#G3

Since we’ve covered the two most prominent PDW rounds of today, I want to take a quick detour and look at an interesting – but obscure – personal defense weapon/assault rifle round from history. After World War II, the apparati of the German war machine were being dismantled, and anything of value claimed by the Allies as spoils. While the Americans got Germany’s most prominent rocket scientists, the French claimed Germany’s tank designers, and many of her small arms engineers. As France was looking to replace their motley and outdated collection of small arms (a suite which developed more organically than by design, thanks to two devastating World Wars), they put these German engineers to work, including one Dr. Heinrich Vollmer, who before and during the war worked at Mauser. Vollmer had been involved in development of – among various other projects – the StG-45 assault rifle, which possessed a unique roller-retarded blowback action that promised an inexpensive and reliable, yet lightweight weapon. This rifle would eventually lead to the G3, but during Vollmer’s stay in France, the French government set him to work making a smaller version of it, in variants chambered for .30 Carbine as well as a new round: The 7.65x35mm MAS.

It feels like déjà vu: India has once again issued a Request For Information (RFI) for a new rifle, this time in 7.62x51mm NATO caliber. The RFI was reportedly issued on the 27th of September, making it two and a half months between the nation’s government announcing they were preparing the document, and actually issuing it. DefenseWorld reports on the RFI’s contents:

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.

The Portuguese Army has recently put out a tender for a procurement of 10,225 light machine guns, rifles, submachine guns and handguns according to a recent report by Jane’s Defense (in an article very poorly edited for what they usually put out). The procurement will be in the ballpark of $90.2 million, and is intended for the Army to replace three entire battalions worth of small arms. The report states that the Army previously canceled its former standing tender from 2005 wherein the service declared it needed 30,000 small arms, and is now going with this current one. It also mentions that gear procurement and “light armament”  are being looked at as well. It looks like this means personal Infantry equipment and with that it seems the plan is to bring the Army up to speed across the board. From the report-

MKE – Makina ve Kimya Endüstrisi Kurumu – from Ankara in Turkey has roots going back to the 15:th century.

Good news if you live in Germany, and some other European countries. If you live in the US I suppose these will continue to be made in unobtanium, but you’re always welcome to comment below how much you would like them. As I approached the H&K stand at IWA the surprise grew bigger, is that really? Yes it is!

February is coming to an end. Spring is soon here, which means exhibition time in Europe and time to tell our TFB followers about some new interesting products and news.

The term “battle rifle” is a colloquialism that is generally used to refer to rifles firing a full caliber cartridge and generally are select fire. After WWII, many nations decided to forego intermediate rounds in favor of heavy hitting, powerful fully automatic long arms that lasted until intermediate cartridges seized the day. In this video, we take a look at 5 that we consider the best.

The PTR 91 series of rifles are essentially HK91 clones that are built here in the USA on old Portuguese tooling. The rifles are priced right and shoot well, and many people are rediscovering the joys of roller delayed blowback as a result of their being on the market. So what do the guts look like, and how do you get to them?

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.

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.

This is the zeroeth part of a series of posts seeking to describe and analyze the 7.62mm Light Rifle concept promoted by the Americans, and subsequently adopted by NATO in various forms. This series will cover development from before World War II to the present day, but will focus primarily on the period from 1944-1970, which constitutes the span of time from the Light Rifle’s conception until its end in the United States with the standardization of the M16.

Bob Holloway, then of Fort Worth, Texas, in the 1980s built on his experiences in Southeast Asia and Rhodesia to design a .308 caliber military rifle, what eventually became the HAC-7. His rifle was an amalgamation of Armalite, FN, and Kalashnikov designs, with a considerable amount of his own ingenuity thrown in. The result is now one of the most interesting “might-have-beens” of the 20th Century: A lightweight .308 infantry rifle two decades older than the FN SCAR-H.

A reader emailed us with the above photo …

Pakistan Ordnance Factories (POF) had a new compact variant of the G3 called the G3S.