The contours of the front sight, muzzle, hammer, and slide stop were all rounded off for easier carry.
#CUSTOM HK P7 GRIPS MANUAL#
A decocking lever replaced the Rogak's manual safety. The magazine lips were strengthened and thickened to make loading less painful and to improve feeding reliability. Testing continued, with modifications undertaken to correct the Rogak's deficiencies. Steyr resumed the project, and all further development work on the GB occurred in Austria. Not surprisingly Steyr has little good to say about Les Rogak. P-18 production ceased in the late 1970s or early 1980s after Rogak, Incorporated had made about 2,300 guns. Steyr took legal action to halt its manufacture, but even without a lawsuit the gun's reliability problems would very likely have been all the nails its coffin ever needed. Despite good accuracy, the gun gained a reputation for choking on ammunition and earned the derogatory nickname of "Jammatic." Instead, it was made to work as a simple blowback pistol by the addition of fiber buffers around the barrel. So bad was its manufacturing quality that the leaky gas delay mechanism did not work. Those whose tastes ran to the exotic had the new Beretta Model 92 or even, for a lot more money the SIG P-210 or CZ-76 to choose from.īut what really killed the Rogak was poor workmanship. Even those desiring a high-capacity pistol were more likely to buy a Smith & Wesson Model 59 or a Browriing Hi-Power than the futuristic-looking Rogak. What limited demand existed for 9mm pistols was adequately served by the Smith & Wesson Model 39 and the various surplus war-era Lugers, P-38s, Radoms, etc. armed forces adopted a 9mm automatic pistol. This was almost seven years before the U.S. First of all, the 9mm Parabellum chambering simply wasn't that popular in the United States in the late 1970s. Unfortunately, several factors conspired against the Rogak. Its advanced design and stainless steel construction, combined with the highest-capacity production magazine available on any automatic pistol seemed to give it great potential for success. Seemingly, the Rogak had a lot going for it. What resulted was a gun whose troubled history ominously foreshadowed that of the later GB, which it strongly resembled. or Rogak, Incorporated in Morton Grove, Illinois, and began building the pistol in stainless steel as the Rogak P-18, a reference to the enormous magazine capacity. In any event, he set up a manufacturing firm called L.E.S. Whether he got the plans for publicity purposes to announce Steyr's upcoming handgun or actually had permission to build the pistol under his own name (the advantage of that arrangement for Steyr being deniability if the gun should fail) is not clear. It became known as the "Gas Bremse,' German for "Gas Brake," or by the initials GB.īefore Steyr built and marketed the GB design under its own auspices, Les Rogak, a Steyr importer, received in the 1970s a set of manufacturing drawings for the new pistol. The Austrian handgun took the form of a large double-action pistol with an eighteen-shot, double-column magazine. Steyr studied the late-war German firearms and then painstakingly began developing and testing their own design. By 1969, the Austrian government was thinking of replacing its aging collection of P-38 and FN Hi-Power pistols, and they requested that Steyr, Austria's chief manufacturer of military equipment, develop a new pistol. However, the GB's ancestry really dates back to the latter days of World War II, to the gas-delayed operating mechanism of a prototype German assault rifle and to experimental pistols Walther was building that were less expensive to manufacture than the P-38. Steyr-Daimler-Puch, a world-renowned Austrian manufacturer of military and sporting firearms - as well as trucks and heavy machinery - officially introduced this pistol in 1981. The factors influencing acceptance or rejection are often more complex than any one simple explanation, and a very good gun may fail for any number of reasons.Ĭonsider the story of the Steyr GB. Why do some guns persist for years or decades and make firearms history, while others appear only briefly and then fade into obscurity? That answer might be that the guns that last are good and the ones that don't are no good, but while this may sometimes be true, in many cases it is not.
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