Today I’m taking the SPAS-12 out to the range, to try a variety of ammunition and see what runs in it. The SPAS is a gas-operated shotgun that can be switched to manual pump operation for use with underpowered ammunition. This was originally intended as a way to allow things like beanbag and other less lethal rounds to be used by police forces – but it is also a way to run light practice birdshot that would not normally cycle the gas system. So let’s see what runs and what doesn’t!
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Congratulations, Ian, you found pretty much all the faults of the SPAS-12 all at one go.
My experience with one was that;
1. Remington 00 buck or slug loads would not cycle the action reliably. These were not “light loads”, but full-power hunting loads intended for deer. Smokestacking and failure to eject at all were typical malfunctions. I never did find any load of any brand that cycled the damnable thing reliably. I suspect its gas system was balanced for something equivalent to upland game or migratory bird loads (typical for Franchi’s more “sporting-type” 12-gauges)- meaning 3-inch Magnum ammunition- which of course would not work in the SPAS-12’s 2 3/4″ chamber.
2. The safety system sucked. One Garand-type safety, left side of trigger guard, one M1 Carbine type safety, right side of trigger guard. Both had to be set just right or it would not fire. Also, the Garand type safety had a detent spring that would actually push it back under recoil. Imagine your shotgun putting itself on safe in the middle of an IA. Not optimal.
3. As for that wacky stock, thank the French Air Force. They wanted “door gunners” on their Aerospatiale Puma CSAR helos, but didn’t want to mount machine guns in the doors. (Less on grounds of PR than those doors being cramped enough to begin with, one thing about the Puma nobody liked, including the RAF.)
The solution? The SPAS-12. The drill was to use the “hook” under your forearm to steady it, hook a dummy cord (yes, basically a bungee cord) from a handrail over the door to that “ghost-ring rear sight” (actually the latch point for the stock when folded), and use it one-handed, allowing you to use your other hand to hang on to the chopper with.
Anyone who has seen the original Red Dawn or Rambo; First blood Part II got a good look at just how…exuberant.. a Puma’s maneuverability at speed could get. And they were deliberately slowing it down for filming purposes. A door gunner needed a free hand to steady himself, even with a safety harness.
The SPAS-12 was a highly-specialized weapon. Like it says, it’s right there on the label; Special Purpose Automatic Shotgun. It was a gun for the crew chief on a CSAR chopper, and apparently saw quite a bit of use in that role during the French “intervention” in Chad.
What it was not was a particularly reliable or practical tactical shotgun, for police or anybody else. I know the Italian Carabineri used it, but not for very long.
As for myself, all the SPAS-12 did for me was make me appreciate the Remington 870 SP Deer just that much more. That “entry level deer gun” was the definitive police patrol shotgun for an entire generation, with good reason.
The SWAT boys tried the Remington 11-87 after deciding the SPAS-12 just wasn’t for them. In the end, I believe most of them ended up using Benellis.
clear ether
eon
I screwed around with one of these just long enough to figure out that a Benelli M1 was the better buy, even at twice the retail price.
To my way of thinking, the SPAS-12 is basically the AMELI of combat shotguns… Looks sexy, performs like shiite.
However, comma… On that basis, there is some point to them: A cop acquaintance used to swear by what he termed “Intimidation factor”, in that the gun he hauled out of the patrol car looking sexy and threatening often did more to defuse violent situations than anything else. The SPAS-12 is easily identifiable, looks threatening, and the average person has no idea about all of its many issues. So, unlimber one in a fight? You may have better effect than you really deserve…
The psychology of all these things regarding weapons and their effects are often discounted, when they really shouldn’t be. There are reasons that guns supplanted bows long before they were truly more effective and a better choice… All that damn noise was incredibly “sexy” to both the combatants and their commanders. You felt like you were “doing something”, even if the reality was that you were basically setting off a firework whose effect was minimal.
Well, at the first European battle in which cannon played a serious part, Crecy’ (26 Aug 1346), Edward III of England had about half-a-dozen small (about one-pounder) guns that were later called “stampede cannon” because the French said after the fact that all they were good for was “frightening the horses”.
I don’t know about anybody else, but having dealt with cattle on horseback (yes, in OH) and knowing how they react to thunder, I’m not sure I’d want to be anywhere near a mass of horses who were suddenly exposed to a series of loud bangs of a type they’d never heard before.
cheers
eon
Grew up around horses and other large domesticated animals. I have seen the effects of something like an unexpected leaf fluttering to the ground do things to the equine mind that could likely not be duplicated by a set of back-to-back tours in Vietnam…
The trick with horses isn’t so much in triggering the stampede, but in avoiding triggering one.
My mother trained horses for the U.S. Cavalry back in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when horse cavalry was still considered a viable option.
She stated that you literally had to start getting a horse used to gunfire about a week after birth. She started with firecrackers and .22s and eventually worked them up to .38s, .45s, and .30-30s.
She also told the U.S. Army that machine guns had made horse cavalry obsolete. And that if general officers wanted polo ponies, they should damned well pay for them out of their own pockets.
One that was rejected was named Nicodemus. Fire a gun near him and he’d give you a look that said, “Do that again and I’m going to make you eat that thing.”
Yes, he became her horse. She called him “Nick”, and they got along famously together for twenty-nine years. He passed on two weeks before I was born.
cheers
eon
Why would a horse be pulling back to back tours in Vietnam?
Oh, and PS;
4.Yes, the stock design pretty much directs all the recoil force to the pistol grip, and your wrist. I’ve fired full-power .44 Magnum in the (original) Colt Anaconda with its abbreviated (i.e., way too small) “combat” grip one-handed, offhand.
The SPAS-12 made my wrist hurt worse fired off the shoulder.
clear ether
eon
I just remembered something I was told at the time I was looking at the SPAS-12, which was that there was a special specific load for the damn things which wasn’t available in the United States, and that anything else would cause problems. The guy telling me this was a dealer, and he offered to set me up with the load data if only I’d take the damn gun off his hands… He’d apparently gotten stuck with a bunch that he’d purchased for a police department, they got the initial batch in, and then refused delivery on the remaining ones. He’d gone back to Franchi, complained, Franchi told him (supposedly…) that the guns weren’t functioning to specification because the loads were wrong, and then said it wasn’t worth the money for them to make up a batch for export to the US. Something about the load was tuned to the gun; I want to say gas pressure and the gas pressure curve were specific to the system, required a special powder and wad.
How much of this was gun show BS? No idea. He did have what looked like a metric butt-load of SPAS-12 shotguns in stock, however.
Guns like this, that are built to specific use-case for a specific user? Very often, they don’t work under other circumstances for other people. At least, not well…
I’m inclined to believe it because the French AF had exactly one load for the thing, a Brenneke slug, the one like an oversized air rifle “diabolo” pellet, in a plastic sabot.
It was supposedly cast of a hardened alloy that would penetrate light armor. In other words, they were trying to use a shotgun to do an LMG’s job.
Granted, if you hit Joe Tango with it, it would put him down right then and there. But on the whole, you’d be better off with an actual LMG or at least a, you know, rifle.
I’ve always suspected that SPAS-12 was the French equivalent of SPIW. The difference is that we didn’t build 50,000 SPIWs and then have no idea what to do with them.
cheers
eon
Franchi is italian company, not french.
Yes, I know but French AF bought the damn things from them. And Franchi apparently built them to the French AF’s specification.
They probably should have known better.
cheers
eon
The thing that strikes me about this detail is that it’s entirely illustrative of how you’re usually better off not trying some weird one-off idea that your guys come up with.
I mean, seriously… How much harder would it have been to put the money and time to get this thing certified for aerial use to simply acquiring an already working solution from, say… Hughes Aircraft? I mean, they managed to put machineguns on the OH-6 in a similar role, and if that’s out there… Why the hell bother with a boutique shotgun?
I swear to God, I have seen SOCOM OH-6 helicopters in some seriously heavily armed variations flying around the ranges at both Fort Lewis and Fort Campbell. I find it hard to believe that the same money going to Franchi to design and build these couldn’t have financed buying an off-the-shelf solution like the GE Six-Pack Gatling guns.
“(…)Why(…)”
Maybe due to The French copy no-one and no-one copies the French?
British cops use 12 gauge slugs for putting holes in vehicle engine blocks
“(…)it was not was a particularly reliable or practical tactical shotgun, for police or anybody else. I know the Italian Carabineri used it, but not for very long.(…)”
There is also another issue, namely weight. At 4,4 kg it is definitely heavier than self-loading shotguns like Benelli M1 at around 3,5 kg or older Remington Model 1100 at around 3 kg.
The M1 came 6 years later. However the Franchi 48al, the most sold semiauto shotgun in Italy from it’s introduction (1948) to the mid ’80s weights 3kg.
I wonder how hard it would have been to turn its long recoil action into a mixed semiauto/pump action.
I am quite surprised that you need to depress a button to be able to load the thing. That is impractical and unnecessary. Years ago I had a Browning Auto 5 which you could load just like a pump action. If I had had to press a fiddly little button to load it I would not have bought it, and that was just for clay pigeon shooting, not for firing from a Puma.
Apparently that was an extra “safety feature” the French AF wanted. Along with the double manual safety.
I can understand them wanting some serious safety features on a shotgun intended for use in a helicopter loaded with Jet-B, but by the time the crew chief or whoever got the thing’s safeties and etc. released and it was ready to fire, the IA would be over and done with and the pilot or etc. they were trying to pick up would likely already be captured by the enemy- or dead.
As John D. Clark said of certain hypergolic fuel/oxidizer combinations in LFRs, the system is just too precious to work.
cheers
eon
“(…)LFRs(..)”
What is this?
Liquid Fueled Rocket, I presume.
Bingo.
Ignition; An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants. Rutgers University Press 1971. PDF free here;
https://archive.org/details/ignition_201612
Highly educational and often funny as Hell.
cheers
eon
Before the two piece lifter, A500 was same… Having to press a button for acting the lifter to permit shell loading.
If looks are what matters, making spas 12 thats manual only could be a good marketing decision.
This weapon did spawn (pure) pump-action shotgun that is known as PA3/215 see 1st photo from top at https://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Franchi_PA3
Great find !!
Ah, only my wishful thinking, suppose this did not explode the market in the end…
Ian sometimes shows a surprising lack of knowledge about shotgun shells. In this video, he seems to think the larger the shot, the more powerful the load, instead of just looking at the mass & velocity marked on the box.
I’m reminded of his Walther shotgun video, where he remarked on the significant recoil, possibly indicating he was using shells too long for the action.
In all other fields of firearms endeavor, he knows a great deal more than I do.
You are correct, inasmuch as an ounce of shot is an ounce of shot, whether it is No.8 or OO Buck.
I beg to differ with you, on that “an ounce of shot is an ounce of shot” idea.
It’s like arguing the “spherical cow” in physics; an ounce is an ounce, but… There’s a huge difference in things like density of the load in the wad, retention of velocity, and all the rest of the attendant factors.
At the muzzle, you’re going to find very similar outcomes. At ten feet, the difference between a load of what’s effectively lead sand and 00 buck is going to be brutally apparent in terms of effect, because of the effects of aerodynamics and all the rest of the other ballistic factors. Lead sand doesn’t retain much energy very far past the muzzle, unless you somehow get it to stick together with something.
I’ve got an acquaintance who does a lot of his own shotgun shell loading, and once you get him talking about all the things that go into his loads that he’s worked up, your eyes will roll up into your head. He’s mastered the art of it all, and the sort of thing you’d never think having an effect on what the loads do at various ranges is incredibly wide. He’s documented actual pattern effects from something as insane as the density of the plastic used in the wads being changed by the colorant used in it… Plain white “natural” plastics having different characteristics than the colored ones, due to density/weight differences.
There’s a lot more to it all than just the weights of the shot involved. You could probably get away with that, were all other factors removed, but so long as your shotgun shell is used in the real world we all live in, there’s more to the equation than just weight of the shot load.
Hell, that friend of mine has documented differences produced by different lots of the same propellant, ones where the velocity is reduced or increased only a few hundred or less feet per second.
Kirk, you are absolutely right as far as aerodynamics and terminal ballistics goes – to a semi-auto shotgun mechanism, whether it’s throwing an ounce of #9 shot or an ounce of 000 buck, mechanically it won’t know the difference.
In Ian’s latest video about the difficulty of semi-auto shotguns, he very clearly differentiates the loads via velocity, mass, & muzzle energy.