I just read the following article in wired magazine :
Someone made a comment that I've seen repeated many places elsewhere that, based upon my limited understanding of rifles, is completely and utterly wrong.
The statement is " The reason American companies don’t “come up with this design” is because it is inherently inaccurate. Cleaning a rifle that is more accurate instead of building it with sloppy tolerances is a fair trade off. "
The key issue is : as far as I know, reliability for a rifle is completely unrelated to the ammunition handling components of the weapon. However the rifle works, you need to get a round into the chamber reliably each firing cycle, and when the user has the trigger down and the safety is off then the round needs to be struck with enough force to detonate the primer.
It is completely and utterly obvious that a weapon that keeps the dirty propellant gas out of the moving parts is a superior design to one that uses it directly. Furthermore, a weapon designed to continue working even if there's dirt in the feeding mechanism is also superior. End of debate. In general, the best feeding design is one that only fails extremely rarely, even with poor maintenance and dirty ammo, and is cheap to manufacture. I'm sure with modern tools a mechanical engineer could create a design for a rifle feed mechanism that is even more reliable than the AK-47.
Now, ACCURACY is related to the quality of the barrel, the quality of the sighting mechanism, and the way the rifle handles recoil. It's entirely possible to build a rifle with sloppy tolerances in the feed mechanism that keeps firing no matter what and to give that same rifle a match grade barrel and a high end optic sight. That weapon would be as accurate as a rifle with a tight tolerance feed mechanism requiring pristine, clean ammo in a HEPA filtered room to continue firing, with cleanings every 100 rounds.
The reason the M16 has a terrible feed mechanism is due to politics and institutional problems with the military. For a number of reasons, this bad design has been in use for 50 years. It does work if the soldiers clean it, and aren't operating in an environment with too much of the wrong kind of dirt, and don't get in prolonged firefights where they fire enough rounds to foul the weapon. It doesn't mean that the design of the feed mechanism is any good.
Yes, I have used the rifles in question. I found that with live ammo it jammed on me every couple hundred rounds, and with blanks it would start jamming in about 3 magazines unless you took out the bolt and sprayed it down with CLP. I found that the stock AK-47 has bad sights, but this is easily fixed, and it needs a better recoil spring.
Someone made a comment that I've seen repeated many places elsewhere that, based upon my limited understanding of rifles, is completely and utterly wrong.
The statement is " The reason American companies don’t “come up with this design” is because it is inherently inaccurate. Cleaning a rifle that is more accurate instead of building it with sloppy tolerances is a fair trade off. "
The key issue is : as far as I know, reliability for a rifle is completely unrelated to the ammunition handling components of the weapon. However the rifle works, you need to get a round into the chamber reliably each firing cycle, and when the user has the trigger down and the safety is off then the round needs to be struck with enough force to detonate the primer.
It is completely and utterly obvious that a weapon that keeps the dirty propellant gas out of the moving parts is a superior design to one that uses it directly. Furthermore, a weapon designed to continue working even if there's dirt in the feeding mechanism is also superior. End of debate. In general, the best feeding design is one that only fails extremely rarely, even with poor maintenance and dirty ammo, and is cheap to manufacture. I'm sure with modern tools a mechanical engineer could create a design for a rifle feed mechanism that is even more reliable than the AK-47.
Now, ACCURACY is related to the quality of the barrel, the quality of the sighting mechanism, and the way the rifle handles recoil. It's entirely possible to build a rifle with sloppy tolerances in the feed mechanism that keeps firing no matter what and to give that same rifle a match grade barrel and a high end optic sight. That weapon would be as accurate as a rifle with a tight tolerance feed mechanism requiring pristine, clean ammo in a HEPA filtered room to continue firing, with cleanings every 100 rounds.
The reason the M16 has a terrible feed mechanism is due to politics and institutional problems with the military. For a number of reasons, this bad design has been in use for 50 years. It does work if the soldiers clean it, and aren't operating in an environment with too much of the wrong kind of dirt, and don't get in prolonged firefights where they fire enough rounds to foul the weapon. It doesn't mean that the design of the feed mechanism is any good.
Yes, I have used the rifles in question. I found that with live ammo it jammed on me every couple hundred rounds, and with blanks it would start jamming in about 3 magazines unless you took out the bolt and sprayed it down with CLP. I found that the stock AK-47 has bad sights, but this is easily fixed, and it needs a better recoil spring.