#Ar-18

One lazy afternoon in the gun shop I was killing time browsing the local gun classifieds when I finally found the gun I had been seeking since middle school: an Armalite AR-180. I promptly made arrangements to meet the seller and called my wife to haggle over money. I prevailed (thanks babe!) and soon thereafter I was the proud new owner of an old, odd gun.

Back in January after the hustle and bustle of SHOT Show 2020, I had the pleasure of taking a look inside the armory at Battlefield Vegas. Battlefield Vegas have some amazing firearms in their inventory, one of many rare and interesting rifles you don’t see in the wild too often was a Chartered Industries of Singapore (CIS) [later known as ST Kinetics] SAR-80, an indigenously designed 5.56x45mm rifle based on the AR-18.

At SHOT Shows or other exhibitions, booths of companies like Serbu Firearms are some of the most interesting ones to visit. And the reason is, as a rule, such companies constantly experiment with new ideas and if you are lucky enough, you can meet and discuss their inventions with the actual owners who also oftentimes are the chief designers. This year, I had another chance to meet Mark Serbu and learn about his new creation – a 5.56 rifle dubbed Diabolus.

At the 2017 Association of the United States Army annual meeting, gunmaker FB Radom was present at the Polish pavilion, displaying their MSBS modular assault rifle, recently named “Grot” (arrowhead) by the Polish government. The new rifle has been selected by the Polish government to replace their legacy AK fleet, many of which are the upgraded 5.56mm “Beryl” variant. The first order for the new rifles was signed in mid-September, and will result in the delivery of 53,000 rifles to the Polish government, which is expected to be completed by the end of November.

Polish arms maker Zakłady Mechaniczne Tarnów (ZMT) has released a new large-caliber semiautomatic sniper rifle system. The 100 year old company, formerly known for their bolt-action sniper rifles and autocannons, introduced the new advanced rifles at the 2017 International Defence Industry Exhibition (Międzynarodowy Salon Przemysłu Obronnego, MSPO) earlier this month. The new rifle system will come in two sizes, one designed for magnum-length rounds like .338 Lapua Magnum, and the other designed for short-action cartridges like .308 Winchester. Called SKW308 and SKW338 after the calibers in which they will be chambered, the rifles stem from a program begun in 2010.

What do you get when you combine what’s widely regarded as one of the best rifle operating mechanisms ever invented, an innovative and promising concept, and a factory with over 150 years of history making some of the finest small arms in the world? If you said “the best rifle ever made”, you’d be out of luck, because today we’re talking about the L85A1, and how a weapon that seemed to have everything going for it ended up being possibly the worst modern infantry rifle developed by a major party.

Strabane Police discovered an Armalite AR-180 and ammunition during a security alert. The PSNI (Police Service Northern Ireland) Superintendent Mark McEwan blames the “New IRA” for the weapon and that they intended to kill people with it. He goes on to condemn the firearm and that its only purpose is to kill people. They are concerned about such weapons being in the hands of the public and will stay vigilant.

In October, I traveled out to see my co-writer Alex C. to collect data on the weights of different long guns and some of their components. Over that weekend, I weighed 58 rifles and submachine guns, and numerous magazines, bolts, bolt carriers, and other miscellaneous items. The purpose of this was not only to collate a general list of the weights of different weapons, but to be able to enhance the accuracy of a previous spreadsheet I’d produced showing the loaded “combat” weights of different rifles; that being available at this link.

Rufus writes:

Aftermath Gun Club  has posted images of the Leader T2-derived AAA SAP pistol on its firearms identification site ID.Gun.FM. The Leader T2 was not a commercial success, resulting in the dissolution of Charles St. George’s company Armtech Pty Ltd in 1983. The patents were subsequently sold off to the Australian Automatic Arms company (AAA) who produced Leader derivatives in 16.25″, 10.5″ carbine, and a 10.5″ pistol variant. The latter, called the SAP, was imported to the United States for a brief time.

I certainly won’t pass up a chance to post about the AR-18; the rifle has a uniquely 1960s-chic about it that I can’t resist. The marriage of unadorned stamped steel and black polymers makes for a rifle that looks like it’s ready to be carried by a special operations trooper in some desolate and ungodly hot backwater, in the seemingly unending struggle against Communism.

We’ve covered a little bit of the AR-18 here before, and in passing mentioned its ancestor, the 7.62mm AR-16. For those uninitiated to this relatively unknown rifle, there is a brief but instructive article on the rifle at Wikipedia. GunLab’s Chuck has posted before about the AR-16, which he got to examine in Reed Knight’s collection last year. On Friday, though, he mentioned his intentions to replicate the rifle:

For our February Blog Of The Month, we take a trip back to the early 1960s, after Armalite had sold the rights to its highly desirable AR-15 to Colt’s, and were searching for a competitor to their own design. The rifle designed by Art Miller to fill this void, itself an evolution of Stoner’s work on the 7.62mm AR-16, was the AR-18, the civilian model of which was called the AR-180. Dedicated to this fairly unsuccessful but highly influential weapon is AR180s.com, a website that in its own words seeks to become “the central depository for AR-180 information.”

Ronaldo came across a negative of a photo of an AR-18 he photographed at the Brazilian Army’s Fábrica de Itajubá back in October 1982. The gun is unusual for having a rifle-length handguard, carbine-length barrel and rifle-style flash suppressor. It also features a fore grip that matches the pistol grip’s design but it is not a repurposed pistol grip (it has no trigger guard cut out).

The Armalite AR-18 is arguably one of the most influential guns of the 20th century. Many of its gas, bolt and recoil spring features continue to be appropriated in new gun designs. The rifle was a commercial failure, although some of its direct descendants did well. Armalite never produced many AR-18 themselves but licensed the design to the Sterling Armaments Company and other companies around the world. One of the little known variants produced by Sterling was the compact carbine AR-18K. A reader spotted the Sterling AR-18K in a photo, taken in the 1970s or 1980s, of high ranking Royal Malaysian Air Force officers. This is the first photo I have ever seen of the AR-18K “in the wild”.