After his success with the AR 10/15/16/18 series of rifles, designer Eugene Stoner went on to develop the Stoner 63 weapons system with the Cadillac Gage company. The Stoner 63 was in many ways a natural evolution of the AR15 rifle, with a strong emphasis on modularity.
The driving idea behind the Stoner was to use a single receiver for an entire family of weapons. The stocks, barrels, sights, feed assemblies, trigger assemblies and other main components were all modular and interchangeable. Some configuration changes were relatively simply, like changing between rifle and carbine – the carbine used a shorter barrel and folding buttstock. The more impressive design achievement was the ability to flip the receiver over to change from shoulder rifle to light machine gun configuration.
The rifle and carbine designs use a gas piston on top of the barrel and magazine fed from the bottom. The accommodate a belt feed, though, the belt needs to be fed from the top of the gun, which thus requires the gas piston to be on the bottom (you can see this on virtually every gas operated LMG, like the Bren and BAR families). The Stoner allow the rifle receiver to be rotated 180 degrees and mount the LMG components in this way.
Other features included a fixed vehicle mount design fired by solenoid, and tripod adapter to allow the gun to be used with the standard US machine gun tripods of the day.
The Stoner was used experimentally by special forces in Vietnam, though it was eventually declined for regular issue due to high maintenance requirements.During the procurement process, a number of modifications were requested by the military, which resulted in the development of the Stoner 63A – most significantly a change to right-hand feeding for the belt fed models, to eliminate the problem of ejected casings bouncing back into the feed port and causing malfunctions.
We have a preliminary official manuals for the Rifle, LMG, and MMG configurations of the Stoner 63/63A, as well as a sales brochure for the weapons system, a Cadillac-Gage report on the design changes from the 63 to 63A variant, and a maintenance annex to the testing reports on the 63. These are available here, as well as on the Original Manuals page in the Vault.
Stoner 63 System sales brochure (English)
Stoner 63A rifle manual (English)
Stoner 63A LMG manual (English)
Stoner 63 MMG manual (English)
Annex to Service and Troop Tests, Stoner 63 System (English)
Cadillac-Gage Engineering Change Report for Stoner 63A (English)
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Thanks for this collections of manuals !!! I was waiting for this post and it’s great!
Today we talk a lot about a modular firearm to replace AR15 platform guns… Just look at this gun. This is the most modular weapon system I’ve ever seen !!! It’s simply genius ! I like Stoner 63 system !
It appears that the 63A Rifle manual and the Annex are both damaged files. Otherwise, this is an excellent post!
Sorry guys – I fixed the two files, so they should work now.
Wow,
Thanks for this incredible weapon information,
I been waiting for it too long but no info available elsewhere…
I had repaired those 2 pdf files,Annex have a better graphics manual than other one black and white color..
i wish someone will upload Franchi LF57 smg manual anytime sooner..
interesting that the 63a has a side folding stock instead of the later underfolding one…
It is finally here! info about the Stoner 63. Thanks guys. I was wishing for info on how to change to the different types of the Stoner, but this is awesome enough for me to understand now.
thank you for this post excellent information
couldn’t find it anywhere else
Thank you for uploading the manuals. The Stoner 63A is one of the finest weapons ever designed and my favorite belt fed to shoot.
I worked with Gene Stoner at Cadillac Gage Company while the Stoner 63 system was being developed. As someone commented, the system was able to do many different things with very little adapting. One variant that I designed was a backpack to hold the ammunition belts that were used on the helicopter fixed weapons. Each belt held 300 rounds of ammunition and was wound in a spiral. It was designed so the crew could remove the Stoner and ammunition belts to be used if the copter was disabled. It enabled a small crew to carry a lot of firepower if they were shot down.
There were many interesting projects during Stoner’s time at Cadillac Gage. Once, they mounted a weapon in a vice to film the firing mechanism in action. It was aimed a thick armor plate to deflect the rounds down into a bucket containing two feet of sand. When we finished, we found that every shot after being deflected 90 degrees had gone through the sand and the bottom of the bucket. They were buried in the concrete that it was sitting on.