Life is too short for shitty ammo.  Shitty ammo will make a shooter question everything.  Now maybe the gun doesn't work, or maybe he can't shoot straight anymore, or his magazines might suck or whatever.  

When you get to the range, that should increase your confidence, not reduce it and send you into replacement of odd component parts searching for a solution to a phantom problem.

Baffle strikes are really rare. Hopefully you wont have to experience that again.  It can't really be understated how low quality ammunition has to be for the bullets not to stay together for 6" of flight.  

I fired a prototype 240B suppressor yesterday, 600 rounds in one burst.  Zero baffle contact.  No malfunctions.  It's the most durable silencer our company has made.  The gun ran that in 58 seconds.  ~620 rounds a minute cyclic rate.  I wouldn't be surprised if the ROF wasn't up more than 25RPM from unsuppressed.

Sound metering it was interesting.  I adjusted timing of the "trigger" in B&K 75 microseconds to sound meter it.  It appeared about 75-80MS behind conventional firearms, due to open bolt operation.  

That guns kind of not 100% or I also have some shit ammo- remanufactured from lake city pull downs.  We have to spray oil the ammo to keep it from having separated case heads (stuck cases with ripped off heads)- that's been a problem as long as we have had it. That means you kind of breathe vaporized rem oil while firing it because the heat of firing evaporates the rem-oil near instantly.    

We did have a different batch of ammo for that- mag tech factory new, but I needed it to run 100% or I would have to re-shoot and the ammo would be a waste, so I spray oiled it anyway.  I never had to do that to an issued 240.

I would prefer to burst fire at distance as opposed to just shoot a belt into a berm, but that's kind of how a lot of suppressor testing work goes.  

It was interesting to fire 5-6 rounds without ear pro and have no ringing or anything, and it's neat to think about the military possibly having some interest in them.  The collapsible stock is cool, and it has a cheek rest for optics that I took off because I wasn't running any (you can't see the sights with it on).  

In Iraq I did a decent amount of vehicle work on turret guns- M2's 240's, Saws, Mk46's and MK19's.  I used the 240 more than the others from the turret and it was sometimes like that Indiana Jones movie with the tank- the gun is a dream to shoot- puts rounds wherever you want them, even with the vehicle moving at some speed.  I liked the 240 better than than any of the other turret guns.  Same experience as you- unsuppressed all.  I think the idea of a turret gunner being able to shoot without taking miles off everyone's ears is cool.  In a city, an M2 is kind of big, if you weren't careful you could hit something with the barrel when the turret was sideways, and one of our guys almost got his finger chopped off by the spades pinching it on the turret armor when something impacted the barrel while moving.  

I would hear people sometimes cuss and stuff, indicating their ears hurt.  I always had my ear plugs in so I could shoot if I needed to- it was at that point in time my job obviously, and we needed to be on top of whatever needed attention pretty much immediately.

The Bushmaster is a bitch.  I never shot one, but spent a little time on a kuwaiti range once right next to one, and it was not fun to be next to a Bradley shooting on a range.  That brake is insanely loud the concussion you'd swear it picks you up a little bit off the ground every time it shoots.  The concussion has to be at least 30% worse than an XM107

It is totally mysterious to me- rem oil the rounds and it runs, otherwise case the rear about .300" of case head is ripped off in 1-3 rounds no matter what can I'm running or even without a can. Maybe the barrel was sold to me because it had a bad chamber? I got a pretty good deal on it like $600 new.


I found this from the USMC:
https://www.trngcmd.marines.mil/Portals/207/Docs/TBS/W3I0003XQ%20M240B%20Medium%20Machinegun.pdf



I think in the Army they told us 3-7 but my memory could be wrong.  I have 6 clicks on my barrel.  I also have a pair of barrels, and I think the other is at 5 or 6 also- same issue.  

Those swing mounts really seem odd if they actually swing on two pivot points radially.  Our turrets were only one radial pivot, the turret being the second, and it having a manual crank for rotation, and a lock that could be disengaged via a lever to allow you to move like 180 fast ( I think with the crank handle spinning), then re-engage the ring lever lock and use the radial pintle pivot and getting elevation via a receiver pin pivot I believe on the mount which was like a pintle fork with a pin through it on top.  

I forgot I also was an M60 gunner earlier.   The M60 wasn't an M240, but it was nice and light for LRRS missions.  I liked the gun, but it shot patterns about 6x6 at maybe 450 meters and that made it harder to qualify with on a pop up range.  But that just meant people shot 60's all day to qualify, whereas an M240 is a one time go.  You could get discouraged or just say fuck it I'm being paid to shoot an M60 all day long.  I think I took like 3-4 attempts to qual on the pop up range with it, and I was really trying the whole time.  The barrels on those 60's you could grab and rattle around though, and the rear sights were I believe open sights like a 1928 thompson, even when the rear was flipped up.  

Shooting with the 240 from a bipod with the can the other day, I could easily see my sights and the gun was almost recoil-less.  The M60 was a different animal in that you really had to muscle the gun on the bipod, and it was tough to retain a sight picture while firing it.

I talked to a SEAL (the show guy for Seal1 lubricants) at a show in Arizona years ago, and he said they would get issued a bunch of barrels and put them in a pile and test fit barrels to find barrels that fit tighter, and even throw some out if they didn't fit tight enough, for that reason (accuracy).  In the Army we just had shitty barrel fit and lived with it.  When I was in Iraq in 2004, I saw a couple units drive through that were still running M60's in OIF.   We had 240B's at that point, but still had Winchester 1200 trench guns, and got issued some Mossberg 500's in 2005.



Charles Kaufmann was unfortunately killed in the first half of a mission I ran the mirrored second half of, 240 gunning, escorting Iraqi police recruits from Tikrit to BIAP, and trained recruits back from BIAP to Tikrit, in 2005.  He was 19, and had come back to Iraq after a near fatal accident deer hunting on leave when he had an option to not return. He's in the picture with the 1200 trenchgun on the Samarra Barrage hydro-electric power dam on the Tigris River.  I had my only malf running a 240 on a mission on that mission- back then the regulators had three positions, after that mission I always ran position 2(second slowest rate of fire).  The gun had short stroked and failed to re-cock itself, and I only figured that out when I had to shoot it again and needed to charge it to get it to fire.


Here's a 50cal overlooking the town from turret:


An M60 on the range


M60 on the zero / first component of qual - traverse and search paper part of the range:


A little Infantry comedy- Dead Little Ivan that fucked me out of a 39/40 (the 50M Right was broken), so when we put up chem lights for a night fam fire, I stabbed him with my bayonet to make sure he didn't get the better part of that.  

The cannon shells look pretty formidable.

We have a new gate lok can to release soon.  Its just been busy and tough to get to it.  

The M4SD-L is pretty nice.  The best of the gate lok cans so far in my opinion, but it is tubeless and loses the fluted tube.  There is no plan to drop the gate lok cans, but they are an older style of mounting system.

We also are doing 1.375x24 accessory mounts in gate lok finally.   I didn’t think it was a good idea, but I did use one on a Griffin custom 7075 forged full ambi colt pattern 9mm lower we just prototyped and it was pretty slick.  The Bushwhacker .36 was pretty quiet on that- I was running a Colt upper and snapping a can on the A2 was cool.  I did have to widen the rear groove .005” on that one to get it to fit though.  We will need to add a 9mm device to our muzzle device lineup for it.

The 9mm lowers and guns are  at least 4 or so months out as we have to metal injection mold some feed ramps and ejector/bolt catch blocks to complete them.

We’re going to release full ambi 556 lowers first.  Those turned out really awesome.  That was a tough part to design (the forging), and the manufacturing is really gee whiz with probing and the geometries are super accurate and well within the USGI print tolerances, which are actually pretty impressively tight for a forging.  In the process I learned a lot of  functional, working lowers are outside of tolerances.

We bought a newer depth laser for $90k to support marking the lowers. Thats our fourth laser engraver at the shop.