{"id":2262,"date":"2008-03-14T05:30:29","date_gmt":"2008-03-14T10:30:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2262"},"modified":"2008-04-02T08:41:14","modified_gmt":"2008-04-02T13:41:14","slug":"hot-gear-friday-the-ljungman-ag42","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2262","title":{"rendered":"Hot Gear Friday – The Ljungman AG42"},"content":{"rendered":"

The next installment in Hot Gear Friday was Sweden’s answer to the M1 Garand – the AG42, better known in the US as the Ljungman, after its designer.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And better known to me as “my first real rifle”.<\/p>\n

Developed in 1942, during World War II, as the Swedes realized they were going to need something a little more modern than their early-century Mausers, the Ljungman was ahead of its time in many areas – for better or worse.<\/p>\n

A fairly conventional design in many ways, with a 10-round box magazine (usually loaded with the same five-round Mauser-pattern stripper clips that the Swedish Mauser bolt-actions used), it had one feature well-known to any current American serviceman; its operating system used direct gas impingement.<\/p>\n

Where a conventional gas system uses a piston in a tube next to the barrel (like the tube above the barrel in the infamous AK47), the Hakim’s gas tube directly vents back into a little cup-shaped gas-catcher on the front of the bolt carrier – much like the operating system on the American M16 rifle and M4 carbine. The blast of gas pushes the bolt carrier back, camming the bolt (a tipping bolt, similar to the FN49 or the FN-FAL, and very unlike the rotating-lock M16-pattern bolt) out of its locking recess to open the action. It’s simple and fairly rugged – provided you’re using decent ammo. With 6.5mm Swedish Mauser, that’s rarely a problem. But for the Ljungman’s most famous descendant, the “Hakim” (an Egyptian rifle in 7.92mm Mauser caliber, built with the same machinery the Swedes used for the Ljungman, which Sweden sold to Egypt in the late forties), it’s been rather a different story; the widely-varying quality of 7.92 ammo can yield weak rounds that won’t cycle the action, or – worse – extra-powerful ammo that’ll push the bolt carrier back so violently that the extractor will rip the rim right off the round, causing a nasty jam that usually takes a cleaning rod and a lot of swearing to clear.<\/p>\n

But in 6.5mm Mauser – a ballistically-sweet if fairly small round – the Ljungman was a joy to fire; fairly reliable, bone simple to maintain (for me; given the problems the M16’s similar system has had, I have no idea how it’d have fared tramping through some north-Swedish bog), and a joy to shoot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The next installment in Hot Gear Friday was Sweden’s answer to the M1 Garand – the AG42, better known in the US as the Ljungman, after its designer. And better known to me as “my first real rifle”. Developed in 1942, during World War II, as the Swedes realized they were going to need something […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geekery","category-hot-gear-friday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2262\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}