#Stg-44

STG-44 reproductions have been in the works from Hill & Mac Gun Works for a while, and now Palmetto State Armory is onboard to bring it across the finish line! The STG-44 reproduction is part of PSA’s new “Battlefield” line of retro inspired guns. There area few modern touches such as a new magazine pattern, and a tweaked gas system to help make the gun more shootable, but the look and feel is faithful to the original.

Here is a video posted by Vaporwar on Facebook. It has some fantastic slow motion video clips of firearms being fired.

The roller-locked* Heckler & Koch G3 rifles and MP5 submachine guns have become iconic weapons of the Cold War era, being used in conflicts everywhere from civil wars in Africa, to hostage rescues and counter terror operations in Europe, to anti-cartel operations in South America. The operating system of these rifles is as unique as they are, and dates back to the death throes of the Nazi regime at the end of World War II. Desperate to save their failing state, the Nazis tasked engineers with developing new weapons, and the engineers were all to happy to oblige, lest they too be handed an old rifle and sent to the front!

The following is an article that was originally written in Russian by TFB contributor Maxim Popenker, and Andrey Ulanov, and translated to English by Peter Samsonov. With their permission, I have replicated the text here, and edited it, for the enrichment of you, our readers!

It’s a blunder so bad it makes you look twice: On the new sculpture dedicated to Russia’s most famous small arms designer, there is an unintentional homage to a weapon of Russia’s hated adversaries during the Great Patriotic War. Behind the tasteful statue unveiled last Tuesday of Mikhail “Mikhtim” Kalashnikov cradling his invention like a fine instrument, there lies a sculpture panel dedicated to his inventions themselves – and, by accident, the Nazi Sturmgewehr of World War II. While the majority of the panel is filled with models of Kalashnikov’s inventions and derivatives, nestled in the backdrop of the representation of the AKS-74U compact assault rifle is a slab depicting an exploded view of the MKb42(H),, a World War II German assault rifle which helped serve as the inspiration for the program Kalashnikov’s rifle was designed to satisfy.

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.

Quick: What’s the definition of “assault rifle”? I’ll give you a moment to think about it.

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.

The M1 Carbine is a lightweight, handy weapon that is well-liked by many. One of its weakest points for many people, however, is its cartridge: The .30 Carbine caliber is regarded by some as being too weak to be a true intermediate caliber round fully capable of effective 300m fire. Still, the .30 Carbine is short, so maybe there is another caliber out there that could fit into an M1 Carbine’s action while giving it a little more punch… It turns out that during the late 1940s and early 1950s, at least one Spanish small arms designer felt the same way, and invented the gun in the Forgotten Weapons video below:

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.

Many would consider this next round to be the first intermediate cartridge ever, and while that isn’t really true, it is one of the most influential rounds of all time, and perhaps the most influential intermediate round ever developed. I am talking of course about the Nazi-era Kurzpatrone 43 Spitzgeschoß mit Eisenkern, or as it is more commonly called, the 7.92×33 Kurz. This round became the model – in one fashion or another – for numerous intermediate rounds developed all around the globe after World War II, including the promising .280 British, and ubiquitous 7.62x39mm Soviet, as well as several others we’ll discuss in later installments.

At SHOT 2016, Hill & Mac Gunworks unveiled their prototype multi caliber re-imagining of the World War II-era German Sturmgewehr assault rifle. The new semi-automatic rifle, while not an exact replica, captures many of the design elements and the basic aesthetics of the original, making for one of the more interesting intermediate caliber carbine projects of this year.

Hill and Mac Gunworks have made a name for themselves by making a STG-44 replica in the US. The design is similar to the WWII classic. However for the sake of simplicity and ATF there are some notable changes. The HMG STG44 will be available in four calibers: 8mm Kurz, .223 Wylde, 7.62×39, and .300blk. According to the HMG guys, the .300blk is very interesting as it is ballistically similar to the original 8mm kurz round. They have designed the STG44 to be somewhat modular and that you can swap calibers easily.  Barrel kits will cost between $349-$499. The original trigger has something like 207 parts in it. To simplify this they are using a modified HK pack.

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.

(This is Part 2 of the TFB Rifle Weight Omnibus. You can read Part 1 here.)