[ Reproduction Historical Guns ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another "Ask Ian" Q&A on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and our question today comes from Paul on Patreon who says,
"I've always thought that there were a lot of older guns that deserve to be reproduced,
many of which could be really simple to manufacture.
PSA is planning the release of their Sturmgewehr 44 reproduction, which is exciting.
But why don't we see this thing more often?
I suppose not everyone in the firearms community is going to want this sort of thing,
but I think there are a lot of guns that would sell well enough to justify their reproduction."
Now I've touched on this question a few times before in earlier Q&As,
but I continue to get asked it on a regular basis
and I think it deserves a ... standalone video as an answer.
Fundamentally the reason we don't see more reproductions is that the general consensus
among the businesses that are in a position to make them is that the potential sales
do not justify the cost of tooling up to actually produce reproduction firearms.
So let's look at a couple of case studies, ...
actually let's first talk about the various factors that go into this.
So you want to do a reproduction firearm. First off, what's the calibre?
Is it a calibre people can actually get? If it is, great, we can move on.
If it's not, you have to then decide are you going to use the original calibre,
or are you going to re-chamber it in something different?
Theoretically if it's something different but similar, you'll get a lot of people
who will be more willing to buy the gun because they can actually get the ammunition.
However, every time you move a step away from perfect original authenticity,
you're going to lose a portion of the audience who are purist enough
that they don't want the gun if it's not perfect enough.
And you're always going to be working with a relatively small audience to begin with
because you are marketing them what is completely a luxury good.
... Sometimes this may be a firearm they can use to go out and hunt with or compete with,
but the reason they're buying it is as a collectible.
As a stand-in for an authentic collectible that they can't afford or can't find.
So every step away from perfect originality is going to be a problem for you.
So let's say you have a rifle that does use available ammunition, now does it use available magazines?
Because if you have to produce your own magazines
that's a huge expense and a tremendous amount of work.
Way more work than I think most people recognise.
A good example is the HCAR, the Ohio Ordnance modernised version of the BAR.
They developed a 30 round magazine for that gun.
That magazine, even though it is the exact same feed lip geometry as the original BAR magazines,
and like everything about this gun was already there.
They'd already built 1918A2 or A3 semi-auto BARs.
Even with all that, they spent more time getting the magazine perfected
than they did getting the gun perfected.
People accept virtually no unreliability in magazines.
The gun has to work almost perfectly to be acceptable,
we have very high standards for this in the commercial market these days.
And in order for the gun to work that well, fundamentally the magazine has to work that well also.
The magazine is one of the core elements in what allows a firearm to run reliably.
So if your reproduction gun requires the use of a new production magazine,
you're already fighting an uphill battle in terms of cost and time and viability of the project. So.
Alright, so let's say it does use an existing magazine, cool, we've passed two big hurdles.
The next one is, is this a gun that's actually available in its original form on the collector market?
Because if it's even a little bit available, you're going to have a really hard time convincing people
that they should buy a brand new one instead of an actual authentic one.
Again, this isn't a gun that you're selling because of its practical characteristics.
It's a gun that you're trying to sell because of its historical place and its historical authenticity.
So if I want to buy a G43 for example,
yeah, they're collectible, they're not super rare though.
Like, I can go out and get one for a couple of thousand dollars.
It would cost a company at least a couple of thousand dollars apiece
to actually tool up and manufacture them from scratch again.
And how many people are going to want the brand new one instead of the original one?
So in order to be a viable reproduction usually (there are exceptions to all of these rules),
but generally it has to be something that's really, really hard to get.
Perhaps something that is a machine gun in its original form, that's a really good way
that you can have something that is iconic and well known, but also really hard to get.
Sturmgewehrs are like that, you can get an original Sturmgewehr,
but it's going to cost you these days probably 30,000 or 35,000 dollars.
So the Sturmgewehr is a good case study here.
Do you run it in 8mm Kurz? Ammo is available, but it's not really available.
The magazines are available, but not really available, the ... original mags are all 80 years old.
People are going to have to get new magazines. There are reproduction magazines out there,
but they're of questionable reliability.
So with PSA, the Hill & Mac Sturmgewehr,
what they opted to do was give it a whole new magazine design.
Something that is compatible with STANAG AR-15 magazines.
And they chose to chamber it in four different cartridges, all simultaneously,
not all in the same gun, but you get your choice of four different cartridges
that they're all being developed for, simultaneously.
8 Kurz, 5.56, 7.62x39 and .300 Blackout, which was really cool, and really ambitious.
And I suspect that is part of the reason that the gun took so long to drag its way through development.
That's not the only thing going on with it, but
that certainly made the development project a lot harder.
It is interesting to compare ... in concept, because I don't have either one of them in front of me,
but it's interesting to compare the HMG/PSA Sturmgewehr to the PTR-44 Sturmgewehr.
Those PTRs are German imported reproductions, and they're really, really good reproductions.
As in most of the parts of an original Sturmgewehr will drop into the PTR guns.
And their price was massively higher as a result. Those things are going for like $7,500 now,
and they were a couple of thousand even when they first came in.
The HMG guns are expected to be a much lower price.
But they have (I don't think) any parts compatibility with originals.
And they don't quite look the same because the magazine is just a little bit different,
and a lot of the other parts are just a little bit different.
So this is a balancing act that ... people considering making reproduction guns have to play with.
The closer we are to original, the more of the audience we can attract,
but we're also inevitably going to have higher production cost.
Another good case study I think to look at are the AR-10s.
Brownells a couple of years ago decided to do a reproduction AR-10
based on the original ArmaLite AR-10s.
So these aren't quite the exact same pattern,
they did sort of the Guatemalan/Sudanese pattern, this is a Portuguese gun.
But fundamentally this seems like ... a particularly easy reproduction to do
because it's an AR-10 based platform. ... All the development's already been done,
we have lots of AR-10 based guns out there that you can use.
There's not a whole lot of new engineering that has to go into this.
And yet when faced with the question of how authentic do we make them
versus how do we balance our production costs?
Brownells opted a little bit more towards the production cost side, let's keep it affordable.
And they were able to sell these for, I don't remember the exact price now,
somewhere 1,000 or 1,500 dollars.
But they had complaints that the furniture didn't quite look right,
the muzzle devices weren't quite authentic enough.
And I suspect as a result of that, the project
was never really popular enough to justify keeping it in stock.
So they made a batch of them, and they decided not to make a second batch.
Had they made them as exact perfect copies of original Portuguese or Sudanese AR-10s,
would they have sold more? Maybe.
But their ... cost would have been probably twice as much.
So I've talked about this sort of question with some gun makers before,
and we've kind of brainstormed over which guns would be cool to do.
Like one that often comes up is the Fedorov. The Fedorov would be awesome.
I'd love to have a reproduction Fedorov. It meets some of these criteria.
It's got a relevant historical place in history, it's arguably the first assault rifle.
It is flat out impossible to get, I think there's maybe one in the United States that I'm aware of.
But it hits other hurdles right off the bat.
It's chambered for 6.5 Japanese, it's a hard cartridge to get in any sort of quantity.
It uses its own proprietary magazine, and there aren't a whole lot of other magazines out there
that are set up to feed 6.5 Japanese, like none actually.
You could take Type 96 Nambu magazines, but
... $1,000 apiece on those magazines is a darn good deal these days.
So like already you've got two strikes against that project.
And then it's a really complex gun, like do you try and rebuild it so it can handle .308, maybe.
Like that's probably the only route by which people would actually be interested in buying them.
Maybe you come up with some sort of ad hoc version of it where it's in 7mm Mauser,
or 6.5 Swede using German MG13 mags, which look fairly similar.
But then you're in a position like the FG-42s
where, yeah, MG13 magazines seem pretty cheap and readily available now.
But you start making those reproductions and they're going to dry up fast.
Just like CB 26 magazines did with the FG-42s.
The FG-42 by the way, is a project that I think survives and was successful
only through the sheer tenacity and skill of Rick Smith at SMG.
He's now put more development time into that gun
than Krieghoff did for the German government in World War Two.
What he's done with that is really pretty amazing.
And no sane large company would have looked at the financial balance
on doing a reproduction FG-42 and gone forward with it.
Kudos to Rick for doing it and for doing it successfully,
but he really is an outlier in that.
Let's see, so fundamentally you need to have a gun that's easy to make,
and also cool, that is recognised, that a lot of people are going to want.
The Sturmgewehr is in a cherry position in that case,
because everyone's seen them in movies and video games,
and all sorts of pop culture and history, and everyone wants one, and they're super cool.
And even those, we see people have had
significant difficulty making reproductions of because of the cost.
There were a batch of guns from Dittrich in Germany that came in.
But once. ... No one could justify being able to pull that off a second time.
HMG looks like they're going to come through now by way of PSA,
but that is a project that had significant hurdles.
And that's one of the best possible guns,
like in the best possible situation to make a viable reproduction.
One of the interesting ones that maybe, maybe could be viable,
something that I'd toss out there if there is a vaguely insane company
looking to try and take on a project like this, would be a FAMAS G2.
Now some of you are, probably rightfully, going to think that of course I'm biased on that,
but I would point out that the G2 FAMAS uses standard AR-15 FN pattern magazines,
which is a big initial check mark in its favour.
It uses standard 5.56, another big check mark.
The receiver is a relatively simple design, there's nothing
all that complicated about a FAMAS receiver, that's a good thing.
Where I see ... that project hitting a potential wall is the fact that has a lot of polymer.
The upper handguard assembly, the bottom buttstock and trigger guard assembly,
are all big polymer components that would have to be moulded.
So you'd have to pay for a couple of polymer moulds.
That requires a fair amount of engineering expense, you're spending probably half a million dollars
out of pocket just to make the moulds for those two parts ... before you can even start production.
So would enough people buy a reproduction FAMAS G2, recognising that it can't really be scoped?
Or do they maybe make a version that is a Valorisé,
the FAMAS with the modified modernised Picatinny rail system.
Well the problem is some of the parts on that, ... they're of dubious quality.
Like they're a little more fragile than the standard FAMAS, because they were kind of a kludge
to make the Picatinny optics rail thing work well.
Anyway, maybe that one's possible. Maybe there's someone out there who thinks that that one's viable.
If so, by all means if you get one up and running let me know, I'd love to do some video with it.
Because those guns are totally unavailable in the US. But.
Hopefully, that has expanded a bit on why we see fewer reproductions.
Fundamentally Paul, it is because while they may look like they're not that difficult to manufacture,
setting up manufacture of a firearm to make it reliable enough
for people not to immediately dismiss as total junk in the US commercial market,
that is a very time consuming, and a very costly, and a very difficult undertaking.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed this one, Thanks for watching.