Quote:
Originally Posted by zormpas
I keep reading that the Swedish guns are of inferior metallurgy...
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I would call that an urban legend. The M/40 was taken out of service because some of them developed cracks, from what I have heard there were even some accidents where the shooter got hit by parts flying off the gun. However, this doesn't have anything to do with the steel quality.
The Swedish M/45B "Carl Gustav" submachine guns use a 9mm round especially developed for use in submachine guns. Sometimes you find it as surplus, packed in brown boxes marked M/39B. This round has a bullet with a very heavy jacket, actually heavy enough to qualify as armor piercing (even though it isn't). This ammo is easy to come by in Sweden, and it has been the demise of many 9mm handguns.
The heavy jacket causes more resistance in the bore, which in turn leads to higher pressure and a more violent recoil. Some people claim that it's a hotter load, but it's simply a matter of the bullet itself. The M/40 pistol is designed to work with standard 9mm pistol ammo, but many of them have been shot extensively with M/39B ammo just because it's easier to come by. This is what caused the infamous cracking in these pistols, and it happens in just about any pistol you shoot with this ammo. I know that many SIG 210s (a popular target gun in Sweden) have met the same fate.
This made authorities realize that the next service pistol needed to be of a type that could be shot with M/39B ammo, so this was one of the requirements in the trials before adopting the Glock 17 as Pistol M/88. Sometimes you will find surplus M/39B advertised as "armor piercing", "personal defense" etc, but my recommendation would be to stay away from it. You can compare this with some Com-Bloc surplus ammo, it happens that you encounter a submachine gun variety that's simply not suitable for use in handguns. You'll see the same thing when somebody shoots commercial 30-06 in an M1 Garand. This is a very well built rifle, but parts can start flying around if you use the wrong ammo.
So there's nothing wrong with the steel quality, the problems are caused by operator error.