Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum and I'm here today in Scottsdale, Arizona,
at Bear Arms taking a look at one of the guns that
they have in their reference collection, specifically
an StG 77 or a Steyr A.U.G. or Steyr AUG,
depending on how you prefer to pronounce it.
This was a rifle developed in Austria in the early 1970s to replace the existing StG 58,
(... basically the FN FAL), which Austria had adopted. So what Austria was doing here was
going from a very traditional style of rifle at that time. Obviously it's not quite a
... straight wood stock, but we're going from a 7.62 NATO calibre, long, heavy battle rifle
to the more modern concept of an intermediate assault rifle.
And the AUG often gets a lot of credit for being sort of the first in this area with a lot of its features,
but I wouldn't entirely say that's true. What it was, absolutely, is one of this pack of
an interesting batch of guns from a sort of a transitional period. So in the late 1970s
(it was of course adopted in '77, I believe the first deliveries were in '78),
... it's a very futuristic looking gun and in this way it's very similar to a couple others of the time.
Of course it's a bullpup, it has an integrated optic,
and the British were doing a very similar thing with the SA80 that would come a couple years later.
SA80 was in development for quite a long time and, had it gone as planned, it would have been in service at the same time as the AUG.
And then of course the French introduced the FAMAS in 1979, so basically exactly at the same time as this.
Both of those guns have heavy use of polymer, they're 5.56 calibre, but not using M16 magazines in either case.
The Austrians were a little bit farther ahead of the curve with an integrated optic, where the French still used iron sights on the FAMAS.
But you have a lot of a lot of these futuristic elements in the guns at the same time.
So the AUG actually uses a substantial amount of polymer, more than you might expect.
And we'll take a look at that in just a moment when we take it apart.
But at any rate, it was adopted in '77. The initial order was for like 80,000 of the guns.
It is still to this day the Austrian combat rifle, although that may change at some point here.
... Actually, I think that's pretty much all the background on it that I really need to give you.
Let's go ahead and take this apart. There are a number of interesting things about how it works.
So, of course the AUG is a bullpup, meaning that we have a fairly long barrel.
The barrel comes all the way back to here.
The standard length I believe is a 20 inch barrel, not counting the muzzle device.
In an overall length that would be more typical for something like a 14.5 or 16 inch barrel in a traditional style of rifle.
It has a couple of unique controls to it, or not unique, but unusual.
The magazine release is right here behind the magazine, and this is a straight-in mag.
But it is not an AR-15 pattern magazine.
They use these sort of smoky translucent mags. They started with transparent ones, but had some ... durability problems with them.
There are two patterns of magazine here, or two sizes. This is the 30 round and then there is also an ... extended 42 round magazine.
Later patterns of the AUG, the A3 version, can be set up to use AR-15 pattern magazines.
That was important for the commercial market, but when this was developed for the Austrian military
you know, a proprietary magazine is just fine because
it's not like the Austrian military has large existing stocks of AR-15 mags they need to use.
Anyway, the magazine snaps in like so.
We have a safety lever on the side of the gun. The red is fire. Push it through,
you have a white dot on the other side, that is safe.
And then these are select fire guns using a progressive trigger. Meaning that a short pull of the trigger, like this,
fires in semi-auto, and a long pull, like this, fires in full-auto.
This is a concept that has been around and used sporadically pretty much ever since there were select-fire guns.
It's more common to find on submachine guns than on full-power rifles or assault rifles.
You know, ... you hear differing opinions on them.
Some people will say that it's a benefit because there isn't a separate selector lever
that you have to keep track of, and that you might inadvertently operate or not operate.
On the other side people will say that this trigger is not good under stress, because
especially inexperienced soldiers will tend to just yank the trigger all the way down if they are,
you know, getting shot at for example, or otherwise under stress and thus fire full-auto and ... miss their target.
So there are arguments on both sides of that one.
Charging handle is located up here, and there is a little cutout here so that you can lock the charging handle
up, and that will lock the bolt open. This does lock open on an empty magazine.
Being able to do this means you can lock the bolt open when you don't have a magazine in it,
which is important for disassembly if nothing else.
The ejection port is on the right side of the gun, this is set up to be a right-handed gun.
The AUG can be ... reconfigured to be fired from the left shoulder.
But that does require getting a replacement bolt and then swapping around this cover plate in the receiver.
So where some bullpups, for example the FAMAS introduced at the exact same time, could be easily
configured just swapped over to left-hand operation in the field, the AUG not so much.
You do actually have to have a different bolt, a left-handed bolt to do that.
The integrated optic here is something that was pretty uncommon at the time but not entirely unique to the AUG.
The British were on the cusp of doing the same thing with their SA80s.
The French did not, the French stuck with iron sights on the FAMAS.
But the British had also done this on the EM-2 in the 1950s actually, early 1950s, had a purpose-built optical sight on every rifle.
You'll notice that the optic here does have moulded in emergency iron sights.
It is a 1.5x power magnification and it has a pretty distinctive reticle
that everyone just calls the "doughnut of death". A little cheesy there,
but that's what everyone seems to call it. And it is a round reticle with a little dot in the centre.
Now I mentioned that this is a 40th anniversary commemorative
recent production AUG rather than an actual original StG 77 receiver.
And really the only difference here is that this optic on the new version is
held in place with a pin and can actually be removed.
Where on the original guns this optic mount was moulded into the receiver, the steel receiver,
and could not be changed or exchanged. So a little bit of a difference there. You can
visually see that from ... farther away by looking at the distance between the optic and the top of the receiver.
On the original guns there's substantially more space here because this wasn't being done as two parts.
One of the other cool features to the AUG is it does have a very easy quick change barrel,
We've got a little button right here. Just push that back and you can rotate the barrel up and off.
There were a variety of different barrels made for these,
down to like a 13.8 inch commando or submachine gun style barrel,
16s, 20s, and then there was a 24.5 inch long barrelled version.
They did also make a light machine gun version of this. That's the 24.5 inch barrel, it's a heavier profile barrel,
has an integral bipod on the front, and the gun was actually converted to fire from an open bolt
for the light machine gun pattern. All the standard rifles fire from a closed bolt of course.
You can also fold the front handle, the vertical grip here can go forward if you'd prefer it that way or just for stowage.
If you're transporting or stowing spare barrels, you don't need to have this thing sticking out in the way all the time.
The barrel locks into place using these lugs, this is an interrupted pattern.
So it goes into the receiver, and then rotates down just enough to lock these into
the trunnion and then, presto, it's locked in place.
The AUG operates as a short-stroke gas piston system and that piston is built into the gas block, right here,
integral to the barrel assembly. So that just pushes this little piston back to operate the gun.
If we disassemble this the rest of the way we can see all of the internals. And the internals on this are pretty cool.
So first off there's a little indentation on the butt plate. Push that in
and then push the sling swivel inwards and that allows you to remove the butt plate, right there.
And then we have this. This is what you're actually pushing in, push that in again, and pull the sling swivel entirely out, like so.
And then you can remove the fire control group. We'll come back to this in a minute.
Then we're going to put the bolt forward to relieve spring pressure,
and then we push this lug all the way through the receiver,
like so. And that allows us to slide the stock and receiver off of each other.
Once I have the receiver out, then I can just slide the bolt and bolt carrier assembly out of the receiver.
What we have here is mechanically basically an AR-18, again.
The AR-18 is a rifle that didn't do very well by itself,
but it showed up in a whole slew of very successful modern combat rifles and this is one of them.
So we have a rotating pattern bolt like an AR-15 here, and then we have it running on two dual guide rods there.
The guide rod on the left is actually the gas piston. Up here this ...
well, this is impinged upon by the little gas piston right there. And then the left hand guide rod is
impinged upon by the charging handle. So ...
when you pull the charging handle back, (you can see it right there), it's pulling back on this guide rod.
The recoil springs are both located in the butt stock, so they're not on the bolt carrier itself.
If we slide this in,
once we have the bolt carrier installed then I can push back on it.
And you can hear the springs there.
So they're located in there and they don't come out when you disassemble the gun because you don't need direct access to them.
The bolt carrier assembly fits nicely into the receiver like so.
And one of the other cool little features is this sort of skeletonised, claw looking piece here,
you'll notice that it has these fingers that lock in between the lugs of the bolt.
That ensures that the bolt stays in this unlocked configuration whenever it's in transit.
So with a gun like this, because you have so many little tiny locking lugs,
you need to make sure that the bolt lines up so that the locking lugs go into the trunnion properly when the bolt closes.
If this bolt were able to rotate even slightly out of orientation, you would get to right here and hit,
and not be able to go into battery. And that would cause a malfunction, well, that would be a malfunction.
So there's always something involved to prevent the bolt from rotating.
And on the AUG they came up with this little piece, and the way that works is the lugs are able to start
entering into the trunnion, and then those fingers hit the back of the receiver, right here.
And as the bolt continues to close this piece is held backward,
the lugs go fully into the trunnion and then
you can see that the cam pin here is able to rotate, and that locks the lugs into position.
If I have the bolt out of the trunnion, it just stops here because those fingers are holding on to the bolt lugs.
So that's kind of a clever little feature.
Lastly, and perhaps most interestingly on this gun, is the heavy use of polymer.
So obviously the receiver, the bolt, the bolt guide rods, the carrier, all that stuff is steel.
But the the ... body housing of the gun is polymer and the entire fire control group is polymer.
So the hammer's polymer, all of these parts are polymer,
which really surprised me when I first discovered that they had done it that way.
However, they are nice large surfaces here and it appears to have worked just fine,
it keeps the gun certainly lighter than if all of this stuff had been made out of steel.
So what you have here is a pretty ... typical trigger group.
There is a front and a rear engagement sear to catch the hammer.
So we have a full-auto disconnect here. When the bolt goes forward, it pushes this down, and that's going to trip the hammer.
So that goes forward, you hear the click, and you can see that the hammer lifts up out of that locking notch.
So in this position, as soon as you pull the trigger, this comes backwards and the hammer drops and fires.
The way the trigger is actually engaged, I can pull it back here, but you actually have a pair of guide rods
coming back from the trigger itself that push on these two surfaces, right there. That pushes this back.
And in normal firing, if you're holding onto the trigger the hammer is going to engage,
be caught by this front pair of sears and that prevents it from firing full-auto.
If you are holding the trigger all the way back, remember it's a progressive trigger, then right there
you can see that these front sears are pivoted forward. And so when they go forward like that
they're moved completely out of engagement, the hammer no longer encounters them.
And as long as you hold the trigger all the way back like this, the only thing that catches the hammer
is the auto sear here. That's there to ensure that the hammer doesn't simply follow the bolt.
When that happens in a firearm like this, it typically robs the hammer of some of its energy
and it often won't strike with enough force to actually fire.
So you'll get a failure to fire and then have to clear it.
This is a very common part in a full-auto mechanism.
So basically what this does is forces the bolt to close, go into battery,
and only then is the hammer released to fire the next round.
So there you have a completely field-stripped Steyr StG 77 AUG.
Definitely a forward thinking gun, there were a lot of novel interesting concepts that went into this.
The integrated optic, the extensive use of polymers, the select fire with the intermediate cartridge.
... It's not the very first of those, obviously the M16 kind of led the way with the 5.56 cartridge.
This was a definite step into sort of a future realm for countries that were used to shooting,
you know, large calibre 7.62 NATO rifles primarily in semi-auto.
This was a new thing, and Steyr ... made it a quite innovative rifle here, and they did very well with it.
So I think better than they typically get credit for today.
I think people look at this and normally think of it as just an unusual looking firearm,
instead of one that actually incorporated a bunch of forward thinking and interesting mechanical features to it.
The AUG ended up not just being the Austrian standard infantry military rifle, it was also adopted by a number of other countries.
Ireland adopted it, Australia bought a bunch, New Zealand bought a bunch.
... The Australians are probably the most substantial user of the rifle other than Austria.
They adopted it as the F88 Austeyr, and they actually licenced production in Australia.
So they have a bunch of them. And then a lot of police and security agencies,
separate from actual you know full-fledged militaries, a lot of agencies bought these guns.
So even here in the United States, the US Border Patrol has some guys that have AUGs. So it's a gun that definitely got around.
Because of the way it looks it's gotten into a lot of movies. Of course, obviously most notably the original Die Hard.
As a result, it's a kind of an iconic gun, obviously a distinctive look,
and it's a gun that has seen a fair amount of successful service.
So there are certainly quibbles that people have with it, features of it that people don't like,
but you can't really argue that it hasn't been a successful and effective combat rifle.
Anyway, a big thanks to Kurt at Bear Arms for letting me take a look at his [AUG] and taking it apart to show to you guys.
If you're looking for a good full-service gun store in Scottsdale or the Phoenix area definitely check out Bear Arms.
They are full service, they do NFA work, they do regular guns, everything you need.
Thanks for watching.