#Reproduction

Frontier Armory is a leading source of African firearm parts. In addition to their array of imported parts, they are also creating a US-made reproduction Halbek device. What is a Halbek device, exactly? The legendary Ian McCollum at Forgotten Weapons made a great video explaining what it was and how it worked.

I’m not gonna lie, I am super excited to see more retro AR-15 parts like new production retro M16A1 furniture hit the market since M16A1 kits have become very hard to come across in good, complete condition and they often cost nearly as much as a complete rifle.

Your chance to own a semiauto reproduction StG-44 is coming soon: Hill & Mac Gunworks recently announced that the first of their Sturmgewehr rifles would be shipping before the end of this month. In an announcement made through the latest InRange TV Question & Answer Session with the company, HMG founder Mac Steil explained that series production of the Sturmgewehr has, at long last, begun, and that the first rifles will be shipping to pre-order customers before the end of August. Further, he stated that HMG would be publishing a Sturmgewehr release calendar, so that preorder customers could figure out when exactly their rifles would ship based on their preorder dates.

One of the most interesting firearms for me at the 2017 SHOT Show was Hill & Mac’s quasi-reproduction of the WWII-era StG-44 Sturmgewehr. We’ve covered this weapon twice before at trade shows, including SHOT 2016 and the NRA 2016 Annual Meeting, and I am very pleased to say that the progress that HMG has made on this project is very apparent in the examples that were present at this year’s SHOT Show. A year ago, I had been fairly critical of the weapons the company had brought to the show, as they were in a very rough state and not very convincing as reproductions, but this year the weapons HMG brought looked extremely promising.

James River Armory is a North Carolina based company that specializes in reproduction rifles for the collector market. Something we are seeing a lot of today is that collectors will have a number of specimens of historical rifles that are very rare, but they still want to be able to enjoy the rifles as much as they collect them. Shooting some of these historical rifles can diminish their value drastically, especially if they have been rarely fired to begin with. Thus, companies like James River specialize in reproducing these rifles so collectors and shooters genuinely interested in the design so we can shoot or even compete with them and not damage a very historically significant rifle.

A seller on Gunbroker has recently posted a very peculiar and unique weapon system, a civilian legal 40mm reproduction of the China Lake pump action grenade launcher. The receiver, stock, and pump are registered under a Title 1 firearm, while the barrel is registered as a destructive device. So too is each individual 40x46mm Low Velocity grenade, but the sale of those is not included. The seller claims that this is one of the few reproductions in existence (even fewer originals exist). At the time of this post, the current bid on the launcher is $9,500 while the minimum bid is $9,525. By the time this post is published, the item will probably have ended on Gunbroker, so the link might be broken. Weaponsman has also written up an in-depth report on the post.

A recent news article has highlighted the efforts of a company in Oklahoma in replicating the Iraqi Tabuk service rifle, a Saddam Hussein era Iraqi Kalashnikov. The Tabuk is readily identifiable from the myriad of other Kalashnikov copies from the Yugoslavian pistol grip, the extended three vent handguard, grenade launching flip up sights, and the reinforced trunnion of an RPK receiver. In fact, if any of these reminds you of the Zastava Arms M70, then you would be correct, as the two rifles are virtually identical in terms of design. The news article further states the companies rifles were used in American Sniper because of their authentic features.

One of the more interesting plans to provide weapons to the irregulars and resistance fighters during World War II involved airdropping around a million crudely made single shot pistols over occupied territory. Most shooters and history buffs are rather familiar with the FP-45 Liberator but have never shot one. Our friends Ian and Karl at Forgotten Weapons take a reproduction out to the range for some first shots that look painful as all get out.

This post is part of two others, about a recent range outing with some very historically interesting small arms, the DeLisle commando carbine, the M50 Reising submachine gun, and the Russian PM1910 Maxim heavy machine gun. All of these are NFA items (either Class III or suppressed) and the owner was extremely kind enough to take me out and blow over a thousand rounds through his small arms.

Reproduction firearms have always occupied a portion of the shooting market, for a variety of reasons. Many competitions are based around old firearms, such as the Single Action Army Shooting Society in the sport of cowboy action shooting. Other shooters simply want to have firearms that are faithful reproductions because they want to shoot them much more than they could an actual hundred year old or so firearm, or because they are too expensive to risk. However, reproduction scopes are not very well known, and thus Hi-Lux optics company has filled that void by manufacturing reproduction scopes. One of the primary reasons they are doing this is for the CMP Vintage Sniper Rifle competitions where competitors compete with original or reproduction firearms. Many of the older scopes have degraded in quality over the years, or are extremely expensive, some of the Unertl scopes for the Springfield 1903 have reached eight thousand dollars for example. Thus, Hi-Lux has made faithful reproductions of such scopes as the M8 USMC Sniper scope (the long Unertl scope that you’ve probably seen from Saving Private Ryan), the M40 USMC 39×40 (greenish tint body, used during Vietnam on the Remington 700s), and William Malcolm Vintage Telescope Rifle Scopes, used on such competition designs as the Browning High and Low Wall rifles (even longer scopes, almost the length of the rifle, from the 19th century).

Hill & Mac Gunworks brought to the show their brand new rifle, the HMG Sturmgewehr, a reproduction of the famous German StG-44 assault rifle of World War II. The company bought prototypes of three different configurations of the new gun, the STG-N, a rifle, the STG-P, a pistol with a short 13″ barrel, and the STG-K, an SBR. All three versions will be made available in four calibers, the company said: 5.56×45, 7.62×39, .300 Blackout, and the original German 7.92×33 Kurz for the purists. The HMG Sturmgewehr is not an entirely faithful reproduction of the StG-44, differing in the location of the recoil spring, the barrel retention system, and the trigger. However, the result is a firearm that resembles an original, in a rifle caliber.

InRange has got something very interesting for their viewers this week: Two segments on the SMG Guns project to create a modernized FG-42. They also released a trailer on YouTube, embedded below: