I recently was lucky enough to be sent to a three day long carbine course by my work, there we put just over 1,000 rounds of PMC XTAC M193 through our rifles. I bought myself a brand new Colt 6920 just for the course, and now I carry it at work and I have to say the rifle was phenomenal and did everything I asked it to do and did it with class. In fact I found my practical accuracy with the weapon to be far beyond what I had anticipated and was seeing groups of 3-4 inches while standing at 100 yards using a Vickers sling and the factory carry handle with A2 sights.

HOWEVER...this carbine course was supposed to allow us to fire 2,000 rounds of ammo! Not 1,000! So, what went wrong?

DPMS

Dont get me wrong, my family has a very nice 24" DPMS that is a dedicated prarie dog popper, but my entire carbine course was fucked up due to this one company with just one rifle and the douchebag who brought it there. Now let me start by saying we all brought our own gear and that the range only supplied the ammo, and that we all were vested to pass this course it was not like we could kick the guy with the shit rifle. So, story goes, DPMS recently "Reimported" a bunch of rifles they built in the early part of the Iraq War that were used for the Jambo gate guards at the bases there. These rifles recently sold for under $500 and featured some desirable specs, hell I cant say I didn't get my interest piqued when I learned about them! But fuck if I would choose it as my fucking GO TO GUN! Anyway, this guy tried shooting this POS and dragged the entire class down due to it! Constant FTF, FTE and Double Feeds! Thank God the AK guys didn't see it! He tried PMAGS, Hexmags and USGI mags...nothing worked! The range brought in a gunsmith on the second day and he threw his hands in the air on it and said "DPMS! You know what that stands for? Dumb People Making Shit! You need a whole new rifle!" Now I'm not up on exactly what was happening in that gun other then watching the malfunctions but I know DPMS owes me about a full day of highly motivated trigger time and about 1,000 FREE rounds of 193 that I didn't get to pop!

Now to summarize, this class was not really pushing the rifles. I was paying attention to what the others had and I saw a lot of home brews, mostly PSA and Del-Ton parts, tons of Windham Weaponry and even a polymer Bushmaster! None of these rifles bit the dust like that poor DPMS did. Also the most expensive rifle on the field that day was probably a Daniel Defense that had a free float rail, looked kinda like M-Lok, and an Aimpoint Comp M4. But at the end of the day I saw that most ARs available nowadays are capable enough of keeping up in a moderate carbine course....most

Pics of my Colt




Dressing up the Colt

In the future I will also be doing a quick table top of the Colt vs a Sig M400

The gun smith was an ass hole who can't fix shit!
The DPMS was a heavily used weapon that had seen action in Iraq!
I use lots of DPMS parts, never a problem.

CSB.

Nice shooting!

Hey can you take some pictures and add in a little more haze

Not sure if serious.

Sounds to me like the issue was a beat up gun, not the mfg.

I shot a DPMS at a four-day, 500rd carbine course and never had a single FTF, FTE or malfunction in any way. And it was a well used rifle. It took all the mags I used, whereas the guys around me were having trouble with everything from Magpul to USGI.

DPMS guns experience a significantly higher than normal failure rate in shooting classes.

I was that douchebag (idiot) at a DMR class.
My Grendel had never been anything but 100% reliable, but during the class I had a multitude of failures and jams.  People were definitely getting peeved, and I was pretty frustrated.  Luckily, I'd brought another AR that I finished up the class with.
I simply could not understand what the problem was.  I was using ammo I'd never used before (Amax) but this rifle had never had any problems digesting anything.  When I got home I had a moment of clarity and gave myself a big ol' Homer Simpson head slap.
All the problems were caused by my decision to swap the lower before the class.  See, I normally ran a PRS on it, but because I knew I'd be running around a bit, I'd wanted to lighten things up, so I put the 20" upper on my carbine lower.

Sometimes even fairly smart people do dumb things.






 

That is the idiots fault for failing to test his gear before taking it to the course.  It doesn't matter who makes the rifle, you should put it through its paces and identify and fix any shortcomings before going to any course.  The same thing can, and has happened to many other people using many other brands of rifle.

If the class provides the ammo... maybe the ammo didnt like his gun?

DPMS belongs in the trash can too.  A 20incher and two carbines in my life have all been disasters.

The gunsmith should have been able to tell why the gun was not functioning. The reason was not a brand name.
What class did not have a loner gun to keep things flowing?
What instructor let one gun slow the course down that bad?
Orbits.

Gonna go with all of this.

Seems odd they cancel class over one guy. if a car breaks down at a race you push it off to side and let the others do their thing. id be wanting some money refunded for the other half you paid for.

We were qualifying to use the rifles for work. So they cant give you a loner just because you have a bad gun and then send you out into the world to get yourself jacked up. And I'm sure the gunsmith did know what the problem was, I was about 8 lanes over so I wasn't able to read his mind from that far . Honestly with the entire experience I was just astounded to learn that DPMS is seen to have a much higher failure rate then other rifles given my personal experience with my families 24" one back home.

They didn't cancel the class, sorry if I wrote it in a confusing way, the one guys rifle failed so often that it slowed the class down to the point that we only got 50% of the trigger time we should have.

I keep getting told over and over how "DPMS is just as good as Colt" and how "Parts are just parts".

Obviously OP is a liar.

The course instructor should have told the guy to shelve the rifle and use another one, or get another one and try another course at a later date.  Plus the guy jist said above that he had a different rifle he could have used in the class.  Why not just switch to that one when you have your second malfunction with the first rifle?  

After a couple hold ups I would jave told the instructor to either shelve this guy, get him a different gun, or give me a refund.

So let me get this straight the gunsmith did not do anything but call it a DPMS?

Thats why you bring an extra rifle to classes. I have a 6920 that is bone stock just for shit like that (or me fiddling with too many changes on my own rifle)

Here...Use this.

It sucks one person dragged down the class.  But DPMS owes you nothing.  Maybe talk to the people that ran the class.  Nice 6920 and good shooting.

Still the "class" can be ran with a rifle you do not carry daily.  Then you "qualify" with your carry rifle.  The instructor was an idiot for not pulling the rifle and giving the student a range rifle or simply pulling the student from the class.

Edited as I'm moving it...VA-gunnut

500 rounds spread out over four days isn't exactly pushing the rifle.

Yep.

This is why you bring two (at least) of everything critical to a class.  If something goes down you don't have to fuck about with it right then, you just grab the backup and keep on truckin.  Same caliber, mags and all.

You're paying for the training, it's stupid to miss out on that because of a mechanical problem.  Even denser on the instructor's part though not to keep the class moving.

The problem is a guy took an untested gun to a carbine class. A gun that he should have known needed testing because it was used.

You need a rifle you can trust. So you either buy a top brand like Colt or Daniel Defense and shoot enough ammo through it to trust it. Or you buy something cheap and shoot enough ammo through it to trust it. The difference is how much you spend on ammo.

Yup agree with above, always bring a spare.  Did the "gunsmith" make sure the BCG was properly lubed, could have been running dry.

Look on the bright side, he got to do a lot of malf drills!!

Sometimes the best ones are the unplanned malfs that force you to think on your feet and action the issue.

I initially read this as "Milf drills". My mind went somewhere completely different.

DPMS + Korean PMC XM193 = FAIL


http://www.dpmsinc.com/Ammunitions-Warning_ep_59-1.html



http://pmcammo.com/wp/about/


http://www.luckygunner.com/ammo-manufacturer/pmc-ammo-review

Correct.

 

PMC XTAC 55gn is excellent ammo.

The DPMS probably would have ran fine with a few bucks in new parts. Extractor assembly, action spring, gas rings...

This right here. Lead instructor always has spares, armorer should be able to do his job. Bunch of fail. And yes, I have been lead in numerous courses.

A buddy of mine had a dpms 7.5" kitty kat upper on his sbr that patterned like a shotgun at 50 yards. Needless to say it got unloaded fast.

What kind of podunk employer approves a DPMS carbine that was surplussed out of Iraqi gate guard duty with a highly unknown past for use as a duty weapon?

Gunsmith probably didn't know what he was doing.  



Those rifles were pretty used though, likely needed all new springs, a new extractor and possibly a new barrel.

       
 

OR just an O-ring around the extractor spring-cured my problems once.

As the lead, I brought the following spares to my last Sniper/DM course, all zero'd, well-tested, ironed-out:

* GAP .260 Rem AR, Vortex Viper HST, 5-15x44 Mil Dot, SF, plenty of ammo 129gr Hornady SST

* Surgeon 18" .308 with Lilja barrel, Manner's stock, USO, Bryan Litz data cards for the load, and a 100rd box of hand loads for it using Lapua 155gr Scenar

* 16" 6.5 Grendel AR15 with Vortex Viper PST 2.5-10x44 MRAD, zero'd, with plenty of ammo

* 17.6" Lilja barreled 6.5 Grendel AR15 with Vortex Viper PST 2.5-10x32 FFP MRAD, with plenty of ammo

* 16" .223 Wylde SOPMOD Block II type carbine with DD handguard, nitrided SOCOM profile barrel, MLGS, case of 69gr SMK Match, GRSC 1-4x Combat Optic with CRS Reticle

My Guest Instructor brought:

* Sig Sauer .308 SSG 3000 with Hensoldt Scope, zero'd, known performer out to 1100yds
* AR15 carbine


On Day 1, one of the attendees and fellow AR15.com forum members sheared the bolt handle off his SAKO TRG22 in .308 Win.  He got the Surgeon and continued on without skipping a beat.

On Day 2, one of the DM attendees had a borrowed Noveske go down from the build up of Wolf laquer, so he was able to use my Block II carbine.

On Day 2, a 6.5 Grendel with an aluminum gas block started short-stroking, so I handed him my 17.6" Lilja Grendel and he continued on through the course.

Murphy made it known long ago that he planned on riding my back in this life, so I plan accordingly.  3 out of 5 back-ups that I brought for a course with 8 attendees were put to essential use.

Here's a pic of the back-up Lilja Grendel during a field-fire portion on the morning of Day 2, ringing steel from tripod standing supported:

This is why I take a second rifle with me to any rifle class I take, either for my own use or another students if theirs takes a terminal dump. If you spend hundreds of dollars on a class and expect to fire hundreds or thousands of rounds, you're gambling that nothing will break or malfunction
I used to only show up with one rifle, never had any issues, but then I realized I wasn't practicing what I believed that two is one and one is none.
.
Last fall I was at a rifle class and multiple people on the line had issues. Heck, even I had issues, mainly magazine related.
Too many training mags with too many years of moderate to heavy use.
I've rotated those bad mags out and hopefully can afford to replace them over time
You learn stuff by watching the problems others have and hopefully you avoid them yourself
I'll never buy a polymer AR after seeing them have so many issues in that class, for instance
If your fellow student had issues with the DPMS maybe it was a rifle that needed to be checked out for worn parts, or operator maintenance was lacking.

Only being able to shoot half the allotted rounds due to delays is problematic.
At some point that instructor owed it to the other students to remove the student slowing down the group from the line, getting him/her a replacement weapon, maybe even refunding their tuition and asking them to leave so the rest of the class could continue on with a normal training schedule.



One that has a tight budget and is happy to have any rifle at all.
Probably one that doesn't have an adequate armoring plan for duty rifles. They likely have no one to go through the gun with a fine tooth comb looking for issues with the rifles before the things actually break down

Any instructor or training provider that limits, stalls, or delays an entire class to the tune of 50% (you said you were on for 2000 rounds but only fired 1000) due to a student's problems is NOT the place I'd spend my training dollars. The student got fucked by his rifle and you got fucked by the training provider.