from the AR-180 design. By creating a new bullpup lower for Brownells’ modernized AR-180 (the BRN-180), the basic mechanics of the SA80 are used, but in a form that is well tested and reliable.
The parts include, of course, the new lower (which is legally a firearm, and required FFL transfer). The lower is milled aluminum, and uses standard AR fire control parts. It also includes iron sights that mount onto the BRN-180 picatinny rail and a high quality printed cheek rest and front handguard.
This is a really fun rifle, and a very clever way to create an L85 analog that is affordable and accessible.
As I’ve heard it, exactly 12 semi L-85/L98A2s came into the US as a LE demo set years and years ago, and a few more in canada, and that they’ve gone for absolutely heinous amounts on the few occasions they’ve come up for sale. A guy told me that one went for north of 70 at the big Las Vegas show in like 2010
$70? That seems a bit much for a rifle that has not been improved by H&K. Because of our restrictive gun laws, no SA-80s went on sale to civilians in the UK. They made some .22LR versions for MOD Cadets only but in limited numbers. They are now being discontinued but it is extremely unlikely that they will be sold off to civilians. There is a theory that full bore semi-autos were banned in 1988 to stop civilians being able to own the L85…and find out what a terrible rifle it was.
That has a ring of truth about it.
Jan Stevenson’s “Handgunner” magazine got disappeared for a year or more after it published an article titled
“Service Rifle SNAFU”
with a long list that covered a small percentage of the problems with the rifles
apparently there were big problems producing the things as well
I heard that some of the top people at the Royal small Arms factory at Enfield, took early retirement rather than getting taken through the disciplinary process and fired.
I did a joint range with a British Royal Engineer unit, wherein we brought out all our toys and played with them.
The L85, still in its pre-HK fix setup, was absolutely one of the most horrid experiences I’ve ever had with a service rifle. I mean, it shot well enough, but… The ergonomics were so FUBAR that it defies the entire concept of anyone on that design team having had the first clue about how a soldier has to use his weapon in combat. Never mind all the little issues like the fact that it was built horribly, and had parts that would fall off, but the entire human interface paradigm on that weapon was just built in total ignorance of how you use a rifle in combat. Controls in the wrong places, no use of the “hand finds hand” principles, and a design that denies any opportunity to do the sort of normal indexing of things like magazines that speeds things up.
Handling that rifle, I came to the conclusion that there was zero real input from anyone who actually shot a rifle in combat, beyond the basics of “Hey, it’d be nice to have a decent optic on it…” sort of stuff.
The sling was about the only thing I liked, and I negotiated with the Brits to get one I could copy. Had one of my own versions optimized for the M16A2 on my rifle every time I went to the field, ever after. The rest of that weapon I’d have simply binned, as the Brits put it.
Funniest damn thing about all the stuff we did that day in training was the Brits asking me what I thought of their rifle, and me telling them my honest opinion. They told me my concerns were utter bollocks, in their words, and then I demonstrated how long it took me to do a reload on the M16 and how I didn’t have to break situational awareness. I could, at that point, shuck through my entire basic load of magazines in about 2 minutes wearing my gear and maintaining eye contact with my field of fire. The poor bastards with the L85 had never even been exposed to that concept, which was US doctrine as far back as Vietnam, and were shocked that there was that much difference just due to the ergonomics.
Oh, and at the time, I was using my own web gear that carried 8 magazines, so that wasn’t even the standard basic load. I used to do drills on that with my personal AR-15 at home, in order to maintain proficiency, and when I told them that, they about to lost their minds. It just didn’t compute for them…
The L85 is the product of a dysfunctional firearms culture in the UK, I fear. Nobody could identify that it was shiite, so nobody stopped the procurement. Which they should have.
Just a remainder that, when that thing had been adopted, the Steyr AUG had been in service for seven years already.
I don’t think that there is someone with a working brain, with or without firearm experience, that can examine the two rifles, and conclude that the L85 is the superior weapon.
The Osprey book (Weapons 049, SA80 Assault Rifles, by Neil Grant) says basically everything you said, but in excruciating and gory detail.
Grant goes deep into the development history of the thing, and gives chapter and verse on Royal Ordnance playing the game they’ve known so well since the 1870s; namely, claiming that “Not Invented Here” was a deal-breaker, while copycatting foreign patented designs with just enough differences to avoid legal retaliation. (The Erskine Allin method- See “Trapdoor Springfield vs. Hiram Berdan’s Widow”.)
Grant pretty conclusively shows that SA80 was and is an AR-18 clone, which should have been a reasonably decent rifle. Except that RO, in their quest to put their own “We Did This All By Ourselves” mark on it, made a bunch of changes that showed they understood neither ergonomics or production and service conditions.
Controls in the wrong places, a complete misunderstanding of soldier-rifle interface (i.e., how it has to be handled in use), and materials chosen on the basis of “cheap”, never mind “durable”.
As far as production and service, I’d say SA80 was built like a Sten MK III, but that would be an insult to the Sten.
As bad as SA80 is, the Light Support Weapon (LSW) is even worse. No quick-change barrel, no effective heat dispersal, and still with the standard rifle magazines, limiting its sustained-fire capability to that of a BAR, not even a Bren. It also fired full-auto only; no selector switch. That became important when it was actually put to use somewhere other than a practice range.
In Afghanistan, it was supplanted in the SAW role by the FN Minimi (which at least actually works), with the LSW reclassed as a Designated Marksman Rifle (DMR). Yes, a full-auto-only DMR. Somehow the idea of just fitting it with the safety/selector of the standard rifle just never occurred to anybody. Or more exactly, right from the start it was designed with its own “bespoke” fire control package which made it impossible to refit it with the rifle’s version.
(According to RO, at least. I can think of a few hundred custom builders here in the States that could probably have done it in an hour or so.)
It should surprise no one that it sucked at doing the DMR job even worse than it did as a SAW. Accuracy beyond 300 meters was indifferent from a cold barrel, and once it heated up, was nonexistent at any range. (One reason it was not considered usable as a SAW to begin with.)
The Steyr AUG showed that yes, a bullpup IW can be made to work. (And cover the embarrassment of APC designers who make the inside height too short.) It can even be made a decent SAW or DMR, with appropriate bits swapped in and out. Or even an SMG in 9mm.
But it requires a lot more work and common sense than Royal Ordnance saying “Hey, let’s just rip off the AR-18; nobody will ever know”.
clear ether
eon
Kirk:
I fear you are right. No British soldier could ever practice with his privately owned version of the service rifle, because that is now illegal. No civilians could comment on it, because it is also illegal for them to own it.
The ergonomics of the SA80 family are plain bad. The manual of arms is odd too. I do not understand why the drill is for the rifle to be tilted over so the left hand operates the charging handle. It would be natural to do this with the right hand. How are US personnel taught to use the charging handle on the AR family, with the right or left hand (assuming they are right handed)?
I rather like the build quality of this kit. It is considerably better than that of the real SA80s, which were noticeably flimsy. Then again, they were designed and built by people who did not seem to know what they were doing. It should not have beyond the wit of man to take the AR18 and turn it into a functioning bullpup. Steyr did it, Enfield could not manage it. They needed HK to turn their dog into something that at least worked, more or less.
@JohnK;
As you said, turning the AR-18 into a functioning bullpup should have been simple, as Armalite had already done the hard bit, namely making sure none of the required action bits extended into the (folding) stock. Unlike the AR-15’s buffer assembly.
The one important thing they never even thought of was how to fire the thing off the left shoulder. Not to accommodate “southpaws”, but for shooting ’round right-handed building corners without exposing yourself.
With the FAL/SLR, it was “transfer rifle to left shoulder, continue”.
With SA80? “Take two steps out from corner, maintain.”
I realize the Brit ruling elite’ don’t like the peasants very much, but really.
clear ether
eon
Eon:
I was under the impression the L86 was selective fire. That is why it ended up being used as a DMR. But it was always a failure, even more than the L85. The concept was flawed from the beginning.
Enfield also stole the AR18 design, but did not know what they were doing with it. The people who did were Sterling, who were manufacturing the AR18 under licence. However, Enfield and Royal Ordnance hated Sterling, ever since Stirling sued them for making copies of Sterlings without paying a fee. Thus, they would rather produce a rifle that did not work than ask Sterling for advice. To be fair, Sterling would probably have told them to swivel. We should have bought AR18s instead. It would have saved a lot of time and money.
“(…) We should have bought AR18s instead. It would have saved a lot of time and money.(…)”
Now I wonder how much work went into developing SA80 and how it does compare to work done by Armstech to craft Bushmaster M17s https://modernfirearms.net/en/assault-rifles/u-s-a-assault-rifles/bushmaster-m17s-eng/
@JohnK, RE: 7:38 post
What is totally unnatural about the very idea of charging anything with your primary hand is that it basically turns reload or misfire drill into a sad joke.
Primary hand stays on the pistol grip; all controls should be amenable to ambidextrous use, and you would charge with your non-primary. On the L85, that necessitates turning the rifle over, reaching over with the non-primary hand, and then having to worry about the sight and whatever other impedimentia might be in the way.
T-totally, mind-bogglingly flatly insane. Never mind that your mag well and ejection port are where you can’t see them, can’t feel them, and the mag release and fire selector are somewhere else on the receiver that you cant index.
Whoever designed the ergonomics on the L85 had to either be dumb as a brick, or actively trying to get British soldiers killed in the stupidest ways possible.
Let me make this as clear as I can: THE PRIMARY HAND SHOULD NEVER HAVE TO LEAVE THE PISTOL GRIP. That’s the first commandment of good design; the second is that THE RELOAD AND MISFIRE DRILLS MUST BE CAPABLE OF BEING PERFORMED WITHOUT BREAKING EYE CONTACT WITH THE ENVIRONMENT. If you have to take your eyes off of what is going on around you in order to just find the mag well, or whatever else? You have failed at design.
EVERYTHING IN THE WAY OF CONTROL FEATURES SHOULD BE MANAGEABLE WITH THE PRIMARY HAND NEVER HAVING TO LEAVE THE PISTOL GRIP.
The ‘effing L85 is designed so that all the controls are located in different locations on the receiver, and only the trigger and safety are accessible to the primary hand. In-f*cking-sane.
Whoever hacked off on the L85’s ergonomics never had to “fight” a rifle, and if they did, likely did so in a state of blessed obliviousness and never did it in combat. If they had, they’d have died stupidly, bumbling with the rifle they were issued, never understanding what was necessary.
Every so often I have to post this thread:
https://m4carbine.net/t/lessons-learned-in-combat/135516
That’s worth a read; that young Marine did not benefit from the sort of tactical skill-at-arms training I got from the Vietnam veterans I had around me as a young soldier during the early days of my career in the early 1980s. The stuff he describes doing under fire that led to his being wounded were the exact things my former Marine veterans harped on incessantly about; the little details of having your web gear set up properly and practicing where your magazines were until your little fingies bled from the pain were what I had beaten into me from the beginning. I have no idea where the hell the Marines lost that particular bubble, but if you read through that plaintive thread, you can clearly make out the outlines of “They sure as hell did…”
I don’t think the ultra-super-ninja-capital-letter IDJIT types who were responsible for the L85 getting through the system ever knew any of that stuff, and I rather doubt that many in the UK do to this day. The UK “Special” types may, but I’ve never seen them actually doing the drills with the weapons. I surmise from their choices of AR-15 pattern rifles that they probably do know, but I can’t ascertain for certain.
There is a huge qualitative difference between “shooting a rifle” and “fighting a rifle”. The L85 was designed and signed off on by idjits who had no idea whatsoever about “fighting a rifle”. I mean, yeah… If you’re merely putting holes in paper on a nice, safe known-distance range, without nasty strangers shooting back at you, the L85 is perfectly adequate.
If, however, you’re being shot at in some God-forsaken hellhole by people who’re actively trying to kill you, and you’re trying to stay alive when they come at you in close quarters? It’s a pistol-gripped deathtrap.
@JohnK again addressing the 7:38 post:
Forgot to mention that the AR-15 family should be taught to be charged with the off hand. If you do it right, the charging handle release is actually more accessible to your presumed non-primary hand, because you can just sweep it back blade-fashion or whatever and hit it while rapidly “fanning” the charging handle.
It ain’t optimal when the weapon is shouldered, because your face is in the way, but… I actually find that location easier to use than the forward one like on the HK weapons. Which, admittedly, may be because I’m used to the M16, but… I’ve tried out the HK forward charging idea, even back when I was (idiotically) contemptuous of the M16, and I found it a lot less “friendly” to work, even after considerable practice with one.
AR-15 pattern rifles, you get used to just sort of “sweeping” the charging handle back, or grabbing it. I’ve got so much time manipulating that system by this point that I no longer think about it consciously; my hands just do it by muscle-memory. I actually had to pause and go through the motions in order to remember what the hell I do, in order to answer your question…
And, that’s the way it has to be. I’ll be on my deathbed and likely be able to still do those drills reflexively.
@Daweo,
RE: The Bushmaster M17.
At some point during the 1980s, I actually talked to one of the guys involved with that project, and I can assure you that Bushmaster had and put in to that design exponentially less than Royal Ordnance did the L85. They didn’t have an “engineering team”, they had a couple of guys bodging around the Bushmaster manufacturing facility (which did not, in fact, really amount to anything at all impressive at the time…) basically doing the M17 as a side project.
They still managed to do a better job than Royal Ordnance did. I mean, in terms of equivalence, it’s about how Beretta did the BM59 compared to the US M14 program, only absent Beretta’s history and engineering team and substituting a couple of guys in a garage.
The M17 is way better than it deserves to be, even in its early untuned state. The last one I handled, which had been gone over by “that guy” whose name I cannot think of at the moment, was a weapon I’d actually think about taking into combat. Maybe not entirely willingly, but I’d not be as unhappy about the prospect as I would be about some asshole pawning an L85 off on me…
The crappy lay out of controls and ergonomics make even less sense when it’s remembered that British Forces used the AR15 in Asia…
Your quip about wanting to get people killed, has far too much historical support
I attended a local remembrance day service, a friend was laying a wreath.
The parson read an account he’d been given by a local family
the guy who’d written it, had joined either a Scottish or Irish Brigade of the Northumberland Fusiliers.
on the first morning of the battle of the Somme, they’d climbed out of their trenches and walked
walked!
he was one of two pipers playing the frigging bagpipes as they walked through the barbed wire towards the German trenches
somehow he survived
the other piper only survived to the German trenches and died there.
given that all the socialist policies advanced since then have been sold to the population as necessary to avoid a repeat of WW1
is it too much to speculate that people who were more intelligent and more cynical than most, may have wanted every family in the land to suffer a loss, and then be pliable to such persuasion?
in the case of the American expeditionary force in ww1, the case appears even more convincing, with officers still sending their men over the top at 10:15 am on 11/11/1918.
“(…)M17 is way better than it deserves to be, even in its early untuned state. The last one I handled, which had been gone over by “that guy” whose name I cannot think of at the moment, was a weapon I’d actually think about taking into combat.(…)”
M17S spawned M17S-556 https://modernfirearms.net/en/civilian-rifles/u-s-a-civilian-rifles/km-m17s-556-eng/ which is attributed to Ken McAllister.
@ Keith in England
Yeah, they walked.
Because they were in full gear, and the distance to the enemy lines varied between 400m and 1500m of fully cratered and muddy terrain.
The mistakes of the Somme had been:
1) To attack at all. 1916 technical conditions were too favourable to defense (defenders had machineguns and heavy grenade launchers, attackers, only bolt action rifles and hand grenades), and time was working in favour of the Entente (in the end Germany had been strangled economically).
2) Scarce artillery preparation and coordination with the infantry. Especially the British artillery barrage had been far below what was needed to cut the barbed wire, and was stopped too much in advance, giving the Germans time to get out of the bunkers and man the trenches (“rolling barrage” was developed only after the battle).
Kirk:
I can see why the left hand is used to charge rifles like the FAL or G3, where the charging handle is on the left. On the M1, M14 and AK it is on the right. It would only be natural to use the right hand to charge the piece, and I feel it would be easier to do that with the SA80, but that is not what is taught. I expect there is a good reason for it.
The AR family is ambidextrous with regard to charging, so it is interesting to learn the US Army teaches using the left hand. I imagine if doing so with the right hand on the pistol grip it would be easier to cant the rifle to the left, giving a more natural grip for the left hand on the charging handle. Is that how it is taught?
@JohnK, answering to 10:23 post:
Y’know… I had to stop and think about where I’d learned all that about how to “fight a rifle”, and I’m sad to say that there was never really any good formally-taught drill on the matter. In initial entry training, it was mostly left up to the individual as to how they did most of the manipulations of the rifle, and so long as you met the time standards, nobody really cared. It was not a big deal; nobody really paid attention, so long as you could clear the weapon and so forth; you were left up to your own as to how you organized yourself.
Which was, as we can see from that post made by the young wounded Marine, the wrong way to go about it. Now that I consciously think about it, that is.
When I got to my first assignment, it was a very transitional time for the Army. I was sent to Fort Sill, and assigned to a school support battalion for my MOS, which was assuredly not artillery-related, making it a real backwater for the Engineers. The Army was coming out of its post-Vietnam hangover about then, and the troops I served with were pretty much typical of the dregs of the 1970s US Army. The Reagan-era recruiting efforts were just at the beginning of their success, and I am not kidding you when I tell you that the first mass urinalysis we did at that unit resulted in over 85% of the company coming back “hot”. Including the company commander, who I later learned was actually a CID plant when I ran into him as a JAG defense officer in later years. The place was a mess, but it had its moments and pockets of extreme competence at some things.
I should probably mention that they literally lost my ass on the first field exercise I did with them; as the new private, I was put on LP/OP duty and left behind when they did a planned and scheduled “jump” of the bivouac site… I woke up out in the middle of nowhere on Fort Sill to discover that I was alone, and it took most of the morning before anyone noticed and I got picked up by my platoon sergeant. Good times, good times…
As to the “pockets of competence” there, a couple of standout Vietnam vets were still in the lower ranks to where you could get at them for what amounted to the “tribal knowledge” tutelage. I was around one guy, the former career Marine that had rejoined the Army so as to get his time for retirement after having left the Marine Corps out of sheer disgust after the end of Vietnam. He’d been a Marine Staff Sergeant, so basically the equivalent of an Army Sergeant First Class or so in experience and time-in-service; the Marines typically slot their leadership one pay grade below the Army, as per pre-WWII standard practice, so where the Army has Staff Sergeants as squad leaders, the Marines have Sergeants and the Staff Sergeants run platoons…
In any event, he knew his stuff. You’d look at him, and where the rest of the mob had their gear set up all haphazardly in the field (parade/inspection standards being ridiculously unworkable… We kept two sets of gear: Stuff we used, and stuff we had inspection-ready…), his was always meticulously thought out and extremely usable. Something I noticed as a standard “thing” with guys who’d actually seen combat in Vietnam, BTW…
So, I picked his brain. He saw I was interested, and then “took me under his wing”, which amounted to “Yeah, hey… Let’s haze the snot out of this kid…”, particularly with regards to the M60 and all it’s foibles, as I was a gunner on that weapon. I learned a lot from him, in terms of fieldcraft and the sort of “Yeah, if you want to survive, here are the best practices with your weapons…” stuff that really gets into the dirt of how things really work.
There were a couple of other people who contributed, but looking back on it? One reason I did so well there in that unit was that I was demonstrating interest in that stuff, and doing my best to emulate the veterans. Which they liked, and it fed off of. I think I got my job as unit armorer because of that, and I had those guys, who formed a small internal network of switched-on types that did things to make the unit better informally and sometimes in opposition to the “official chain of command” around to mentor the living crap out of me as a young soldier. It was all informal, and frankly, I think I might well have been one of the only junior “new” soldiers that sought that sort of thing out, respected it, and got it. It probably helped that I was a military history buff, knew the battles and battlefields of Vietnam quite well, and was able to ask sufficiently informed questions that a couple of the vets would look at me and ask where I’d been in Vietnam, myself… It did not help that I’d always carried an ambiguous appearance as to age; I don’t look all that different in my early sixties to what I did then, and if I had been shaving my head in those days, you’d have some problems figuring out which decade my pictures are from, over the years. I was mistaken for a Vietnam veteran on more than a few occasions, something I had to hastily correct. I probably could have passed off pretty well to do some “Stolen Valor” BS, but never had the inclination.
In short, the sort of things that I think you’re thinking of aren’t “Ofeeshuly” encoded; it’s all down to osmosis, tribal tacit knowledge passed on. You only rarely get people who’re interested in the issues, and past what you’ve got to officially enforce in training, the little bits and pieces of “Yeah, you really ought to train yourself to keep track of where you get your fresh magazine from, and work all that out so you can do it reflexively when you’re scared spitless… Practice, practice, practice…”
You basically do what IPSC shooters do, applied to the rifle. Not all that many are actually interested in it, and the whole thing was one of those blind spots that I only recognize in hindsight and realize that I should have spent a lot more time passing on to subordinates over the years. I think I know why that young Marine I put the link up to wasn’t properly trained on his weapon for combat: Nobody actually consciously ever trained on that minutiae, and because of it, the knowledge fled when they left the Marine Corps.
Much of the most important information for actual combat soldiers isn’t transcribed in the manuals or regulations; it’s all tacit, all stored in the individual repositories of other veterans who fought earlier battles, and without it? Steep, steep learning curves result.
There are reasons why Augustus was more worried about having lost the Centurions the Romans did there at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest; all other ranks were essentially disposable. The Centurionate of any legion represented the corporate knowledge and actual “heart” of the legion, and without them, all the little details of “how it works” were lost.
Which is probably why we still don’t know, to this day, whether or not the Romans marched in step. I think they probably did, but I’d love to know whether or not they led off with the left or right; probably right, because “left” was always cast as ill-omened and outright evil.
I have just realized that a lot of the crap I’m talking about here is basically the exact same thing, only separated by time. It’s tacit knowledge, passed on through informal osmosis, and because of that, and the source? People like the idjits that designed the L85 never looked for it, never codified it, never thought to consider it.
If someone had interviewed that former Marine that got me started, odds are pretty good he’d have been unable to articulate “Why” for most of his knowledge, even though he likely knew better than most of the lab-coated idjits how to design a rifle interface. Because he wouldn’t have been able to articulate it in any way they’d understand, the sad fact is that even if they’d have interviewed him on the matter, they’d have walked away having learned precisely nothing.
Which leads me to suspect that there were probably some British Army equivalents to that Marine involved and yet utterly ignored in the whole “design and field” disaster that was the L85. Humanity, as a whole, does not do the “tacit-to-formalized” transfer of knowledge at all well; there were almost certainly members of the Roman Centurionate that knew marching in step was important, but they weren’t the sort of men who wrote stuff that was deemed sufficiently important to be recorded and preserved, sooooo… We’ve no friggin’ idea at all how the Romans actually marched in any detailed manner. From the way the battles were fought, I think they did do their formations “in step”, but there’s no recorded proof. Hell, we’re not even all that sure exactly “how” they swapped out the front ranks of the Legions in combat, either…
Which, when you get down to it, is exactly how that young Marine got betrayed by his institution.
Kirk:
Thanks for that answer, you never short change, that’s for sure.
The British army does seem very strict that the SA80 must be charged with the left hand, which means the rifle has to be canted over to the left rather awkwardly. I can only imagine that some thought process went into this, but what it was, I don’t know.
The SA80 was always going to be a bullpup, and once you accept that, ergonomics are going to be iffy. The SA80 design ensured that they were in fact poor. But no-one in the UK is allowed to own a modern self-loading rifle, so there is no community of knowledge which would enable even constructive criticism. Civilians using their own rifles may well have evolved a better manual of arms for the SA80. We will never know, and I feel that is how the authorities wanted it. I think they wanted the British people disarmed so that in the event of a nuclear apocalypse, they would not have to worry about dealing with angry armed survivors. Any idea that an armed people might support the defence of the state did not compute with these people.
Looking forward to hearing Bloke’s comments on this weapon.
Did the bayonet handle heat up after firing with it mounted?
yeah, the bayonet is a bad joke
I can’t remember whether it was £6M ,or £7M that it cost to develop, in early 1980s money
with
theftnot so invisible taxinflation, your probably looking at four or five times that figure in today’s government shitcoins.someone (possibly Jan Stevenson) quipped that it was a good job those bright young engineers weren’t entrusted with the job of developing the wheel barrow.
One of the excuses that I’ve read for the crappy nature of the whole SA80 package, was that RSAF Enfield, couldn’t retain engineers during the roller coaster ride of booms and busts caused by Thatcher’s monetary policy of alternately flat out money printer go brrrrr then interest rate go brrrrrr
arguably designed to destroy both British manufacturing and the British working class, while benefiting her financier donors.
Hey, don’t feel bad: The US Army’s M9 bayonet was perhaps cheaper to design, but I’m pretty sure the program cost was similar…
Stupidest ‘effing thing they ever issued, in my opinion. Gadgetry made manifest; a single tool to do the job of several, and do them all poorly. Same concept as the L85 bayonet, and I honestly reject that whole train of thought. I think the entire concept of these multi-purpose tools is suspect, and especially since none of them make decent bayonets… Which is presumably the primary reason they are purchased.
Eickhorn got it started; whoever was behind the Kalishnikov version apparently cribbed some notes from the Germans, and it was Hey! Presto!! “We gotta keep up with the Soviets…!!!”
Which was all of a piece with the IFV and so many other Cold War era idiocies. Copy mindlessly, ‘cos ya know, those guys on the other side really know what’s goin’ on…
Reality? Go stick one of these idjit-class “tool-cum-bayonet” through a ribcage or two, and get back to me. I know for a fact that the M9 will likely break, almost certainly get stuck, and ain’t none of them going to perform as well as good ol’ Rosalie, the cruciform bayonet on the Lebel. Blade bayonets are ‘effing useless, in my opinion: You want a halberd? Carry one; nothing you can stick on the end of a rifle is ever going to be “slashworthy”; they’re too light and nowhere near long enough. It’s poky-poky-poky, all day long and tomorrow that works in that space, nothing else.
About the only “multi-purpose” I’ll endorse is to say that your rod/cruciform bayonet ought to be usable as a mine probe, and nothing else. Past that, do not venture; it does not work. Down that path lies madness…
Every so often, I get this vision in my head, of all these long-dead Germans who’ve been delightedly passing on their wisdom through the offices of the Good Idea Fairy(tm), and they’re sitting around some heavenly conference table rubbing their hands together and muttering things like “Let’s make them think they can fight from the same vehicle that carries the troops…” and “Yeah, multi-purpose Swiss Army knife bayonets, that’s the ticket…”
A lot of the really bad ideas of the Cold War were first thought of by some idjit-class type back during WWI or WWII, and whose ideas never quite got enough traction during the war. Those ideas then got implemented in peacetime under the Cold War budgets, and boy howdy, were there some doozies. This whole “One bayonet to do all the things” was one of them, and I really wish they just… Hadn’t.
I think the USMC decided to do it the smart/cheap way. Looked around for an OTS knife and added a bayonet lock and muzzle ring to it.
https://ontarioknife.com/products/okc-3s-bayonet
All it really is is this.
https://www.midwayusa.com/product/1015676132?srsltid=AfmBOoptWL74IkYU1FpOs1Gxm6259dai7esdhHeLxh-ZFbZ-GMX-a11Q&pid=670347
I’ve had one for thirty years. Next to actual FN magazines for my High Power, it’s about the best $29.95 I ever spent.
cheers
eon
That Marine bayonet looks really good… Right up until you actually stick it into someone’s chest cavity and then try to get the damn thing out. It’s really too long, and the tang is nowhere near sturdy enough. Friend of mine took one out on a sheep butchering, stuck it on his AR-15 and went for a hanging sheep carcass that was apparently not well-secured. Blade did it’s thing, got stuck, and about 120 pounds of dead sheep came off the hook, which he tried preventing with said bayonet. It was sideways in between the ribs, sorta torsioned, and… Yeah. Tang snapped, sheep carcass fell, wife yelled… Ugliness all around.
I was going to buy one of those bayonets until he told me how he’d managed to break his.
What I want, nobody makes. That would be something like the old vintage Rosalie of Lebel fame, made of titanium with a nice, sturdy non-magnetic handle that could also accept something improvised to make it a decent mine probe. Nobody makes anything like that. Which is… Sad. It might be of actual utility to the average soldier.
@Kirk;
The more I see of “modern” bayonets, the better the old-fashioned, Civil War or earlier era triangular bayonet looks. Tubular socket, elbow, foot and a half of triangular steel tapering to a needle point.
If all you want to do is poke holes in somebody, that’s all you need.
Stick it on a hunk of wood about five feet long; instant mine probe.
Other that those two functions, there really isn’t much you can practically do with a properly-designed bayonet. And you probably shouldn’t be trying.
cheers
eon
I also have an L85 bayonet, which I bought on a whim. The handle portion is clearly a casting. The blade is either a part of the same monolithic casting, or it’s a forging welded onto the cast handle? Either way, it’s going to snap off the first time it’s actually used in combat.
Now I know what I want for Christmas. Thanks for informing us, Ian. This certainly made my day
I’m guessing that with the long sliding bar from the trigger to the sear, moving forward to fire, that this kit doesn’t have the drop safety problems that persisted until H&K got the job of de bugging the POS?
There was at least one civilian version of the SA80 in America at one point in 84 or the first half of 85
Guns and Ammo magazine did a (glowing) review of it
I don’t know whether it stayed in America or went on somewhere else
Guns and Ammo had a bad habit of glowing reviews of questionable guns. I am not saying they were wrong here. It’s just that I learned to take their endorsement with a grain of salt.
I used to read the gun trade magazines with near-religious frequency.
After enough time passed, I started noting a bunch of inconsistencies with what was written and what my personal experiences with what they were writing about were… Doubts, as they say, set in.
At this point, anything I see anywhere about firearms is untrustworthy. Small Arms Review is an exception, but I can’t even find them anymore in the stores. All that’s there is excresences like Guns ‘n Ammo, nothing within which is even worth reading.
Trust nothing you see in print, in the modern world.
Small Arms Review has a website but don’t believe they still print a magazine. That is one magazine I truly miss.
yeah, the “glowing” is intended to convey plenty of scorn.
You are right though, they may have had a decently made pre production gun to play with.
Back in the mid 70s to early 80s, reliable info was so difficult to get, I remember having De Haas’ “bolt action rifles” on order for about two years at a local book shop, and checking whether it had come in whenever I got to town…
half a century later its still not arrived.
Realising that most of Guns and Ammo’s content* was written for the hard of thinking, was part of a growing-up process
realising that de Haas, Ian V Hogg And WHB Smith were often way out of their depths too, was another stage in that slow process.
___________________
*there were also some excellent writers at Guns & Ammo who did know their stuff, Ross Seyfreid, for example.
The production L85A1 was an abomination in every way, a totally unworthy replacement for the L1A1 SLR. Any country that cannot provide their standing military with a decent rifle should make the people responsible for that decision go into a live combat zone with the rifle they have provided. Having said that I got to handle L85 weapon serial No 000009 at the REME Depot. It was one of the pre issue weapons and had 12K rounds put through it under trial conditions. It was a well manufactured and tight when functioning. Unlike the original issue L85A1s, which sounded like a paint can being shaken when fired and required a “Forward assist” to ensure the bolt was locked forward on loading. POS.
FWIW, I got to speak with one of the guys who was on the testing team for L85. He said the test weapons were decently made, but what he actually received the next time he was in an operational unit was trash. Which lines up exactly with what you’re saying. If I remember right, the L85 was produced at an actual Royal Ordnance site, and then production was moved to Nottingham, where none of the original production people were willing to move. This was supposedly a key reason for all the production problems…
I think they’d have been a lot better off if they’d just decided right then and there that the UK was “giving up the gun”, and simply moved to something international like the AUG or a Colt M16. Hell, even the HK33 would have been a better choice…
Considering they came form 30 years of use of a licence-manufactured FAL, the sudden obsession with “it has to be designed here” is scarcely comprehensible. If they really wanted a bullpup, they only had to made a competition, and manufacture (if the winner was British) or licence-manufacture the winning design.
Dogwalker:
I think the thing is that Royal Ordnance was being sold off, and needed a product they could sell. Enfield was closed down and sold, production being moved to Nottingham. As it turned out, no-one wanted the SA80 because it was crap, so ROF Nottingham was closed down and sold too, and we now have no domestic small arms manufacturing capability. How cool is that?
As with the rest of what their (do you capitalize that?) Majesties governments have come up with in the last century, none of it really demonstrated any sort of competence.
I think the British class system and the surrounding BS is what made all of this happen… Britain never really developed a decent approach to technology and business, because that was trade, and Properly Upper-Class sorts of Britons don’t do vulgar “trade”. Britain is not at all good doing the correct “bottom up” crap that the Japanese are so good at with their factory floor production systems; the lower-class tradie types are supposed to be silent and compliant, never contradicting their social superiors who’re usually… Idiots, especially when it comes to practical things.
Guy I used to correspond with RE: Toyota was a Dyson employee, back when Dyson was still doing manufacturing in Merrie Olde Englande. He was brutally honest about why Dyson left the UK, and that basically boiled down to middle-management mucking everything up. They’d never, ever listen to the people out on the floor doing the work, and the usual UK factory support issues were always a problem.
There’s something really FUBAR in British culture with regards to “closing the loop” for a lot of major firms. I’ve experienced it innumerable times, starting back when I was a mere child and helping my stepdad work on British Leyland Land Rover products. You’d order stuff from the dealers over here in the US, wait six weeks, and something completely “other” than what you ordered would show up. We wound up owning a desert-spec Land Rover because the owner, who’d brought it back from Libya when Khadafi kicked everyone out, got tired of waiting for the parts to come in. He also got tired of paying the storage fees because of that, and we got the Rover handed over to us the day that the storage fees on that car went over the Blue Book value.
Humorously, the week after they did the title transfer, Leyland finally came through and got us the part that we’d ordered like 18 months earlier… I still have a bundle of half-shaft axles they sent as a mistake, and didn’t want to pay the shipping for to return out in our family garage.
I’ve no idea what the actual issue is, but I’ll tell you this much: If you buy British, do not expect good factory support. There’s a major problem out there where the “execution” part of the company interfaces with management, and that’s something that’s true across the entirety of “British governance”, whether it is private enterprise or government agency.
I don’t think it’s actually the people; the Japanese car manufacturers are producing pretty good vehicles with the same British labor pool that Leyland was working from, sooooooo…?
I think it’s the management. I really, really do.
Kirk:
There is a lot of truth to what you say. Britain is heading back towards 1970s era industrial relations, it seems, whilst our energy costs are four times America’s, so the future of our manufacturing sector looks bleak. Good job we still have a Rolls Royce civil service to manage our decline.
https://modernfirearms.net/en/assault-rifles/great-britain-assault-rifles/sa80-l85-eng/ claims that The L85 is fed using NATO-standard (STANAG) magazines, similar to M16 type magazines, with the standard capacity of 30 rounds. Early L85A1 steel magazines caused a lot of troubles, as well as amagazine housing itself, which had a thin walls that could be easily dented,thus blocking the magazine way. Both magazines and its housings were upgraded inthe L85A2 configuration. which raise question how they manage such antics in 1970s for standard capacity magazine for rimless cartridge and using already established standard as base (no need for new invention there)?
Daweo, although claims about a STANAG 5.56 mm magazine pop up again and again, there is no such STANAG. There was a proposal, but it was never ‘promulgated’ as the NATO bureaucratic language calls it. An this was in my opinion a wise decision.
I gotta be honest… The M16 magazine was always sub-optimal, at least until MagPul came on the scene and sorted things out.
Part of the basic problem was that one of the design criteria/choices was that the magazine was going to become something like the charger strip, a disposable one-time use item. That was the original intent, and it never quite materialized.
Because of that, the magazine was always a lot flimsier than it should have been, and the weapon’s accommodations for it were always sub-par because it catered to that… The depth of the mag well and so forth were predicated on supporting a flimsy disposable.
The trade-offs are there, though: The AK magazines, for example? You could likely beat an elephant to death with one, and the weight due to making it that sturdy is one of the key reasons the AK is what it is.
I don’t know what the best trade-off would be. The AR-15 approach allows for lighter mags that are easier to deal with in terms of swapping out, and the AK is sturdier, but I’ll tell you this much: I don’t want to be the guy dealing with the AK ergonomics and such in the middle of a firefight. You want an optimized gunfighter’s rig, that’d be the M16. You want something sturdy, that can double as a flail if need be? AK.
STANAG standards really ought to be named differently: Not “STANdardization AGreements”, but “STANDardization ARGuments”. STANDARG, for what they really are: Arguments over what compromises to make with things, because ain’t nobody gonna be happy with what you come up with…
And as far as STANBLARG goes, the SA 80 platform was originally designed for that 4.85 x 49mm cartridge. Which was an even stranger reshaping of 5.56 x 45mm than the 5mm/.223 wildcat was.
And oh yes, it needed a “proprietary” 20-round magazine, which is what the catch and well in the rifle was designed for. Which weighed about half what the supposedly-standard 30-round 5.56 magazine did. This may explain the L85 catch’s annoying habit of breaking and dumping the magazine at your feet.
RO claimed they designed the SA80 to handle 5.56 x 45mm if their pet 4.85 x 49mm cartridge wasn’t adopted, but looking at the results I have my doubts.
clear ether
eon
it’s interesting that at least one of the Japanese manufacturers (Toyota at Derby) refused to employ anyone who had previously worked in the British car making industry.
They wanted Toyota cars to be made the Toyota way, not the British Leyland way.
Given the terrible industrial relations at British Leyland, it is easy to see why. In the 1970s BL had some genuinely good car designs, let down by terrible manufacturing. The same cars built in Japan would have been great.
1.This is a very clever product and I hope they make money.
2. Not many $5000 “exact reproductions” will sell, especially with this on the market first.
2. What happened to AJ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3gbnYJ_pyM