Quote History Quoted:
1) I keep a database with AR10 info such as sales (gunbroker, RIA, sturmgewehr..) and have been given data collected by others. I will often contact and owner or dealer and they will provide SN info.
2) Yes, your bolt will break. The early AR10s and the majority of the Transitional AR10s had small lugged bolts prone to failure after about 3000 rounds. The Portuguese AR10 variant had a wider lugged bolt that vaguely resembles a LR308 bolt. I have seen many examples of failed small-lugged AR10 bolts but have never seen a broken Portuguese bolt. (corrosion gets em though) Since pre-may guns are to be shot an not admired, many folks have retrofitted their Guat machine guns with the tougher later bolt heads. This can be done by adapting an entire Portuguese upper assembly to the Guat lower. The Porto has a larger and offset pivot pin as compared to the Guat and earlier AR10s (its as difficult as putting an sp1 upper on an M16). Another more elegant route is to re-barrel the Guat upper to use a Portuguese bolt head. This requires a Portuguese barrel extension and a Portuguese bolt head.
View Quote
I agree a collectable gun shouldn’t be a high rd count shooter, but 3000 rds is pretty low. Serial 1002 was a hand built prototype on the same design and went 5564 rds before a barrel failure, and then 7500 rds in an austrian test once refitted with a new barrel.
Maybe it had a new bolt for test 2, but it may not have, as stupid as Armalite was at poorly outfitting guns for military trials. The book mentions a barrel and handguard replacement but not a bolt, so it may have been the same bolt.
The first 5664 rounds were fired of a experimental higher pressure armor piercing round.
The book mentions two rifles completing 7500rd tests successfully, also talks about breakage of lugs in tests over 10,000 rds. Also mentions accuracy loss of .2moa over 6000 rd endurance tests. Implying shorter tests that didn’t produce bolt failures as they weren’t mentioned.
So its obvious the bolt wasn’t as strong as they wanted it to be, but not necessarily horribly inadequate either.
They did mention a few freak short rd count failures traceable to poor heat treatment at a different vendor in CA. I would assume the Dutch tightly controlled heat treatment at the state run plant like they did everything else so probably not going to have freak failures on Dutch parts.
Probably a good idea to load low pressure as if for an m1Garand for example where in 3006, people commonly load 100-150 fps reduced velocity loads for M1’s.