#Swiss

The world of early semiautomatic rifles is a wild, untamed one. The conventions that are virtually set in stone today as best practices didn’t exist, and a seemingly endless combination of requirements and ideas came together to produce some truly weird and wonderful firearms.

Swiss company B&T is only a small to medium sized company, but with big ears and very short distance from demand to R&D to production and delivery. Don’t ask why Heckler & Koch springs to mind as something being the total opposite.

An interesting little rifle made an appearance at the CSAAA show in February. Canadian company Wolverine Supplies brought in a sample of the Swiss-made B&T SPR 300. This little bolt gun is chambered in .300BLK, features an 9.8″ barrel and an integrated suppressor. Its got a price tag to match, and will cost your department or unit $8000 to add to the armoury, and that’s before you put an optic on there. Unfortunately the suppressor means that this rifle is only available to Canadian military and law-enforcement buyers.

Previously, we looked at the Breda Model 39, an Italian rifle that competed against what would become the Beretta BM-59 in a bid to be the Italian military rifle of the 1950s and ’60s. TFB friend Trevor Weston sends along more photos of three Italian rifles that are not well known today. The first two are Beretta-made licensed-produced copies of the 7.62mm  SG 510-4 rifle, the more conventional one being the first Chilean contract rifle of 13,000 made by the company for that country. The other is a Beretta-made “improvement” of the 510, called the BL-62, with a combined buttstock and pistol grip.

Andy writes …

For those looking for some modern Swiss firearms, Brügger & Thomet USA firearms have now been imported and are available. Ethan of Aftermath Gun Club reports:

B&T AG (formerly Brügger & Thomet AG) of Switzerland have introduced a new sound suppressor targeted at the .380 subcompact market. The suppressor is partnered with a barrel either for a Glock 42 or a SIG P238 pistol. Designed to be smaller than other suppressors, it still offers hearing-safe sound suppression of about 28db (about the same as a pair of ear plugs). B&T has released through their YouTube channel a brief, but satisfying video of the new product:

NL sent us this photo he took of Swiss Army MG51 machine guns and MG64 machine guns waiting to be cleaned.

World renowned gun expert and author Max Popenker took this photo recently in Switzerland. Apparently the Swiss have some serious machine gun collectors. Max writes …

Swiss manufacturer Brügger & Thomet has a civilian model of the APC9 SMG currently available in Finland. Designated the APC9 Suomi (literally Finland or Finnish), this 9x19mm semi-auto sub-carbine has one distinct feature for the Finnish market – a fixed suppressor.

For several years now we’ve been told the Swiss made Sphinx would be imported into the USA. It’s finally happened after a long wait. Was it worth the wait? I think it was.

SIG Sauer will soon be shipping the SIG 551-A1. This rifle is essentially a SIG556 upper receiver, with Swiss-style furniture, combined with an aluminum SIG 551-style lower receiver. The biggest difference between the SIG 551A1 and the SIG 556 is that the former uses Swiss transparent polymer magazines instead of AR-15 magazines.

So I was giving my car a much needed clean and I found a long forgotten surplus Swiss SIG 510 rifle cleaning kit. Having never given it a second look since the time I bought it on the cheap, I take it inside and examined it. It contains two plastic bottles. I expected one to be used for oil and the other for solvent, but I was wrong. They both were full of grease. Long story short, I manage to get this ancient Swiss grease on my fingers and then, replying to an email, I get it on my beautiful new aluminum Apple keyboard!

Every five years the Swiss get together for a month long shooting competition / party. This year the Eidgenössische (Federal) Schützenfest was held in the city of Aarau. There were 2300 teams made up over over 45,000 individual shooters!

Recently two European firms, Hera Arms in Germany and Astra Arms in Switzerland, have entered the AR-15 market. I have been told that US Department of State export regulations have made it increasingly hard to import firearms from the US. Even Canadians have problems getting certain types of AR-15 rifles across the border and so have resorted to importing AR-15s from China.