Engineer’s Delight: Stemple 76/45 Becomes the Stemple Takedown Gun

Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! The saga of how the original Stemple 76/45 became the Stemple Takedown Gun is a fantastic story of engineering design choices. Essentially, John Stemple began by building a rather crude copy of the Swedish K in .45 ACP in the mid 1980s, called the Stemple 76/45. He produced and registered 2,000 transferrable receivers for the gun (pre-1986), but only built them slowly, a few at a time. In the late 1980s he faced criminal charges from ATF, and transferred the receivers to a friend while he (successfully) fought the charges. When he went to get the receivers back, his friend refused, and the two entered into a nearly decade-long legal battle over them. By the time Stemple eventually won the case, he recovered about 900 transferrable tubes. By this time (circa 2000) these tube receivers were much more valuable than when he first made them, as the ma