Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

As you may remember, I tested out a drum magazine for the HK-91 made by Allied Armament (AA). It worked flawlessly, looked awesome, and just generally made me feel like some sort of ballistic superman by having 50 rounds of .308 on tap. I told the evil genius from Allied Armament that he had a great product and while I appreciated having one for my PTR-91, there were probably more sales to be made for the other, more commonly found, .308 rilfes out there like the FAL. I naively suggested that just making the magazine drum a modular part with interchangeable feed towers would be the way to go. Shows what I know.

X-FAL? Excellent!

I received an Allied Armament drum for the FAL a few weeks ago. It casually resembles the drum for the HK-91 series of rifles, but it has a few changes…the cartridge followers are steel, the winding knob is slightly different, and there are a few differences to allow it to work in the FAL series of rifles. At first blush, they look the same but in reality the FAL drum is quite different and necessarily so.

From a magazine development standpoint the HK series of rifles must be pretty easy to design a magazine for….there’s no bolt hold open system to plan for and the bolt and carrier don’t rotate or do any other gymnastics. The FAL system, though, not only has a bolt hold open to factor in, but there are two distinct magazine flavors…metric or inch pattern, and each one uses a somewhat unique magazine catch. Rather than have two different styles of drums, there is a small interchangeable part at the front of the drum feed tower…swap out the part depending on if your gun is metric or inch pattern. Clever.

There is one huge (to me) difference between this drum and the HK drum. The metric FALs must be ‘modified’ to accept the drum.The bolt release on the metric FALs has to either be removed or replaced with an L1A1 bolt release for the drum to fit the gun. The metric release has a little projection on it that the L1A1 version does not. For the drum to fit in the well and lock in place you have to either remove the bolt release or replace it with the L1A1 part which is, according to the video from AA, a six dollar part. Now, anytime you have to replace a part of your gun to enable it to function with an accessory I get nervous. I think its an acceptable ‘modification’ to the gun, and calling it a modification is probably an overstatement since its really just swapping out one OEM part for another. You decide. Personally, swapping one genuine military part for a slightly different but genuine military part that lets me have 50 rounds of .308 on tap seems like an acceptable change. Doing this part swap will leave you with a gun that will not lock open on the last shot from a 20-rd magazine, but you will be able to manually lock the bolt back. This is pretty much the same procedure the HK series of guns had…you could lock them open manually, but otherwise had no last-shot hold open.

Loading the drum was pretty much what you’d expect after loading the HK drum – give the winding knob a bit of a turn to pull the follower back, drop in some rounds, regrip the knob to turn it some more, and repeat until the magazine is filled. A big change from the X-91 drum I received is that the FAL drum required a bit of creative engineering to overcome the problem of upward pressure of cartridges from the magazine against a moving/rotating bolt. In the makers own words:

The pinball flipper or what we call the kicker device was designed and patented out of necessity, as the drum would never work in it’s original configuration with the FAL platform. The HK’s delayed blowback bolt is unlike any other bolt design, it does not rotate when operating therefore there is no downward pressure on the magazine when the bolt head passes the ammunition. Almost all firearms however have a rotating bolt head that interacts with the magazine, as a result we had to create a device that would relieve magazine tension when the bolt passed by, and -voila- there you have the kicker device. The kicker device is essentially the same thing that sits on the front of the motor of a car and allows for consistent tension while the motor operates.

-The increased spring tension and larger handwheel are for three reasons. One due to the increased drag of the kicker device, more spring tension was needed. Secondly larger tower lengths like the X-25 (sr-25 platform rifles) and the M14 model, require more spring tension to feed ammunition up the larger tower. A third aspect that is quite interesting is because the kicker removes the majority of spring tension when operating we can run almost infinite spring pressure in the main body allowing the magazine to perform with weapons that run well into 800 plus rounds per minute. Before this device single stack magazines were always limited by the direct force they exerted on a bolt.

And here I was foolishly thinking that all that was involved would be modifying the feed tower to accommodate the FAL magazine well geometry. This is why I’m not in the magazine business. Well, that and a brilliant idea like his never occurred to me.

Test guns for this little adventure were a SAR-4800 from Springfield Armory, an StG58 built on a DSA FAL receiver, and an early Springfield Armory Israeli model….and let me tell you, that Israeli heavy-barrel model is exactly the kind of gun this drum was meant for. Fold down the bipod legs, insert a drum, drop the bipod on the hood of a car, get comfortable behind the stock and you are a one-man roadblock. Unfortunately the X-FAL did not fit in the magazine well of the Israeli model…just a bit too snug a fit. If your history is a little fuzzy, let me recap – the Israeli heavy-barrel FALs were put together by Springfield Armory years and years ago from military parts kits. Since the lower receiver was a former military product made in Israel it may have been a little off in it’s tolerances. :::shrug::: Such is the world of parts-kit guns using GI parts. In the SAR-4800 (Imbel receiver) and the DSA (DSA receiver) the magazine locked in place just fine. Very little play and no problems removing the mag from the well

Testing followed the same procedure as for the HK drum. Load it up, fire one shot every second until empty. According to AA, there are two versions of this drum…one for semiautos and one for full-autos. The difference, apparently, is in the spring system. Since I’m not fortunate enough to have access to a full-auto FAL this particular distinction was wasted on me.

Ammo for this testing was the glorious South African batlepack stuff that used to be so common at the gun shows. It’s a good performer and an excellent example of military ball ammo. As I expected the drum never missed a beat (get it? Drum? Beat?). Slow fire, rapid fire, whatever…it just chugged along like a champ.

Is it fun? Absolutely. Is it practical? Well, I suppose that depends on what you’re expecting out of your life. Since my interest is in being prepared for the uncertain future, I’ll take every advantage I can get and this drum is definitely something that can give you an advantage in some scenarios. I’ll leave it up to your imagination what those scenarios might be, but I doubt there has ever been anyone who got into a violent encounter and thought to himself “geez, I wish the magazine in my rifle held less ammo”. If you’re the kind of guy who thinks that the future may involve armed gangs roaming the countryside looting and pillaging…well, two or three buddies armed with rifles with a few of these drums are going to do more to deter that sort of behavior than any social program ever would. Big magazines are no solution all on their own…training, tactics, maneuverability, etc, all are valuable in a violent encounter, but everything else being equal I’d like to have as many rounds in my rifle as possible. I don’t mind hauling the unfired ones back to the bunker.

It was pointed out to me that Beta has jumped on the .308 drum bandwagon and is offering a 100-rd drum for the G3/HK91 series of rifles. Twice the firepower, twice the price of the AA product. I have mixed feelings about the Beta drums…on the one hand, hey, 100 rounds! On the other, plastic magazine loaded with five pounds of ammo dropped on a hard surface = $470 flushed down the crapper. The AA product is a far more robust design. In fact, I think AA should do a YouTube video of their mag versus the plastic Beta product in a rough-n-tumble head-to-head comparison and see which one wins.

The folks at AA have done an amazing job of bringing a product to market with a level of quality and innovation that is rarely seen outside of huge manufacturers with larger budgets for R&D. These magazines are solid, dependable, and practical. This is the second one I’ve gotten to play with and if anything it’s even better than the last one I reviewed…and I’m a big fan of that HK drum.

If you’ve got an FAL (or PTR-91 / HK clone) and you want something to give you a bit more capacity than your average 20-round magazine, you may need to get yourself these drums from Allied Armament. Even if the world doesn’t come to an end, they’re excellent accessories and, probably, good investments.