Looks like  positive upgrades,    since I'm out of the Army   my chances of ever firing full auto again are zero.  so the AR-15 platforms I have now  I couldn't ask for a better weapon.  I see the gas system still the best and heavy BCG

I'm still shaking my head about the early teething probs with changing the M193's powder.  Astonishing to me that this country could have fallen into such a dumb error. Especially in a shooting "war".

As an engineer who has reloaded for 30 years, silly fuckups like that make me shudder.

Bump because I thought it was interesting incorporating a constant recoil system in the AR

The original buffer was the Edgewater:




Those guns ran fine on the original batch of M193.  The "fix" buffer is the current design we still use today. Edgewaters on left, carbine and rifle to the right.

My understanding for the change in powder was because it was cheaper to use ball powder than flake powder..

Wow. Are those friction rings or something?

Flake powder?  Flake powder will kaboom a rifle if loaded to normal 5.56 charge weights.  It was a question between ball powder and extruded powder.

They are ring springs.  The idea came from a prototype M2 .50 Cal anti-aircraft buffering system.

How do they work? Do they expand as they're compressed?

Ah, that's exactly what they do. Interesting.

The head of the Edgewater buffer floats, then the rings, or friction springs, retard the rearward movement.  There are similar friction rings for Browning designs like the A5.

I have yet to put my hands on an Edgewater, but I became aware of them when I was a kid reading about the upgrades to the AR15 from the original Colt 601's & 602's, to the XM16E1 program.

The buffer is probably the biggest change to the operating system that got over-looked by the lay person, since the malfunction assist forward device was the obvious external change.

The next obvious change was the birdcage flash suppressor once they finalized all the fixes on the Colt 603 / M16A1. One of the most mentioned internal changes was chrome lining for the chamber and bore.

I have learned more about this design by diving into the Retro sub-forum, as well as stuffing different calibers into the AR15.  Just when I thought I knew most of what there was to know about this weapon, volumes of information manifested themselves to me, and there is a ton more to digest than most people would ever think.

I'm about to start some experiments myself, regarding buffer and spring issues. Some of the things we talked about.

One of my buddies is into the retro stuff, so I'd seen an Edgewater, but I didn't realize that's what they looked like inside.