Bm-59 Research - Beretta Factory Visit & 'dutch' Bm-59

[UK Armourer]

Gentlemen, my research into the development and manufacture of the Beretta manufactured M1 Rifle and the BM-59 is moving slowly forward. I thought I would share a little of it with you...

 

Firstly are a couple of pictures of the BM-59 section of the 'Pattern Collection' at the Beretta Factory that I photographed back in July 2007. I posted these last year to the forum but the image hosting site I used back then deleted the images!!!

 

Top to Bottom

Beretta Garand Model 1 (1960)

BM-59 Mark I Ital (1961)

BM-59 Mark IV so called Nigerian Model (1961)

BM-59 Para Prototype (1959)

BM-59 Mark I Prototype built on a modified M1 Garand receiver (1959)

BM-59 Mark I Ital Sectioned (1960)

to the left, BM-59 Para

to the right, BM-62 Sport

 

http://i303.photobucket.com/albums/nn152/UK_Armourer/Bm592.jpg

http://i303.photobucket.com/albums/nn152/UK_Armourer/Bm591.jpg

 

Then a picture of the beautiful Beretta offices...

 

http://i303.photobucket.com/albums/nn152/UK_Armourer/IMG_2936.jpg

 

Interestingly, when I was at the factory I was introduced to one of their top engineer/designers who now only works part time with Beretta. He was involved with the design and manufacture of the BM-59 back in the 50's & 60's. He had a little book which contained notes that he had made back then and one of the anecdotes he related to me was that in the early 60's two engineers from the Dutch Ministry of Defense were posted to Beretta to learn about manufacturing BM-59's for Dutch Military service (actually the Royal Netherlands Army). They stayed a little under a year and took away all the information they needed to manufacture the BM-59 in Holland...

 

After further research and some help from the curator at the Royal Netherlands Army Museum and a noted firearms collector in the Netherlands the correct story is as follows:

 

Back in the late 50's / early 60's the Netherlands Ministry of Defense wanted to adopt the Belgian FN FAL rifle with bipod but without fully-automatic capability (this they did in 1961), being called Het licht automatisch geweer in Dutch service. They had unique sights (hooded at the front) and the German (G1) style front handguard. The reason the Dutch wanted to know about the BM-59 'conversion' was that the Dutch 'Home Guard' had thousands of M1 Garand Rifles in .30" '06 which they wanted to make calibre compatible with the FAL that was comming into service. The famous company Artillerie Inrichtingen (who was the major manufacturer of the AR10 under licence from Armalite) was charged with tooling up for the production of the BM-59. When the costed up the task they decided that it was way too costly to do so! They did however build two prototype BM-59 'style' Garand conversion rifles and interestlingly used AR10 magazines as part of that conversion as they already built them as part of the AR10 contracts they were fulfilling. The project fell dead in the water as the cost of conversion was so close to just manufacturing 'extra' FAL's for the 'Home Guard' they went down that route. The fate of the M1 Garands is unknown, but one of the toolroom prototypes still exisits and is shown below:

 

http://i303.photobucket.com/albums/nn152/UK_Armourer/AIGarand1.jpg

 

http://i303.photobucket.com/albums/nn152/UK_Armourer/AIGarand2.jpg

 

Enjoy!

 

I will be returning to the Beretta factory later this year to continue my research, interestingly I also found 50-200 'Brand New' BM-59's at a location in Europe... If only you guys could import them!

 

Cheers,

 

Vic Tuff

[mikebaker1129]

Vic Thanks for sharing !

The Dutch rifle is very interesting .

We are all looking forward to your book .