Self Loading Rifle 1/35

[ivan-o]

Now available At Historex Agents! at last 

Look under Callsign models on brands page.

ooops sorry double post delete please

 

 

Edited July 4, 2017 by ivan-o
double post

[Kingsman]

SLR also already available from Battlegate Games, Legend (as part of a set with bergans) and in the Italeri modern weapons set.  Despite their age, the Italeri ones are nice.

[Giorgio N]

3 hours ago, Das Abteilung said:

SLR also already available from Battlegate Games, Legend (as part of a set with bergans) and in the Italeri modern weapons set.  Despite their age, the Italeri ones are nice.

 

The problem is that the Italeri ones aren't really SLRs. They are more representative of the Belgian "metric" FALs than of the British and Australian variants. Sure, the differences in something as small as a 1/35 scale rifle would probably be lost to most people, personally I'm a big fan of the FN rifle and I can see them. Others would likely not notice them (ok, many modellers may not even know these differences)

[Kingsman]

Much of that difference will depend on wood vs plastic furniture, which changed the shape of all of those items including the carrying handle but especially the butt.  My first Army Reserve unit in the early 90's still had hybrid SLRs with mixed wood and plastic furniture, although all had the length-adjustable plastic butt and plastic pistol grips.  Wood was limited to some front handguards, which had vent holes rather than the later slots.  Mine was one of those.  The cocking handle would be the other obvious FAL difference: you certainly won't see the extra position on the selector lever.  The Italeri ones look fine to me and I shall be using a couple on my Pink Panther.  

 

I wondered if Live Resin might do SLR or FAL.  They've just done the G3 and Tank (same company) have just released SAS figures with (poor) SLRs.  On which subject Tank did a nice set of 7.62mm L4 LMG - 7.62mm Bren conversions - before they closed their weapons line down. You can still find them, if you're interested.  Try BNA Modelworld, Der Sockelshop or Modellbau Koenig for starters.

 

I have seen and held one of the early and very different prototype FAL chambered for .280" before that calibre failed to be selected as the NATO standard (it damn well should have been) and the weapon had to be redesigned for 7.62mm x51.  Fortunately, RSAF Enfield had designed .280 to use the same case base diameter as .308 (essentially the 7.62mm) to make the manufacturing change easier for candidate ammunition manufacturers so this made the weapon redesign easier.  I believe that some trial M14s were also made in .280.  .280 would almost certainly still be the standard round now had it been adopted, and the .223"/5.56mm change would not have been necessary.

 

So, 2 US Army Chiefs of Staff have personally screwed the small arms world for decades for outdated personal views contrary to the recommendations given to them.  In 1936 the USA should have adopted .276 Pedersen instead of sticking with 30-06, potentially allowing the US Army to field a fully automatic assault rifle in WW2 - and we'd probably still be using that calibre today. In 1950, .280 should have been adopted: it was recommended.  Adoption by the US of the FAL was also recommended, as I recall.  But when the USA said "no", no-one would stand up to them and UK wouldn't go against standardisation.  We folded.

[ivan-o]

Here they are, can be used with wooden or plastic furniture as after they changed from the round wooden stock to the triangular one there is no difference between either version! See linked images below.

 

 

https://s5.postimg.cc/y3paai69z/Full_Size_Render_216_slr.jpg

 

Clean them up and you have 'The Black Rod of death'!

[malpaso]

About a third of the SLRs in our Uni OTC were wooden furniture (early 80s).  They were a teeny bit heavier but much preferred to handle as they felt so much nicer.  Whether those guys who actually used them for real had a preference...

[dcrfan]

FAL also available from Shapeways.  When painted they don't look too bad.

 

1-35-fn-fal-rifles

 

Paul

[Giorgio N]

13 hours ago, Das Abteilung said:

Much of that difference will depend on wood vs plastic furniture, which changed the shape of all of those items including the carrying handle but especially the butt.  My first Army Reserve unit in the early 90's still had hybrid SLRs with mixed wood and plastic furniture, although all had the length-adjustable plastic butt and plastic pistol grips.  Wood was limited to some front handguards, which had vent holes rather than the later slots.  Mine was one of those.  The cocking handle would be the other obvious FAL difference: you certainly won't see the extra position on the selector lever.  The Italeri ones look fine to me and I shall be using a couple on my Pink Panther.  

 

 

It's not a matter of wood or plastic, both metric and inch pattern FALs changed from wood to plastic over time (and some had pressed metal handguards and some multimaterial ones...), the matter is that the furniture on the Italeri FALs is not the one used on British rifles because they don't represent the British variant but rather an FN 50.00.

Without going into the several variations of FAL furniture, the main issue from a modeller point of view is that Italeri moulded 3 vents on the handguards, a feature typical of metric FALs. The British L1A1 however had only 2 slots on the handguards, apart from a small number of experimental rifles with 3 and those wooden ones with the holes you mentioned (there were also wooden handguards with the more common 2 slots).

Then there's the flash hider, that on the L1A1 is a long style with 3 or 5 slots depending on timeframe but on the Italeri FAL is the short style used by most Belgian built rifles. The L1A1 also has a bayonet lug, missing on the 50.00 but this is invisible in 1/35 anyway. The buttstock is also different between the L1A1 and the metric FALs but again in 1/35 scale this is almost impossible to notice.

Of course on the real guns there were a whole load of other differences between metric and inch pattern rifles, starting with a different receiver and going through a different bolt, selector switch, mag release catch and so on but none of these would be of interest to a modeller.

When I used the Italeri rifle on a figure I filled the third slot but I couldn't do anything to the flash hider, a proper modification was beyond my skills back then (and probably even today) so I kept the shorter one. Most wouldn't notice but I know it's there.

 

I have seen and held one of the early and very different prototype FAL chambered for .280" before that calibre failed to be selected as the NATO standard (it damn well should have been) and the weapon had to be redesigned for 7.62mm x51.  Fortunately, RSAF Enfield had designed .280 to use the same case base diameter as .308 (essentially the 7.62mm) to make the manufacturing change easier for candidate ammunition manufacturers so this made the weapon redesign easier.  I believe that some trial M14s were also made in .280.  .280 would almost certainly still be the standard round now had it been adopted, and the .223"/5.56mm change would not have been necessary.

 

So, 2 US Army Chiefs of Staff have personally screwed the small arms world for decades for outdated personal views contrary to the recommendations given to them.  In 1936 the USA should have adopted .276 Pedersen instead of sticking with 30-06, potentially allowing the US Army to field a fully automatic assault rifle in WW2 - and we'd probably still be using that calibre today. In 1950, .280 should have been adopted: it was recommended.  Adoption by the US of the FAL was also recommended, as I recall.  But when the USA said "no", no-one would stand up to them and UK wouldn't go against standardisation.  We folded.

 

Agree that the .280 would have been a great round, it was a proper intermediate cartridge and would have given NATO a very good counterpart to the AK ammo. Unfortunately most in the US Army were still very attached to the idea of long range shooting (and many in the US still are...) and things went a very different way.

Not wanting to get into a debate on calibers here as I'm sure someone is going to mention Afghanistan and so on, but in my days in the local Army I remember shooting a couple of 7.62 rifles with their expected 600m range and wondering where I had ever found a clear 600m field of view in the various exercises... plus the fact that aiming at something at 600m without a scope is not as easy as they make it.

I'm not sure the 223 would have never happened though, as even the Soviets moved to a smaller round in the '70s with their 5.45. Maybe NATO would have gone the same way.

Had the British proposed a 6.5 bullet with the same case length of the .280 though... that would have been something that many today indicate as the best compromise for a military rifle. Of course the US would have never accepted such a small round back then.

Not sure what difference the case base would have made, the original design of what became the FAL was chambered for the German 7.92 Kurz, the .280 rifles were the result of the collaboration between FN and the British Army but FN was already looking at different calibers. The problem in moving to the 7.62 NATO round was that everything had to be "bigger", resulting in a much larger gun than originally envisioned.

 

[ivan-o]

Well as someone who toted one these for 16yrs i still think they actually look like SLR's!

[rayprit]

 

3 hours ago, ivan-o said:

Well as someone who toted one these for 16yrs i still think they actually look like SLR's!

Ditto..............used, fired, stripped, assembled, slept with, active service.............definetly looks like an SLR to me

[4scourge7]

Dropped on foot, made to run round parade ground with it above head......agree that it looks like an SLR.

[bzn20]

I loved the SLR . Unless it was doing funeral drill with it, it was a killer on the arms with wood furniture. Marching for hours on Saturday mornings in training with **** thing at the shoulder with a continuous force pushing the muzzle fwd. Soon found out how to stop that by holding the mag instead of pistol grip, illegal but balanced !

Over the 14 ish years I got as little as 19 and a max of 22 rounds in a SLR mag but usually somewhere in between, weird, you'd think they'd all be the same.

The LMG was a joy to use on single or Auto. lazy action, negligible recoil, next to no  jumping around like the SMG ,which was nuts! I got the same grouping as with an SLR on single and only a bit bigger on Auto using "double tap". Far too accurate for a machine gun. A long cigar shaped firing (spray) pattern as opposed to the SMG's county wide "take cover".

In my minds eye I can still go through the stripping and assembly process . That piston firing across the room or into their fizzogs during annual GDT with the Rock Apes.

[Kingsman]

I have to say that if I'd paid good money for that quality of casting I'd be very disappointed: very rough.  The barrel is far too thick with no visible flash hider and the magazine looks too narrow.

 

I was thinking of the differences you would see in 1/35 scale.  

 

The curator of the Light Weapons Wing at Defence Academy Shrivenham was very clear that the FAL was initially designed around the .280 round, not 7.92 kurz.  He may be wrong, of course. The Belgians supported .280 as the NATO standard, as did the Canadians (who might also have adopted EM2 - they had a trial batch with enlarged trigger guards for winter gloves).  Yes the Russians went for 5.45, but 7.62x39 remains far more widespread and new AK-type weapons are still being made today in that calibre.

 

I read, but can't now recall where, that ROF concluded that cost of changing ammunition production facilities would be a factor in adopting the new standard round.  It was in one of the articles on .280 and the selection process.  Changing the length of the case is apparently far easier and cheaper than changing the diameter of the base.  A disadvantage of course is magazine length with such a relatively large cartridge diameter.  FAL, EM2 and the M14 variant all had 20rd mags.  Look at the length of the 30rd AK mag and/or recall the size of the L4 mag on the SLR.

 

I suspect that had .280 been adopted we would have seen a "Mk2" round developed later using a shorter smaller-diameter cartridge case.  The round itself was very lethal, but the whole cartridge was still designed with long range performance in mind.  The US weren't the only ones wedded to that idea: as noted above, use of the SLR out to 600m was taught into the 1980s at least.  

[ivan-o]

LOL! £5 for six and who else makes them? Live resin and Accurate Armour have been badgered to do them and no result.

I have painted one up and they turn out not to bad at all.

[Kingsman]

And then we argue over how many slots the flash hider should have and how long they should be when the casting doesn't even have a flash hider ...........

[ivan-o]

The fact remains they are the only thing that resembles a true SLR, you yourself has said you are using Iteleries FN for your Pinkie so you are content to use something it doesn't claim to be. I will use this despite the fact the flash hider is missing but until someone makes a better version you have to use what is available.

[rickshaw]

Interesting effort at the L1a1 SLR.

 

I carried the Australian version, which was identical to the early British version for 10 years.   Downunder, we never changed to plastic furniture and they were always in wood.   We did change the carrying handle from wood to plastic though.

 

The picture above has unusual fore-end to the forestock.  It lacks, as has been noted the flash hider.  It also lacks the "spur" on the change handle, which prevented the change handle being changed to "Automatic".   It also lacks the non-reciprocating cocking handle and has the FN-FALs reciprocating one.   It has an odd rearsight as well, much more like the FN-FALs.

 

What it resembles most of all was the L1a1s that were carried by UNIT soldiers in the 1970s episodes of Dr.Who!   I've never quite understood where the BBC got them from but they were, as far as I can tell, a weird mix of FN-FAL and L1a1 rifles.   I understand that in the early 1960s, the British Army had a few hundred of this sort of rifle in it's stocks when it was figuring out which features they liked on their new rifles.

 

As for alternative sources for L1a1, Firestorm models downunder used to make them in resin.

[ivan-o]

7 hours ago, rickshaw said:

Interesting effort at the L1a1 SLR.

 

I carried the Australian version, which was identical to the early British version for 10 years.   Downunder, we never changed to plastic furniture and they were always in wood.   We did change the carrying handle from wood to plastic though.

 

The picture above has unusual fore-end to the forestock.  It lacks, as has been noted the flash hider.  It also lacks the "spur" on the change handle, which prevented the change handle being changed to "Automatic".   It also lacks the non-reciprocating cocking handle and has the FN-FALs reciprocating one.   It has an odd rearsight as well, much more like the FN-FALs.

 

What it resembles most of all was the L1a1s that were carried by UNIT soldiers in the 1970s episodes of Dr.Who!   I've never quite understood where the BBC got them from but they were, as far as I can tell, a weird mix of FN-FAL and L1a1 rifles.   I understand that in the early 1960s, the British Army had a few hundred of this sort of rifle in it's stocks when it was figuring out which features they liked on their new rifles.

 

As for alternative sources for L1a1, Firestorm models downunder used to make them in resin.

Sorry to say but that is the Firestorm SLR.

[rickshaw]

16 hours ago, ivan-o said:

Sorry to say but that is the Firestorm SLR.

 

Then I'd say they did them wrong.   Looking at the reverse side picture, it appears to be an effort at an early wooden furnitured L1a1 but while they got the wooden carrying handle right, they got, as I noted quite a few things wrong.

[Giorgio N]

Ok, so now I'm confused... is this made from Firestorm or Callsign ?

In any case I agree with rickshaw, the rifle I see is not as good as hoped for. No flash hider, front sight is L1A1, handguards at least have 2 slots, cocking handle is  FN (actually this was also initially non reciprocating, the Israeli FALs had a reciprocating one), buttstock shows a mix of features. I also don't like the magazine, the way it's moulded makes it look weird. I always support the efforts of the smaller companies working in resin and other media, but I'm not sure I like what I see here.

 

FAL prototypes: there may be a case of having to agree on nomenclature behind the reason why the curator at Shrivenham denies any link with the 7.92 Kurz. The first prototype of the rifle was indeed made in this caliber but by then it was not known as FAL. When the .280 prototypes were built for the British, the rifle received the name with which it's still known today. The original 7.92 gun predates the work on the .280 rifles by a year. Some also consider the .280 as the first FALs to go into production, albeit limited. As this "production" was probably around a dozen guns, It would be more correct to call them all prototypes. So in a sense it's both correct and incorrect at the same time to say that the FAL started in .280

It should be mentioned that FN also built an experimental variant chambered for the US .30 Carbine round, but this had several mechanical differences so should probably be considered a more distant relative.

 

UNIT weapons: I tried to look for pictures of these rifles to understand what they actually are, some of the features are clearly L1A1 but others are FN. I've yet to find a clear picture showing the right side of the receiver, that would sort the matter. Being weapons used for movies, there's of course always the possibility that they are replicas of some kind made from whatever pattern the manufacturer decided to follow. There's also the possibility that they are guns coming from the civilian market, this is very common for companies supplying firearms to movie productions.

[ivan-o]

Firestorm but sold here under Callsign models by Historex Agents for £5 for six.

Firestorm and Callsign share the same web page and are from Australia.

So pay your money and take your chance or leave it another few years till someone else has a go at them. 

[rickshaw]

19 hours ago, ivan-o said:

Firestorm but sold here under Callsign models by Historex Agents for £5 for six.

Firestorm and Callsign share the same web page and are from Australia.

So pay your money and take your chance or leave it another few years till someone else has a go at them. 

 

Neither Firestorm nor Callsign sell them any more.  http://www.firestormmodels.com

[ivan-o]

4 hours ago, rickshaw said:

 

Neither Firestorm nor Callsign sell them any more.  http://www.firestormmodels.com

Just been on Firestorms site and they are halfway down the figures page! If you want them here in the UK see my previous post,i got mine last week.

In this scale they look ok to me but if people want to nitpick about lumps and bumbs not being in the right place then don't use them.

For the price you are not going to get any better.

Happy modelling, that's it from me on the subject!!

Edited July 13, 2017 by ivan-o

[rayprit]

1 hour ago, ivan-o said:

but if people want to nitpick about lumps and bumbs not being in the right place then don't use them.

 

I think we maybe/ we are talking about the professional rivet counters or "Geeks" that roam this site(of which there are far to many) If it looks like an SLR(of which I have handled 100s during my time in the forces) it is an SLR....good greif, who is going to argue over a bump being in the wrong place or a hole missing at this scale?????.......we are modellers, are we not capable of adding the hole or removing the bump, or, failing that (hate to say this) ignore it, who will know?   Besides at this scale who would notice a slight imperfection but a geek or rivet counter.

[bzn20]

12 minutes ago, rayprit said:

geek

 

Watch out!  The kids got an SLR, L1A1 or FAL....not sure.  Roger that , is it a 2 or 3 way selector? I'll google it ...BANG

 

2 way ! Hello?

Edited July 13, 2017 by bzn20