We figured we should try shooting the Ljungman in its natural habitat here.
This kind of sucks, let's go someplace warm.
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video episode on ForgottenWeapons.com.
It's another beautiful day out here at the range,
but a lot of people right now are dealing with winter cold and piles of snow.
So in respect of that we figured we'd pull out a neat Swedish rifle.
This is a Ljungman AG-42B. It was made in 1945, these rifles in general were made from '42 through '45,
and adopted as the standard Swedish service rifle, but they never saw a whole lot of use.
Obviously Sweden wasn't all that active in the war, but there are a number of interesting features to this rifle that we'll go over,
and do some shooting and see what it's like.
So first of all, something to note.
The Ljungman is one of not a whole lot of direct gas impingement rifles out there.
There is a gas block up here on the barrel, and then a stainless steel tube under the handguard,
which comes out at this little vent, and that vent pushes directly on the bolt carrier which cycles the gun.
So it's an extremely simple gas system. There are literally no moving parts other than the bolt and the bolt carrier.
Mechanically, it is a tilting block design. We'll take it apart in a few minutes after we do a little bit of shooting.
Another neat feature on it is the rear sight here. This is a
nice big knob that you can adjust and it tells you what your range is in...
these are metres or yards, from 1 up to 700. And so all you have to do to make a range adjustment is
click that up or down and it moves the rear sight notch for you.
The front sight is adjustable for windage if you need to correct that.
This rifle is chambered for 6.5mm Swedish.
It has a 10 round magazine. It is a detacheable magazine, but the magazines ... weren't
issued more than one magazine per gun. It was intended to be reloaded with stripper clips.
So in fact you may recall ... when I gave you the designation as the AG-42B, there was originally just a plain AG-42,
and they came up with a number of problems with it, revised it to the B designation.
One of the things that they changed was adding this front magazine catch.
They did have some issues originally with the magazines coming loose when they weren't supposed to, so they added that.
They also added this rubber case deflector on the B upgrade, and they added these two
lumps to the bolt carrier. The original guns just had flat pads and it was really hard to get a secure grip on those.
Now something else when we look at the operation of this rifle,
This will make M1 thumb from your M1 Garand look like a paper cut.
In order to cycle the gun
what you do is actually grab the bolt carrier here. Push it all the way forward.
So we have a bolt that moves back and we have a bolt carrier that moves forward (although only when you push it manually),
and when you push it all the way forward, there's a little hook inside here that catches on the bolt itself,
and now the two are locked together and travel together. So the recoil spring is fully compressed inside here.
You can see this little nub on the bottom. When you run the bolt carrier into that nub it releases the bolt
and slams forward. A little bit unexpectedly if ... you're not familiar with the rifle when you pick it up.
That'll just really ruin your day.
How about some shooting?
So I have loaded up my magazine.
Put that in nice and secure. Now,
when I open this up, you can see we have a live cartridge in there, we're all ready to go.
This has a really light recoil.
There aren't a whole lot of, you know, full calibre battle rifles like this in 6.5 Swedish.
And it's got a bit less recoil to it than a .308 would, which is really nice.
You can see there's also a built-in muzzle brake, it's a series of vent holes on the muzzle.
Those seem to do a decent job.
And there you go, locked open when empty. So if I were a Swedish soldier, I'd reload that with stripper clips.
I am familiar with this system and I still don't want to put my thumb in there.
So I'm gonna take the magazine out and reload it manually.
Very neat, fairly rare service rifle.
Thanks for watching guys. I hope you enjoyed it.