AR Sponsor
Posted: 1/19/2008 8:01:01 AM EDT
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In the quest for ultimate reliability, what are the most likely causes of an AR15/M16 failure? Obviously the two biggest are ammunition and magazines, so I'm not talking about those. Plus, those two failures can happen in any rifle. So, apart from ammo and magazines. Personally, the only rifle related failure I ever experienced was with an M16A2 that had a hammer spring break and unwind. So, in my experience, the most likley cause of failure would be springs wearing out. I'm interested in what parts, especially in non-mil spec rifles, are prone to failure. |
totally agree! That was always an issue with my Bushies. I have also had my bolt carrier key on my bushie carbine loosen up which caused all kinds of issues but i dont think that would be a common accurance. |
| In my experience, the biggest things we have problem with in the classes are poor cleaning and lubrication being a big causeof problems. Magazines that are repeatedly droped on the concrete are right up there too. Both of these problems are mainly due to the shooter but parts also break as well. Here, probably the biggest problem has been broken hammer springs and extractor springs have also broke as well. Using training weapons with a large number of frangible rounds has also lead to brokn bolt locking lugs, mainly on either side of the extractor. We alternate weapons each day but you still have to figure that the average M-16 is seeing about 200 rounnds or so per week. When I was at Hurlburt Field, it seemed we had a large number of M-16s there that were having a lot of issues with double-firing. I replaced a piece at a time and I found that in these rifles it was a bad hammer that had worn down enough to slip off the trigger nose when the shooter released the trigger. Given the number of hammers I replaced, I can only guess we had a bad batch of soft hammers that were wearing out prematurely. Of course barrels wearing out is something that is going to happen with any weapon that shoots a large number of rounds so I'm not sure I'd call that a real failure, just normal wear and tear. |
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I've had three parts failures that I can think of, two parts failures were in the last 30 days on two of my ARs, 1st; several years back the extractor spring gave up on my bushmaster A2 at approx 14+k rounds, replaced with a wolf spring and it's still working fine, this rifle has approx 30k rounds through it; 2nd; was the extractor pin broke in two on the bolt in my model 1 sales upper, it still functioned with the broke pin, I didn't find it broke till I removed the bolt from the carrier when I was cleaning the rifle, it's got approx 7k rounds through it, 3rd; was earlier this week on my bushmaster A2, it started short stroking badly, the gas rings were worn out, this was the fourth or fith set I replaced in this rifle, but it's first time I've let them get so worn as to cause malfuntioning, I replaced the 3 piece rings with a one piece Mcfarlan, all in all I've had pretty good luck with my ARs. |
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