Since patents are long gone, why hasn't the AR-10 seen the same industry standard as the AR-15?

Is the AR-10 just that bad of a design? Or is it due to lack of military acceptance?

This isn't 2010 anymore.  The LR308/SR25 pattern is pretty widespread now and offered by many brands.

There are two, pick the one you like.

FPNI as usual. There are very few companies offering AR10 pattern parts in comparison to the huge number offering SR25/LR308 parts.

Exactly, this is the standard.

LR308/SR25 is the de facto standard.

Just because your Teutonic marketing gods at H&K didn't feel that way doesn't make it less true.  

There was no standard to begin with. This is LarryG answer.

You must remember when the AR10 built. It was not formally accepted. Therefore no Mil-apec standard.

DPMS built there design to utilize much of the AR15 design platform and use the original AR10/SR25 mag design.

The new Armalite designed the current AR10 around the upper of the old AR10 but using modified preban magazine during the ban years.

So as someone who does not have a AR-10. can you put any AR-10 upper on any SR-25 pattern lower, even if they come from different companies?

No.

And not all rails line up properly on LR308 uppers since there are two different heights.

Yeah you have to do your homework a little. DPMS high or low rail.  

And they can be tricky to get to run right sometimes since .308 throws a ton of gas into the gas system.  

Think of it as AR building 201.  101 would be AR15s.

The SR25 is not "the" standard as some may want to believe.  The AR-10 is still a popular design, so there's a lot of that format floating around too.  Unfortunately, there's also a lot of hybrid designs that use some of each (like Matrix & Ruger for instance).  With the new DPMS G2 design out there, I expect the issue to get worse before it gets better.

So which seems to be gaining more traction?

SR-25 style or GII style?

Wouldn't RRA make 3?

Dpms dropped the High rail in '09 I believe....

And they also dropped their whole LR308 for the completely new G2....

I wanted standardization.. I was really disappointed that DPMS went with the G2. I think they fixed a problem that would have been better served by putting the LR308 on a diet.

The long section at the rear of the receiver is what needed to go away. The Colt really should have been the solution, if only they would make it in a non monolithic and single caliber format.

is there a place where i can find concise info (like a chart, for example) of the differences between the two types of 308 AR's? Like Armalite vs DPMS, what mags work with what reciever works with what uppers, etc.

Are Magpul 308 magazines For the AR10 or 308 AR?

I wish there was just one type.

AR10 comes in an A & B models. The A model accept sr25 pattern mags including pmags.

Don't be afraid. Ask a lot of questions before you buy. Personally for a budget gun I'd buy a Palmetto. For better quality, an Armalite def10 A model.

I've owned most of them and did not keep any until I acquired a DPMS GEN II. It has been perfect and I hope that it gets traction as even with good optics it is still not to heavy to carry around hunting.

yes I wish there was an AR10 version of "The Chart"

Best I can do - this is just the mags:

http://www.ar15.com/forums/t_3_121/669426_-308-AR-magazine-compatibility.html

If anyone has updated info, let me know, and I'll update the list.

I don't think anyone ever faithfully copied the AR-10, which was a good design and was well-liked by Portuguese soldiers fighting in Africa.

The 'AR-10' rifles you see today are typically upscaled AR-15s, and the efforts to upscale were independently done by multiple companies resulting in variation and thus lack of a standard design.

AR-15s don't suffer from this issue because the design came from a single source and was simply copied and improved upon by others. Had the AR-10 been so copied there would similarly not be such an issue.

It was not adopted by the military.

Genesis 80% lower and upper.

No.

First off DPMS has not "dropped their whole LR308".

You wanting standardization at the expense of improvement won't move thing forward.

The G2 is much, much more than just a light weight LR308.

It is, by definition, a game changer and we are seeing the game change as other manufacturers try and compete in the Small Frame .308 Win market.

The LR308/SR-25 pattern guns are going to be essentially gone from the market place in 5 years.

And the oversized carrier.

This

I really like my ARMALITE DEFENDER 10

cheap -  $938

reliable - 100% so far

uses cheap magpul or brownells mags

Armalite has been building them a long time, and unlike some brands, has worked the bugs out of
them

The LR308 and SR25 aren't the same pattern.

History of the AR10, from 1955 to Present, with variations in the market

Only about 2 of the posts in this thread so far have correct information, and they are from a Brit named Bradders.

Most of the posts are seemingly unaware of what is happening in the AR10 world, and are based mostly on incorrect data that was still incorrect in the early 2000s.

There certainly is less and less of a standard now than ever.

For those that think DPMS is a standard, DPMS has 3 different rail heights.....in just the LR-308/AP4 series before they introduced the GII.

The Eagle Arms 1996 rifles were built around an SR25 upper, not original AR10s from the Dutch or the real ArmaLite Inc. in Hollywood.  Eagle Arms acquired the ArmaLite Inc. brand name from Elisco Tool and Machine out of the Philippines, who had obtained it several years after the Stoner patents were sold to Colt.

The trend in the market right now is lightweight and good balance, with smaller frames like the Colt 901, DPMS GII, Mega Machine SF MATEN, and Savage MSR-10.

If you're making a large frame AR10 purposely in the end of the 2nd decade of the 21st Century, you are behind the power curve.  It's about time the industry caught up to 1959.

To make a chart for the AR10s, you will need it to be a funded project.

On personal research alone, it has taken me decades to try to keep track of what is going on as both a customer and researcher.

Just within any of the given companies, you will find significant variations that require charts within the chart, especially with KAC, DPMS, ArmaLite, LMT, CMMG, Bushmaster, RRA....

Coming in late to this subject (and thoroughly confused), are there basically three /308 battle rifles on the civilian market today? The M1A, FAL, AR-10 (and variants of those rifles)? And the AR-15 is a scaled down carbine version of the AR-10 chambered in 5.56.

Is that about right?

You forgot the HK G3.

Technically no but they share the same mags, which is the big decider - mag availability.  There are tons of LR308/SR25 mags available.  

You can nit pick all you want but it's pretty damn easy to piece together an LR308 pattern gun today with the availability of parts for that pattern.  Even a caveman can do it.

There are several generations of "Battle Rifles", if we are talking about military service rifles that were meant to chamber a cartridge with performance characteristics like 7.92x57mm Mauser, .30 Cal M1 US Rifle, and 7.62 NATO.

The 1st Generation was the late-1800s metallic cartridge rifles of Mauser fame.  You can also include the various 6mm, 6.5mm, and 7mm cartridges in this line-up of the late 1800s and early 1900s, many of which served on into the Second World War.

Then came the self-loaders, pioneered by the M1 Garand, Soviet SVT-38SVT-40, and Gewehr -41 and 43.

In the post-war era, you had basically a standardization in the West to the 7.62 NATO cartridge, with the M14, FAL, and G3.  The AR10 was submitted too late to the service rifle trials, and Army Ordnance was hellbent on adopting their own abortion rifle over any competitor, even leaving the T48 standing in the corner by one of their officer's own accounts, while working feverishly to sabotage the AR10 space age rifle.

The Russians dropped the failed concept of the battle rifle and only included 7.62x54R Designated Marksmen Rifles in the Infantry Squad, whereas the US tried to make a rifle that would do the jobs of the SMG, M1 Carbine, M1 Garand, and BAR all in one.  This of course failed miserably, and the 5.56x45 AR15 was adopted as a temporary stop-gap until Fort Benning could unleash its super weapon, the SPIW, scheduled for introduction in 1968.

Throughout the Cold War, with all its little hot wars of insurgency and counter-insurgency, tiny little brown men humped around the ill-conceived battle rifles of US/NATO design.

Nothing really changed until FN introduced the SCAR-Heavy for a SOCOM requirement to field a lighter, modern 7.62 NATO rifle to augment M4A1 carbines in dismounted special operations units who wanted something for enhanced barrier defeat, as well as increased effective range for DMs, without having to mess around with M14s and SR25s that had longer barrels and reliability issues.

The SCAR-H created a new era in keeping the ill-conceived battle rifle concept alive, but since it has never been asked for or adopted by large regular Army units, it remains relegated to the limited role for which it was intended:  A killer of the older generation, excessively-heavy battle rifles.

So which are the LR308 pattern rifles?

And which are the SR25 pattern rifles?

Except for magazines, there's not a whole lot of commonality between the DPMS and Knight rifle.

Are you kidding?  There is more to the gun than mags.

There are several patterns out there.  The two with the most similarity are KAC and LMT.




It sure didn't.  WAAAAY more than 2 patterns out there.

DPMS alone has two, with a variation on one of them.

They are supposed to use the same pattern of mags, but variation in tolerance stack and variation of receiver drawings sources has created a de-tuned market where many of the magazines available will NOT correctly function in many of the rifles that are claimed to be made to be SR25 compatible.

Common problems we see are:

Peening of bolt lugs on the bolt catch
Shearing of lip material on the magazines

Nobody is on the same page.

You can only be responsible for what you do under your own roof, and that is hard enough for most of the manufacturers that try.

This. I gave up on it a while back - I have an LR308 that is fun to shoot, but I have no illusions about it being compatible with new accessories in 10-20 years. I'm happy with the build as-is, and I'll just leave it that way.

The strength of the AR-15 design has been its defacto standardization, and consistent improvements within that standard. If I want to build something up in an A2 configuration from 25 years ago, it's not hard. If I want, instead, to build a very modern rifle off of the same receiver set with niceties and accoutrements, again, not hard. You can't say that about the 308 pattern rifles. I've stopped hoping that would be possible.

So just to be clear here are some of the things that vary between all of the manufacturers:

SR-25 length RE or AR15 w/shorty buffer or other (proprietary)
Different threading patterns on upper receiver
Several different BCG styles
Not all uppers mate with all lowers depending on how they are contoured at the rear
There is no standard barrel extension

KAC SR-25
LMT MWS
LaRue OBR
ArmaLite AR-10
DPMS LR308 and GII
Daniel Defense
S&W M&P 10
RRA
CMMG

This is just off the top of my head--there are more.  Tell me which two of those are of the same pattern and fully interchange?

Within the DPMS LR-308 family, there are 3 different receiver heights, not including the new GII.

Within the SR25 family, there are many different changes, to include receivers, bolts, carriers, fire control, handguards, extension tubes, buffers, small parts, ambi controls, QD sockets.

What pattern is it that you are talking about?

When these variations started to manifest in 1996, the receiver mating patterns were the same between KAC and ArmaLite Inc., since Eagle/ArmaLite used an SR25 upper to develop their Clinton-ban compliant lower that ran on modified M14 mags.

DPMS introduced a totally different pattern of receivers with a curved cut like an AR15 in the early 2000s.

LMT and LaRue use the SR25 receiver pattern.

Magazines don't work across the designs like one would expect, and need to be individually-verified by the customer.

Uh oh.....I got crucified in another thread for saying that Armalite did some borrowing from KAC in the '90s to get the AR-10 going.  Get ready.

Gas tubes are also different lengths.

Pin diameters for the Take Down and Pivot pins are different diameters and lengths.

Bolt carrier rails are different lengths, so when you think you got a "DPMS-compatible" BCG from XYZ parts.com, the bottom rail slams into your lower receiver even when you use the "correct length" buffer.

Muzzle threads are all over the map.  KAC uses 3/4x24.  ArmaLite Inc. and DPMS use 5/8x24.

Bolt catches vary in dimensions.

Bolt lug lengths and face depths vary all over the place.

Upper receiver barrel nut threads are different between the main companies, no telling what the after-market is doing.

Extension tube lengths and buffer lengths are different.

Gas ports are located and cut differently, most not with any understanding of .308 pressure curve and case volume.

Firing pin apertures in the bolts and firing pin heads vary in diameter, to the extent that many will cause cratering even at normal working pressures when you shoot 175gr and up.

Every time I see someone say, "Just build your own, it's easy."  I chuckle, because while it may be like assembling an AR15, reliability is rarely there for the home-builder with all these parts coming from different sources, many of whom have never designed and tested a rifle themselves.

ArmaLite has that statement in their tech notes, or at least they used to before being bought by SAC.

They listed a very detailed history, which included the work of David Doerbeck and Karl Lewis on the 1996 AR10 (not to be confused with the real AR10s from the 1955-1962 time period).

They specifically stated that the design team at Eagle Arms used a complete SR25 upper receiver, mated to their lower, which used modified M14 magazines, as the Clinton AWB had just passed in 1994, making manufacture of new standard cap mags in excess of 10rds illegal for civilians.

DPMS's first LR-308s were shipped with translucent 10rd mags for that reason, as they came to market at the tail-end of the ban.

To fully grasp the AR10 market and history, you need to dive deep into the technical aspects of the rifles, different personalities involved, as well as the political tones of both the late 1950s, as well as the Clinton era.

I was thinking of swapping a bolt gun for a Bushmaster ORC .308 with some upgrades and have been doing some studying on .308 ARs.  It gives me a headache.

Looks like they pulled their tech notes, which were one of the few in the industry that were actually useful:

ArmaLite Tech Notes gone from new site

I went looking for those myself when I got called out and realized that they were gone.  Looks like ArmaLite has a different master these days.  I've always wondered why they changed the thread pattern on their uppers which makes them incompatible with KAC rails unfortunately.