A lot of you know Stag as "the new guy" when it comes to making ARs, but that's not correct. When it comes to making ARs, Stag is actually among the oldest. In fact, it makes a lot of the rifles you see with other names on them. It is an old, experienced and capable manufacturer, and when the demand for a piston became great enough, the folks at Stag decided to investigate.

Now, I have not been at the forefront of the "the AR lacks/needs/requires a piston" crowd. As a professional curmudgeon, I've spent the last couple of years being dragged, kicking and screaming, toward that point of view. As a manufacturer, Stag obviously doesn't have the luxury of being a curmudgeon, but neither was it just going to jump into the pool because everyone else was.

Stag took a close look at the designs out there, and it rejected the designs that were complex, busy and required too much modification of the basic rifle. After all, if you're going to make things better, you usually don't accomplish your goal by shoe-horning a basketful of extra parts into a proven design.

I had an opportunity to see for myself when I visited Stag, which is located in a quiet business district of the general Hartford, Connecticut, metropolis. If you didn't know the address, you could drive right by and not have a clue ARs were being built there. And at the time of my visit, I had no clue Stag was beginning to produce a piston gun.

Inside, I was greeted by a sight that fascinates the mechanical engineer and gunsmith in me: big machines cutting metal. In several areas, the bins were filled with barrels and carriers that differed from the norm.

The piston tube is welded to the gas block, on top of which sits a folding Midwest Industries sight. At the base is a nut that permits gas regulation.

Stag does all the external work on barrel blanks, and it machines the front sight housing castings on standard AR barrels. Stag has its own CNC machines to carve carriers, so it was a simple enough change to make piston-specific carriers instead of the USGI carriers that it usually produces by the truckload. Having spent more than my fair share of time working on ARs, I immediately spotted the fact that I was looking at different parts and started quizzing my hosts.

They told me they'd received so many requests for a piston gun, they finally made room in the production schedule for a run, and since they had already been testing designs it was a simple matter to modify a few production machines for the new model. I was sworn to secrecy since Stag is not a company that tests the waters by announcing a prospective model and then gauging production by the orders that come in.

They fully planned to have as many piston ARs as they needed when the announcement was made. We'll see. Some say the bloom is off the AR rose, but I suspect the depth of interest and market demand is a lot deeper than many have predicted. Even planning ahead, Stag may be caught short with the thousands on hand they planned to have on announcement day.

The Stag piston system is a short-stroke piston, with a spring-returned actuating rod held in place over the barrel. The new front sight block/gas housing is held onto the barrel by means of both tapered pins and set screws.