Explanation: A little bit of gun history! The bottom is the venerable Sten submachinegun, a weapon designed to be as cheap and easy to make as possible under Britain's WW2 constraints as a nation constantly being bombed by the Nazis and in desperate need of automatic firepower for a massive number of troops.
The top is the Accuracy International Arctic Warfare, which was initially made by three guys in a shed.
David Caig and Dave Walls were enthusiastic target shooters who had an uncanny ability to make high-quality weapons and replicas from sketches and photographs and turned their passion for gunsmithing and tuning into a business operating out of Mr Walls’ shed in Worthing.
A chance meeting with Malcolm Cooper, MBE, later a double Olympic Gold Medallist led to the trio forming Accuracy International, and their first big project was to create a dedicated rifle for sniping rather than a hunting rifle modified for the purpose.
As it turns out, their timing with what became the L96A1 could not have been better, as after a few small orders by the Special Boat Service, Special Air Service and the Sultanate of Oman, as well as a few police sniper units in the UK, the rifle was entered into a competition to replace the venerable Lee-Enfield L42A1.
The Ministry of Defence wanted Accuracy International to submit an entry, but when they won handily, suddenly the three men in Mr Walls’ shed were charged with producing over 1200 rifles and all of a sudden needed to prove they could make that many weapons.
What they did was rent out a workshop for a day and filled it with all of the guns they had made in the shed up to that point, claimed the rest of the staff were out to lunch and later found out when they went to eat with the requisitions lieutenants that the inspection was purely to ensure the operation was not just three men in a shed.