"French"-"Broken" Sten Stocks

[Peter Laidler]

I must confess that I'd never really taken any interest in the angle of the butt plate on the tube. What is it?

[Flying10uk]

Will measure an original with an engineer's protractor to find out.

[Peter Laidler]

Engineers protractor F-10........ just a guestimate will do........, I ain't planning on making 'em!

[Flying10uk]

I would say off the top of my head and without looking at a stock that the butt plate has been shunted past 90 degrees by 5 to 10 degrees, at the bottom of the tube.


* Later Edit, one of the manufacturing problems with having an angle on each end of the tube is because the tube will likely twist after the first angle is cut when the saw vice is released before the second angled cut is made. The tube could, of course, be placed and clamped in a jig for this cutting operation but this starts making the process complicated and more long winded. It is easy if both ends are cut at 90 degrees because it doesn't matter if the tube twists and it's less of a problem if only one end of the tube is angled while the other end remains at 90 degrees. It does make you wonder why they didn't weld the butt plates on at 90 degrees in WW2 because it would have made production simpler.

[Brit plumber]

Here are some of my Butts, one is a Repro, one is a reasonably rare variation. Can anyone guess which is the repro?

[Flying10uk]

I would say the second Butt up from the bottom is the reproduction one because the plates don't appear to have been punched. The other 3 Butts all appear to have punched components.

[Vincent]

I would say the second Butt up from the bottom is the reproduction ………

Me too.

[philb]

isn't this the stock dimensions ?

[Peter Laidler]

I won't follow suit. I'll say the bottom one just because it is sooooooo bad and the abutment plate hasn't been punched down around the top part of the circumference

[Flying10uk]

isn't this the stock dimensions ?

philb, I think that drawing is someone's "modern day interpretation" of what they think the stock dimensions should be? The original drawings would be dimensioned imperially. However the Germans may have produced some of their own drawings for their version of the Sten which were presumably metric dimensioned and one would expect their drawings to be captioned in German for obvious reasons.

---------- Post added 01-07-2017 at 12:01 AM ---------- Previous post was 01-06-2017 at 11:53 PM ----------

But we still need to figure out, between us, which is the reasonably rare variation??? The bottom one could be the rare variation because the key/button is made differently to the other 3 but I wouldn't like to bet any money on it.