#Cetme

New for 2023, MarColMar is introducing a variant of the CETME-L in .300 Blackout. In this video, Hop stops by the MarColMar booth at NRAAM 2023 to check it out. This is one of the vanishingly few roller delay guns in .300 BLK, however, there are some quirks to suppressing roller guns to consider.

The Ruger PC Carbine garnered plenty of aftermarket support, almost as soon as it was released, but tinkerers have been having their fun with it too.  Some of our TFB readers surely remember one such homemade Ruger PC Carbine project that involved using a surplus PPSh stock, but our friend Axel reached into more German and American roots when he began his homemade Ruger Carbine build.  We have featured another work of Axel’s doing, his sci-fi, double Marlin 60 rifle (make sure you check that out if you haven’t seen it yet).  Let’s see his take on the Ruger PC Carbine.

MarColMar’s have not only saved CETME L, they have breathed new life into Spain’s former service rifle. Built from original imported parts and newly US-made parts the rifles replicate the original 5.56x45mm CETME service rifles – right down to the custom Cerakote colour.

It has been a while since we wrote anything about MalColMar Firearms (Indiana, USA), but anyone who likes historical firearms, optics and the CETME rifles specifically should continue reading.

The Guardia Civil, Spain’s oldest law enforcement agency, has issued some of its officers with old, obsolete rifles. The Union de Guardia Civiles, a police union, has raised concerns that its officer are being equipped with out of date firearms after some units were issued with CETME Model C’s dating from the 1960s. The Union de Guardia Civiles expressed ‘surprise and outrage’ when units in Cantabria, La Rioja, Burgos and Soria, all in northern Spain, were issued Model C’s from central Guardia Civil stores to replace CETME Model LCs. The ageing rifles had previously been used for ceremonial purposes.

MarColMar has been hard at work.  After 2 years of effort, and 2 million dollars spent in production, their CETME-L reproductions are shipping out to customers.  These are full guns, not a kit that you have to weld, bend and pin together at home.  These feature new CHF nitrided 1:7 twist barrels and brand new 600 ton stamped flats made in-house at MarColMar.  They are fully 922(r) compliant because the only use 8 imported parts: The hammer, sear, guide rod, front sight tower, rear sight, bolt, rollers, and flash hider.  

We abuse this 2.9lb Shot Stop Duritium PA Level III+ Body Armor (Model Number D1652SSB) with multiple rounds of 7.62x51mm NATO, .223, and 5.56mm, including M855A1 to assess its ability to protect beyond its rating.

This is a guest post by Zain from Pakistan

As I was walking down the aisles of the NRA Annual Meeting, I spotted Hill & Mac Gun Works. I had meet them before at Big 3 East when they unveiled their Semi Auto STG44 replica. They had mentioned that they also make semi-auto versions of the Cetme-L.

The Spanish National Police Corps (Cuerpo Nacional de Policía, or CNP) have captured a huge number of weapons during a series of raids conducted in the areas of Biscay, Girona, and Cantabria in Northern Spain. The raids recovered about 10,000 firearms including pistols, rifles, assault rifles, submachine guns, and machine guns, plus about 400 grenades, bombs, and other explosives.

Hill & Mac Gunworks’ flagship is their ambitious project to create an affordable, shootable reproduction of the WWII-era German StG-44, but another thing they have been working on is a recreation of the CETME-L Cold War era Spanish assault rifle. Unlike their StG, which is being made from the ground-up, the CETME-L effort centers around the use of parts kits, now available relatively inexpensively on the surplus market.

Today we’ll be looking at a round with one of the strangest-looking projectiles ever designed for a military weapon: The joint Heckler & Koch-CETME 4.6x36mm round designed for the HK36 en-bloc clip fed assault rifle. The rifle was, as the name suggests, developed by HK, and based on their successful family of roller-retarded blowback rifles, including the G3, MP5, and HK33. It fed from an unusual fixed 30-round magazine, which was loaded from the side through a panel with a polymer 30 round en bloc clip. The projectile was developed by Gunther Voss, of CETME, the very same who invented the unique aluminum-cored projectiles for the 7.92×40 CETME a couple of decades earlier.

We haven’t done a Historical Intermediate Calibers post in a while, mostly because most of the stuff that’s interesting enough to cover is difficult to find real world examples of. Today, we’ll be looking at one round I had planned to do ever since the series expanded beyond the original seven rounds covered, but of which I hadn’t been able to find a physical example until recently. Most of what I’ll call “first generation” intermediate rounds (although they aren’t truly the first) owe some debt to the German 7.92×33 Kurz caliber developed in Nazi Germany, but today’s round is truly its heir. After Nazi Germany’s capitulation in World War II, Mauser’s engineers fell into the hands of the French government, who set them to work developing weapons for French forces, including carbines based on the roller retarded blowback StG-45 assault rifle. Unhappy with his work in France, Ludwig Vorgrimler, who had worked on roller blowback firearms since before the Nazi surrender, left the country in June of 1950 and moved to Spain, where he began working for the Spanish Centro de Estudios Technicales de Materiales Especiales (CETME), who were responding to an ambitious Spanish military requirement for a new assault rifle. The weapon had to be less than 7 pounds in weight, controllable in the fully automatic fire mode, and have a maximum range of 1,000 meters. To meet this requirement, a former Luftwaffe ballistician named Dr. Gunther Voss came up with a unique idea: A new projectile with an aluminum core and gilding metal cladding, which would be very lightweight, yet very long and with a relatively high ballistic coefficient. The gilding metal cladding was ingenious, as it gave the bullet high rotational inertia, similar to a flywheel, which ensured it would remain stabilized throughout its flight, despite its extreme length.

According to the local site MyrtleBeachOnline.com, PTR Industries, maker of US-made H&K G3/CETME rifles has been served a default notice for failure to pay rent on their county-owned property. PTR famously made the move to South Carolina from Connecticut after the Sandy Hook shooting and its political fallout.

Hognose tackles one of the most confusingly designated of all Heckler and Koch weapons, the HK36 (distinct from the G36) and its 4.6x36mm round (itself distinct from H&K’s 4.6x30mm PDW round):