Came across this video about the accuracy potential of the G3 clones and was pretty impressed. 500 yards with open sights is not a cakewalk under any circumstance.
The G3 platform has two things going for it: rugged, brute reliability and the complete lack of a gas system. What it has going against it is literally everything else. SO, why do I have so many of them? Well, the choices for a .308 ‘battle rifle’ are mighty limited – M1A, FAL, AR-10, and this thing. Yes, there’s all sorts of boutique and niche guns like a Galil or a Saiga but we’re talking about guns that are common enough that you can find them (and their logistics) fairly easy. I went with the G3 platform because mags were a buck each. Even used FAL mags were ten bucks, M1A mags (if you could find a reputable aftermarket maker) were twice that, and AR-10 mags weren’t standardized so it was anyone’s guess what your gun took.
If I had to do it all over again, now that Magpul makes AR-10 mags, I’d go with the AR-10 for it’s best-in-class ergonomics. Do I like it enough to sell my PTR’s? Nope. But I wouldn’t turn down a nice AR-10 if one came my way. And it’s nice to see that with the basic iron sights this thing will still ring the bell at 500 yards…at least, for that guy it did. But he shoots way more than I do.
Just bought. 5-pack of MGpul gen M3s (20 rounders) for $75. Not bad. More available there if anyone wants.
I know this is off topic. But. I read today in a reliable periodical that Vista Outdoors has restarted production at the Remington plant in Arkansas.
Maybe then I can get some UMC ammo for my M1 carbine and not have to pay $31.99 a box of 50 from PPU. And that was a sale price.
For the M1A, it is my understanding that Check-Mate Indiustries has been the military contractor for M14 magazines since the late ’90s. They are pricier than the foreign competition, but I have heard bad things about the foreign magazines’ reliability.
For the range, failures to feed are an annoyance, not life-threatening. For spicy times, how much is your life worth?
If you have an M1A, M1A magazines having anything but the Springfield Armory logo, or Checkmate, printed on them, are absolute crap.
I have a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of such foreign-made after-market abortions pounded flat with a sledgehammer on my armory bench: failure to seat, failure to remove (without a crowbar) failure to feed, failure to extract.
Total and complete pieces of sh*t.
I only save them as a reminder, and in hopes of finding the sumbitches who made them, or the one who sold them, with a view to using them on the offending parties as suppositories.
Caveat emptor, and spending the money for the good gear means Buy Once, Cry Once. It’s a hard lesson, but finding out in sportier times would be far, far worse.
There’s a firearms trainer that has a YouTube channel and he says that he doesn’t consider the AR10 reliable enough to be seriously called a Main Battle Rifle.
I can’t speak to the reliability of the AR10 platform or lack thereof but I can speak of my HK91…….. not a hiccup in thousands of rounds.
Ya just can’t reload the brass. If ya can find it it’s dented to hell.
You can reload the brass.
Yup. It’s just difficult to remove those gas stripes.
I tumble my brass for 24+ hours after recovery.
One of these days I’m going to take my pres to the range and do a video of me shooting and reloading the same .308 case several times to dispel this nonsense about the cases not being reloadable after firing.
I was going to mention that also – I’ve heard a couple of trainers say they have never had an AR-10 finish a class, and I have heard a well known trainer say they must be rare because he’s never had one show up in class.
I have both FAL and G3 clones and I prefer the G3/HK91/CETME since it is lighter and more comfortable to shoot than the FAL. Plus there are more spare parts, mags, etc available for it. To me, it’s by far the best choice for a .308 battle rifle.
Why can’t the brass be reloaded?
People get this idea that somehow the flutes on the cases make the brass unusable. Also, alot of time the case mouth gets dinged pretty well on ejection. Straightening out the case mouth isn’t a difficult task.
Own both a PTR 91 and now a PTR C. No issues with either and great folks down there in SC. Even have the all steel bipod and carrying handle which gives it a nice look. The PTR91 is a great rifle and their MP5 clone is just as good. Just break them in properly like anything else.
“500 yards with open sights is not a cakewalk under any circumstance.”
Au contraire.
500 yards with open sights was the standard of basic rifle marksmanship in the USMC, going back a century.
Most guys went 8/10 or better, and I hit 10/10 5 years running, with no intermediate practice besides sighting in for the annual quals, even with a shot-out M-16A1.
Now, with ACOGs, headshots are the norm, and far beyond 300 yds.
If you can’t hit a man-sized target from 500 yards over open sights, you’re not a rifleman, you’re a noisemaker, and may as well load up with blanks.
Only hits count.
It bears repeating for the youngsters for whom this was in the mist of prehistory, but St. Elmer of Keith was renowned for teaching himself to make shots at rifle range with pistols, with a tedious predictability.
Working range for anything in the .30cal species for any average marksman is 600 yards, not 500. It’s only beyond that distance that we get into what is properly understood as long-range marksmanship.
I suspect that if you spoke with those shooters, who practiced rather extensively, they would agree that it’s not ‘a cakewalk’. It’s something that requires time, practice, dedication, practice, patience, practice, and practice. I’m sure to a world-famous heart surgeon, a quadruple bypass is a cakewalk. My point is, unless youre, basically, a professional…that sort of open-sight-long-range shooting is a challenge for most of the shooters out there.
I was in the Norwegian army late 90’s and regular grunts with no prior training would regularly hit man-sized targets at 400 meters (out maximum range at that camp) with our iteration of the G3. Only hits in what was defined as vitals would count and more than 70 % would pass on the first range day. At the end of three months we’d reach above 90 %.
I hade a AK4 (g3) during my years in the homeguard.
Iron sights at that time, today they use aimpoints.
I would hit man sized targets at 600 yards with bäring regularity with that gun. Wonderful reliable guns with Great precision for its kind of weapon.
Obviously my bolt action 6.5*55 with adequate glass shorts better at range, but the hk G3/hk91/ptr91 plattform is really good guns. Inwould love to get one with the new Spuhr stock and a good modular red det based sighting system.
Sorry to disagree, but no, still.
The sum total of “extensive” practice I had was 40 rounds at that range prior to qualification.
The entire qual course was 250 rounds over 5 days, of which 50 were at that range: a whole 10 per day.
By the middle of the first day’s string (i.e. 5 rounds) one was dialed in. Subsequent days merely proved the point.
Each day’s actual shooting time was only 32 minutes.
2:40:00 for the entire five day week.
Succeeding years were only 4 days, with no practice in between.
IOW, if you went to the range now for simply a long day, and burned through a single case of ammunition, you would have fired more rounds on that one day than I did in an entire enlistment (1068, total, including two times in five quals when they actually gave us 9 rounds to BZO weapons from the outset).
And yet I was zeroed in at 500 yards before the end of the first half hour, which includes the fact that 80% of my rounds and 60% of my time were spent at closer ranges.
My last time at bat, I hit black every time, and 43/50 were bullseyes. 10/10 at 500Y, every year, every time, within a few rounds’ worth of practice. Bullseyes at 500Y were “easy money”.
It’s just not that hard to accomplish.
So really, truly, and actually, if someone can’t hit a bull elephant in the @$$ at 500Y, it’s either them, or a crap rifle, (i.e. something designed for Russian peasants and pounded out at a tractor factory by vodka-sodden workers, with accuracy measured in minute-of-grid-square).
Open-sight riflery at 500Y simply isn’t that hard to master with any decent rifle made since 1903 (tens of thousands of kids with just GEDs master it every year), provided you simply have someplace to apply it.
Since my military time, I’ve done it with ’03 Springfields, M-1 Garands, and M1As. I’ve got a couple of .45-70s that should be up to the task as well. And though I haven’t had the opportunity, doing it with a G-3 clone or FAL would be just as easy.
But it will never be learned at a range that only goes to 300Y, nor by someone who never attempts it in the first place.
What’s hard is getting people to do that.
Harder still, getting them to simply battlesight zero their rifle, or even learn what that means.
People who aim at nothing will hit it every time.
But I’ll tell you what: I have three new Californicated M-forgeries. So just to be sporting, next chance I get, I’ll take one to the range, NIB, and see how long it takes me to get dialed in using the iron sights, and I’ll write up a range report.
If AR10s are not reliable enough to trust your life on, which I don’t doubt with some brands, how do you mount a scope on the other options? Do you have the clamp thing for the PTR?
I don’t see the point of a battle-rifle with only iron sights in the modern world of cheap, quality optics. If I wanted to run irons only for simplicity and reliability, I think I would stick to 5.56mm.
I followed a similar path to the PTR. I had an M1A and was tired of paying $20-25 a magazine. Everything associated with the platform was overpriced, in my opinion. So, I sold it and bought a PTR91F, 100+ mags and, various accouterments with the money I made off the M1A sale. The rifle has been modded a bit since I’ve owned it. Springfield trigger job, 2 stage buffer, M-Lok handguard.
Mine is the version without a rail section on the upper receiver. It is also the version with out-of-spec flutes in the chamber. Correcting that would require rebarreling, which woldn’t be a problem If I could find a reputable gunsmith to do the job. I already have the barrel and a new trunion. For now, I just run steel case through and that works very well.
I also have a PTR32, the 7.62×39 version built on the same receiver. This is the softest shooting .30 cal rifle I’ve ever pulled a trigger on. It’s also the most accurate 7.62×39 rifle I’ve ever shot. I didn’t want an AK. Never liked the ergonomics. PTR/HK/G3 is nominally better.
I’m glad I got into the platform when I did. Cheap mags are hard to find now.
Yes, CZ, I would think that inspecting cases, discarding any with cracks would be the only real problem in reloading the brass.
I don’t know how common cracks are tho–
It’s very hard to find fault with an HK91. The 7.62 round is certainly a stopper and as the video shows, they can be very accurate in the right hands. If I had to be picky, the only issue I have against the HK91 would be the weight at 10.9 pounds empty.
In times of yore, I picked up a Lee-Enfield Ishapore MkII barrelled for 7.62mm, and some magazines for it. I haven’t had the chance to do any long distance shooting with that firearm, but it runs 1MOA at 100 yards (it may be better, I am a mediocre shot at best). You may not treat this as a battle rifle considering that it’s bolt action instead of semi-automatic, but I’d claim that it qualifies, having been in actual battle.
By that same logic, a Brown Bess from the Revolutionary War would be considered a battle rifle.
That is incorrect, given that the Ishapore is a contemporary of the G3 and M14, produced in the 60’s and 70’s, not a 250 year old relic.
No, your claim was that because it had been in battle it was a ‘battle rifle’. You didnt mention that the qualification also had to include that it had to be contemporaneous with the G3.
Got them all. My go to these days is the AR-10 platform, because of accuracy and ergonomics.
But, I have a couple of M14’s (Fulton and LMT, got rid of my SA’s because they were frankly, junk back when I got them), a couple of FAL’s (which is way the hell overrated – every nation that fought a war with them either lost and disappeared (Rhodesia) or replaced them (Britain, Israel, Argentina) as soon as they possibly could, the G3 series (PTR’s mostly) and AR-10s. I have a Tavor-7 on order, just for fun. And a Garand, of course, but I wouldn’t rely on it for much, since my ammo is WWII surp.
I lucked out with the M14s – CMP still sold magazines for a reasonable cost, and I loaded up. The FAL’s were a bit of an issue, mags were never what I’d call cheap, but they weren’t nosebleed expensive like the non CMP M14’s were. The reason I went with and still have G3s’ is because CTD sold cases of brand new aluminum mags for under a buck apiece (the list price was $0.99 each, if you bought a case you got a discount off of that).
And the PTR is good enough – minute of bad guy out to 400-500 meters, durable enough that a novice shooter won’t blow it up.
But, these days? AR-10s and Magpuls.
I bought the PTRs because M1A was overpriced and AR-10 was still all over the place. I went big on the cheap mags and the proven reliability. That was 10 years ago. Nowadays we have a mature field of AR308s to choose from. I can’t afford an SR-25 but, I built a really nice rifle using mostly Aero parts. Also, weighing 3 fewer pounds is quite welcome.