Stay Safe !
I've happily carried the L85A1 on several occasions, both firing off blanks with MILES gear, at which it generally worked better than an M16A1, and a couple of times where it was quite possible that any targets I fired on might well shoot back. I had none of the reliability problems noted in many reports, and found the things to be considerably more accurate than most 5,56mm rifles, due both to the full-length barrel made possible by the bullpup layout and the SUSAT telescopic sight mounted on the ones I packed, though not on all rifles the Brits have fielded. And on one happy occasion, I got to haul a L86A1 LSW, a sort of half-hearted cross between an SA-80 and a SAW, built heavier, fitted with a bipod, and which fires from an open bolt. The LSW has also come in for its share of criticism, though my limited exposure to it was also at least satisfactory.
The worst failure of the L86 rifles was probably the stories of firing pin breakage, which seemed to have no rhyme nor reason. The ones that came my way worked fine and without problems; others reported a breakage every 80-100 rounds, or worse, suggesting that heat treatment problems in certain batches may have been the culpret. That flaw, at least, seems to have been cured by the H&K workover process.
The reworked rifles are now to be known as the *SA80A2,* though in fact the things are in their fourth generation, fifth if you count the old .280 EM-2 rifle that was blended with Armalite's AR18 to produce the original 4.85mm Enfield XL70 rifle that itself went through several versions before the requirement for a rechambering to the NATO standard 5,56mm cartridge was pressed on the Brits. Sid Hance, Cliff Jewell and Jack Ward, among the other boffins at Enfield charged with reworking the design did a credible job with the resulting XL70E3, though somewhere down the road you have to ask if they wouldn't have been at least as well served just by having had Sterling at Dagenham crank out a quarter-million AR18s that in any event wouldn't have become a political football and would have been a great deal less expensive to issue, then replace. And I'd likely have been just as happy with one of them, too. But I understand that both the L85A2 and LSW are out of production now, and when the British police recently required a batch of 5,56mm rifles for antiterrorist response unit and security purposes, they went with H&K G36s.
The greatest lists of complaints seem to be coming from those units that use rifles very little in their daily duties and aren't used to repeat daily maintenance as a soldier's common first task, and those units that use them a great deal and use them hard, such as the Royal Marines. The SAS simply aren't bothered by such things, and have the relative luxury of substituting foreign or allied weaponry instead, though the sasmen sometimes masqueraded as regular Tommies in Northern Ireland, and accordingly had to use the ordinary soldier-issue rifle and kit. I suspect theirs worked just fine.
One large problem seems to be from the 30-round magazines, adapted from the US 30-round M16 magazine. Since the original M16 magazine was a 20-round straight magazine, the magazine well of the M16 family of weapons was cut in a straight line to accomodate it, so the later M16 30-round version was curved at the bottom to improve feeding, but straight at the top where it enters the straight magazine well- perhaps not the best arrangement for certain reliability. And since the FAMAS G2, H&K G36 and M16A2/M4 share that same magazine, they too might share similar magazine-induced reliability faults, if that's the case. The Stoner 62 or Galil magazines might have offered an improvement, but the Sterling and Radway Green-produced 30-round steel magazines work very well in M16 and AR15 type rifles in my experience, though they're a bit heavier and can be prone to rusting once their external and internal finishes are worn. You have to wonder why the Brits didn't use stainless.... but at least one quick-and dirty soldier's answer is to use the old 20 shot magazines.
My only real beef with the L85A1s I dealt with is that they're awfully clumsy with a 40mm M203 grenade launcher attached...and the British way of dealing with that problem seems to be to issue an M4 with M203 attached instead. That may be a foot in the door for FN or Colt to peddle M16 variant replacements, or possibly for the Canadian firm of Diemaco to sell their C8 version of the M16 family to the Brits instead. And there's always the Israelis, and at least the possibility of the Australian F88 version of the Steyer AUG peeking its way into the British tents, though the F88 has hardly been without its own problems in Australia.
Likewise the Gurkhas don't seem to be the source of many complaints about the L85A2...though they may not be depending on them that much, either. In one report of a recent Royal Gurkha Rifles' unit demonstration of their techniques, they charged up to the objective, unloaded from the back of an armoured personnel carrier, threw their L85 rifles to the ground, and took on their targets with their drawn kukri knives- but that may well have had much less to do with any lack of confidence in their rifles as a decided preference for doing things up close and personal with cold steel. Ayo Ghorkhali!
