It was my understanding that the Berlin Garrison got the first bunch, the 24th Division's 1st Airborne Battle Group, 187th Infantry got theirs just after their Mid-July to October 1958 jump into Lebanon during theeir reinforcement of the US Marine detatchment in Lebanon following the assassination of King Faisal II of Iraq by exremist members of the United Arab Republic. The 24th, previously the 11th Airborne Division, got their M14s shortly thereafter, which may have been in the works back when their equipment was being upgraded as an airborne unit.
Third Armored Div. {Elvis Presley's old outfit] was the Division slated to reinforce the Berlin Garrison in the event of trouble there, so I expect they got their their new '14's about the time you got yours. You stationed around Augsburg or Gelnhausen, by any chance?
They seemed like fine rifles and were very accurate as they came out of the box. Having only fired about 2000 rounds or so through one I wouldn’t know about the front sites falling off.
Garands have the same front sight and they do it too, as the retaining screw loosens from repeated firing vibration. The M70 grenafde launcher uses the same sight, but since it's a single-shot weapon, the problem doesn't often arise there.
I am aware that the plastic hand guards that came with the early ones tended to melt during automatic fire and they removed the selector switch from ours so they would only fire semi-auto. Thanks for the other info.
Yep. The early black handguards looked good but had that bad habit. The later ones were fiberglass, and were a bit more heat-resistant, and painted with heat-resistant aluminum paint, a trick we learned from the British, the wooden handguards of their L1A1 FAL rifles being notorious for charring and bursting into flame on the range. Spectucalar, but distracting!
The real answers to the M14s stock problems were the adoption of the M14E2 automatic rifle stock, equipped with a folding front foregrip and longer sling, and the water and rot-proof fiberglass stocks developed for use in Vietnam. There are now a couple of pretty good stocks available for the M14 and M1A, including the VLTOR and Sage units now in use in afghanistan and Iraq, and this one:
