Austrian Stg58 Manual Gas Regulator

West Germany adopted a version of the Belgian FAL rifle to re-equip their border guards and subsequently the Bundeswehr.

This relatively small country endured nearly five years of persecution underneath the Nazi jackboot.

Coming as this was on the heels of a previous similar performance in 1914, the Belgians were mighty keen to keep this from ever happening again.

The Nazis brought us the modern combat submarine, the main battle tank and the assault rifle.

While World War II ultimately ended with Soviet troops in Berlin and Hitler dead by his own hand, the revolutionary nature of the German Sturmgewehr assault rifle was not lost on a world brutalized by war.

These weapons were essentially upgraded versions of the weapons with which the world fought the First War to End All Wars.

Slow to load and slow to run, these expensive guns could kill at a kilometer or more but were heavy and difficult to manufacture.

This stamped steel rifle still weighed around 11 pounds but fired an intermediate-sized 7.92x33mm round that offered minimal recoil and only a modest weight burden.

This stubby little round offered power up close where it counted, while consuming markedly fewer raw materials and exactly half the powder charge per round.

Despite its diminutive dimensions, the 7.92x33mm Kurz cartridge still reached out effectively to 400 meters and beyond.

Contrived by veteran gun designer Dieudonn Saive, the man who completed the design of the P35 Hi-Power pistol after the death of John Moses Browning, and Ernest Vervier, the resulting Fusil Automatique Lger ultimately armed most of the free world.

The United States naturally had its own ideas about how a modern combat rifle should look and adopted the M14.

The original FAL was chambered for the same German wartime 7.92x33mm Kurz cartridge that drove the StG44.

The British were enamored with the FAL, but they wanted it in their own proprietary intermediate.280 cartridge.

The Brits ultimately adopted the.280 cartridge and their own bullpup EM-2 rifle to fire it.

However, soon thereafter, in 1951, the Labour Party lost the general election in Great Britain, and Winston Churchill once again took the helm as Prime Minister.

In what was likely a quid pro quo between Churchill and American President Harry Truman, NATO ended up with the full-power 7.62x51mm round.

The FAL was subsequently chambered for this NATO cartridge and adopted by more than 90 nations.

The British built their own version of the 7.62x51mm FAL, calling it the L1A1 SLR or Self-Loading Rifle.

The action is itself intellectually similar to that of the Soviet wartime SVT-40.

Austrian Stg58 Manual Gas Regulator

FAL rifles come equipped with a manual gas regulator underneath the front sight, and the line of recoil is essentially in line with the buttstock.

FALs feed from detachable box magazines of between five- and 20-round capacities, though 30-round mags from 7.62x51mm British L4A4 Bren guns may be adapted to fit as well.

Magazines for the Inch FAL in the British family of FAL, will not interchange with the Metric FAL magazines from the Belgian family of FAL.).

The side-folding stock of the FAL was later copied almost exactly on the Israeli Galil assault rifle.

While most FAL rifles were offered in selective fire configuration, the British L1A1 was semi-auto only.

As a result, West Germany and Austria moved from aggressor nations who had recently set Europe ablaze to allies in the burgeoning Cold War against communism.