Eugene Stoner was a genius.
I helped Billy do some upper assembly work on some of his AR’s this Sunday. Besides not being able to drive some pins out of a front sight base and chasing little steel balls all over a linoleum floor it was remarkably anticlimactic. All of the work I’ve ever done to AR’s has been anticlimactic. Everything has been so easy. Everything just goes together so well. I expected to have to fit pats and do machining and lapp things, but besides fiddling with taunt little springs and chasing even smaller detents there’s nothing to it.
Usually when your messing around with guns you have to be very careful with one critical measurement. Headspace. Too much and everything goes boom. Too little and the round won’t chamber. Or do I have it backwards. With the AR it doesn’t matter, unless your actually installing barrel extensions to the barrel and if your doing that then your hardcore. You do have to worry a little about keeping the bolt with the barrel and a cautious person will at least check things out with a field gauge but if it’s a new barrel and new bolt it’s not really necessary. On most guns the barrel fits into the receiver and then the bolt slides back and forth in and locks to the receiver. So you’ve got to be really careful how the barrel attaches to the receiver and how the bolt locks in the reciever. All of this is going to affect headspace. With the AR the barrel fits into a barrel extension. The barrel extsion has lugs that mesh with the lugs on the bolt. The upper receiver basically just clamps to the barrel extension. The fit of the barrel and barrell extension it the real critical determinant of headspace on the AR. The bolt and the barrel extension will wear together so you kind of want to keep them matched. Really the whole gun just kind of hangs off the barrel extension.
We did get to do a bit of machining yesterday though. One of Billy’s uppers had the M4 feed ramps machined into it but the barrell he was wanting to use did not have the enlarged notches to match. So out comes the dremel tool to touch up the barrel extension. Even doing this operation there was no real change of doing something that would make the gun dangerous, just hard to feed. Which I guess could be dangerous if you were actually having to use the thing in anger, but that’s why you go to the range and the test the things. Well that and the fact that they’re just fun to shoot.
I finally got to see his CAV-AID lower It’s basically a plastic lower. I liked it a lot. It is light. We slapped a twenty inch barrel on it and I swear I’ve held toy guns that weighed more. Of course with a loaded mag it would weigh a bit more but It was just unbelievably light. I want one I want one. I want one.