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The dike holding back on FEG Hi Power information just broke, and there's now a veritable FLOOD of information coming through. You can find it over at the Hi Power Collectors forum: https://highpowercollectors.proboard...eg-high-powers. It seems that there is a Hungarian guy with an interest in the FEG company who has been doing research for a book, including sifting through Hungarian government archives, interviewing former FEG employees, etc. For some reason he has decided not to publish his information in book form, so he has begun dumping the Hi Power related info onto the FEG sub-forum at the site I referenced above!
The big blockbuster so far is that the FEG HI powers were not, in fact, unsanctioned reverse-engineered copies of the Hi Power, but were actually built under license with FN engineering data and with tooling provided by FN!
As an owner of two FEG Hi Powers, and knowing about the way that FN parts will drop right in to an FEG, I always felt that they were too close for this to be a reverse-engineered hack job. I speculated that the engineering package was taken by the Germans when they overran Belgium in WWII (They actually reopened the FN factory using the same Belgian workers to make the Hi Power for Luftwaffe paratroopers.). I figured then that a copy of the package was sent back to the Waffenamt in Berlin, and then was snatched up by the Russians when they took Berlin right before the German surrender. Eventually I figured that the Hungarians got the FN engineering package from the Russians. Who would have thought that FN actually licensed FEG to build the Hi Power and even provided them with the tooling!
And we thought that all of these records went up in smoke when the Iron Curtain fell!
The big blockbuster so far is that the FEG HI powers were not, in fact, unsanctioned reverse-engineered copies of the Hi Power, but were actually built under license with FN engineering data and with tooling provided by FN!
As an owner of two FEG Hi Powers, and knowing about the way that FN parts will drop right in to an FEG, I always felt that they were too close for this to be a reverse-engineered hack job. I speculated that the engineering package was taken by the Germans when they overran Belgium in WWII (They actually reopened the FN factory using the same Belgian workers to make the Hi Power for Luftwaffe paratroopers.). I figured then that a copy of the package was sent back to the Waffenamt in Berlin, and then was snatched up by the Russians when they took Berlin right before the German surrender. Eventually I figured that the Hungarians got the FN engineering package from the Russians. Who would have thought that FN actually licensed FEG to build the Hi Power and even provided them with the tooling!
And we thought that all of these records went up in smoke when the Iron Curtain fell!
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