Archangel Nomad 10/22 Conversion
The Poor Man's HK G36
Slapping an Archangel Nomad kit over your favorite Ruger plinking rifle
will not miraculously transform you from mild-mannered doc into an
SAS commando, but it will make you look the part!
The Archangel Nomad conversion stock transforms your humble Ruger 10/22 plinking gun into the spitting image of a state-of-the art HK G36 assault rifle. Featuring killer styling and bells and whistles aplenty, the young shooter thusly equipped instantly becomes the coolest kid at the range. The Nomad also amps up the awesome for grownups as well.
The basic chassis is molded out of indestructible polymer and the parts are a drop-in fit. If you can change the oil in your car, you are grossly overqualified for this project. The end result will reliably increase your serum testosterone.
This is Will’s 1970 Buick Skylark convertible — the ultimate teenager car.
The little guy on the hood is Will’s baby brother. He is 6' 3" and a
federal prosecutor today.
Thomas Magnum’s cherry red Ferrari 308 GTS was the sexiest ride
on the road back in 1982. Will took this picture himself to document
a friend’s mid-life crisis.
Beauty Really Is Only Skin Deep
All normal little boys dream of rolling in a really cool car. I got my driver’s license at 15. I wouldn’t trust today’s 15-year-old boys unsupervised with rubber bands, much less an automobile, but apparently the human animal was somehow different back then. The apex predator back in my day was Thomas Magnum’s fire engine red Ferrari 308 GTS.
Magnum, P.I. ran from 1980 through 1988. The brainchild of Donald Bellisario and Glen Larson, this wildly popular TV show orbited around the adventures of a former Navy SEAL-turned-private investigator named Thomas Magnum played inimitably by Tom Selleck. Magnum mooched off of a lyrically successful though faceless novelist named Robin Masters. Watching the show also planted a seed about how cool being a rich and famous writer might be. Trust me, after writing professionally for some three decades now myself — reality can be a cruel mistress.
Magnum lived for free on Robin Master’s expansive estate, driving his cool cars and generally being a human leech. In retrospect, I suppose he seemed more like O.J. Simpson’s professional house guest Kato Kaelin than an actual productive citizen. Regardless, for a skinny awkward 15-year-old in 1981, Magnum’s red Ferrari was my key to popularity, girls and general all-around awesomeness. Obtaining such a car for a guy like me working as a janitor in a local drug store, however, was another thing entirely.
I actually researched it back when I was 16. That car would have set me back $58,550 new in 1982. That’s around $200,000 in today’s money. I made $56.26 every two weeks working every afternoon and every Saturday at the drug store. I would have had to save every penny I made for 40 years to make the sexy beast my own. As I am 56 now I guess had I just been patient this magnificent ride would have been mine right about now. Considering this was admittedly somewhat impractical, I considered my alternatives.
The next best thing was a kit car. I pored over those things in the classified ads of Popular Mechanics in a manner flirting with unseemly. These mail order kits usually consisted of a fiberglass body kit somehow bolted onto a VW Beetle, making it look like a high-end supercar in dim light. Alas, the end result would still sound like an asthmatic cicada on the road and would only accelerate properly if dropped off a cliff. However, it would look cool, and for a 16-year-old in desperate need of a proper date, this was all that mattered.
In the end, my dad helped me land a 1970 Buick Skylark convertible. My metallic blue Skylark was the only ragtop in my small Mississippi town. As such, my car always led the Christmas parade underneath whatever bit of nicely adorned female hotness had been laboriously selected that year. While hardly a Ferrari 308 Quattrovalvole, the car did help me snag a cheerleader of my own. Now four decades and three kids later, I’d say the old Skylark rendered admirable service.
So why all this vapid jabber about teenaged dream cars? Because there are, believe it or not, some serious parallels for the modern American gun nerd desirous of adding a proper Information Age assault rifle to his stable. Landing a real-deal Heckler and Koch G36 entails either investing in a viable Class 3 firearms business, tracking down an expensive Tommybuilt semiauto clone or enlisting in the German Army. For those unwilling or unable to follow one of those three paths, the Archangel Nomad is the next best thing.
The Archangel dress-up kit transforms your pedestrian Ruger 10/22 rifle into the spitting image of an HK G36 assault rifle.
Technical Details
The Nomad is brilliantly executed. The general morphology and mechanical particulars are just spot-on. In dim light the Nomad really will pass for a G36. The top-mounted charging handle and selector switch are molded in just for looks, but the side-folding stock and optics mounting system are just like the real deal.
The stock itself weighs 3.4 lbs. When complete, this gives the rig enough heft to feel serious in the hands. The kit comes with an extended and enhanced bolt release, an extended mag catch and a folding polymer sight with two selectable apertures. The side-folding stock inexplicably includes a generous rubber recoil pad and the gun can be fired in the folded state. There is a full-length aluminum-reinforced optics rail up top along with a detachable lower forearm accessory rail up front. There are three steel-reinforced sling mounting sockets and two cool hidden compartments for a little extra ammo or a survival stash of M&Ms.
Archangel is a subsidiary of Pro-Mag. The Archangel engineers spent some extra time on the little aesthetic things making the rifle look right. The first glaring defect is the lame anorexic barrel sticking out front. The kit comes with a slip-on cast aluminum flash suppressor held in place with a roll pin. The cooler option, also included in the kit, is a slip-fit polymer fake suppressor. With the faux can in place, the resulting rifle looks like it should be SAS-issue.
The other sticky issue is the skinny 10/22 magazine. The Archangel remedy there is an oversized mag body including Archangel’s proprietary 25-round 10/22 mag. This magazine looks right and mounts to the gun in the same manner as an original high-cap version.
Mounting up the rifle in the chassis is best done over a little Netflix. That’s where I seem to do my best gun work. Just lay out the parts on a handy table, pull up something gratuitously violent on the tube and prepare to kill a delightful evening. At the end of the session, you’ll have the coolest plinking rifle in the world.
The beating heart of the Nomad conversion is a standard Ruger 10/22 rifle.
The Host
Bill Ruger and Harry Sefried II designed the Ruger 10/22 in 1964 back during the Johnson Administration. More than 7 million copies later, the 10/22 is the most popular rimfire rifle in the country. Countless adult shooters got their start behind this reliable inexpensive little plinker. The unit cost for the base rifle when it was introduced was $54.50. That would be about $512 today.
The MSRP for a base model 10/22 nowadays is $379. Modern manufacturing techniques and an economy of scale help keep prices down. The standard Ruger rifle comes with a patented rotary flush-mounted 10-round magazine, though there are lots of higher capacity options available. The 10/22 is one of the most customized rifle designs ever created. Nowadays a complete 10/22 rifle can be built from aftermarket parts without using a single Ruger component.
One of the linchpins to the success of the 10/22 is the gun’s innate modularity. The 10/22’s unique two-screw, V-block system allows barrels to be exchanged easily without a gunsmith. The rifle also comes from the factory drilled and tapped for an included scope mount. The rifle’s rear sight folds out of the way to accommodate an optic.
As of 2015, Ruger offered the 10/22 in 11 different models. The standard model 10/22 features an 18.5″ barrel and is available with either a hardwood or black synthetic stock. While there are bull barrel versions available, you’ll want a standard thin barrel no-frills version to serve as the Nomad host.
The 10/22 can be adorned to resemble a G36, a German MG42 belt-fed machinegun, an M1 Carbine, or an M1 Garand. Of all the dress-up kits I have encountered in my travels, however, the Nomad is hands-down the best executed.
The real-deal HK G36 is indeed a superlative military-grade assault rifle.
However, you won’t be picking up one of these puppies at your local gun emporium.
The Donor
The HK G36 was originally designed in the early 1990s as a replacement for the time-tested 7.62x51mm G3. The weapon was first adopted by Germany’s contingent to the NATO Quick Reaction Force in 1997. The modern G36 design has followed a curious path.
With the fall of communism came the death of the radically advanced HK G11 caseless rifle. This extraordinary weapon would have changed the way the world made combat rifles had it not fallen to post-Cold War budget cuts. However, it did ultimately lead, albeit indirectly, to the G36.
The original designation was the Project 50 or HK50. Once the design was ready for prime time, it was redesignated the G36. By combining the rugged piston-driven action of the short-lived ArmaLite AR-18 with the same sort of injection-molded gun technology that brought us the GLOCK pistol, HK engineers produced an unusually reliable combat rifle without a lot of extraneous mass.
Most of the HK G36 is crafted from carbon fiber-reinforced polyamide that is both rugged and light. The stock, forearm, receiver and fire control components like the hammer, trigger and sear are all formed from polymer. The bolt assembly, barrel, gas system components, pins and springs are made from steel. The optics rail is aluminum.
The G36 is a truly modular design you can transform from an assault rifle into a stubby close combat tool or a heavy barreled light support weapon all by pushing out a few pins and swapping out components. While there were allegations the G36’s accuracy degrades when the barrel gets hot, the weapon nonetheless enjoys a stellar service record. The action is just slippery smooth.
The Archangel Nomad (top) is a superb facsimile of
the HK G36 assault rifle shown below.
Ruminations
At the end of the day, despite its striking good looks, the Nomad is still just a Ruger 10/22 rifle at heart. The baseline accuracy and reliability of the platform is neither better nor worse. However, thusly adorned it does look just super slick.
If you’ve always wanted an HK G36 rifle but just couldn’t bring yourself to enlist in the Bundeswehr, the Archangel Nomad might just scratch your itch. Sweet, sleek, fun and cool, the Nomad makes your great gun even greater. It’s the replica supercar of rimfire plinking guns.
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