some new ideas to upgrade an AR-15 upper, advice or better ideas?

[jason41987]

hey everyone.. ive been looking at some of the new generation rifles, been looking at what they bring to the table, what they offer, and well, the AR-15 is close, very close, so i was just wondering if its at all possible to improve it, or atleast change it for various reasons

one idea i started with was a side charging model... ive seen these before, such as the magpul OPS-4 and other similar modifications, but ive determined all i need is a forward assist-less upper and a stripped carrier that hasnt been machined for forward assist, both of these are easy to find... so i can machine the upper for the side charging handle, and with the charging handle i would no longer need the forward assist device or charging handle...

advantage of this would be less moving parts, fewer parts in general, and greater simplicity, and i guess it would even be possible to have a charging handle slot on the left side, so the charging handle could be pulled out and switched to the other side....

so then i got to thinking what the side effects of this would be, what would be left in the rifle... well, there would be a big gap in the rear of the receiver previously occupied by the head of the former charging handle, and a rather large gap above the carrier itself that allows the key to pass through the receiver and out the back for field stripping

what can i do with this extra space?.. well i thought about machining a lip in the area that the charging handle head used to be in to fit a block that can be easily removed by pressing in a button and popping it out... reason i was thinking this is i though.. someone could chop off the back end of the bolt carrier behind the firing pin, and machine a new key that could fit a new recoil spring and telescoping guide rod assembly that would fit into the rifle where the old charging handle was...

so, to field strip, open the receiver, press the detent to pop out the back of the recoil spring assembly, then the spring assembly and carrier fall right out, really it would be exactly the same as before, and still allow the use of any direct impinged, or gas piston system to still be used...

which got me thinking more.. is there an easier way than messing with the nearly flush fitting pins that hold the receivers rear together?.. for this i thought of machining a groove in the rear hole for the pin, so the hole would be keyhole shaped, and install a cammed button so one could simply press the button and pop the rear open... another idea was to use the captive pin setup the sig 556 uses

with all of this, my final idea would be to make an adapter, to fit a newer generation style adjustable, telescoping, and folding stock like used on the SCAR, ACR, etc

at this point, any gas piston system could be used, should someone decide to use one, or just keep the direct impinged system instead... im not exactly sure how having the recoil spring directly behind the key that pressure is applied to for cycling the action will work, or how bolt tilt will effect it, or rear its head in this case, so id like to make a prototype upper and see how it goes...

other ideas i havent really worked on working out just yet is the possibility of adding a quick-change barrel option... since the AR-15 barrel is pretty quick and easy to install without tools, perhaps some kind of third party barrel nut you could install over the threads that would offer some mechanism to lock a barrel in place without tools, like how the ACR operates.. i dont think that would be very difficult to machine...

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so, what do you guys think of these ideas? do you have any of your own? im interested in discussing these or other ideas as i would be quite interested to hear anyone whos had similar ideas

 

[jason41987]

haha.... wow, i just did some further research and just learned a company already does exactly what i said it does with the recoil spring... they cut the bolt carrier just behind the firing pin, and installed a recoil spring behind the key that, of which is held by a lip to where the charging handle used to be.. EXACTLY like i just described...

that rifles the rock river arms PDS... by cutting down the carrier, moving the recoil spring they managed to make it buffer tubeless allowing them to install a folding stock, with that they did install a short stroke piston with the charging handle on the forearm, but obviously, one could run a side charging handle setup with this too allowing any gas system or forearm to be used...

im not really suprised to see someone already did this though.. but im glad they did because it just completely validated my idea and at this point i have absolutely no doubt in my mind i couldnt modify a pre-existing stripped carrier and forward assistless upper receiver to do exactly what i had imagined...

also, apparently with testing of the PDS rifle, there is in fact no bolt tilt since you dont have the piston pressing on the top and the spring pressing on the bottom, since its all inline theres no tilt.... so im going to go ahead with this build....

ive also seen some aftermarket devices for quick barrel changing using standard AR-15 barrels, so with the modifications stated and the aftermarket available, theres no reason i can make an AR-15 do whatever it is i decide i want it to do, or become whatever i feel like shooting... that being said, quick change barrels almost never hold zero with the sights, so its a gimmick thats fun on paper, but in reality if youre changing to a long range barrel, youre probably going to want long range optics as well, and youre not going to want to mess around with zeroing your sights... best to buy a handfull of cheap stripped uppers if i wanted different configurations