A question for Capt Laidler on the Sten

[Flying10uk]

Possibly official U.K. records are not as complete/accurate as they could be due to some official paperwork being unintentionally lost over the years and not ending up in the Public Record Office? Probably the last thing on Civil Servants minds during WW2 was to save every scrap of paper relating to Stens solely for the benefit of future historians.

[henry r]

A thought with no fact to back it up...
it has been mentioned that a lot of home guard rifles ended up with heavily corded barrels from excessive cleaning. Plus that various peace time canadian rifles (c1's?) ended up loose from excessive cleaning. Could the home guard stens have ended up with similar wear?
In the post war economy it could have been simpler/cheaper to just replace them instead of ftr-ing them?

[Frederick303]

Just checked those pages, I missed them originally, there is so much detail I suspect I will read this a few times to digest it all.

so that accounts for 35, 602 of the MK I Stens.

Was it common to destroy or DP problematic Stens? If so how common were such beasts? I know this would have been from before your time, but as a rough percentage, were 5% defective, 10 % or higher defective from a functional point of view.

[Eaglelord17]

A thought with no fact to back it up...
it has been mentioned that a lot of home guard rifles ended up with heavily corded barrels from excessive cleaning. Plus that various peace time canadian rifles (c1's?) ended up loose from excessive cleaning. Could the home guard stens have ended up with similar wear?
In the post war economy it could have been simpler/cheaper to just replace them instead of ftr-ing them?

Quite a fair bit of the damage done to a service firearm tends to be excessive 'cleaning'. For example I have met idiots who felt it was a good idea to take a screwdriver and scrape the crown of the rifle until it shined. They called it the 'silver ring' (this being taught to them by other idiots who insisted upon this 'cleaning' standard). Other things such as constant assembly and disassembly (in particular over assembly and disassembly, such as trying to take of the pistol grip on a C7 which messes up the whole trigger mech) and abuse/lack of caring/lack of knowledge about the firearms leads to them being damaged.

Not sure about the Stens, but it still happens to this day and I suspect it happens in most militaries.

[browningautorifle]

canadian rifles (c1's?) ended up loose from excessive cleaning

They ended up loose from being used continuously for 30 years...and not all of them were loose. I take it you were Canadian army and carried one?

[henry r]

me. no, but you were:

Yes, rifle team guns were well treated by comparison. Rifle company rifles were cleaner though, but then they weren't as tight because of it. Mind you, every year the rifle companies would be gone through by the rifle team to glean the best they had for the team. Mine was taken...

https://www.milsurps.com/showthread.php?t=59000 #8

and as I said it was just a thought based off no fact, (or personal knowledge / experience) just extending off what I have read here.

[tankhunter]

Peter! 'Little' Sten Gun Book????? Nothing LITTLE in the mass of content within that work of yours! I dread to think of how many hours went into just THAT publication Mate!.....

You have gained an accolade also of being a 'Holy Grail'......Good Stuff!

Although you know I would take the P*ss & call you 'My Holy Snail'!....

I have a few of your works on one of my bookshelves. & like others, Hungrily await the day the Bren Work is released!....

Blessings be upon You, & may your house be Honoured with a thousand camels!......
(Hope you have enough room, & the money to pay for feed. & the logistic staff required to clean up the mess! )

[Brit plumber]

With ref to the Mk1, when it was damaged, why keep it? There's not much to salvage as it's mostly unique to the Mk1 so just chop it up. There were thousands of other marks so not really much use to fixing them.

I don't think I've ever seen a DP Sten other than the late L guns. I'd imagine they just used normal service weapons for training. That's the current policy for the L85, all training done on live guns.

[Peter Laidler]

There was to be a programme for a DP L85. It was to have been the L114 (or L116?) as I recall and there were several variations trialed. The winner as such combined the best features of the 4 trials varieties. Eventually dropped for several reasons not disclosed

[Brit plumber]

That would have been an interesting variation but I bet there wouldn't be enough L85s in the system. Typically we have about 30 guys on a Common Core Skills day (CCS) so 30 DP rifles per unit for say 20 units and the RAF would need at least 600 for guard training alone. Thinking about it I'm probably wrong and there would be plenty.

Actually I think I have a photo of one the Trial DP guns. I'll need to fire up the old steam powered computer.