If you pushed down on the front of the charging handle, it would engage with teeth cut in the top of the bolt carrier group. 308 version of the design still had a non-reciprocating charging handle on the top of the receiver, inside the carry handle. (It is really interesting to note that the final iteration of the AR-10 known as the “Portuguese Model” actually did have a forward assist. If a round is stuck so bad that you have to mortar the gun to eject it, then you definitely shouldn’t force it into the chamber to be fired. Better hope that one shot was perfect, and all that was needed. And that kind of jam nearly always requires disassembly and a cleaning rod to fix. Why? If there is an issue where something-fouling, dirt, or whatever-is making the chamber tighter than it should be, a cartridge forced into that chamber and then fired, expanding the brass, dramatically increases the chances for a failure-to-extract jam. The rifle looks suspiciously like the FN FAL. It has a side mounted charging handle and no buffer tube in the stock, allowing it to be folded. The semi-auto only civilian version was sold as the AR-180. Later, ArmaLite developed this design into the AR-18 in the early 1960s and had some success selling the rifle, which was also made under license by a Japanese company. Before Eugene Stoner left ArmaLite for Colt, he began working on a simpler version of the AR-15, which was working under the designation of AR-16. 30-06 rounds that came before the 5.56 NATO. They even held a test, which was later proven to be biased, just to prove the M14 was better than the AR-15 after the latter was recommended by the Advances Research Projects Agency after the testing with indigenous troops in Vietnam.īy 1963, the new Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had taken control of ordnance away from the army, for the most part, and the Green Machine was being “forced” to adopt a rifle made of space age aluminum alloys and plastics that was half the weight of the M14 and fired a tiny cartridge compared to the 7.62 NATO and. In the late 50s, army brass really wanted the M14 to work. The most dramatic alteration they requested was the inclusion of a “manual bolt closing device,” a mechanism that would allow a soldier to force the bolt into battery if, for some reason, a round failed to chamber completely.įrom everything I’ve read, experts I’ve spoken to, and the testimony that was given regarding the M16 during the congressional investigation held about the rifle’s early problems, it seems the only rationale for this was that every other modern rifle the military had ever used to that point (the bolt guns, the M1 Garand, the M1 Carbine, and the newer M14) had a charging handle attached directly to the bolt, making it possible to manually push the bolt forward. ![]() By 1965, the military had purchased at least 300,000 of the rifles. ![]() With the situation in Vietnam heating up rapidly, the decision was made to buy 80,000 AR-15 rifles and adopt them as the M16. The BRN-Proto rifle from Brownells is a reproduction of Eugene Stoner’s first AR-15 prototype rifle chambered in.
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