My "Monster" rifle Idea

DannyinJapan

DannyinJapan

Joined
Oct 9, 2003
Messages
5,594
I have always wondered why we didn't just scale down the BAR for use as a semi-auto rifle in WW2. It was issued for use in WW1, so it was already a well-known, established weapon.
20 round removable magazines, very modern design.
I think we had a chance to field a weapon that would have been 10 years ahead of the rest of the world.
The BAR itself is too heavy for an infantry rifle, but if it had been scaled down for 308 and given a shorter, lighter barrel for semi-auto use, I bet we could have come in very close to the same weight at the Garand but with all of the features of the rifles designed and used 10 years later.
I did some crappy photoshopping to give you a rough idea of what I was thinking about. My monster is in the middle.
monster.jpg
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this is a modern BAR. It comes in around the same weight and size of a Garand. I dont know if these modern BAR will accept the old 20-round mags of the army versions or if there are aftermarket mags available, but I would LOVE to have a military-version of this rifle..Or at least see what could be done with it..
031008m.jpg
 
Ever owned or shot an fn FAL Danny?? I am building an Para fal at this time. The adjustable gas system on the FAL makes it able to gobble any ammo and I have found them to be the most reliable battle rifle on the planet, used in over 90 countrys. There is an stg58 on the files that is near 14,000 rounds fired and Never cleaned, hows that?
Yes I would like to have an BAR too.
 
Today's BAR sporting rifle and the BAR of military fame share little but the name. They function completely differently and are indeed apples and oranges in comparison.

Simply scaling something down often doesn't work, unless the ammunition is also scaled down accordingly. Even when it is it still doesn't work sometimes.

Hatcher's "Book of the Garand" details the rifles leading up to the M1 marvellously. Indeed, the biggest problem facing the arms developers of the day was the weight. With the metallurgy of that period it seemed impossible to build a reliable, accurate autoloader that would withstand military use and weighed less than ten pounds. Parts were lightened from original MG dimensions to make weight, then wore out prematurely or simply broke. Existing heavy mechanisms for automatic weapons relied on big, solid parts to handle the battering and when they were scaled down, those same mechanisms were no longer up to the task. This was the first thing most autoloading rifle designers tried, and it was the thing that was least successful overall.

Would a shrunken BAR have worked? Maybe, but I would bet a paycheck that it wouldn't have worked nearly as well as the full-sized version.

Also, consider the doctrine of the time and what the rest of the world was using. The lack of a large magazine was not considered to be a disadvantage; in fact, the clips were lighter and cheaper than magazines (and still are), and the lack of a protruding magazine made for a more solid prone firing position. The resulting weapon could still generate more volume of fire than nearly any other service rifle in the world at the time, and certainly every rifle in common circulation. Had the military thought that it needed a magazine-fed rifle, they would've had one built. (They did, actually -- the T20E2. Very few were made and they probably didn't see service, most likely because they weren't needed. But it was tried.)

The fact that they decided that they did need something like this twenty years later is another matter, and even that wasn't what they really wanted as it turned out...but that's another story entirely.
 
IIRC, the 1918 BAR receiver started out as a 20 lb block of ordinance steel & took more than twice as many machining operations as a garand receiver. Quite a bit of time & resources, probably one of the reasons for the M1.
My dad used a BAR in WWII & it kept him alive a bunch of times. It was a load for a real man; besides the 18 lbs of rifle, the gunner usually carried 6 mags & the #2 man carried as many as he could, that + the other gear made for 60-70 lbs. Burn out a barrel & it had to be replaced by the battalion armorer. Quick job but it took special tools.
I run 1.5K+ rounds thru a Garand every year. Tho it holds 8 compared to an M1A's 20, reloads are quick enough that I think it can keep up a rate of aimed fire equal to anything else.
Uplander
 
Say what you want, but Id rather have a Bren in .308

Ive red articles about the Brens that India still uses, rebarreled, restocked, everything but the reciever came from india, but it is a British reciever.

But that is just a wish, reality states that I must continue to save in order to finish building my black franken rifle.
 
DannyinJapan said:
They did come out with the M-1 carbine, which had a removable 20 round magazine..
Click to expand...

And other things as well, but none of them were service rifles. It's an important distinction.

The folks who did produce rifles with detachable magazines at the time often didn't issue any spares, intending for the same magazine to be used continuously. In some cases (the SVT comes immediately to mind) the magazines were not even necessarily interchangeable, being fitted to a particular rifle. Clip fed boltguns were the state of the art during WWII and the M1 was considered more than competitive as it was.

Subguns, pistols, and PDW's were another matter entirely of course, but remember that they used ammunition that was much lighter and less powerful, and were meant to operate at considerably higher rates of fire. Magazines made a lot more sense here. Who the hell would want to keep a select fire weapon fed with clips? (And yes, that was tried too by several nations, and that's why no one does that anymore. Firearms Design Rule #1 is that there are no ideas that are new, only ideas so old that everyone's forgotten about them.)

As I said, it's not that no one was curious about a magazine-fed service rifle for the US during WWII. It was tried. The refusal to adopt was a matter of disinterest, not omission. Evidently they were not impressed enough with the concept to bother changing the tooling.

This sort of thinking died hard in the US. Even when the M14 hit the bricks it still had an integral charger, although I doubt too many people ever used it as such...but it's there, should someone wish to play with it. I'd advise anyone so inclined to keep their nails trimmed short.
 
Too bad those overpriced socom's still can NOT outperform an FAL, and cost twice as much.
 
Eleven pounds? Jeebus. They managed to make it even heavier.

By comparison, a RRA LAR-8 with the quad rail option is 3/4" of an inch longer, around two pounds lighter, and approximately $500 less expensive with similar capabilities and better ergonomics.

This actually brings us back to the original topic in a roundabout sort of way. Certain devices do certain things well by design. We can often make them do more if we apply enough effort (and money) to the problem, but sometimes it makes more sense to simply use a different design better suited to the task.

The M14's design was already dated when it entered production. Some of the efforts to modernize it have been interesting but underneath all that extra weight, it's still an M14 with all an M14's flaws. (Or rather an M1A, with those additional flaws as well.)
 
Well, it just seemed like a good idea to me, but I guess things are always more complicated than they seem. I like the looks of that LAR8 and the price isnt bad, but I already have my BM-59, so I dont plan on buying another 308 weapon. I am thinking about geeting an AR180B sometime, though, just because I like it. (5.56)
 
All my sources indicate that the 30-06 was the parent case for the 7.62, although it is certainly possible that the .300 Savage was the actual parent case. The world may never know...
I've actually seen full fledged flame wars over which it truly was on various gun forums.
 
Hey Danny, I have a Beretta M62, the civ version from Beretta. Darn nice gun. And real close to a BAR/Garand blend.
The problem with the WWII mods to the Garand to allow BAR mags was that they were field depot level (mostly) built and there were feed problems. If look look at a BM59/62 bolt you will see the cuts made to allow a detachable mag.
I think a bigger missed chance was not using the Johnson light mg. Single stack mag, but light at 12.5 lbs and useful. Now that with BAR mags would have been super.

Dino in Reno
 
I'd like to see a shortened M1 Garand (so-called "tanker") or M1A in that new .450 Bushmaster or .44 Auto Mag.
 
You know, there used to be a guy who made M1 carbines in 45 winmag. I dont know if he is still in business or not..
 
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