From Paul on Patreon:
“I’ve always thought there were a lot of older guns that deserve to be reproduced, many of which could be really simple to manufacture. PSA is planning the release of their StG44 repro which is exciting. But why don’t we see this sort of thing more often. I suppose not everyone in the firearms community is going to want this sort of thing, but I think there are a lot of guns that would sell well enough to justify their reproduction.”
Fundamentally, we don’t see more reproduction firearms because they are actually a lot harder and more expensive to make than people would think, and the market for them is small than people would think. Re-engineering old firearms for new production is a really substantial project, and the original data required rarely exists. The guns must be cheap enough and reliable enough to attract modern buyers, which will often require compromises on authenticity – which immediately reduces the already-small pool of potential buyers.
I would like to see the 1941 and 1944 Johnson rifle and carbine reproduced. I have talked to a few gunsmiths in my area as I have a Johnson 1941 rifle to copy from but Nope. I even suggested recreating in 308.? I even got a bit of info on the 1944 Johnson carbine. Anyone interested?
NO – my opinion of Johnson and all his works is very low. Look at the Dror. I have shot the rifle. Verdict – nice sporting arm, but not durable enough to be a military firearm
“(…)Look at the Dror.(…)”
According to http://modernfirearms.net/en/machineguns/israel-machineguns/dror-eng/
These light machine guns were broadly based on the US-made Johnson M1944 LMG, but with certain alterations in the feed system and dimensions.
Also they were made when Haganah badly needs any weapons, which does not seem ideal condition to take time to properly test and remove flaws.
Consider that at same time they used https://plane-encyclopedia.com/cold-war/avia-s-199-in-israeli-service/ which used Bf 109 airframe and proved to work very poorly, does that mean Bf 109 itself was poor design?
Another downside to repros is parts. Specifically, magazines. The FG series made by SMG uses ZB26/30 mags. These have seemed to have gone from being plentiful to dried up.
The MP remakes use a mag that is also remade but hit or miss on quality. Usually good, sometimes not so much.
Repro scopes are in greater supply.
Ammo is fairly common but you will pay for it.
Why is it technically difficult or financially difficult to reproduce existing magazines? I understand their importance but it does not seem to be a complex piece of apparatus. What am I not understanding?
A lot of things, really.
There are these issues called “tolerance stacking” wherein you have a whole bunch of parts that are “within specification”, yet won’t work together when assembled. Getting all that worked out just right isn’t easy; serial manufacture of precision components like magazines is a lot more complex than it looks, especially with the machinery they used to have available.
Affordable magazines weren’t really reliable until the late 1930s. That’s a large part of the reason the Johnson LMGs all have those weird single-feed magazines and built-in feed lips. Johnson had something to do with the initial production of BAR magazines, from what I remember reading, and he had so much trouble with it all that he never designed a weapon with a replaceable box magazine as a result.
I’ve seen first-person historical accounts from the post-WWI and early 1930s US Army, where the person writing them describes going through crate after crate of WWI-produced BAR magazines to make up a working set for his BAR during qualification. The reject rate he describes is on the order of 60-80%. An armorer he mentioned had to spend considerable time to get even a fraction of the rejects to work in any of the guns.
All that went away with better production machinery and technique in the late 1930s.
Manufacture is never as easy as it looks, from the outside.
Kirk pretty much nailed it. Tried to get magazines for an MP44, ordered 6, 3 worked. Other three I have on the workbench waiting for the time I can tinker with them (which will probably be never).
Most common problem is they just won’t seat/lock in. They fit, but do not click.
Considering that I can’t get a new military 1898 Mauser action for a rifle project because it is not economically feasible, I can see Ian’s point about the high start up expense and low sales. I would think that would be simple compared to the number of parts in a semi auto. But the potential market is limited by the people who would be happy with a Howa, Savage or 700 action for far less cost. Someday we will have molecular level 3D printing and the game will change. But that is Star Trek stuff.
But then when this molecular 3D printing is available, you can also design new types of actions that are lighter, stronger, simpler etc etc than anything before because you are no longer constrained by the machining operations possible with conventional tools. Yes for small series you could manufacture 100% copies, but I think most buyers would take a new design designed specifically for the new manufacturing technology. So it ends up being am expensive hobby for enthusiasts. Well at least it will be possible to manufacture small series of these old pieces
It’s all going to look very much similar to the way design changed with production technique during the transition from machining to stamping parts and assemblies. The new techniques are going to enable things that you just can’t do with even CNC machinery or a press, so the designs to take advantage of them will look a lot different. Consider the AR-15 compared to the AR-18; one is aluminum forgings, the other is stamped sheet metal. They don’t look anything at all alike, do they?
“Molecular 3d printing” sounds like flying cars we should have by now, presented in countless sci-fi works from 1950s
It will happen, assuming we don’t blow ourselves up. Question is, when?
A lot of the enabling technologies are starting to become practical enough that I don’t think this is entirely a pipe-dream. Had you told me that I’d see commonplace smart phones and tablets in my lifetime sometime back when Star Trek: The Next Generation was first aired, I’d have said you were mad, such things were probably a hundred years away…
Technological prediction is an effort fraught with peril for accuracy and likelihood. Nobody really knows for sure what’s out there in terms of possibilities, lurking in the depths of the R&D labs. Hell, sometimes the guys that do know don’t know for sure what’s going to take off, in terms of break-throughs.
The tech of the future is always 20 years away. Until it isn’t.
Of course, conversely, sometimes the stuff you think is going to become ubiquitous… Doesn’t. Anyone remember the brief fad for 3D everything, back when?
True, hardware development and miniaturization of computers has been an explosion in short amount of time.
3D as in movies was unsucessfully resurrected several times (last time around 2010s), every few decades or so, but it was always a failure. Maybe it needs some completely different hardware to work as intended, or maybe it cannot be done at all, because of some limitations of human visual perception and mind.
Hell, its great we are as is, fooled by 25 frames per second, imagine we have eyes needing 100 frames per second!
How ‘bout a semi auto grease gun. Sell as a pistol, a 16” barrel would be horrid.
Also, Garand receivers perhaps??
“(…)semi auto grease gun(…)a 16” barrel would be horrid.(…)”
This is already done, see SA/M3-A1 carbine http://www.valkyriearms.com/m3a1.html
There is some fairly simple math that anyone can do to test the idea of making and selling:
– How many do you believe will be sold at a certain price?
– How much will it cost to develop the firearm in that sellable form? “develop” includes engineering, testing, etc.
– How much will it cost to actually make the version you settle on?
– Make sure to include realistic salaries etc. marketing costs, and so on.
So with the above assumptions and calculations you can get a sense of if your idea might possibly be successful.
Does anyone have more info about attempted replica of Merwin & Hulbert revolver
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merwin_%26_Hulbert#21st_century_revival
?
Did they insurmountable technical obstacles or there is simply not enough buyers’ interest?
Your mention of Me.109s to Israel demonstrates the difficulty of building replicas. Those Me.109s were built in Czechoslovakia on much of hte same tooling as that Czechs had used to build Me.109s – under license – during World War 2. When hey ran out of original engines, Czechs substituted Jumo 211F engines originally made for Heinkel 111 Bombers. The new engine exacerabted handling problems that plagued Me.109s during Nazi service (e.g. swinging on take-off and ground-looping on landing). Since the substitute engines would not accept motor-kanon, Czechs substituted under-wing cannons which degrades performance. They also installed rifle-caliber machineguns in the engine cowlings.
Czech pilots disliked their Avia 199s and sarcastically nicknamed them “mule” for their poor handling.
Israeli mechanics struggled to synchronize those MGs with the propeller, which resulted in at least one Israeli Avia 199 shooting off its own propeller. Messerschmitt Bf.109 might have been the best fighter available in 1937 (Spanish Civil War) but it was out-classed by more modern fighters a mere decade later. Desperate Israeli arms-buyers bought a batch of Avia 199s from A Czech arms-dealer and smuggled them into the new nation of Israel.
Bottom line, even with most of the original tooling Czechs built a Messerschmitt 109 reproduction that was worse than the original … and the original Me.109 was borderline obsolete by the middle of WW2.
This is off-topic, but the Bf 109 was certainly not borderline obsolete by the middle of WW2. That was in 1942 when it was close to its peak compared to contemporary Allied fighters.
You could make a case that the Bf 109 was obsolescent in 1945, but even then there was the Bf 109K-4, which remained competitive with the numerically most important Allied fighters, even if their latest variants were superior. In any case, the main problem of the Bf 109 past 1942 was that it was not a very good bomber interceptor. It couldn’t carry enough weapons for that role, which it was increasingly forced to fulfill.
But there’s big differences in performance between different 109s, and different Spitfires and different Mustangs. In that period the aerial balance of power would swing back and forth in as little as 6 months as each side threw everything they had at engine improvements. The frontline fighters of 1943 could overwhelm those of 1942, and those of 1944 could overwhelm those of 1943. Aviation was most sensitive to the slightest advantage, maybe because there was no place to hide and the pilots who survived their early months became high-kill-rate monsters while the other side ran out of such fliers, creating a death spiral of just-obsolete planes and untrained pilots.
The problem for the Germans was hight octane fuel. The Germans went sooner for a large DB605 from a DB601 engine. The Uk kept the Merlin for longer before changing to the Griffin because they could use hight octane fuel. The Germans partly solve the problem by using water/methanol injection to get higher octane rating. The other part of the equitation is supercharger. As increase the altitude the amount of oxygen decrease. To get the amount of oxygen to preform at altitude a supercharger is required. The Americans never developed a effective supercharger for the Allison engine. This doomed the P-40 for the European theater. Because of effective supercharges the Spitfire and Bf 109 could operate at altitude. Only when the Mustang was fitted with a Merlin engine could it be effective at hight altitude. The high amount of planes shot down by the Germans was because they could operate at a higher ceiling than the Russians. The tactic the Germans used was to dive on the enemy, fire and then climb back to hight. The same tactic used by American aces in the P-38 in Pacific. The true advantage of Bf 109 is automatic slats (which is a British invention). This give Bf 109 very steep climb angle. It the Germans claimed that they could out turn the Spitfire because of the slats. The turning circle was elliptical not round. By having slats a smaller wing can be used and same effective wing size can be achieved. Smaller wing, lighter aircraft better power to weight ratio. This give the Bf 109 its supreme zoom climbing ability. This can be checked by comparing the initial climb rate of Bf 109 with other aircraft. The true advantage the Allied have was high octane fuel. The Germans compensated for it by using water/methanol injection. In principal water/methanol injection could be retrofitted to all Bf 109 G models. After the war the Americans tested Japanese Ki-84 on American fuel. The K-84 beat the American fighter planes om nearly every aspect of speed, climb and maneuverability. Octane not obsolescence.
makes a lot of sense. thanks buddy.
I would like to see someone reproduce the Savage model 99.
I think there are still rather too many of those on the used market, these days. Your best bet, should you really, really want one would be to find one to have rebuilt by a specialist into the rifle you want.
There’s probably an equation out there, to be written, which would express the tip-over point where “market availability” crosses over with “able to make money with reproductions”. The Savage 99 ain’t made that point, just yet.
Besides FAMAS, and Burgess Folding Shotgun (Mentioned by Ian in past. Only a single internal magazine, takes common shotgun ammo, has general practical use, usable in common type of competition, and could even be built outside US because shotgun imports are trivial), I think Thompson SMG and MP40 could be viable to reproduce even if sales had to be exclusive to rental ranges and movie armorers. Their appeal is incredibly broad, the ammo is very much obtainable, Sten magazines work in an MP40 and are super common, they’re both incredibly rare, and even if the upfront cost was moderate (2000 USD), it doesn’t take too many customers giving it a go to pay it off. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Tommy Gun’s TDP was obtainable.
I still WANT an Adams repro in production though. That one has most of the advantages of Burgess, plus it’s open to a few more countries.
Sten magazines work in MP40 !?
What have you been smoking ? :-))
Well, Sten magazines work in an MP40 as well as they work in a Sten…
Another thought that comes to mind is, what if the originals had some functional issue (thinking magazine and jamming problems in M-1 carbines, for instance); do you “fix” problems in the original or preserve the original shooting experience in all its complexity?
Or, like a lot of black powder reproductions, do you leave out the fixes in favor of affordability?
Consider the market for black powder reproductions. The modern versions of those old guns are popular and apparently quite profitable. Why are they able to make money selling those, and yet not be able to manufacture and sell profitable copies of later weapons?
I would submit that it comes down to the complexity of the designs and the price of the specialized tooling and labor you currently need to replicate the various weapons people would want to buy. It’s pretty easy to churn out black powder copies of a Remington revolver on machinery that you probably have laying around already, but when you go to replicate the stamped sheet steel receiver of an StG44, you’re gonna have a lot of pain doing that, along with the expense of it all.
The other issue is the comparative simplicity of the rest of the package… A black powder revolver needs very little in the form of accessory items, and it thrives in a relatively austere technical ecosystem. You want to make a successful StG44 clone, and you’re going to have to produce a bunch of things at the same time; ammo, magazines, and so forth. Most of which are fairly complex undertakings themselves.
I think that as CNC and 3D printing get better and better, then there will be an affordable market out there for low-production items like reproduction FG42 rifles and the like. The reason we don’t have it now is that we’re still at the stage where production of these things requires a hell of a lot of effort; we’re not at the point where you can find yourself an old StG44 magazine somewhere, run it through a scanner, and then start printing copies of it on your desktop 3D metallic printer. May never be, but that’s a question yet to be answered.
I think the “Golden Age” of reproduction weapons hasn’t happened yet. It’ll come; when it does, the various museums and collectors are going to be sitting on some damn gold mines, because the IP is going to be valuable. A smart person with some acumen in this area would begin now, and negotiate how all these things are going to work. I expect that a significant fraction of museum budgets will eventually come from them selling IP for making copies of artifacts in their possession; how are those to be worked out? Imagine someone wants to play around with a copy of a Madsen LAR? They talk to the nice people at the museum owning copies of that rifle, get the scan of it, and away they go.
Still a lot of legal framework there, that needs to be worked out. I imagine that we’re eventually going to need to do just that.
Suppose, for example, that someone wants to play around with a derivative copy of that Madsen LAR in 5.56mm NATO. Get the scan, run it through some software utility that can do the necessary re-dimensioning, and then you’ve got your latest range toy, hot off your metallic printer. Who owns the resulting IP on that one-of-a-kind range toy? Is there a market for that IP, or actual physical weapons you might print off for your friends? How is all this going to work, and what will the rules be?
An awful lot of the current patent and copyright framework is predicated on a very different set of manufacturing realities. Imagine a ChatGPT for engineers; you tell it you want that Madsen LAR in a semi-auto 5.56mm version; you hand it the scans from the Military Museum in Copenhagen, and away it goes. Day later, you have a printed, functioning version of that rifle in 5.56mm. Who, pray tell, owns all that IP? Who has the right to sell copies, if they proved to be popular?
Bunch of other stuff occurs to me, coming out of this nascent set of “new model manufacturing”. Let’s say that the US Army issues its troops a new weapon, call it the M16 Recap. Unit commander gets the weapon, finds that it has issues; they then tell their maintenance warrant officer to fix the damn thing, and get replacement parts fabbed up in the unit’s field manufacturing cells. Now, his unit has weapons that work, but they’re no longer standard bits of interchangeable kit that everyone else is using. Further extrapolate that the Warrant Officer Underground starts sharing the new files for the fixes, unofficially of course (nothing a Warrant ever does is official, if they can help it…), and now you’ve got this whole complex ecosystem out there of fixes and adaptations to weapons that are unique to every unit…
Logistics is going to look very, very different in a few decades. You won’t worry about replacement parts; you’ll worry about printer feedstocks for your field fabrication facilities.
“Consider the market for black powder reproductions. The modern versions of those old guns are popular and apparently quite profitable. Why are they able to make money selling those, and yet not be able to manufacture and sell profitable copies of later weapons?(…)”
Wait… are you claiming that there is no profit in making copies of later, that is fixed-cartridge revolver? So Beretta is at loss when making Laramie revolvers?
You’re putting words in my mouth. When I said “later weapons”, that pretty much includes everything after the black powder weapons, which includes things like the StG44 attempts and other such failed enterprises.
Also, the Laramie ain’t exactly a reproduction, either. It is a modern revolver designed to look like a much older pistol.
Some modern reproductions have been successful. Browning’s designs spring to mind, but I’d also point out that a lot of the classic Winchester rifles never really went out of production, as well as pieces like the Colt SAA.
There’s a huge difference between trying to produce a copy of a Colt Dragoon and something like the Federov. That’s what I’m trying to get at… You can no doubt find a few modern reproductions of smokeless powder cartridge weapons, but those are generally ones that were popular enough when they were made to keep production lines more-or-less open, like the Winchester Model 1895.
Do not forget the lever-action reproductions.
From a manufacturing standpoint, I don’t think that a M1 Carbine, SVT40 or STG-44 is significatively more difficult to produce than a 1973 Winchester. There’s some part more, but nothing fundamental.
Problem is that probably the purchasers of those reproduction also want them to work, and probably they expect them to work better than the originals really did. They expect “modern” reliability and service life.
Manual repeaters solve a lot of problems, since timing is decided and force is applied directly by the shooter but, for semiauto-auto operation, is like designing a new weapon, with the adjunctive constraint that it has to look like an old one.
I think you’d be mistaken in this belief. Not a mechanical engineer, but I know my mechanisms pretty well from working on them all these many years as an armorer and mechanic.
The difference between the lever-action and a semi-auto is at least one order higher; minute differences in timing and mechanical interaction that are meaningless in one of the old Winchester lever-actions become show-stoppers when applied to a semi-auto. That’s why so many post-WWII M1 Carbines are such sh*t-shows for reliability. Serial manufacture of these mechanisms is not at all easy. Not economically, at least…
: Kirk
Infact, as said, “From a MANUCFACTURING standpoint I don’t think that a M1 Carbine, SVT40 or STG-44 is significantly more difficult to produce than a 1873 Winchester. There’s some part more, but nothing fundamental”.
The tooling that would be used now to manufacture a M1 Carbine reproduction is no different than the tooling used to make a 1873 Winchester reproduction, and they would work with the same tolerances, that are much better than those obtained in the ’40s.
But manufacturing comes after designing and testing.
“Problem is that probably the purchasers of those reproduction also want them to work, and probably they expect them to work better than the originals really did. They expect ‘modern’ reliability and service life.”
“Manual repeaters solve a lot of problems, since timing is decided and force is applied directly by the shooter but, for semiauto-auto operation…” there are all those “minute differences in timing and mechanical interaction” you are speaking of, and that have to be figured out BEFORE manufacturing.
“is like designing a new weapon, with the adjunctive constraint that it has to look like an old one”.
: Kirk
As a demonstration, Pietta uses exactly the same tooling in the same factory to make their reproductions, and their modern lines of semiauto shotguns and rifles. They work in batches. “Today we are manufacturing wild west revolvers, tomorrow we’ll manufacture semiauto carbines”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdnbNJKJ9ZE
@Dogwalker,
Ever heard the joke about the old millwright they had to call in as a consultant down at the factory? He came in, spent fifteen minutes looking around at things, and then walked up to a machine and whacked the living hell out of it with a bloody great hammer. Everything started working flawlessly after that.
He presents his bill for $10,000.00 to the manager. The manager looks at him incredulously and says “TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS? Are you mad? For fifteen minutes worth of work…?”. The old guy just looks at him for a few minutes and then takes his invoice back, rewrites it and hands it back. It now reads “Hammer whacking: Fifty cents” on one line, and the next says “Knowing where to whack: 9,999.50”.
That’s where the expense comes in; having to relearn everything about manufacturing those bits and pieces for the reproduction. Given the costs, and the low rate of production due to the expense and esoteric market, they’re never going to make their money back on R&D. And, the amount of fitting and parts interaction on a semi-auto are another order of magnitude higher than for the lever-action.
Like I said… If you doubt me, go look at all those repro M1 carbines. Most of ’em are utter shiite until you take the time to have someone who knows what they’re doing go through ’em, and even then? A lot of those gunsmiths will simply laugh at you. The M1911 market is another place where this goes on… And, those are weapons in recent production. Try to extrapolate to going back and bringing the French RSC M1917 back into production, with no machinery and nobody who’s ever built the damn things left.
This isn’t quite as easy as it looks. It never is.
At some point in the future, it might well be possible to do these things affordably. That ain’t right now.
:Kirk
Kirk, we are saying the same thing.
The problem is not in MANUFACTURING. The tools that can manufacture those repro revolvers and those modern semiauto carbines and shotguns, can ABSOLUTELY manufacture M1 Carbines. They can make them BETTER actually. With more consistent tolerances than the originals EVER had.
Problem is that the ORIGINAL M1s didn’t work that well to start with. They were good for WWII, not for now. Modern purchasers would expect, from the reproduction, a superior reliability than the original EVER had.
So, a modern manufacturer can’t just take a M1 Carbine and reverse-engineer it. He has to design it from the start, like he would do with a completely new rifle, with the ADJUNCTIVE constraint that he can’t do it as he please. As he know it will work. He has to keep it consistent with the “original” while, at the same time, “bettering” it.
“(…)Federov.(…)”
V. G. Fyodorov himself admitted that his automaton was not reliable enough and unduly complicated (Фёдоров В. Эволюция стрелкового оружия. Часть 2. — М.:Воениздат, 1939, page 63)
The maintenance officer’s work is a government employee operating in his official duties. Public domain.
Obviously. What I was alluding to was the situation wherein you’ve got seven different units out there with seven different customized sets of their primary weapons…
Day’s coming. Best to consider possible ramifications now, rather than after the fact.
Hell, it’s hard enough now, with people putting their custom sight setups together from all the options, and/or adding their own stock/grip options in the field. What’s it going to look like, when there are actual mechanical changes made by someone looking at the lockwork and saying “I could do better…”, and then doing it?
I think things are going to go back to a much more artisanal approach to it all. Hell, we may find it wise to fit a guy for custom stock interfaces in initial entry training, and then issue him those parts for the rest of his career, along with the files to remanufacture or modify them as needed.
Of course, the other approach might be to biologically engineer everyone such that they’ve all got a standard set of body dimensions… Either that, or figure out some means of producing polymorphic materials that can be changed on the fly.
I’d love to see a repro M60!
Actually the firm US Ordnance manufactures new M60 A6 machine guns: http://www.usord.com/weapons/m60e6
Not taking the bait…
And, someone did make some awhile back. Why? I dunno; I never did understand masochism.
Denmark purchased 600+ M60E6s less than a decade ago. I have not heard anything about them since, which I suppose is a good thing. If they had been catastrophically bad, we would have heard about it by now.
“Less than a decade” is the significant piece, there.
The other issue is, what are they using it for? As I understand it, the Danes are using it mostly in the squad light support role. No sustained fire, no use into the zone of the MMG on a tripod. It took the Marines about 10-15 years to wear though their purchases of the E3 variant.
The M60 can work for you, so long as you’re aware of the limitations and keep up on the maintenance. The problems come in when you refuse to buy parts, and don’t stay on top of maintenance. If the Danes bought that thing on the basis of “Give us 20 years of MG service”, rather than “Give us 2,000 machineguns, and we’ll worry about parts and maintenance…”, they might do alright.
To be as charitable as possible towards the design, if I had experienced the same level of support that the M60 got during Vietnam, I might have a different opinion. As it was, however? I was in the position of a guy handed a couple of off-brand Kleenex knock-offs, and told to use that as a handkerchief for a couple of decades…
Honestly, if they’d just issued the damn things a disposable affair with a pallet of 10,000 or so rounds, it might have been workable. The difference between the M60 and the MAG58-based M240 is the same difference as the one between the AT-4 and the Carl Gustav.
A miniature 98K, in 5.56, would make a nice plinker. CZ could use the 527 action, combined with the sights from the 452 Lux. A superb utility rifle to boot.
Though it would be novelty cool, completely defeats a point, as you get only visual shell of k98, not original recoil experience.
This is what I knew would happen and it illustrates Ian’s point. No two people in this group has the same desires and that shows the thinness of the potential market for anyone design.
And no one mentions that your new project is liable to be rendered worthless by the whim of a legislature for reasons unconnected with anything you do. Who’s going to cough up a couple of million for that gamble?
A STG replica is already illegal in more than 10% of the population’s jurisdictions right now.
Well I can certainly see the future being somewhat exiting with these “Star trek replicator type 3d printing things, folk allude to.” But also, when we look at the ar10 lark which, was a replica but not exact… I have wondered of we could just take a gun, specifically a Gerat 06h and reproduce it as per; yes this is not ideal unless you made lots. But I did think awhile ago, what if you could simplify the operating mech further and thus make it so much cheaper you could knock out alot of then cheap.
And the key to this system was, not “star trek” but, thinking about what a bolt is? Does it reall need to be as it is; a lump of machined steel.
Now, you may think it does; and maybe it does, but if like me you thought what if it may not need to be…
Well you may come up with what I thought of after seeing that other nazi attempt at a cheap gun with the \ angled gas plug thing; forget what it was called, was somewhat obscure. But the point was, I crossed the two and came up with the o6h minus a “Bolt” or to be more accurate without a bolt as we know it, a type of ufo if you will.
Instead of machining a “Bolt” you instead construct a chadd; as I have this minute termed it, a cartridge holding and discharging device. Quite. This does what it “says on the tin” it holds the cartridge and allows it to be fired; disharged complete.
So it consists of 4 pieces of steel “Rectangular ciggie lighter shaped” bits which you arrange in a diamond; stacked so they are pinned together, with a further two pieces pinned above forming a triangle; these pieces however create a smaller angle triangle than the top of the diamond aforesaid… And they end in a cylindrical gas plug. Same thing stacked and using the same pin (Each rectangle is around 5mm thick thus you get about a 30mm thick stack of plates…
So you may wonder, well; the rear of the diamond has a piece shaped like an ar buffer, which is pinned over “cut to allow thus” the 20mm at this point plate stack… It fits into an ar spring.
The gas plug goes into a gas port above the barrel, and when you fire; gas hits the plug, the angle of the plugs triangle forces out the middle of the diamond, when pressure drops the plug can move forward into the gas port as the diamond now contracts “Can’t move forward bolt face; which I will get to, is against the chamber” so it does this against the spring. In so doing the edges of the diamond can now pass between two vertical pins “Sat behind the diamond at maximum expansion” drilled through the frame… This then allows, ok! Remember the buffer piece at the back, well at the front is a bolt face pinned in the same manner; the cartridge holder…
The entire thing is a one piece unit, the firing pin mounted to the rear of the diamond and fires (open bolt) the plate sections of the diamond are pinned through this plate in the middle “Forgot that bit” anyway upon maximum expansion of the diamond the pin hits the primer. The cocking handle it attached to the rear of the gas plug, and you pull it forward; pushing the plug into the gas port (This is a tube, with the port being just infront of the chamber) and has about 1cm of forward play in it. Doing this, contracts the rear of the diamond…
The diamond is the bolt you see.
A bolt not as we know it a “chadd”
Upon said contraction, of the “bolt” it clears the pins and when you pull it back as you rotate it up slightly so it fits in the reciever cut out for it (Keeping the diamond depressed to clear the pins)
But other than that it looks good, point being a cheaper gerat o6 in theory; mind you that is from memory years ago perhaps there was other issues.
You may be able to ameliorate any issues, such as explosion by mk3 if you have a shed fair quick; still fair cheap & simple wear safety specs he he.
Anyway the point overall in regards this thread, is I suppose it depends on the gun. I think cheap gerat o6 h* historical premise being it may have gone this was I.e. Cheaper & simpler still had the war gone on, may be popular in 7.62x39mm using ak mags.
* = Ok it is a new mech as oppose the ar10 using new parts, but with the 06 the what if is strong… It may not have ended up as a g3, as oppose a ar10, so justified curiousity.
Open bolt, but not heavy and opens quick; 1cm of diamond contraction… So would be different firing the first shot than, from normal bolts.
Semi auto sear, probably engages underside of “bolt” face the chadd. Basically so long as enough gas hit the plug, before the diamond contracts; the plug must move forward against the expanding gas like so may get bit extra delay there. Bit of work and a can of wd40 should be able to knocknout loads of ak mag feeding o6’s, if anyone has a stamping machine; I don’t know, pan makers.
I like that o6 think it was a very good gun for the time, poor old adolf bit short of time as it turned out. Probably would have timed out had they won anyway, by around 1966 due to the previous & massively extended fashion for short 20’s mustaches and side swept hair invitebly faded as the youth sought sideburns and flared trousers or such.
At least the trains would have run on time, is all I can say being a commuter.
Well actually the pin must hit before maximum exapansion… Think there was a spring… Actually it had a spring running over the top from the cocking handle as a guide rod, cocked by the rear piece… Meh, anyway all good if you live in idaho have a shed and spare time. Knock something up, I sort of finished it in principle; probably switched to thinking about niti stuff which while productive in ideas has resulted in a dead end… Mind you I don’t have a shed and live in idaho.