Real Guns

[Zenith]

a6m5, lube the gun! All semi-autos need lube!

Your malfunction sounds like a failure to feed. There's probably too much drag and not enough force somewhere in the system. As Michael stated, steel cased has more friction against the mag, but your gun should be able to cycle those.

Could you tell me a bit more about the malfunction? Was this occurring halfway through the magazine or on the first round being chambered? Did this occur with all magazines or just certain ones? Did it occur more often with fully loaded magazines?

Possible reasons are not enough lube in the right places, ridiculous amounts of dirt, bad magazines, weak action spring. I don't think fixing this issue will be expensive.

 

[Omnis]

Check the canooter valve.

 

[a6m5]

I think it's the lube, and to a degree, debris, and to a microscopic degree, steel casings. It is a failure to feed, it is the first bullet, and I can see the bullet struggling to work up to chamber.

 

[Michael88]

Lack of lube can cause a truckload of problems, especially FTF's and a slow bolt with weak extraction. Metal on metal can create tons (Yes, TONS!) of friction (think of cylinders in an engine running without oil) especially in a gun that hasn't fired a ton of ammo yet, maybe it needs some breaking in.
Throw in dry powder residue and you've got a gun that jams a lot.

I can't tell you how often I meet people on the range who are new to the sport and don't want under any circumstances lube their guns because its ''messy'' only to shoot a gun that jams a lot or milsurp bolt guns that need to be operated with a 2x4.
Guns are like any other mechanical device made of metal parts, they need oil if you want them to work properly.

There is also some basic stuff you can do to improve bolt travel and thus feeding + extracting, what I always do to improve a gun is polishing the feed ramp, even TINY hardly visible burs can cause major feeding problems, the feed ramps need to be butter smooth. I use some chrome polish and a piece of cloth (jeans cloth works great) to make the ramps shiny.

Polishing the surface of the hammer and removing small burs also improves the bolt travel quite a bit, the bolt needs less power to cock it so it has more power left to extract the case. Its also a good idea to make the firing pin as smooth as possible, this improves ignition and decreases ignition time which makes the gun more accurate and more reliable (if you load ammo with hard primers).
You can also greatly improve bolt travel if you shorten / heat up the firing pin and/or hammer springs, but thats really stuff for the pro's. If you screw up the primers wont ignite.

Don't forget the bolt itself, but don't go crazy on it, you don't want to remove to much material unless you want a loose bolt. Polish the edges and the areas where it contacts the receiver.

Things that shouldn't be polished - unless you're an experienced gunsmith- is the bearing surfaces of the locking lugs - remove a little too much material and you're going to get excessive headspace in no time at all - and the bolt carrier groove that locks and unlocks the bolt by turning it.
Mess with it and it wont lock properly.
Trigger group can also be rather tricky, better stay away from it unless you really know what you're doing. Polishing the wrong parts and/or removing too much metal can lead to various mechanical safety issues.

I improved all of my guns that way and its crazy what removing some burs and polishing a few metal parts does, in most cases bolt travel improved at least by felt 50% when compared to the gun out of the box.

 

[a6m5]

Damn, Michael. I've been so lazy with this gun, but I think your motivational input worked. Don't they make AK that looks like a AR? Just kidding, I will get to work on my gun. After my hands heel though. I cut up my hand when I fell today.

Thanks guys!

 

[Michael88]

You mean the SIG rifles? Yeah, they're like super high quality accurate AK's, but wow, they're expensive.

I cut up my hand when I fell today.

I wanted to suggest you to simply put some ''omni gel'' on your wound and you're like new again, but then I realized I wasn't playing Mass Effect 3. Whoops. Mixing up my realities here.

 

[a6m5]

You mean the SIG rifles? Yeah, they're like super high quality accurate AK's, but wow, they're expensive.

I was kidding man. AK-surefire reliability with the looks of AR. It won't be very accurate either, but my rifle isn't even properly sighted in yet.

I wanted to suggest you to simply put some ''omni gel'' on your wound and you're like new again, but then I realized I wasn't playing Mass Effect 3. Whoops. Mixing up my realities here.

I wish! Neosporin's all I have, and it is all over my hands!

 

[Michael88]

Obamas plan to stop gun violence.

http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2013/01/politics/obama-gun-control-plan/index.html

Oh, this is going to be fun.

 

[a6m5]

Obamas plan to stop gun violence.

http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2013/01/politics/obama-gun-control-plan/index.html

Oh, this is going to be fun.

He is a politician after all. Nobody believes that Obama's action will prevent gun violence. It's all a political game. Even if NRA was rendered powerless and Obama administration got their way, crazies will still be crazies, criminals will still have their guns.

Personally, I think it's number of social issues contributing to gun crimes, but just looking at how criminals are treated by the court, prisons, you can tell that the politicians aren't really concerned about it. Makes me sick.

 

[Omnis]

WTF. Not even 5 pages into the document and I spot a flat-out lie.

Seung-Hui Cho did not use high capacity magazines to kill people at VT. He used 10-round mags, but had multiple, multiple magazines. Limiting mags to 10 rounds is stupid and pointless, but god forbid that stand in the way of Obama and the agenda.

Stupid Obama administration ruining the Gotham HTF typeface with all these lying bullcrap publications.

 

[a6m5]

It also said something along the lines of one-third of police departments having reported increase in "assault weapons" after the ban was lifted.

Duh. Major failure of the assault weapons was that it didn't slow any criminals down. It's like banning sports cars to stop street racing, but everybody just turned to riced Civics & Maximas to keep on racing on the streets. Ban gets lifted, Z-cars & Corvettes are seen street racing again. "Oh look, one-third increase in sports cars street racing. Dahhh....".

Edit: I received the bumper stickers from the GOA you brought up the other day. I've been handing them out at work, and they like it a lot.

All I got left.

 

[David]

.

 

[a6m5]

Oh, god, I don't have the guts to put something like that on my car either. People already hate me on the road as it is. Other than one guy who joked about putting one on his mom's hybrid Civic(she's church going & like 80 years old lol), we are all putting the sticker in the shop, toolbox, etc.

Sucks about your mispackaged Magpul sight. If you go back few pages to where I bought my Bushmaster MOE 308, you'll see that mine was missing the rear flipsight, front grip, and instead, it contained risers for the scope.

I hope you get the situation on the two sights resolved soon.

 

[Joel]

WTF. Not even 5 pages into the document and I spot a flat-out lie.

Seung-Hui Cho did not use high capacity magazines to kill people at VT. He used 10-round mags, but had multiple, multiple magazines. Limiting mags to 10 rounds is stupid and pointless, but god forbid that stand in the way of Obama and the agenda.

Stupid Obama administration ruining the Gotham HTF typeface with all these lying bullcrap publications.

Didn't one of his handguns have a 15 round mag? Still doesn't change the fact that it's absurd to use Virginia Tech to justify a ban on "assault rifles".

 

[David]

.

 

[a6m5]

It's pretty cool actually. Amazon is already sending the replacement even without receiving the bad one yet so I'll probably have the rear sight by tomorrow or saturday. We'll see about the holo sight from the other seller though.

I remember reading about when you got your gun. That was definitely weird haha, but it seems like the gun shops have no idea what they are getting from distributors sometimes, so who knows what really happened. Might have been that they sent the wrong gun, or might have just been listed as something it wasn't in the first place. Nice that they sorted it out without much hassle though.

Yeah, I think what happened was Bushmaster mispackaged it. I ended up calling them, and they sent me the stuff that were missing, let me keep the risers.

 

[David]

.

 

[Omnis]

I wish the PPQ came with a decocker. What do you guys think of that new PPQ M2 and the PPX? They went with American-style button releases for the two of them.

 

[Zenith]

The PPX looks too much like a friggin Hi-Point. I don't know much about the PPQ M2. If it comes with an American style magazine release I think that I'd prefer it over the standard PPQ.

Edit: Larry Vickers seems smitten with the PPQ. He says it has the best out of the box trigger of any striker fired pistol around. My interest is growing.

 

[Brett]

I wish the PPQ came with a decocker. What do you guys think of that new PPQ M2 and the PPX? They went with American-style button releases for the two of them.

You don't really need a decocker on a striker fired pistol. However if you do really want a pistol with a decocker, then you could look into the Walther P99. If you were to go the P99 route, then I would look into the P99 AS. The single action pull is supposed to be similar to the PPQ.

I am not at all interested in the PPQ M2. The paddle magazine release was a big selling point when I bought my PPQ. Now if Walther offered a 5" PPQ with a paddle release, then I would be interested. Or if Walther offered a PPQ Compact, then I would be interested.

Not sure what to think of the PPX. While the pistol appears to be on the ugly side, I am not going to judge the pistol until I see and hold one in my hands.

Edit: Larry Vickers seems smitten with the PPQ. He says it has the best out of the box trigger of any striker fired pistol around. My interest is growing.

And Larry Vickers is right. The trigger is fantastic.

 

[Omnis]

I hope that AK-107 is still coming.

 

[popcorn]

That is an awesome stock! It isn't exactly cost-effective though, with ammo prices through the roofand all right now.

 

[Michael88]

Oh man, I totally screwed up (literally).
I wanted to install new scope bases (warne bases) but first I had to remove the old clunky one-piece picatinny rail. Sounds easy, right?

WRONG.

The rail was fixed to the rifle via 4 tiny allen screws (nothing unusual here), and I think they were SUPER-GLUED into the rifle by the moronic idiot gunsmith who sold me the rifle - guess what happened? I tried to remove them and just one turn with the allen wrench was enough to completely ruin the fragile screw head. And that didn't just happen on one screw, oh no no, it happened on TWO screws, totally ruined and stuck!
Making a notch into the head of the screws to remove them with a larger blade style screw driver only resulted in two broken screw heads. Awesome.

I spent 6 hours removing a part of the rail piece by piece with a small metal saw paying a crazy amount of attention not to cut through the base right into the rifle. 5 hours later one screw was ''freed'' so I could heat it with a flame to burn the glue and grab and remove it with pliers.
But nooo, that would have been too easy, just one turn with the pliers and the screw didn't have any threads left and what was left of the head crumbled to pieces, it was too smooth to grab it with....anything.
A few desperate blows with the hammer on the stuck screw -which was little more than a small metal pin sticking out of the rifle by that time- didn't loosen it either.

Fortunately I know a very talented gunsmith who fixed the problem in 45 minutes, he heated up the rifle for a few minutes and used special tools to remove those blasted evil little screws, he also removed the rest of the rail with a small saw and re-cut the threads to get rid of any glue residue.
He made me look like an incompetent fool.

Lessons learned. Always assume that scope base screws are glued-on, if they don't turn stop and go to a gunsmith right away, do not mess with stuck screws,you can only make things worse.

Now I scream like a little girl whenever I see small screws.

But enough of my ranting, now for something cool:

 

[a6m5]

Cool vids. 👍

Sorry to hear about the nightmare screws, Micheal. I can see somebody using thread lock on something like that, but glue would be totally unexpected to me. I wonder how often that happens.

 

[Zenith]

a6,

If the gun is failing to feed on the first round then there's too much friction between the magazine and the round. Some other fixes besides the ones Michael suggested are...

-Don't load the magazine to full capacity. In the case of 20 rounders, try loading it to 18 when you run steel cased ammo.

-Buy a stronger spring and/or a heavier buffer. These will increase the amount of force that is shoving the round into place. A good rule of thumb is to run the heaviest buffer your gun can cycle reliably.

-Polish and clean surfaces on the gun like Michael suggested. Reduce the friction resisting the motion.

 

[a6m5]

-Buy a stronger spring and/or a heavier buffer. These will increase the amount of force that is shoving the round into place. A good rule of thumb is to run the heaviest buffer your gun can cycle reliably.

Which spring, the buffer spring? Also, when you say heavier buffer, do you mean something like this?

I'm gonna try cleaning & actually lubing the frigging gun first( ), but with the rifle being a AR, I'd be up for any upgrade that would help increase its reliability.

Thanks for your help!

 

[Zenith]

Of course. Always try the free fixes first You should be able to check if the fix worked at home, since first round clambering seems to be your problem.

So I've been hearing that some AR manufacturers are sending out lowers to their customers who ordered complete rifles. The idea being that if the company waits for all the parts and time to be available to actually build the gun, some crazy legislation could pass like we've seen in NY. You get the lower now and once they're ready they ask you to use the return stamp, assemble the rest of the gun, then give it back to you. Smart move.

 

[a6m5]

Smart move, but I think it's also indicative of the growing divide in this country. I'll just say that it's sad that they are having to resort to that, and leave it at that.

 

[Michael88]

 

[Omnis]

Anyone know anything about this lower?

Is that a good option to get in on an AR before a gun ban happens?