H&K SL-8: The Civilian G36

hi guys thanks for tuning in another video on forgotten weapons calm I mean I'm here today the Rock Island auction company taking a look at some of the guns they will be selling in their September of 2016 premiere auction and among those we have this one which I'm pretty sure is the strangest looking gun to come out of the 1980s and 1990s u.s. assault weapons bans this is a heckler & koch sl8 now we previously did some videos on the SL 6 and the SL 7 and i figured we ought to take a look at the number 8 just to round out the package now this thing looks really strange because it had to be redesigned to meet US import laws when it was brought in in the mid 1990s this is basically mechanically a g36 rifle which is the super sleek and cool and very tactical german standard combat rifle at least until they replace it but they had to make a bunch of changes so at the time there was both a import ban on assault weapons which dates to 1989 and there was also a domestic production ban which dates to 1994 now the 1994 ban expired in 2004 the import ban is still in effect it doesn't have a sunset and at the rate it's going it'll never end up going anywhere so what they had to do to make this rifle legal to import was get rid of all the features that made it and assault rifle so for US production that meant getting rid of things like threaded muzzles barrel shrouds pistol grips the pistol grip is a big one and that's of course why it has this odd thumb hole style stock on it by legal definition if the bottom of the grip is connected to the buttstock then it's a standard single piece buttstock and not a pistol grip despite of course the fact that it functions the same way as a pistol grip just with this extra bit of plastic in there they also had to get rid of the ability to take a double stack or a 30-round really anything over 10 round magazine so that meant they couldn't have a standard magazine well in the rifle they had to cut it down to something that could only use 10 round magazines they did that by putting this indentation on the side of the receiver and then they made a specialty magazine for it which only holds 10 rounds in a single stack now it's kind of interesting that the the import laws in different countries vary most places do have magazine restrictions but in most places they don't require it quite as severely as the US does for import restrictions so most places what you would get for a restricted capacity g36 magazine or sl6 sl8 magazine would be a standard double stack 30 rounder that has been cut down in length and pinned and can only hold ten here for the u.s. they had to design a completely new magazine so that the rifle would be incapable of using the existing 30-round max so these are also a bit unusual in that the balance and that feel is kind of odd to them they have a remarkably heavy barrel which is probably on there to support the sporting style of the gun the sporting usage from this notion that a sporting usage can only mean like shooting target groups from a bench and thus you would want to have your barrel to give better accuracy perhaps I'm going out on a limb here and making assumptions but combined with a heavy barrel out front this is also a very light hollow plastic buttstock on the back so the thing balance is quite front-heavy there's there's one real reason why people bought these guns well people bought them because they looked interesting and they were cool and people liked HK stuff but the most compelling reason to me that people bought these guns was actually to convert them into more proper replicas of the g36 because the mechanics on the inside are basically the g36 if you go if you're willing to put in enough work and time and money you can convert one of these to a semi-auto only replica of the g36 and there are a couple tutorials out there on the internet explaining how this is done but it basically involves replacing all of the furniture cutting the receiver replacing a bit of the end of the receiver getting a semi-auto g36 style fire control group new magazines the new optic the g36 has a kind of interesting to to type optic it's got a red dot and a magnified optic in one unit sit on this optics rail you replace this whole black rail with one of those it's a very long and involved process but it is the one option for getting a semi-auto g36 look-alike rifle in the US anyway this comes apart fairly easily with the exception of a weird choice of allen screw on the back so why don't we go ahead and take a look at that so you can see the magazine is narrow and if you look at this rifle from the bottom you can see that the magazine well is actually off-center because for the proper double stack magazine it should be this wide they indented the receiver here and you can see that the left side or this side of the bolt is kind of not visible underneath the magazine well there now for disassembly we have handle e HK s continued their love affair with pushpins which are an excellent way to do this sort of thing we've got one there we've got one on the front handguard right there and pull those out the front handguard slides off the rifle hollow chunk of plastic there then the magazine well I have to push in the mag release to pull this all the way out which is a little finicky there there we go that comes out just another chunk of plastic and then rather than a pushpin on the back there are actually a pair of large hex head bolts or I'm sorry allen head bolts pull that out that one out and then the rear end of the gun comes off so the buttstock here is pretty much hollow we have a little bit of an impact buffer for the bolt and then we have the fire control group here it is hammer fired like that and to position safety safe and semi-auto there's how the pistol grip actually handles it's a little weird with this being pointed almost the center section seems like it would shoot okay but it's a weird design choice now mechanically the g36 which this basically is is very similar to the AR 18 in that it has a short-stroke gas piston here which is when you fire this piston goes backwards and impacts the bolt the bolt on this just slides out as a unit which is pretty slick and pull the recoil spring out that's captive and then the bolt itself is an AR style multi lug rotating bolt so like I said very similar to the AR 18 the charging handle on this guy is ambidextrous so you can actually just pull it over to either side and if you need it to be a forward assist you pull it over and push it in very slightly and that will lock it in place and you can do that on either side that's a kind of slick handy element to the g36 s design to help lend it ambidextrous nature now one SL eight specific parts change that I do want to point out here because it's kind of interesting that they did this is to the bolt face or rather the locking lugs so this log right here works as a locking lug but you can see that it's been cut down into this triangular shape where the rest of them are square the reason this was done was actually to reinforce the single stack only magazine conversion the single stack Maggie is basically just the left hand side of a standard g36 magazine in a normal magazine you would get cartridges that come up on both sides they alternate this side and then this and then this side and this side and the way these are fed from the magazine into the rifle is one of these two locking lugs hits the back of the cartridge and pushes it forward to feed well the single stack magazines are only ever going to present on this side so HK actually cut down this locking lug so if you managed to convert this rifle to a double stack magazine but don't change the bolt you'll have a gun that malfunctions every other round because it can't feed from this side of the magazine that's an interesting change most of the changes on this rifle are strictly driven by legal requirement things like the single stack magazine the lack of pistol grip etc this seems like it might have been a little more work than was strictly legally necessary although to be fair I wasn't a party to you know the the ATF back and forth compliance discussions about what would make this rifle legal to import into the US thanks for watching guys I hope you enjoyed the video I will point out that at the time of this filming there is some chatter that really has been for a couple years about HK bringing in a more proper g36 semi-auto copy but who knows if that will ever happen importation of these guys ended I believe around 2010 obviously they never sold very well because they're really kind of an odd rifle and there's a rather small group of people who would have bought these things brand new so today they're still floating around this one in particular is in fantastic shape really because not a lot of them got a lot of use so if you're looking for an SL 8 because you think it looks pretty awesome or if you're looking for one because you want to do that project and convert this into a g36 clone yourself well take a look at the description text below you'll find a link there to rock Islands catalog page on the gun and you can take a look at their pictures in their description and place the bid right there online or over the telephone or come up here to Rock Island to participate live in the auction thanks for watching you

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 1,012,113

Rating: 4.9584317 out of 5

Keywords: hk, h&k, hecklet, koch, sl8, sl-8, sl6, sl7, sl-6, sl-7, g36, g-36, german, germany, civilian, conversion, neutered, nuetered, import, single stack, sporting, import ban, awb, sporter, thumbhole, convert

Id: hIfT_l7eskk

Length: 10min 40sec (640 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 07 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Cyberchaotic]

much requested

upvote only because FW and gun jesus

[u/3rudite]

Brings me back to F.E.A.R.

[u/Deadredskittle]

RE4 hype!

[u/Kuroyama]

Yeah I posted about this too a while back, great looking gun