The SMG FG42 In Detail

Wilhelm, thanks for the range report. Especially your observation of case damage vs. gas regulator setting. I will have to fiddle with that, too, next time I'm at the range.

I had the same problem with my safety knob falling apart after a few rounds already. Putting it back together was no problem but installing it in the trigger housing was.

I didn't have any problems reinstalling the safety in on my rifle. I ignored the detent in the housing and held the safety so that the knob was at the 45 degree position midway between "S" and "F". Then I inserted it into the hole and just twisted back and forth as I pushed. The detent took care of itself because of its rounded tip and the safety just snapped in place.

Keep the good info. coming. Great read. I haven't had any issues with my safety or trigger assy. I will keep the additional advice on reinstall in mind if I ever take it apart.

Luft1 - My motto has always been: "Shoot it !" - but I'd draw the line too at shooting an original that's worth so much gwop. Sure would be cool to see one in person some day.

Doug

I, unfortunately, removed myself from the waiting list for this rifle solely because of the reported (and repeated) jamming issues. I didn't want to spend 5k on a reproduction for it to not function flawlessly. Rick was very respectful about my decision, but I could tell it irritated him a bit.

Regardless, I'll continue to follow this rifle and his work.

Luft1 said:

I have nightmares of mine flinging off irreplaceable parts after 50 rounds!!

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Perhaps they are not so irreplaceable after all:
http://www.gunbroker.com/Auction/ViewItem.aspx?Item=449055673

Granted they are not numbered to the gun,nor are they armorer parts,but most likely serviceable replacements.

And apparently Larry Vickers (or the individual who loaned him the gun ) doesnt have such reservations..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NstrbkCg_ks


God knows I understand and respect your reticence to shoot just from the financial perspective of loss of value,but I dont think I could resist.
Easy enough for me to say sitting here without one in my safe but I am a shooter first and formost so I know she would be in the rotation. Naturally I would not be flogging it on a weekly basis and running thousands of rounds through it but it would come out a couple of times a year @ least for a mag or 2 with some milder handloads or some of that weak a$$ commercial crap they sell @ Privi P. and S&B.

Until that day happens(if ever) I will have to content myself with a SMG version which will carry a lesser value penalty for any shooting damage.

I am paying close attention to all that is shown hear to avoid some of the pitfalls and nuances of the learning curve.

Keep the info coming...good stuff.

actiondan said:

I, unfortunately, removed myself from the waiting list for this rifle solely because of the reported (and repeated) jamming issues.

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With all due respect, I think you should have been more patient. First off, if you would have re-read the thread you would have noticed that Wilhelm paid quite a bit more for his rifle (because it was immediately available to him) than you would have paid to SMG. Now Rick will put your rifle on Gunbroker and some lucky guy will bid it up to $6500. That's $1500 above what Rick charged you. That could have been $1500 lining your own pockets.

Or you could have just kept it, run 500 rounds of 8mm through it until it loosens up and enjoy it for a lifetime. SMG brought you a rifle you can't get anywhere else in the U.S. and they offer warranty, service and spare parts. Where's the risk?

Ithink the one you saw for 9K was on the mdshooters forum. That's the one I now own but I can assure you that I didn't pay anywhere NEAR the asking price! The shop put that up for sale back in April and there it sat until I offered them a reasonable price. 9K is NOT reasonable!

GunKraut said:

With all due respect, I think you should have been more patient. First off, if you would have re-read the thread you would have noticed that Wilhelm paid quite a bit more for his rifle (because it was immediately available to him) than you would have paid to SMG. Now Rick will put your rifle on Gunbroker and some lucky guy will bid it up to $6500. That's $1500 above what Rick charged you. That could have been $1500 lining your own pockets.

Or you could have just kept it, run 500 rounds of 8mm through it until it loosens up and enjoy it for a lifetime. SMG brought you a rifle you can't get anywhere else in the U.S. and they offer warranty, service and spare parts. Where's the risk?

Click to expand...

I was still 7 or 8 months away from having the rifle.. It was not in production yet.

agalland said:

Hopefullythe cancellation of that gun will just bump everybody on the list up one number.

I saw one listed awhile back on some forum for 9000.00...had a couple of extra mags and a sling...but jesus talk about your mark up.

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This is all that will occur.. Just a bump up

In this post, we are going to talk about trigger pull. Mine is terrible. It's hard and the best way to describe how it feels is to compare it to a rusty ratchet wrench. It starts hard, clicks and scrapes as you pull and finally, just barely before it goes off, it smooths out. You can actually hear it scraping and clicking in there. So I decided to do something about it...or at least TRY to do something about it. I had a feeling that the problem was the sear so, I cocked the action, took the trigger housing off and used a screwdriver to push on the sear where the sear trip in the trigger group fits. Sure enough, I could feel the scraping and clicking. Time to take the sear out. It's held in the receiver by the bright shiny pin seen here below the charging handle slot:




I just placed a punch on the pin and it pressed out using only hand pressure. There is a spring in there holding the sear under considerable pressure so parts went flying up into the receiver when I removed the punch. I'll figure out how to get it back together later! After fishing the parts out of the receiver I took a picture of them:



Forward is to the right and we are looking at the right side and bottom of the sear. The top of the sear spring fits into the bottom back hole and there is another hole in the receiver for the bottom of the spring. This spring is of a larger circumference where it fits into the sear, presumably to aid in assembly. The step on the bottom towards the front is where the sear trip on the trigger engages. Also pictured is the retaining pin which obviously goes through the hole in the center of the sear.


Here's the scalloped area on the front of the sear where the disconnector goes:




Here's a better look at the bottom of the sear:




And the top of it:




The rear surface of the sear is what engages the bolt carrier notch and as soon as I looked at it I saw why the trigger is so scratchy. It is shown here in two pictures:





All those lines going across the polished surface are the cause of all my trigger problems. As the trigger is pulled, they scrape and stutter across the mating surface on the bolt carrier until they are no longer touching it and the pull evens out just before releasing the carrier to fly home. So I broke out the emery cloth and my diamond encrusted sharpening stone and went to work, being carful to keep the surface straight and flat and only removing exactly enough metal to eliminate the marks. I was also careful to stay away from the very top edge of the surface for fear of making the rifle unsafe when cocked. Additionally, I left just a little bit of the bottom groove to see if I could feel it when I pulled the trigger. If I could still feel this groove after reassembly, it would also tell me just how far down the sear face the carrier notch grabs. Here are two pictures of what it looks like after polishing:





The fact that I stayed away from the top of the surface and the partial notch I left are clearly visible. The ease with which I removed the marks does have me a bit worried though. Perhaps this surface is not hardened? If not, were those grooves made by SMG or are they an artifact of the bolt carrier striking the sear in the forward stroke? If they are from the latter, they are going to show up again with use and the trigger will again become funky. You can't keep dressing the surface or you will eventually run out of sear! I'll keep an eye on it and report back.


Reassembly was an absolute pain in the arse and I can't exactly describe how I did it because it took a lot of fidgeting. There is a technique to it though and I'm sure that it would go easier next time. Once it was back in, I put the trigger housing on and quickly found out that it wasn't in right so I had to take the sear back out and start over. The second time worked and back together the rifle went.

The result of my efforts is a MUCH smoother and lighter trigger pull. I can indeed feel the notch I left on the sear face so I know that the sear and carrier have a good engagement but the drag is minimal and only felt at the very beginning of the pull. After that, while it's still quite a long pull, it's silky smooth all the way to let off. As stated, the weight of the pull is significantly reduced too but I unfortunately do not have a tool to test that.

Of course, a range test tell me a lot and use will tell me if the marks will return. So, should YOU do this to your rifle if you aren't happy with the trigger? Only YOU can answer that for yourself. But I will say this......unless you know EXACTLY what you are doing, don't mess with it. The absolute last thing you want is an unsafe rifle. So if you have any doubts whatsoever about your abilities, contact SMG and ask them if they can polish your sear. Of course, you may be perfectly happy with your trigger already because it's as smooth as glass. If so, you can just disregard this post because you don't need it!!

Recently and today, I spent a good amount of time disassembling an original FG42 for documentation purposes and for comparison to the SMG reproduction. I learned some things. First off, SMG did one hell of a job recreating the past. Second, while published sources tell us a lot about these rifles, there's still a lot of interesting information waiting to be published. In the coming months, I'll be writing an E-Book about the FG42 and documenting things that have never been published before. It'll be ready for publishing in 2015 and I'll post here when it's available.








I threw a couple original Fallschirmjager helmets in there for fun.

I managed to get out to the range earlier this week for more testing. There were several objectives and I'll go over them one by one.

1. Continued function tests. I shot 86 rounds, ten of which were 1973 Romanian. The remainder were FNM dated from 1966 to 1973. I had one failure to feed which made a mess of the round. It was easy to clear. All I did was pull the charging handle to the rear and hold, remove the magazine, dump the bad round out the ejection port, replace the magazine and keep on rolling. The round was nicely mangled:








Here is a random sampling of ejected cases with 5 Romanian on the left (ignore the mangled FNM round) and 5 Portugese on the right:







2. As the rifle warmed up, I began to have problems with it locking up again. Not as bad as before but I still had to place the charging handle on the edge of the table and push with moderate force. I began to hold the charging handle to the rear when changing magazines to get around the problem. I'm hoping the problem disappears as the rifle continues to wear in. At this point, my analysis of the wear marks on the bolt behind the locking lugs convinces me that the problem is tolerances being too tight.


3. Once zeroed, the scope held it even after being removed and reinstalled on the rifle. Accuracy is, as stated before, about the same as an SKS:

Final 27 rounds of the day at 100 yards:



This is not a target rifle nor did I expect it to be. However, I was plinking at fist sized objects laying in the backstop which is at about 110 yards and hitting them one after the other with no problem. For some reason, I shoot at objects better than I do paper targets so the rifle is more accurate than you see above.

4. The blue locktite on the scope screws seems to have done the job. I put pencil lines on the rings as index marks prior to the range trip and the screws did not move. More rounds will tell the tale as to whether or not this is a viable fix. If it proves to be, I'll go over everything at that time.

Front band index mark:



Rear band index mark:



When the scope is attached, the locking levers do not turn fully to their front stops:



I do not think that they are necessarily supposed to but it is worth noting so that you don't get too excited should you buy one and have the same thing happen. What is important is that they do not move during use and mine have not. Again, we're only talking 86 rounds here. Much more testing is required before I can give a real opinion. I can say though, that the optics on the Meopta scope are crystal clear.

5. Now for the bad. The trigger pull is back to rusty ratchet status. I did not remove it and take pictures but I can see it when looking into the back of the receiver and I can definitely feel it. After just a few shots, I could feel that it was going south and the problem became worse and worse. After only 86 rounds, the sear looks just as bad as it did before I dressed it. This problem is simply unacceptable. I don't know if I just got a poorly hardened one or it's systematic but I will be contacting SMG about it. I will report my findings. That's it for now and I will continue reporting back as testing progresses.

Late last night I sent Rick Smith an email about the sear problems I'm experiencing and he was kind enough to respond today. I new, harder sear will be in the mail tomorrow. You can't ask for better service than that if you ask me. After it's installed and tested I'll of course report what I find out. Stay tuned!

Excellent write up Wilhelm! I love the pictures of the war time FG next to the SMG FG. Glad you were able to get the sear issue figured out. That thing sure does beat up the brass. I would love to add one to the collection one day, I may wait until they release the Type 1. Look forward to more posts

Thanks for the reply but the sear problem isn't figured out yet. I won't consider it "figured out" until it is no longer an issue.


It's been a while since I've posted but as they say, 'tis the season....

I received the new sear from SMG in late November but haven't has had a chance to install it until this evening. Prior to installing the new one, I thought it would be a good idea to measure the trigger pull on the original. It was somewhat hard to get a good reading on the digital meter because of the grooved sear. The meter was jumping up and down as it would clear one groove and hit the next one but I finally managed to figure an average pull of right around 10.5 lbs.

Next, I removed the old sear and took a few pictures comparing it to the new one:







The old one is on the right and you can clearly see the grooves pounded into it by the bolt carrier. Also note that the new one has a copper hue to it. When Rick sent me the new one, he recommended that I slightly radius the notch on the bolt carrier where it contacts the sear so that I don't have as sharp an edge impacting the sear. He also cautioned me not to take too much material off as this may create an unsafe situation. Here is the notch on the bottom of the bolt carrier prior to reshaping:





If you look very carefully, you will see that the edge is not rounded but is faceted.


In these next pictures, you may be able to see that the edge is now rounded. I removed only the absolute minimum required to achieve this:






Finally, I reassembled everything and tested the trigger pull again. Now it weighs in at 14.8 lbs. but at least it is smooth and consistent all the way through the pull. As soon as I get a chance, I'll take it back out to the range and try to run another 100 rounds through it. At that time I will of course report back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6vCnyxfbmo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL8svchTpcE

A closer look at the competition from SSD. (BD42) This one may or may not be coming to the U.S. Only Dingo knows for sure.

HDH.

There is no way that thing is going to stay together with real use. The front sight retaining nut and gas block retaining nut WILL work themselves loose if not secured and simply tightening them won't work. There was a reason original ones had those parts staked in place.

Last I saw from SSD's old price list, those BD42s were running close to $9,000+ USD. Maybe less now that the exchange rate is not so different from the EUR to the dollar, but still mega expensive compared to SMG's FG42 price point.

I'm slightly more interested in the BD43s ...

http://www.el-be-tac.com/usa-exports/

Although I would throw the coin at one of these in a frickin' heart beat ...

https://www.marstar.ca/dynamic/product.jsp?productid=74987

At gold old Marstar in Canada !!! ... and "IN STOCK" I might add for only $2,952 a pc. Now I know the CAN dollar isn't kickin' the USD's a$$, so ... could they possibly costs THAT much more with the .922r refitting ... ?

Hmmmm... This dog really wants to know.