Quote History Quoted:
Something else an AUG nerd might find interesting is that a batch of US made castings were recently rejected from the source, leading to Steyr Mannlicher sending over a small amount of Austrian "SWD" castings to hold over steyr USA. These are A1/A2 type castings not seen in the USA for ~25 years. They're just now available for sale as complete guns.
No casting artifacts are visible on the exterior when mounted together, and what's seen underneath is what you saw with A1/A2's.
https://i.imgur.com/LKv6zeM.jpg View Quote
Not being super knowledgeable in the ways of AUG I pulled out my M1 to compare it to this picture. Wow they look completely different! The US receiver looks like it's billet vs the cast Austrian?
That got me thinking. Aside from collectability, is there an advantage to the cast part vs the billiet? Why doesn't Steyr USA just use the Austrian ones all the time? Why go to the trouble of creating a whole new type of receiver? I don't know how much more expensive the Austrian raw casts are but it had to cost money to develop and tool up to create the billet receivers.