Posted on 01/22/2013 12:24:43 PM PST by varmintman
The real stupidity of this entire business starts to sink in when people start to grasp the realities of the basic M4/M16/AR15 rile.
The M16 is a simpler weapon than an M14 or a FAL rifle. The ONLY thing about an M16 which is even a tiny bit difficult to manufacture is the barrel. Unlike a FAL rifle whose upper receiver has to take the stress of firing and which has to be hard forged and whose barrel is fitted to the receiver with something like 130 ft-lbs of torque, the only thing which takes any stress in an M16 is the barrel, the bolt carrier locks into the breach of the barrel and not into the receiver.
Also unlike the case with a FAL, the lower receiver of an M16 which, for all intents and purposes could be made of plastic, is the legal part of the gun i.e. carries the serial number. Ordering a complete upper receiver and barrel for an M16 is legally the same as buying a sack of potatoes, don't take my word for it check it yourself:
http://www.gunbroker.com/All/BI.aspx?Keywords=m16+upper
http://www.gunbroker.com/All/BI.aspx?Keywords=m4+upper
Anybody with any sort of a machine shop could manufacture M16 bolts, bolt carriers, triggers and springs and what not. No joke. My next door neighbor builds race-cars and he ends up needing parts which don't exist in the world here and there... No problem, he draws what he needs up on AutoCad, takes the AC file to a shop with computer controlled machines and voila, and it doesn't even cost much.
Very shortly, people will be making M16 lower receivers, butt-stocks, and magazines (the evil 20 and 30 round types) with inexpensive 3D printers and the only way you could get past all of these problems would be to ban and outlaw the M16 altogether, which would leave our military standing around with, in the immortal words of Santino Corleone, just their.... (in a sort of an unarmed condition).
>>>>“The ONLY thing about an M16 which is even a tiny bit difficult to manufacture is the barrel.”
>>IIRC, mine in Vietnam was manufactured by Frigidaire.
Various armories were making pretty darn good rifled barrels well before the advent of AC motors. The Colt armory in Hartford, Liege in Belgium, Steyr in Austria, Tula in Russia (well before the USSR), etc.
This stuff isn’t rocket surgery, people.
“My Cousin was in The Hill Fights in 1967 with the Marines, the Marines with drew the M-16 until Mods were made. It was still unreliable.”
No doubt. Early development and testing of the M16 used an extruded powder and it worked so well the army decided the rifle didnt need cleaning. In fact they didnt even include a cleaning kit. The reliability issues started when they changed to a ball powder with the wrong burn rate. They fixed that 40 years ago.
That's because the military uses Winchester ball powder ammunition instead of Remington IMR “Improved Military Rifle” which was what the M16 was designed to fire. It's a much cleaner power that the army in it's infinite wisdom decided not to use. Kind of like using rifle muskets in the Civil War instead of lever action rifles because the Quartermaster Corps decided it was a waste of ammunition.
I have one made by Underwood.
I saw a DPMS A-15 (Plain vanilla A2 model) at a gun show on Saturday ... price tag was $2400 ...
It would be really cool to see a full collection, one of each make.
Yep. Big part of the problem was/is the propellant. Stoner’s original design called for a chemical that after burning would deposit a thin film like graphite, contributing to lubrication. Olin had the ammunition contract at the time and said no to the new propellant. The vagaries or acquisitions and the lack of a chromed chamber and bore were the reputation killer of those first m-16 rifles.
Cheers
Well, there’s a couple details you sort of blipped over.
In order of complexity of manufacturing, I’d rate the parts on the AR-15/M-16 in this order:
1. barrel. Obvious. Deep hole drilling is part art, part science. Reaming and rifling can be done reasonably easily, but slowly. Getting the initial hole through the barrel stock and mostly straight is a challenge and requires high-pressure lube/cutting fluid, as well as that fluid coming out the cutting bit used for the deep hole drilling.
But for someone with some skill, they can make their own deep hole drill. It’s been done.
2. The bolt & carrier. Lots of fiddly little machining, but possible. You’ll need a super-spacer or indexing head to get this done on a Bridgeport.
3. The barrel extension. This is the bit you sort of blipped over... the back end of an assembled AR-15 barrel is a “nut” that gets screwed onto a threaded and chambered barrel. The tenon on an AR-15 barrel is supposed to be 0.6200” long, 0.8125x16TPI, Class 3 fit. The finish reamer is sunk deep enough into the barrel that a go gage sticks out by about, oh, 0.129” for a spec barrel extension and a spec bolt.
But even after machining this all in at tight tolerances (this is the part of the AR-15 that has anything remotely resembling tight tolerances), unless we used pre-hardened 4140 for the bolt and the extension, we’ve got to harden both parts and draw them back a bit. Not difficult, but not something that most people making their own are going to remember to do, and their bolts and/or extensions will wear too quickly and the headspace will open up in time.
The fastest way to get around the heat treating is to use pre-hard 4140 and then use carbide tooling to make the extension and the bolt.
When you have the extension done, then you’ll have to torque it onto the barrel to 150 ft-lbs of torque. This will result in about 0.002 of crush on the tenon shoulder and the extension. Once this is to spec torque, you’ll have to drill the 0.125” hole through the extension on the frontmost part of the cylinder that gets put into the upper receiver, then put in the indexing pin for keeping the barrel oriented correctly in the upper receiver.
Then you’ll have to reckon your gas port size, make a gas block to fit your gas tube, put it on the barrel, etc.
Once that’s done, the rest of the job is a downhill run...
I'll bet there are collectors out there who have such an array of M-1 Carbines. I have but one and I think it's really neat.
One could argue that there would have been far MORE dead commies and Taliban, had we had a more dependable and effective weapon/caliber. We had requests from the field during the hardest part of the Iraq War for M-14s because the M-16s weren't doing the job adequately - particularly at extended ranges. I was able to locate 2,500 Condition Code A M-14s at Albany GA and the magazines and the gauges and finally the M-80 ball ammo in stripper clips - but some pipsqueak major at HQMC stopped everything because they "didn't want to interefere with the Designated Marksmanship Rifle acquisition".
It wasn't "my daddy's M16": I was issued one of those damn things in Vietnam and it jammed like no tomorrow and it didn't kill people well enough. I got my M-14 back and kept it for the rest of my time in country.
The new ones shoot better and the new bullet design is better but we need a better battle weapon to replace it - something that isn't a "least bidder" product.
+1!
Some of the most highly prized 1911A1s were made by Singer Sewing Machines.
Doubtless.
I don't have one at all, just not that big on my list. If I were to have one, though, I'd like an IBM.
I got my carbine for the use of my wife when the zombies come. It’s a nice, compact rifle with not a lot of recoil. With a magazine of 30 rounds, it could be a formidable weapon to combat multiple attackers.
When I arrived at Bragg in ’78 (2-508th Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division) I was issued an M16A1 made by the Turbo Hydramatic Division of General Motors. I always preferred the A1 over the muzzle heavy A2, and not only because of the A2’s lack of full auto – which is rarely a good thing for a grunt, but it IS comforting to have it available.
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