Not to mention that a huge part of the attraction to the PSL is the fact that is has the cool commie sniper stock, so tossing on AK furniture (which might be a huge hassle anyway to fit) is to me going backwards.
Scumpup - is your PSL from Century?
It is a Romanian build imported by Century. An identical Romanian built gun is/was imported by Interordinance. Stuff assembled by Century has a dodgey reputation on the internet, but the stuff they import is a good bet. There are others floating around that are assembled in the US on domestic receivers. I think they are marked Tennessee Guns.
FTR, I’ve owned a bunch of stuff from Century, both things they imported and things they assembled, and I’ve yet to have a bad experience. On Saturday, I also shot my Golani, which is a Century-assembled Galil parts kit on a domestic receiver. They, too, are incredibly cheap right now.
If anyone needs me, I’ll be at Scumpup’s house.
Century’s bad rap really comes from the WASR-10. They’re shitty mismatch parts kit rifles and that’s not their fault that people who don’t know better keep buying “super cheap AK-47s” and not knowing what they’re actually buying because they’re too cheap to buy something better from Arsenal.
$566 Golani. Mine came with two surplus 35 round magazines that were in useable condition. It also came with a specialized 10 round magazine for grenade-launching blanks…don’t know what I’ll do with that as I launch precious few grenades these days. Anyhow, it ran like a top Saturday, despite bitter cold. It was too cold to sit at a bench and sight it in, but as it came from the box elevation was good and windage was only a couple inches off; so we bounced some cans around with it. My only real criticism of the piece is that it doesn’t have a chrome lined bore. I don’t know if there even is such a thing as corrosive 5.56 ammo, and the thing isn’t full auto and I’m not likely to run tens of thousands of rounds through it; but the military rifle enthusiast in me says it* should *have a chrome lined bore.
Because of two things: 8MM is more expensive than 7.62x54, and the M76 is more expensive than the PSL.
Not by that much, but a little.
However, the M76 on that site has been marked down a lot since the last time I checked. A year or so ago it cost about $1500.
The Century CETME/G3 rifles are also, supposedly, real pieces of shit.
The M76 has very distinctively shaped furniture. It is different from AK furniture. Here you can see a PSL with AK furniture installed and it doesn’t look like an M76 at all. It looks like an AK with gigantism. The profile of the front sight is different between the two as well.
I’ve had a hankering for an M76 since I first saw one in Jane’s back in the mid-90’s. They only been available here for a little while and I’ve been waiting to see what prices will do. I’m betting on them going down more. The PSL went for about a grand when it first came into the country and now runs close to about half that. I figure the M76 will bottom out at around $750 and that is when I will bite. If not…well, I lasted this long without one.
I didn’t realize that…I thought its furniture was interchangable with any AK…
I think this one looks the best.
When it comes to AK pattern rifles there’s a ton of parts, furnitue, mags etc that look like they should be interchangeable but aren’t. This is especially true for combloc rifles, which generally aren’t AKs at all. That goes double for Romanian stuff. The Romanians maintained an air of independence even under and behind the iron curtain so they would basically reverse engineer Soviet weapons and redesign them to their liking. The end result is great for us since there’s tons of it to import, but it is generally not compatible with the majority of AK/SVD/Tokarev/Makarov parts out there.
They did have a poor reputation. Here’s the thing, though. Century’s prices are really, really cheap. With the exception of the WASR-10, because there actually are decent AK’s for not much money, you at worst are buying a project gun. Prices on genuine HK’s, Galils, and such are astronomical. They’re either no longer produced or can no longer be imported or both. So you buy a Century parts gun for a few hundred. Maybe it works_and all mine have_and you got a real smokin’ bargain. Maybe it doesn’t and you either have to put your own time and effort into fixing it, if you know how, or pay a qualified smith to put it right. Even if you have to pay him what you already paid for the rifle, you are still looking at a total expenditure of half or less what an original costs. Of course, if you are a collector of orginals, none of this matters because you aren’t interested. If, on the other hand, your primary interest is in having guns of these patterns to shoot, I don’t see how you can beat them.
The only problem with that can be finding US made parts to supply on the gun to keep it BATFE compliant. If you swap out too many of the wrong parts because you need to make it work right you can quickly end up with an illegal rifle.
True, true. As far as I am aware, though, most of the problems that people have with Century guns stem from improper/careless assembly rather than from flawed parts. The only exception to that I can recall offhand is some of the G3 rifles had bolt heads ground down in an attempt to correct headspace. Replacing an effed up imported bolt head with an intact bolt head won’t change your parts count. Mainly what you hear about are things like canted sights, barrels overtorqued into receivers, and stuff like that. Those things can be corrected without switching out any parts, though it may require the skills of a gunsmith to do so.
To bring the thread back, somewhat, on topic; one of the reasons we shouldn’t go back to a Garand-based service rifle is that repairing them is a pretty heavy skill set. More modern designs, like the M-16, can be repaired pretty easily just by swapping out parts with no fitting or machining required. Even something like replacing a barrel in an upper receiver isn’t that complicated. A proper vice with blocks and an armorer’s wrench is pretty much all you need. Lots of people have assembled AR’s at home with just the tools they have around. Working on Garands, though, requires actual machinist-type skills. The level of skill required takes time and expense to produce useful personnel. You can crank out qualified M-16 armorers at lightspeed by comparison.
That’s actually a really good point. I don’t currently own an AR, but I’m relatively confident I could assemble a working one from parts alone over a long weekend and I’ve never been in the military and have only a passing familiarity with the rifle. They are, in a phrase, dick simple as long as you keep them in a normal barrel length configuration and don’t start messing with the gas system.
I never understood why the AUG design didn’t take over the world. The carbine version is shorter than the M4, but it has a longer barrel. It seems like the perfect weapon for any unit operating out of an armored vehicle with limited space or doing urban operations.
Bullpup designs have their own advantages and drawbacks. You just listed the chief advantage, which is a longer barrel in a short overall package. Disadvantages include poor triggers due to the long mechanical linkage between the trigger and the action, gases vented into the shooter’s face during firing, and less intuitive reloads. They also, in most designs, do not lend themselves to weak side shooting at all. Gun enthusiasts also typically express reservations about having the chamber right next to their faces, as this can have fatal results in the event of a catastrophic failure. In more conventional designs, everything is forward of the shooter’s face and failures result in fatalities (and even serious injuries) far less often than you’d suppose.
As usual my distinguished collegue nailed it in one, but he’s being too kind.
The AUG might be the most attractive space gun I’ve ever seen. It has seriously sexy lines on it, and I’ve always wanted one. They have horrible trigger systems however. I mean mushy, gritty, heavy, inconsistant triggers. AUG fans even admit it and just say it’s something you learn to deal with. Probably not a huge deal in spray and pray, but otherwise it’s just hard to shoot well.
The other drawback is I’ve never seen anyone able to do a proper tactical reload on one. With the AR/M4 you can drop the magazine and replace it without ever lowering the rifle from the ready position. The magazine well on an AUG (and most bullpup rifiles) is located behind the trigger group, making it akward at best to reach back and release and seat a new magazine and nearly impossible at worst.
So they’re fine for the hobby shooter who just wants one (like me) but they leave a bit to be desired as a fighting weapon so they’ve seen limited adoption.
The AUG trigger in most military versions is not only all the things Cluricaun quite rightly pointed out, it is the selector. Pulling it part way gives semi-automatic fire. Pulling it all the way gives full auto. One can imagine the results in the stress, fear, and confusion of combat with a trigger that is mushy and indistinct to start. The Australian version added a little plastic nub to the trigger assembly that, in effect, functions as a selector switch. Certainly a worthwhile addition, IMO.
That one reason why the Israeli army, as part of its phasing in of the Tavor (another bullpup), has decided to issue it solely to fresh recruits. The idea is that they’ll never become accustomed to any other way of using a rifle; magazine changes are a big part of that.
I did not know that Scumpup. I’ve never been around a real one, just the civvy legal one. If they didn’t do a whole lot to change that trigger pack on the semi it makes perfect sense why the trigger is so bad, it’s a two stage converted to a single stage, leaving lots of room for creepage and stacking and all the rest.
Leave it to Steyr to design something like that. They have a lot of interesting designs, even if they’re not always exactly useful. Like the pistol whose name escapes me that you could cock by squeezing the trigger guard backwards. Cool idea, but it’s solving a problem nobody really had.
Edit - Alessan - That’s interesting too. But I think that they’d quickly figure out that having to drop the rifle down to reload isn’t the greatest tactical advantage.
I have to disagree. The standard method for performing a reload on the AR-15 pattern is to rotate the rifle clockwise and (generally) up, placing the magazine well at chest or neck level, release and withdrawal the magazine with the non-firing hand, insert and tap home the new magazine with the same hand, then rotate the rifle back down, grasp the rifle by the forearm with the non-firing hand, pull the charging handle with the firing hand, tap the forward assist (some people claim this isn’t necessary, but most people I’ve known with field experience swear by automatically using the forward assist), and then return the firing hand to the trigger grip and return to ready. (A good example of this can be seen in the post-bank heist shootout in the movie Heat; the actors trained for two months with Andy McNab and thus the gun handling technique is unusually accurate for a movie.)
The AUG (and other bullpup layout rifles) is actually easier, albeit different. The rifle is rotated to allow the non-firing hand to release and withdrawal the old magazine and inserting the new magazine. The rifle is then rotated down and the charging handle is pulled by the non-firing hand. Not only does this not require removing the firing hand off of the trigger grip, but because the magazine is set further back (essentially in at the elbow) it is easier to swap magazines from a prone or supine position, and really no more difficult in a sitting, squatting, or standing position. It is actually faster to replace a magazine in an AUG than an AR-15. (You can search on YouTube.com for videos of a proper AUG reload.) The bullpup not only offers a more compact package for the same barrel length (a designated rifleman configuration with a 24" barrel is shorter than an M16 with a 20" barrel) but because the weight is further rearward the rifle has lower effective inertia and is easier to maneuver and bring to bear.
As far as the trigger issues, while a race-tuned AR-15 might have a nice trigger, the stock-out-of-box AR-15 pattern rifles I’ve handled have been nothing special in that regard. The AUG is intended as a field service rifle, not a precision target rifle, and the trigger group is designed thus for robustness.
Stranger