Anyone know anything about the T65K2 rifle from Taiwan?

I did some military time in Taiwan so I spent a lot of time with it, and I have to say I do like their system. For one thing removing the handguard does not require 2 people because the upper handguard is held in place with a flathead screw. Once that's off you can remove the gas system and clean it. It also uses a piston system similar to the SKS... though I've seen a few failure to extract (one sergeant pounding spent shells out with a cleaning rod because it got stuck, possibly headspace problem).

The other question is, is it even possible to find uppers for this rifle in the US? I know they're hard to find because owning arms is absolutely forbidden in Taiwan but I also know they export a lot of stuff...

It's the M16A1 design with an added AR18 piston system.

Reference Defense Technology monthly mag's two part artice in one of the 1990s issue.

Here is a link to additional info and pictures.
http://world.guns.ru/assault/taiw/t65-t6-t91-e.html

I wish I had pictures of my days in the military but they were very strict with pictures. In fact no cameras or even cell phones (since they can take pictures) were allowed. Also if caught taking pic of the internal of one of those rifles it would be court martial for sure.

But I will say that it had standard M16 parts kit, except the selector was a 4 position selector. It was safe, semi, burst, and auto. I played with the evil auto sear a bit since they never let us shoot it full auto just to see how it works...

Since at the time I had just experienced the Clinton era assault weapon ban, I thought to myself how it had "evil" flash suppressor and auto sears...

The thing has ZERO recoil... well it had some but it sure felt like shooting airsoft guns. This created problems because lots of Taiwanese shoots airsoft guns, and so some people did REALLY unsafe things with them thinking that the rifles couldn't possibly kill anyone. I kinda wished they made us train on T57 (basically M14) because that thing had lots of recoil, or at least I think so. My dad trained on them and had hearing problem because they never provided any hearing protection.

In retrospect I did do some details around what used to be a shooting range on the base, and actually found old bullets from T57's. The thing deformed very little and was mostly intact.

I've never used a T65, but have had a few friends use them during their service. They all seem to think pretty highly of them. From the sound of it, most of the malfunctions with them are either user error related or just weapons and magazines that have seen a lot of use and passed through a lot of hands over the years. Same deal with our issue M16s and M4s.

I'd love to get my hands on one or more realistically, a locally produced clone.

Not surprised you saw a lot of unsafe handling during your time in. Mandatory service combined with zero exposure to firearms doesn't really bode too well for safe handling. That being said I've had an awesome time taking visiting Taiwanese to the range and never have had a safety issue after giving proper instruction. They always end up having a blast and it's one of the first things they want to do when they come to the states.

I bet finding old bullets was pretty easy if you were on base down in the south with all that sandy dirt.

I heard in the older days they would do a "shock training" where they make you crawl under barbed wires with machine guns going off to the side as well as explosives going off. They stopped doing that for some reason (safety?).

The unsafe incident I was speaking of was guys standing in for guard duty who would often point their rifle at each other playing "pew pew". It makes me nervous because they do have 5 rounds of ammo and a blank in the first round of the mag. I have heard of deaths from such a game and even though we're told to never do that, people still do stupid things like that. Some guy did that to me and I reported him promptly, but I have no idea if they did anything about it (the guy ended up in disciplinary confinement later so I do not know if it was this incident or something else)

One procedure for clearing the rifle after an exercise is to cycle the action twice and pull the trigger while the rifle is pointed in the air. I wonder if this contributed to failure because I read that blank firing is bad for the gun.