The "Carlo"/Carl Gustav-designmachine gun: terrorists/criminals use in US/Europe?

According to this report in The Times of Israel–This 10-year-old Jewish reporter has some tough questions for Bernie Sanders | The Times of Israel do-it-yourselfer made in a crappy metal shop from publicly available designs is a popular firearm for Palestinian terrorists. Specimens have been jacked-up or sideways with components of many other weapons.

I never heard of it. Has it been discovered or used outside of Israel? Surely what goes around there comes around elsewhere.


The Carlo, as it is known, derives its name from the Carl Gustav m/45 rifle, a design that was adopted by the Swedish army in 1945 and later licensed to Egypt, where units were sold under the names Port Said and Akaba, according to a forthcoming report authored by ARES for the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based research institute.

Your own link is a cite:

I was hoping/expecting-as-always SD knowledge, beyond a cite from the author of a report not yet released. You are correct, though: the plain answer, per cite, is it does show up.

Plus, the cite I’m OP is going wonky now. Try this, even though it seems the same: Say hello to 'Carlo,' the cheap, lethal go-to gun for terrorists | The Times of Israel

It’s a straight blowback, open-bolt submachine gun. Very simple in design and execution- according to the article, it was designed by the Swedes based on examination of other agriculturally simple submachine guns like the PPS-43, PPSH-41, MP-40 and STEN gun.

Basically it’s so simple and robust that it’s easily copied by just about any semi-competent machine shop. So are the STEN and the PPS-43, in particular. The PPS-43 was literally made in makeshift machine shops during the Siege of Leningrad, so it has the bona-fides for that kind of thing, and the M/45 was in part derived from it.

ummm…what does farming have to do with gun design? :slight_smile:

Nothing, but farmers are renowned for cobbling together simple devices that get the job done with whatever bits and pieces they have lying around.

I don’t know how y’all harvest crops…

Yeah, “agriculturally simple” is a term used to describe things that are extremely simple and robust- basically they’re simple, practical, reliable and rugged. I suppose the etymology derives from the fact that most traditional farm tools and implements fall under that particular description, and that a firearm or other machine similarly simple, robust and no-frills would qualify as “agriculturally simple”.

If you google the term with quotes around it, you get a lot of examples of how it’s used.

Photo, description of a Carl Gustav gun maker workshop – it was raided this week after terrorists shot up a mall in Tel Aviv this week with the weapon. Not clear if that workshop was for their specific weapons.

Not difficult to make a fairly simple unlocked breech weapon (thought the one in the Times article appears to use a 5.56mm magazine which suggests a more sophisticated design) firing pistol cartridges. Many of them were designed in the '40s to be made in light engineering workshops. Sort of thing that organisations without money or connections to buy regular weapons do.

The article mentions they’re made of water pipes. I wonder what kind of PSI their barrels and chambers can take.

Also, are there any ballpark numbers on their accuracy?

Is it comparable to smoothbore muskets? If so, what kind of accuracy, MAO-wise, do muskets have?
Does 7.62x39 ammo tend to flow freely in Mashrek states? I have some difficulty seeing how some organizations could have ready access to 7.62x39 ammo but not proper Kalashnikovs given that both require about the same level of sophistication.

:confused: “MAO”?
:confused: “Mashrek”?

Mashrek= Arabland East of Tripoli or Egypt. I’ve heard both. Admittedly there isn’t very much in-between Tripoli and Egypt.

MAO= minute of angle, an approximative measure of accuracy.

Shoot 5 rounds. Measure the greatest distance between any two of them in inches.

Divide that by the number of 100 yards of distance between shooter and target.

That is (just about) the MAO. I think the M-16 tends to get about 2-3MAO. Commercial rifles will often boast about 1 or 0.5MAO.

I shoot muskets. I can tell you quite a bit about smoothbore muskets. I own one.

I don’t know if you can easily measure the MOA of a smoothbore musket. Smoothbore muskets fire round balls, and they pretty much always fire curve balls. The round ball will randomly contact the side of the barrel as it goes down, making it spin. The ball will go straight for maybe 50 to 75 yards or so, but after that, which way it goes is anyone’s guess. They used to say that you could stand 200 yards away from a single musketeer and not fear being shot by him (not entirely true, but you get the meaning).

You can make a smoothbore musket a bit more accurate by making the ball fit tighter in the barrel. Then it doesn’t rattle around so much as it goes down the barrel, though it still comes out spinning and thus will curve off randomly. But the tighter you make the ball fit, the harder the musket becomes to load after a few shots have fouled up the barrel with powder residue.

If you try to measure the MOA, you are going to get drastically different results depending on how far away you measure it, due to the musket ball’s spin and its resulting curve-ball nature.

With a pipe gun, since you aren’t muzzle loading it, you can make the round fit the barrel fairly tightly, which will help its accuracy. The round isn’t going to spin without rifling though, so any imperfection in the round will make it veer off course. An imperfect round from a rifle will spin due to the rifling, so any imperfection that makes it veer off course only causes it to corkscrew through the air - it still ends up close to its aim point. Even without imperfections, a conical round fired from a smooth bore is going to start tumbling at some point, which is going to make it veer off in some random direction.

A smooth bore musket is reasonably accurate to about 50 to 75 yards or so. Your typical smoothbore musket has a fairly long barrel though. The better fitting round of a pipe gun gives it an advantage, but the shorter barrel length gives it a disadvantage. I’d say it’s probably a wash, so accuracy-wise you are probably talking decent accuracy out to about 50 to 75 yards or so. Again, measuring MOA probably isn’t going to work very well since once the round starts tumbling its accuracy is going to go to hell in a handbasket right quick. A spinning round from a rifle will stay within a cone that you can measure. A round fired from a smoothbore weapon will have a trajectory more like a hockey stick shape - straight for a bit, then whizzing off in some random direction.

So a pipe gun is going to be horribly inaccurate compared to a modern rifle. But, most military engagements happen in the 50 to 150 yard range. A pipe gun will actually be ok on the short side of that range, though definitely not so good on the long side of it.

If the machine shop can rifle the inside of the pipe, the accuracy will increase rather dramatically.

What tools–“agricultural” or otherwise–would be required to rifle the inside of a metal pipe?

Thanks for the info geek.

How easy would you say it is to make black powder or some other form of propellant that would be sufficient for a firearm?

WHat’s the diameter of your bore and your projectiles?

I’m surprised that even today, smoothbore muskets use round ball. A Minié-type projectile, even if the barrel isn’t rifled, would prevent spinning inside the barrel since the bullet’s length is greater than the bore’s diameter. It would also put more weight in the front and less in the back which helps with stability.

Fairly simple ones.

Sure, but even modern submachine guns aren’t very accurate, even inside some nominal distance. Not like a rifle anyway.

I’ve actually shot multiple WWII era SMGs (STEN, Thompson, MP40, M3 Grease Gun) on full auto, and they’re shockingly inaccurate, with the STEN being the most accurate of the bunch, oddly enough. But outside of about 50 yards, you really, really want a rifle.

I suspect that smoothbore ones would just raise the spread and drop the effective distance down to 20-30 meters at most.

And, FWIW, the machine tool shown in Leo Bloom’s link is a metalworking lathe, if I’m not mistaken. Extremely common piece of equipment that I’m guessing could be used to bore out a pipe to a specific diameter, thread the end that goes into the receiver, and probably rifle the barrel.

Black powder is easy. That’s just a mixture of sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter. Anyone with a modern knowledge of chemistry can probably make something better.

The smoothbore musket that I have is a modern copy of a Model 1756 British Infantry musket. They basically took an original antique and copied it. It has a 46" barrel with a .75 cal. bore. You can get lead balls anywhere from about .71 to .75 for it (or you can buy a mold and make your own). The larger the ball, the tighter it fits in the barrel and the more accurate it will be. It also gets much harder to load after a few shots as black powder fouls the barrel fairly quickly.

Accuracy-wise, you can aim it by kinda using the tang screw (the screw that holds the back end of the barrel in place) and the bayonet lug as sights of a sort, but it doesn’t have a true sight on it anywhere. They didn’t bother putting sights on muskets until they started rifling the barrels.

It ain’t the most accurate weapon I own.

By comparison, the Model 1853 Enfield rifle-musket I own has a flip-up sight that goes from 100 yards to 900 yards in 100 yard increments. Realistically, hitting anything beyond about 500 to 600 yards is mostly going to be a matter of luck. But that musket compares fairly well to a modern rifle in terms of accuracy. It fires a .58 cal. Minie ball, which makes a bigger hole and will do more damage to a person than a modern rifle round will do.

I fire round balls because that’s the period correct ammo for that gun. I could fire 12 gauge shotgun slugs out of it if I wanted to, though they’d be a bit small for the barrel (.75 cal is somewhere between a 12 gauge and a 10 gauge). I could make a sabot of sorts for it, I suppose. Heck, a smoothbore will fire anything that fits down the barrel. I could load it with shot if I wanted to. One common variant back in the day was “buck and ball” which was a round ball surrounded by buckshot.

Without rifling, a Minie ball is going to be prone to tumbling, and once it starts to tumble, it’s going to veer off just as badly as a round ball, maybe even worse. Some modern shotgun slugs are pretty aerodynamic, so those would probably work best.

Many areas have a muzzle-loading hunting season, so a small industry in modern muzzle-loading rifles has kinda sprung up around that. You can buy solid powder that is fast to load, and there are all kinds of rounds available. A lot of them are sabot rounds that are designed to be fired from a rifled muzzle loader. There’s also a “maxi ball” which as the name hints at is a modern improvement to the basic design of the Minie ball.

Interesting.

I’ve never fired a machine gun, so I’ll have to take your word on that.