Today I went to my local gun shop, aka my pusher...
They showed me a STG57 and offered it to me for 700€.
That is a great price!!!
I know it chews up brass like I like to chew up t-bone steaks. I used it a few times in Switzerland over 20 years ago.
And so I just dropped the question.
Now I’m not so sure anymore...
What shall I do?
Last edited by Ovidio; 12-29-2019 at 06:56 PM.
Reason: Typo
Wow- I cant say what I would do for a 700 euro stgw 57. In the US they range from 10-15k US dollars, Unless someone had a fire. I would buy that in a heartbeat. Forget the brass...
Wow- I cant say what I would do for a 700 euro stgw 57. In the US they range from 10-15k US dollars, Unless someone had a fire. I would buy that in a heartbeat. Forget the brass...
Here she is.
What an outstanding technical piece of perfection...
I never thought I’d end up with this rifle, but now it just feels so right here.
650€. The “pusher” asked me to get it from him asap, so that he could lower the warehouse, so I obliged.
Payment for my 50th birthday, in March.
I feel a tad guilty...
I never owned one of those 57s, but I had some very fine years with its "stable-mate" the AMT.
Softest-shooting 7.62 NATO rifle I have ever fired. Magazines were scarce; mine came with one and I found another several years later. If fed good ammo, it was a flawless performer.
Yes, the brass cases (NEVER use steel-cased ammo in these), came out with sixteen blackened streaks on them and sometimes a slightly-dented mouth, but a good FLS die in a decent press ironed all that out.
Case length is CRITICAL. If the neck is above "spec" length, there WILL be tears before bed-time. Chambers and throats are quite tight. Too much neck length means the brass will intrude into the throat / leade section of the chamber and be "taper-crimped" into the bullet, with NOWHERE to go at launch. The consequent back-thrust on the roller-"locked" bolt spikes spectacularly and the bolt opens VERY violently, usually accompanied by a case web / primer-pcket rupture and the bottom (and contents) of the magazine being blown out. Saw a less-fussy AMT owner demonstrate that on a range. Very nasty, indeed.
In the "good-old-days" here in Oz, I reloaded a LOT of brass that I fed through my AMT and HK-41. Inspect, clean, size, TRIM (and chamfer), re-fill and carry on.
Because the design has a "different" extraction / ejection system, the brass often seems to leave the rifle BASE first. Until I scored a genuine Case "buffer" for the H&K, all the empties from that rifle would get a bit dented. BOTH systems were built from the ground up to fire MIL_SPEC ammo, not weird squibs or HOT loads. However, they seem pretty tolerant of a 150-ish gn. soft-point hunting load that closely duplicates Ball ballistics. I used both platforms for hunting feral pigs and goats. Not much brass got recovered on those fun trips!
SiGs are wonderful things; I'm still pining for mine.
"Forgotten Weapons" does the PE57 (semi-only) variant of the StG-57:
The slow-mo shows the interesting ejection.
The "Swiss" chamber with the "ringed" shoulder is something not found on the 7.62 NATO AMT / SiG 510-4. If the cases are brass, and can be reloaded.....
STG57
over 20 years ago.
PM
Originally Posted by speckles
