#LightRifle

The Armalite AR-10 is the original lightweight 7.62mm combat rifle – a space-age amalgam of aluminum, steel, and advanced plastics capable of a rate of fire of 800 rounds per minute and weighing just a hair over 7 pounds, unloaded. Its younger, 5.56mm caliber brother, the AR-15, is today perhaps the dominant rifle design in the West, but the .30 caliber AR-10 is the one the started it all, the progeny of Eugene Stoner’s brilliant design and Fairchild’s advanced manufacturing.

In January, just before the 2017 SHOT Show, I got the opportunity to travel to Cody Wyoming to visit the Cody Firearms Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, to see some of their rare firearms and bring photos of them to our readers.

Expos like the 2016 NRA Annual Meeting or the SHOT Show are usually places to find the latest and greatest in the firearms world. Sometimes, however, exhibitors bring along relics of the past, forgotten firearms that haven’t seen the public spotlight in decades or even centuries. For Rock Island Auction, these kinds of items are their business, and in reflection of that, the auction company brought some extremely rare and unusual rifles to the NRA 2016 showroom floor.

Well, sort-of-not-really, although it makes for a pretty great title. The Bendix-Hyde Carbine was in fact one of the nine prototypes initially submitted to the Light Rifle program (not to be confused with the Lightweight Rifle program  that is the subject of my ongoing serie s), and it’s in many ways the most interesting one to me. First, though, a brief overview of George J. Hyde, the brilliant designer who invented it:

The next few installments of my Light Rifle series of articles will cover in detail the development of the two calibers that shaped the NATO rifle trials until 1953: The .280 British and the .30 Light Rifle, the latter of which – spoiler alert – subsequently became the 7.62x51mm NATO in 1954. The subsequent rejection of the more intermediate .280 British as the standard NATO rifle cartridge caused considerable controversy in the UK, and many experts today believe that it was the superior choice for a standard round versus the much more conventional .30 Light Rifle. Advocates of the .280 British lament its rejection as being politically-driven, but – while there’s considerable truth to that notion – there is another side to the story. One critical document from this period is A Comparison Test of United Kingdom and United States Ammunition for Lightweight Weapons, from 1950.

This is the third part of a series of posts seeking to describe and analyze the 7.62mm Light Rifle concept promoted by the Americans, and subsequently adopted by NATO in various forms. This series will cover development from before World War II to the present day, but will focus primarily on the period from 1944-1970, which constitutes the span of time from the Light Rifle’s conception until its end in the United States with the standardization of the M16. This article itself deals primarily with the M1E series of modified Garand rifles created at Springfield Armory between 1941 and 1945. However, some rifles in the series are left out, these being the sniper rifle variations (M1E2, M1E6, M1E7, and M1E8), as well as the 7.62mm M1 conversion (M1E14) developed in the early 1960s. My readers should also note that while I consulted a variety of sources to write this article, my narrative heavily favors Bruce Canfield’s magnum opus The M1 Garand Rifle , as it is the most recent and complete source of information on the M1E series that I know of. On some matters, Canfield contradicts earlier sources like R. Blake Stevens’ U.S. Rifle M14 from John Garand to the M21, which is itself an excellent volume.

This is the zeroeth part of a series of posts seeking to describe and analyze the 7.62mm Light Rifle concept promoted by the Americans, and subsequently adopted by NATO in various forms. This series will cover development from before World War II to the present day, but will focus primarily on the period from 1944-1970, which constitutes the span of time from the Light Rifle’s conception until its end in the United States with the standardization of the M16.

As in all Small Caliber Book Reviews here at TFB, I will be covering the area of relevance and strengths and weaknesses of the book, as well as whether it is more introductory or advanced.

We’ve covered a little bit of the AR-18 here before, and in passing mentioned its ancestor, the 7.62mm AR-16. For those uninitiated to this relatively unknown rifle, there is a brief but instructive article on the rifle at Wikipedia. GunLab’s Chuck has posted before about the AR-16, which he got to examine in Reed Knight’s collection last year. On Friday, though, he mentioned his intentions to replicate the rifle:

This is the first part of a series of posts seeking to describe and analyze the 7.62mm Light Rifle concept promoted by the Americans, and subsequently adopted by NATO in various forms. This series will cover development from before World War II to the present day, but will focus primarily on the period from 1944-1970, which constitutes the span of time from the Light Rifle’s conception until its end in the United States with the standardization of the M16.

In preparation for an upcoming article about “light rifle” development (i.e., full power automatic infantry rifles), I have been reading the excellent Collector Grade Publication three-part volume on the FN FAL rifle. In it is contained the transcript of the 1950 Light Rifle trials, which pitted the American T25 design (a rifle that was at once a hybrid of the M1 Garand and BAR, but at the same time much more than that) by Earle Harvey, the Anglo-Polish EM-2 design by Stefan Janson, and the Anglo-Belgian FN FAL design – by none other than Dieudonné Saive, John M. Browning’s Belgian protégé – against the Second World War veteran the M1 Garand. The tests were comprehensive, but not all included the “control” rifle – the M1. Why this was so is not clear to me. In the rain tests, the M1 beat the EM-2 and was not so far behind the FAL and T25, and in the cold tests the M1 was a clear winner, functioning flawlessly (this would be echoed later when the T44E2 would beat the FAL in trials in Alaska, preventing its cancellation and eventually leading to the adoption of its descendant, the T44E4 as the M14, in 1957).

For this week’s DTIC, we have a document that’s not so much significant as it is interesting. Round-Robin Comparison Test of Light Rifle Ammunition Caliber .30 is an early look into the program that would beget the 7.62x51mm NATO round.

Check out this auction. It has thousands of beautiful photos. I think all, or nearly all, come from one collection.