AR Upper/Lower Receiver play.

It just seems like common sense to me that you want your upper and lower receiver squeeze together not pushed apart.

Okay first of all the zip ties are not squeezing it apart, zip ties are squeezing it together. The rifle now has zero vertical slop, zero lateral slop, and no fore and aft slop, its Jam uptight. It only had the tiniest bit before the zip ties. If there is any stretch to the zip ties during recoil which is doubtful since the recoil is pushing to the rear against the buffer and not up and down, then there is certainly less play with zip ties applied than with nothing. Filling upper receiver Tang hole with silicone in mold release seems like a good idea until it all goobers apart inside your receiver like an Accu wedge. As far as requiring extra tools in the field what in God's name are you doing in the field with a rifle and no knife? As far as any tensioning device via a set screw again that pushes it apart and Missaligns the bolt with the buffer tube as do all the other methods except zip ties. Perhaps I exaggerated the cost of the zip ties at $0.25 a piece actually they were more like a nickel apiece. now if you have access to a mill with a hard table that can hold one thousands of an inch tolerance, then perhaps you can run a bolt up through the lower into the upper and draw it together, however I have found the zip ties much more economical than buying a Bridgeport. I have 80 rounds of Underwood 300 grain 458 solid brass ammo through the rifle now without one failure to feed failure to extract failure to fire Etc. To each his own I prefer my firearms to have a solid feel without inducing unnecessary undesigned gaps. The $200 worth of ammo I have so far fired has yet to loosen the $0.20 zip ties, nor do I feel in any way burdened carrying a single edge razor blade inside my Hollow grip handle storage compartment along with a couple spare zip ties. I am hoping to get another hundred and twenty rounds a 458 Socom through it, before I have to break down and spend another $0.20 on zip ties. One more thing the rear takedown pin now has no perceived tension on it since the zip ties are bearing the load by mating the two surfaces tightly together as they are supposed to be and are backed up by the takedown pin without producing any wear on the pin or the receiver. The aforementioned slop was due only to the play between the takedown pin and the hole in the tang in the upper receiver. The forward zip tie also eliminated any play in the pivot pin area. As far as it making it ugly,AR-15 is an ugly rifle anyway. Buy yourself a ghillie suit and one for your rifle too and you'll never notice it's homelyness. Anytime your weapon is out of your direct line of sight, be sure to check the chamber and bore are clear before loading. Bugs like holes.

I am developing special Kevlar zip ties that will not stretch with backwards-facing tritium inserts so the enemy will only be able to see me and shoot me in the butt and that way I can carry a micrometer with me and keep a close check on the tolerance between the tritium inserts.hehehe

With the profusion of polymer and plastic parts on guns these days I just can't imagine why anybody is objecting to the use of zip ties in fact I think the use of plastic started on AR-15 for the most part

If a high speed video of a 458 with a 16 inch barrel was my concern, I would be most upset by the wave shaped Barrel whip at the end of the barrel, which must certainly resonate throughout the whole Rifle right out to the butt plate. I do not care what it looks like I care what it performs like and what it feels like and where it hits on target. My three different LMTs are all tight from the factory, and are extremely accurate and feel great and cycle very smoothly. I do not feel sending them back to the factory and having them put play in between the receivers would benefit anything. Yes I am aware that the tolerances in there are milspec for interchangeability in the field. When my tensioned Kevlar straps are ready to go on I won't have to worry about how far the zip ties May stretch. As I said at the beginning of this thread I never had the honor and privilege to serve in the military, so have not ever been in combat and will never be, hence interchangeability in the field is a non sequitur to me. At age 65 and having been a ASE Master Certified Auto and light truck technician for over 25 years I saw plenty of changes in that industry, all involving metals and Plastics and motion, not too much wood, sad to say. Come on guys I'm just trying to think outside the box isn't that what Eugene Stoner did? I know enough about physics motion and mechanics that if somehow you were out in the middle of the jungle and your AR-15 or AR-10 was missing both the pivot pin and the takedown pin, somehow you would find the right Vines Roots sticks Twigs fibers etc, ,(maybe get lucky and find an old board with a couple nails still in it), something to put it together and it will fire at least one time, if upper and lower are machined precisely enough that's all you would need to hold the two halves together and still have an accurate rifle. The pins are more for locating. If the pins are deemed to have the entire job of holding the rifle together rather than the structure design, it is doomed to eventual wear and failure in the pin holes.... Ask any V8 you happen to see that has slung a rod.

By the way Sir, the hardstop between the upper and lower receiver is them contacting each other as much as possible. Imho pins and zip ties just seal the deal. 5 years on the Mississippi River push boats and barges taught me that whether you are taking a soft line or a steel cable, tension them hard enough around two loaded 1200 ton grain barges and it will be an extremely tight, hard, strong connection, yet be a more flexible connection than solid piece mechanical, which could by the way crack. You could crack the steel Hulls on two barges without ever breaking the cables that connected them, if they landed too fast or too hard. Conversely any slack left in the connection would allow momentum to build up and break the cables and / or crack the hull. Think of the upper and lower receivers as the hulls, the pivot and takedown pins as the deck fixtures to locate, and zip ties as the steel cables.. heavy loads are best dealt with by accurate design structures that bear against each other properly. I have seen so many AR where the lines and dimensions do not match up precisely. With all the talk from guys who know a lot more about this than me ie.how Barrel harmonics on piston systems can affect accuracy, I just feel a tight rifle is a right rifle. Also I just like to stir you guys up because it usually means I get to learn something new

OMG your analogy to my analogies are so bizarre and yes yours are voodoo. Yes when one 1200 ton barge bumps into a fleet of moored 35 1200 ton barges, it is like hitting an iceberg, especially since you always approach them from Downstream. Obviously you have zero Marine experience and what do catamarans have to do with this. The zip ties That Bind the receivers together tightly at the point when recoil begins, when the bolt starts back into the buffer is all that is necessary because by that time the bullet has exited the barrel. And yes the current plastic zip-ties may give a little but just like soft lines on a barge they will return to their shape immediately after the peak Force drops almost instantaneously. Did you really have to go to school to learn how to build an AR15? Oh by the way did you know that engineers are the ones that mechanics cuss out everyday having to work on the stupid stuff they design just so it'll break down sooner. I think you Engineers call it planned obsolescence. I guess your school could not afford good feeler gauges calipers and micrometers, otherwise you would realize that before I could stick .004 to .006 inch feeler gauge between the receivers, now I cannot get a .001 gauge in there. You do not backup your arguments with any facts or figures, only slurs about Voodoo and brain feelings. So you can either continue to push the receivers apart I don't know what good that does, or put up with the rattle between them, maybe the rattle helps your brain feelings. If I had to go into any gun store and get rid of all the AR-15s in tens that had Play Between the upper and lower receivers and put them in the scrap pile I would undoubtedly wipe out at least 90% of their inventory. We all know the players in there for interchangeability milspec reasons is not what you'll find out of any rifles coming out of Quantico. The zip ties are merely an inexpensive solution to cure an irritating problem. Until you can back up your positions with some actual facts figures measurements Etc, rather than talking about Voodoo and brain feelings and all your formal education degrees I'm not going to waste my time responding to any more of your posts. Actually I wish the moderator would close this thread at this time cuz I have nothing more to say about it. Good thing you were not in charge of the Apollo 13 rescue crew on the ground, I can tell you do not like zip ties and duct tape. As I mentioned before I am an ASE Master Certified auto technician of over 25 years. I also spent five years as a CNC machinist with both Mills and lathes. When I started at the machine shop I solved a problem the engineers could not figure out but had created themselves. Oh What a wicked web we weave when at first we try to deceive. Five of them lost their job within a month because of me, sounds like you all went to the same engineering schools. I think Engineers were better when they used to work on paper, it's too easy for you guys to screw things up on monitors, especially when you're playing mrs. Pacman half the time instead of doing your job. I'm a Hands-On guy I live in the real world, I solve problems that Engineers create for their own job security

Oh by the way when I remove my lug nuts and drive out the studs I attach the wheels with Elmer's Glue they only come off in the rain but I only drive in good weather except for the 10 years I spent in an 80000 pound vehicle doing 65 and 70 miles an hour over all kinds of Roads terrain weather. I have an excellent concept of what (F=MA)force equals mass times acceleration means. My brain FEELS it. I'm just still trying to figure out how you're designing solutions for Solutions I thought the solution was the solution. I think you can help us more if you design solutions for problems, please make them cheap I'm old and poor now, you know like zip ties.

All I know is I reduced the static gap between my upper and lower receiver from .006 to less than .001 it does not rattle anymore it shoots great and it feels great in my hands not my brain, so you are totally wrong in that is does not benefit the rifle in any way.

What time I recovered a big four wheel drive out of the woods it had big fat tires on it. It could not be towed all the flats even though the road was mostly sand because it kept wanting to track to the side that had the flat tire in hit trees, so I jammed about 25 to 30 pieces of Tire string into the cut on the side wall it was able to air it up enough to get it to a repair shop. That was a real-world solution by use of something kind of like a zip tie, in fact in the dark they look just alike you can tell the difference because the tire string is sticky and the zip ties are slick.

MistWolf said:

Putting anything in your receiver where it can foul your trigger group with pieces when it falls apart is anything BUT a neat idea. Before doing anything else, insert and loaded magazine into your rifle and see how much slop it removes.

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Zip ties go on the outside of the receiver not the inside and yes sir I am aware that a fully loaded magazine inserted putting pressure on the bottom of the bolt does take out some of the slop, however the Magazine spring will give more and provides less resistance to eliminating the rattle than the zip ties do. I don't like my gun to Rattle with the magazines empty or even does not have one in it.