The very first AR15 rifles submitted to US government trials were extremely light rights, with an assortment of interesting features that did not last long. They had top-mounted charging handles, one-piece hand guards, very thin barrels with plain muzzles, and a different safety selector configuration than became normal later one. Updates and modifications were made to virtually all of the original rifles, but today we have a chance to look at serial number 6 in the Springfield Armory collection – which is still in completely original configuration.
Thanks to the Springfield Armory National Historic Site for giving me access to this truly unique specimen from their reference collection to film for you! Don’t miss the chance to visit the museum there if you have a day free in Springfield, Massachusetts:
https://www.nps.gov/spar/index.htm
“Light rights” = “light rifles”? Someone needs a copy editor ….
Arma Light was a division of Armalite dealing in development of state of the art illumination solutions. :-))
Got a couple pics of SN 000007. Ian, you might see this in March.
Interestingly, the Forward Bolt Assist was added by Colt, not Armalite.
It was the result of complaints from not the U.S. forces, but foreign forces, specifically ARVN, about ammunition from Lake City Arsenal, which at the time was sole source for 5.56mm supplied under MAP.
The problem wasn’t the later ball powder mess, it was case dimensions. Going back to WW2 (LCA opened in 1940), LC-made cartridge cases had always trended near the upper limits of allowable dimensions, in every caliber they made.
This could cause hangups in initial feed, i.e. when you yanked back the bolt on a Browning MG or etc., but wasn’t enough to impede ram feed under power.
On the M1 Garand or Carbine, such a hangup, generally about 1/8″ short of bolt close-and-lock, could be remedied by shoving forward on the bolt-retraction handle. My uncles who dealt with this in WW2 and Korea said that a swift kick from a combat boot was even better, especially in winter.
But on the M16, there was really nothing to “shove” on. What was needed was something to apply pressure to the bolt to get it forward that last 1/8″ or so.
Then one engineer at Colt thought about the bumper jack in the trunk of his car. A rod with a ratchet, worked by a lever.
Yes. The Forward Bolt Assist is basically a scaled-down Ford Motor Company bumper jack.
It first appeared on the export model Colt 603 in late 1963. Yes, five years before it showed up on the M16A1 in U.S. service. And U.S. Forces struggled on with the poor QC of Lake City M193 Ball all that time, without the simple “fixes” of either the FBA on the rifle, or somebody doing the sensible thing and firing everybody in QC at Lake City.
But of course Lake City Arsenal was an Ordnance facility. And you know how Ord reacts to “customer feedback”. (“We’re right, you’re just too stupid to do it correctly.”)
I never have used the FBA on the rifle. But then again, I’ve never used LC made 5.56mm M193 Ball, either.
Taking the advice of a couple of NG ex-USAF Ordie sergeants I knew, I’ve always stuck to commercial Remington or Winchester-made .223 55-grain or 70-grain JSP or JHP. And never had a minute’s trouble.
Moral; Read the manufacturer’s manual, not Ord’s.
clear ether
eon
Ordnance is the best argument for eliminating all the branch structure in the Army that I ever heard.
They were engaged in sabotaging the entire M16 project from the beginning, because “Not Invented Here”, and because they didn’t want a competing system against their vaunted “Special Purpose Individual Weapon”. Which never worked, and likely never will.
Stoner warned them about a whole bunch of issues with the entire program, but they didn’t listen, claiming that the M16 was “Off The Shelf”, and thus did not require a full fielding effort.
Which blew up in their faces when they started screwing around with things they simply did not understand. Which ain’t exactly a surprise from the organization that brought us the M60 and the M14.
What’s amazing to observe is how much inadvertent or “vertent” sabotage has gone on throughout the M16 program. The -A2? WTF was that? Nobody came out of Vietnam saying anything like “Yeah, the M16 is perfect, just make it a little longer, a little heavier, and then put on a overly-complex rear sight nobody will ever have time to actually use, in combat…”
Meanwhile, ignoring the very real issues of weight, length, and utter lack of night sights that didn’t get addressed until the M4 carbine came on the scene along with all the post-GWOT sight and laser goodies that SOCOM pioneered. Through, I might point out, Crane, not the Army Ordnance “system”.
According to Osprey Weapons 14- The M16 Rifle by Gordon L. Rottman;
https://epdf.pub/the-m16.html
The “sabotage” wasn’t accidental and it wasn’t because Ord didn’t understand how the Armalite worked. It was deliberate, patterned, and intended to destroy any chance of CONARC/ SALVO’s “upstart” rifle being approved for even limited service over Ord’s pet M14.
When an Ordnance “expert” replaces the front sight of a rifle with an oversized steel rod, banging it into place with a hammer, and then forces a pair of similarly oversized rods into the rifle’s aluminum alloy receiver in place of its retainer pins, cracking the receiver, and finishes up by liberally greasing everything in Arctic conditions, you have to conclude that as Larry Correia would say, f**kery is afoot. And that was just in the Alaska trials. What they did elsewhere was even more blatant.
Ordnance deliberately and “with malice aforethought” sabotaged the Armalite from start to finish. It only survived because Armalite’s team were faster on their feet fixing what Ordnance deliberately f**ked up.
Pretty much everything Ordnance did in those trials met the minimum standard for indictment for a crime in front of a Federal Grand Jury. Imagine if Ord had done that to the M1 Garand in 1936 or the M1 Carbine in 1940. And yes, those were similar situations, as both weapons were “outside developments”, which Ord originally didn’t want. (“Give a stupid infantryman a self-loading rifle? Are you insane?”)
Army Ordnance is one of the biggest SLICCs in the War Department. It should have been paid off before Fort Sumter.
clear ether
eon
There was an idea floated in 1896 for a .20 and a .22 diameter bullet loaded cartridge on a rimmed case for use in the Krag-Jorgensen rifle. No development seems to have occurred beyond manufacturing barrels and bullets for the .22 version. Bullet weights were listed at 112, 118 and 120 grains, fast twist and roughly 2600 feet per second. Probably not practical with the powders available in that time frame,but most likley killed by old ashioned ordinance officers who did not like the change to .30-40 Krag.
General Julian Hatcher mentions that in Hatcher’s Notebook. He didn’t think much of the idea for the following reasons;
1. A SCHV load like that, very similar to the later .220 Swift, would have generated considerably higher velocities, closer to 3,800 F/S, especially with bullet weights under 120 grains. (The 112 grain sounds especially hairy to me.)
2. It would also have generated average pressures in the general range of the .220 Swift, something Hatcher was not willing to risk in a Krag bolt action. (Even in the actually pretty strong Lee straight-pull it would be dicey.)
3. Considering the problems of bore erosion and etc. with the 6mm Lee Navy (which was the case .220 Swift was based on two decades later), you could expect the same sort of problems with something like this, only more so.
Myself, I would also expect that with the Krag’s weak, single-locking-lug bolt design, there would be serious risk of catastrophic breech failure in an overpressure event. It might have been “doable” in the strong Mauser 1898 or the even tougher Arisaka Type 99 action, but in the Krag it would have been an accident waiting to happen, a lot like the Canadian Ross.
Any way you look at it, it’s something that they were probably smart not to try.
Hatcher never had a high opinion of the Ordnance “establishment”, BTW.
clear ether
eon
It would be interesting to somehow “run the experiment” with that idea, SCHV during the pre-WWI era, and see what would have happened.
My suspicion is that the metallurgy and precision repeatable mass production just wasn’t in a state that could manage that. Something like the 5.56X45 might have been feasible in a hunting rifle, but as a mass-issue item for general military use? I don’t think they could have managed it.
People are constantly underestimating the difficulty of this sort of thing, and simultaneously giving way too much credit to the actual existing industrial base of that era. Remember, this is the same timeframe that saw them screwing up heat treatment on entire production runs of the M1903 Springfield.
As an experiment, sure… They could have done it. Repeatable mass production? I have doubts.
The biggest problem that they had wasn’t really the technology: It was the conceptual understanding of where war had gone, and what was going on in combat. They didn’t need things like the full-size .30-06 or the 7.92X57; they needed weapons and cartridges that were light, handy, and capable just out to about 400m at most, coupled with lightweight portable machineguns that could be infiltrated and maneuvered around the battlefield, along with mortars, grenades, and means of launching said grenades.
The handwriting was on the wall about this set of facts very early on; if you’d been paying attention, you’d have seen it during the Russo-Japanese War and in the various Balkan wars that were going on. Nobody paid attention…
Kinda like today, where any thinking man can look at Ukraine, and see “drones” as the coming thing, while the upper echelons of the military just keep whistling past the graveyard… Literally.
“(…)SCHV during the pre-WWI era(…)”
There were attempts at launching small-diameter bullets at high velocity
https://guns.fandom.com/wiki/5.2%C3%9768mm_Rubin launched .208 bullet of 90 grains at 2900 fps (that was fast by 1890s standards), used in Mondragón M1894 rifle
https://www.cartridgecollector.net/cartridge/5-x-57-sturtevant/ used 5 mm 85 grain bullet, I do not know muzzle velocity or rifle model
“(…)Something like the 5.56X45 might have been feasible in a hunting rifle(…)”
If you disregard case type (rimless vs rimmed) then in 1910s you could attain similar performance using 5.6x52R cartridge https://www.chuckhawks.com/5-6x52r.htm and barrel of enough length.
Norma factory load uses a 71 grain soft point bullet at a muzzle velocity (MV) of 2789 fps with muzzle energy (ME) of 1227 ft. lbs.
Didn’t the Navy try a SCHV solution with the 6 mm Lee?
I think propellant technology was the dominating problem at the time. The 760 m/s for a 6 mm bullet simply is very far from “HV”. Other countries (Germany down to 5.45 mm) experienced the same problems.
Real SCHV experiments with rifle ammunition only began between the two World Wars.
Look in Cartridges of the World by Frank C. Barnes, 6th Edition or earlier, under “Wildcat and Proprietary Cartridges” and “European Sporting Cartridges”.
You’ll find that virtually every ultra-high-velocity (over 800 M/S) small-bore (under 6.5mm) cartridge was concocted between 1920 and 1938.
The reasons were that first of all, new, much more powerful propellant powders became available as a result of intensive research during the “Great War” to field improved propellants that didn’t deteriorate in extreme climate conditions, and also didn’t foul the action of the reigning weapon of the war, the heavy machine gun.
Second, again as a result of the war, there had been a concerted move toward rimless, relatively straight-walled rifle cartridges, replacing the rimmed, heavily-tapered cases of the first generation of smokeless-powder rounds such as 8 x 50Rmm Lebel or 7.62 x 54Rmm Mosin. These newer cartridge designs stood up to higher breech pressures better than the older ones.
Third, research into gun steel alloys had resulted in much stronger material for breeches and barrels.
And finally, there were just a Hell of a lot of surplus bolt-action rifles, mainly Mauser types, lying around that custom gunsmiths and cartridge developers could pick up literally for pennies on the dollar. (Or pfennigs on the Deutschmark or whatever.)
Put it all together and it was an experimenter’s paradise.
The .220 Swift, first developed around 1921, was typical. 6mm Lee Navy (6 x 60SRmm) necked down to .223in, new improved powder, and after early barrels showed excessive leade’ erosion some of the first stainless-steel barrels ever marketed.
You could argue that .220 Swift was the King of the Wildcats, because (1) it was one of the first, (2) it became a standard caliber, (3) it’s still around today, over a century later, and (4) it was the very definition of the SCHV concept; pushing 5.6mm bullets to over 1,200 M/S.
In short, the technology had caught up with the dream. And oh yes, there were people, mainly private citizens, willing to shell out money for that sort of cartridge performance in rifles and etc.
It was (gasp) Capitalism in Action!
The interesting thing is, virtually all the R&D was purely private enterprise. Armies were still all-in on 7.62mm at 800 M/S or so. Maybe it was cutbacks in military spending after “The War To End All Wars”, but I suspect it was mainly Ordnance Departments in full-on “Not Invented Here” mode.
As could be seen first with .276s in Britain and the U.S., then .280 in Britain, 7mm Liviano elsewhere, and finally 5.56 x 45mm pretty much everywhere, Army Ordnance Departments (especially the American version) had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the SCHV era like a two-year-old who doesn’t want to leave the circus.
As the old saying goes, “Expert” is defined as someone capable of coming to the wrong conclusion with total confidence.
clear ether
eon
There’s a reason that SCHV was a “cutting edge” idea during the 1950s. Because, it really was.
Again, the real issue isn’t whether or not you can do something, the question is can you do it at scale. You could probably take a time machine back to, oh… Say, 1780. There, you could find yourself an artisan skilled in gunsmithing, and the two of you could likely churn out a few rifles embodying all the modern innovations.
The problem would come in when you tried to mass-produce them and their ammo. Which is exactly what killed things like the Ferguson rifles and the Austrian air guns: You couldn’t do precision at scale, back in those days. Not on things with those tolerances…
You have to remember that the first people to build steam engines were ecstatic if they had as much as a shilling’s thickness of play in between cylinders and pistons; if you were to show Boulton or Watt the inner workings of even a bog-standard Detroit V-8, they’d likely have lost their minds at it all, and when you told them that the Big Three were going to build literally millions of those engines?
At this moment in time, you’re sitting on top of a tech tree whose roots go back to Ug with is horn antler knapping a piece of flint into something useful. Don’t make the mistake of under-estimating or over-estimating what it takes to do things at any point along the way since…
@ Kirk;
A couple of Eric Flint & Co.’s Grantville novels went into that.
First of all, they adopted a flintlocked version of the Pattern 1853 Enfield .577 as the standard rifle for their new army, because while Lennart Torstennson and his engineers couldn’t make machinery for making, say, an M1903 A1 Springfield or the ammunition for it, making a .58 rifle-musket with an actual flintlock as opposed to a smoothbore musket with a matchlock was less of a “step up” than making a wheel-lock cavalry pistol or carbine, which they were already familiar with.
Later, once they’d figured out that they didn’t actually need mercury fulminate for percussion caps (Hint; during the American Civil War, the CSA used potassium perchlorate and antimony sulfate instead), percussion single action revolvers, apparently Remington Model 1863 New Model types in .44 caliber, replaced the wheel-locks with the cavalry.
In a later book, their “mission to Moscow” resulted in high Russian nobility getting Mosin-Nagant M1981s in 7.62x54Rmm, all carefully hand-crafted by the same kind of artisans who made the Faberge’ eggs. Complete with hand-made rounds of ammunition, with cartridge cases cast from brass via the “lost wax” process and lovingly hand-finished. One at a time.
Note to time travelers; given sufficient incentive (no, not the headsman glowering at them), artisans from about da Vinci’s time on through the mid-18th Century can probably make almost any basic mid-19th to mid-20th Century small arm. By hand, and one at a time. Although at best, they’ll be working to sixteenths of an inch “precision”.
In fact, this is pretty much how everything from Webley revolver copies to SMLEs have been made in the Darra Adam Khel gun manufactories for the last century and a half.
Tell them what you want and agree on a price, and they’ll get it done. By hand. In a couple of days.
An automatic cannon will take them about a week.
cheers
eon
“(…)virtually all the R&D was purely private enterprise. Armies were still all-in on 7.62mm at 800 M/S or so. Maybe it was cutbacks in military spending after “The War To End All Wars”, but I suspect it was mainly Ordnance Departments in full-on “Not Invented Here” mode.(…)”
Do as you wish, but keep in mind military users were prone to Rule 77 saying The use of bullets which expand or flatten easily in the human body is prohibited.