FN CAL Assault Rifle and FN CAL Carbine Assault Rifle Automatic

The FN CAL Assault Rifle made Belgian is an example of a weapon that was at once ahead of its time, built using ideas that were technologically possible at the time, and suffering from the political whims of the time. The FN CAL (Carbine, Automatic, Legere) was the first attempt by FN to “shrink” the FAL into a form that would be preferred by countries now using the smaller 5.56mm NATO round. Most of my readers know the story behind the NATO adoption of the 5.56mm round the FN CAL Assault Rifle original candidate was a Britishdesigned .280 caliber round, but the US rammed through the adoption of their own 7.62mm round due to their greater political power at the time.

FN CAL Assault Rifle

About a decade later, it was realized that the 7.62mm NATO round simply had too much power for a lightweight assault rifle and again, the US used its political muscle to make their 5.56mm round the official NATO assault rifle round. FN had considerable success with its FAL, firing the then-standard 7.62mm NATO round, but they had seen the writing on the wall in the early 1960s, and began designing a smaller version of the FAL to fire what became the new standard NATO round.

The result was the FN CAL Assault Rifle, first produced in 1966. Externally, the FN CAL Assault Rifle  did look like a smaller version of the FAL but internally, a lot of changes had to be made to make a smaller FAL work with the 5.56mm NATO round. Though the operation is mostly similar to that of the FAL, the FN CAL Assault Rifle uses a cam-operated rotating bolt and carrier system instead of the tilting bolt and bolt carrier of the FAL. The FN CAL Assault Rifle uses a “double interrupted thread” on the bolt carrier instead of the multi-lugged bolt used by most selectivefire rifles of the time. Well ahead of almost anybody else, FN used a selective-fire system that allowed for 3-round bursts as well as fully automatic fire.

FN CAL Carbine Assault Rifle

The rifling was optimized for the 5.56mm NATO round used at the time the US M-193 and its European
equivalents. The front sight was a protected post adjustable for elevation and windage, and the rear sight a non-adjustable twoposition flip-type. (This sort of adjustable sight setup was a peculiarity of many European-designed rifles of the time.) Construction is of light, stamped sheet steel for the receiver, operating parts of steel forgings, and a very well-made barrel of the best steel available.

Unfortunately, the FN CAL Assault Rifle suffered from many of the same problems as the M-16: it was sensitive to dirt, and the barrel corroded easily. In addition, the folding stock tended to fall off, and at the time of its introduction. It was also a very complex weapon, both for unit armorers and the average user field-stripping it. The magazines used with the FN CAL Assault Rifle are proprietary, and cannot be used with other weapons; the FN CAL Assault Rifle also cannot use the magazines of other weapons.

Most of these problems were quickly solved (except for the complexity problem and the proprietary magazines), but the damage to its reputation was already done, and few countries actually bought the FN CAL Assault Rifle; even then, they bought them only in small numbers, and there were many cancelled orders. The countries which did buy them tended to quickly withdraw them from service. It does, however, tend to pop up here and there every so often even today, mostly in Central and South America and Africa.