Ultra-Rare Colt AR-15 Survival Rifle, with firearms expert Jonathan Ferguson

Borgman- Royal Archives of
The middle and index fingers used fur bolt manipulation on the SMLE. This the middle or strongest finger is the trigger finger. ( The index being used over stresses leading to arthritis ) The index is then laid along the receiver pointing at the target. The height then much less. A natural handling. Now why the excessively long grip this WOG wonders?

Shame that the UK government stripped Brits of their God-given right to defend themselves… At some point (hopefully far in the future) they will regret this decision.

AR was Armalite’s naming convention for Armalite Rifle. Colt bought the rights for the AR-15 name.
Armalite kept the AR-10 and later came up with the AR-180, a bufferless less expensive design for the 5.56 cartridge for export

I suppose this would be stored in the seat pack with the magazine unloaded to save the spring?

Another excellent video Jonathan Asalways. Not sure whether I'm correct or not, but I'd read them longer flash hider/flash suppressor on these and the XM series were for making the sound of the gun more like an AK when firing, not for sound suppression?

Hello Jonathan as always! Loving your videos. Working my way through them all pretty briskly 😄

John the "sound and flash moderator" was designed to make the 177 sound a bit more like an M16 guns like the XM177E1 and XM177E2 as well as the 606, 607, 608 and 609. As colt wanted to make the gun be as close as possible to the M16 so as to be a bit more comfortable to the shooter.

-reduce muzzle report to M16 levels
-increase backpressure for the 10" barrel

You forgot to introduce yourself as Jonathan Ferguson, Keeper of Firearms and Artillery at the Royal Armouries Museum in the UK

Can you provide a document where it is actually designated 'moderator'? All I've ever seen are documents where it is labeled as a flash and sound supressor.

4:12 It seems to me if you were to hold the upper above the lower, you would get a more compact "rectangular" package, the butt reinforcement plate matching the rear of the sight ramp, and the pistol grip with magazine fitted slotting in between the front of the ramp and the back of the front sight. That configuration leaves it flat above and below, and would fit nicely behind a rectangular aircraft seat.

it's not stupid to have a non-sliding butt-stock

Made me think of Clark in the book (Not tv show) of Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse.

AR- has never stood for automatic rifle EVER! I don't care what the leftist say!

Shame the M231 Wire Stock was first available with the introduction of the M2 Bradley,, that had made a good addition to that rifle here. Not the most ergonomic stock, but i like the aesthetic and the way they had think around the classic AR-15 eternal boner aka the buffer tube.

Hi Jonathan As Always, pleased to meet you…

I have seen photographs of SAS troopers on Jungle Training in Belize with CAR 15 short barrel carbines and underslung M203 grenade launchers. Do you know which model this was? It would have been early 1970s I believe.

For all the people guessing for fun,we guess to play the game, even if we are wrong it's still fun, please don't ruin it by telling people on the comments exactly what gun it is, let us wait for the video 🤘

Colt boffins while designing this muzzle device: be vewie, vewie quiet. I'm hunting wabbit.

The XM177E1 had a flash suppressor. The XM177E2 extended the barrel and changed the suppressor to quiet the weapon down some is what I understand. I could be wrong. A few years have passed and my memory is not what it once was.

I carried an xm177E1 (CAR-15) in Vietnam 1967 looked nothing like what you have there.

Great information as usual from Jonathan Ferguson, The Official British compliment to Ian McCollum (insert further official titles) … I wonder if this predated enough R&D time of the carbine length buffer tube and assembly, so a rifle length buffer was the go to proven design already in production so that's what determined the oddly long stock length? 🤔 I think the short rod guided stock was being used because only round buffer tubes existed at that point, although shorter and with shorter buffer weights and neccessary springs… I'm sure tooling up to produce a short buffer with the lower rectangular car stock guiding rail was quite the manufacturing change from a simple round tube which could easily be literally turned down instead of what I assume became quite the milling process in comparison… But I'm 100% just guessing 🤷‍♂️👍

for an all round survival rifle i'd rather have a M1A1 paratrooper stocked M1 carbine!!you have descent fighting power in the round and effective but not excess damage if used to hunt food a nice recoil impulse and a damn reliable action in the gun even if you shorten the barrel on it now for a strictly fight off the enemy til the jolly green can get to you in that era or even today it's got to be a collapsing stock MP5 or an Uzi for the job!!

Royal Armouries videos are cool.
The comment section however is borderline creepy weird.

The thought of turning in such a nice piece is horrid to me

"But AR stands for Armalite and was designed to only shoot semiautomatic!" Thanks for helping to debunk the fudd lore.

If only 10 were made, how on Earth did one of these end up in the hands of a UK subject?!?

There must be more to the story.

Nowadays it's accepted a "submachine gun" needs to fire a pistol or PDW cartridge. But at one point an assault rifle with a short barrel could be labelled a SMG.

Boffins gotta boff.

Joe Satrapa: "Pfft. Weak."

My brother worked with a chopper pilot who flew in Vietnam who claimed to have been shot down 7-8 times. His preferred survival weapon was a .45 Tommy gun without the buttstock.

Now-a-days we have a folding stock assembly that can literally fold it in half in a second.

Rocking the calculator watch there!

The muzzle "moderator" is also there most likely so the user's ears aren't getting obliterated by such a short barreled rifle. They had tons of issues with the short carbines back in the day being too nasty to use for common use.

Interesting. No forward assist. On both rifles!

As aircrew, all I want is a radio and a guide to golf courses to plan my escape.

Next do AN-94

The concept is asking to be Blackout-ed as you wouldn't want to notify 1/2 the country you've landed in if you have to fire
although, Blackout would limit you hunting options unless you like ballistic carpaccio squirrel. .

Apparently these types of suppressors on the various M16 versions weren't to suppress the noise, just make it slightly quieter, to make it sound like a rifle. Such a short barrel has a lot different sound signature than a full sized M16 with a 20" barrel, but the suppressor/hider takes the decibel level down enough so it mimics a rifle noise, something that ground troops, not say, a special forces squad, or downed aircrew, would have.

I think the moderator is mostly to increase back pressure for improved reliability

Weird they would omit the ability for the stock to collapse on a survival rifle

I looked up the CAR-15 M2 heavy assault rifle he mentioned, found some low-contrast Xeroxed-looking black and white pictures of it.

That thing is bonkers looking.

Hearsay says a 20" barreled AR is still quieter than an XM177 with moderator.

This may be the ugliest AR I've seen, I hate it! 🤮It's only getting worse as Jonathan explains it!

I assume the gas system is the length of the barrel and is part of the gas block. if so, I'd assume the suppressor is mostly there to increase back pressure for reliable functioning, as was on the home-built dissipators. Sound suppression is probably an intention as well though.

Congratulations on reaching 300k subscribers

AR 15 stands for armalite rifle always will it was Stoners 15th design of gun

AR has never stood for Automatic Rifle as far as my research can find and sound moderator doesn't mean silencer. There are modern day sound moderators available for purchase as a standard firearm accessory and the U.S. BATFE has no problem with them. God knows that if it even changed the decibel level of an airsoft gun the ATF would demand a tax stamp on it so obviously a moderator is far from a silencer.

The ejection seats of that time were nothing like modern aircraft ejection seats. Modern ejection seat systems monitor aircraft speed, angle, pitch, yaw, acceleration/deceleration weight of the person in the seat, etc. When a modern ejection seat is fired the ejection seat computer calculates the optimum ejection force, which is just enough for the crewman being ejected to clear the aircraft and no more. The maximum Gs a modern ejection seat can pull is enormous, on the magnitude of 25 Gs. Most ejection events pull less Gs than that to minimize danger to the ejectee. The early style ejection seats had little or no capability for moderating the ejection force so they pretty much went from 0 to 11. At max Gs the crewman can be seriously injured or killed by objects on his person or near him during an ejection event. Those weapons were designed to mitigate against pilot injury during an ejection event. An early example of light-weight pilot survival guns intended for use in the jet age was the Colt Aircrewman which was developed in the early 1950s. The Colt Aircrewman was patterned on Colt's well established snub-nose revolver the difference between the Aircrewman and the standard snub-nose revovlers was in the materials the gun was made from. The Aircrewman was made almost entirely out of aluminum and weighed only 11 ounces. The Airforce issued special low pressure .38 spl loads for the gun. Unfortunately many of the Air Force personnel who were issued the guns did not heed the warnings and would fire the gun with standard .38 loads. Eventually the Air Force recalled most the guns and destroyed them.

Ain't that a cute little gun?