Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
We have very few m14s left. Thank the Democrats and Clinton who destroyed MOST OF THEM in the 90s.
You may have missed the 90s when CINC billy bob had the majority of M14s in storage destroyed.
M14 day has come and gone. AR platform has a rail, a buffer,
lots of companies make goodies for the AR10 platform.
Those M14’s would all need to be rebuilt with new innards and barrels anyway, since most were used and bused by
generations of trainees for bayonet drill and badly cleaned and probably shot out to where the headspace is questionable. I know the one I had in basic was no tack driver.
You have to give snipers a new rifle, to break it in properly and take care of it.
I’ll give you a short answer: the M1 Garand and M14/M1A take a lot more work and skilled manual labor to manufacture.
If you get some experience with machining on lathes and mills, once you start taking apart the older firearms and asking yourself “How do I make this from scratch?” (assuming that you can handle all the heat-treating and other issues in the parts - let’s just worry about getting the dimensions right - you’ll start to see why.
In today’s CNC manufacturing world, arms or parts for same that can be cranked out on CNC machines can be made for the lowest cost, and our government awards contracts to the lowest bidder. With today’s burdened wages (ie, bennies, etc), paying someone who might have actual machining background) to tear down an old rifle, put the parts out on a table and start measuring them for being within tolerances (or dropping them into a jig where possible to gauge tolerances), and then re-fitting the rifle with new parts .... the costs escalate very fast.
In the CNC world, you now have systems where you can put a new billet or forging of metal into a vise or fixture in a CNC machining center, close the door and hit the green button. In a few minutes, there is a new part, done, within very tight tolerances. In the CNC world, you’re paying one guy to load and run the CNC machine, and he doesn’t need to be a machinist - he needs to be a machine operator. In the CNC world, the parts are designed to be manufactured by CNC machines, not manually.
The Army and Marines are already doing that. Clinton got rid of thousands of stored M-14’s during his administration. A lot of the rest of the M-14’s are already in Afganistan and being used by Marines. They like the range and knock down power. Armories are refitting them will rails and other stuff.