Patrick Sweeney - Gunsmithing - The AR-15

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2009937518

ISBN-13: 978-1-4402-0899-7
ISBN-10: 1-4402-0899-9
eISBN: 978-1-4402-0899-7

Designed by Kara Grundman
Edited by Dan Shideler

Printed in the Unites States of America

DEDICATION

F irst and foremost, and as always, to Felicia. I know I gush over her to the point that some believe her to be mythical, but shes real. And she is a far better writer than I am. She can craft prose to make you weep and laugh, think and rant. Me, Im just happy if you the reader get a good chuckle now and then, and clear instructions from me on how to do stuff.

However, for this volume I also want to thank those who stand guard: the police officers who work crazy shifts, in bad precincts, who help people and do not get up in front of a camera and puff themselves up. A lot more of those officers are now using the AR than in years past. Also, I want to thank those men and women who are in faraway places, putting themselves at risk so the risk does not come here. There is a well-known line, often attributed to George Orwell, that cover them: We sleep safe in our beds at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence upon those who would do us harm. While no one has been able to prove he actually said or wrote it, it does neatly capture those men and women.

Thank you, all of you.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T his book is a compendium of the tricks and information Ive gathered in over 25 years of shooting and wrenching on AR-15s. It is also built from the lesson plans of the classes Jeff Chudwin, Ned Christiansen and I (along with a large cast of assisting law-enforcement instructors) have collected in over 15 years of teaching patrol rifle classes for the North East Multi-Regional Training Authority.

The luxury or working with such knowledgable users is invaluable. Besides the differing points of view and backgrounds, Jeff and Ned have experience in areas I have not. As a Chief of Police, Jeff lives daily with the experiences and issues of supervising people under arms. Police officers on duty do things to firearms (and cars, computers, etc.) that would make you cry.

Ned, in addition to being a top-notch 1911 smith, and rightfully nicknamed the Master of Metal, is an NRA classified High Power shooter. He has fired over the course many times, and he has learned things from that that I would not know, not having done it. But in talking to him, I gained info.

In the course of ferreting out information, I talked to and pummeled with questions many of the AR manufacturers. Mark Malkowski of Stag was a veritable font of information and provided me with much technical info. Dave Beatty of Sun Devil manufacturing provided me with primo gear, as did Mark LaRue, Dave Dunlap of PRI, Dave Manson, and Bill Filbert of Wolf Ammunition. The luxury of working with the whole crew at DPMS, who were exemplary in their efforts to find info and products and let me shoot unusual ARs.

Mark Westrom and the folks at Armalite actually let me pore over their manufacturing facility, watch and photograph everything, and pose questions that at times may have seemed more existential than practical. And then, knowing who I was and what I was like, the crew at DS Arms did the very same thing, letting me take up a whole day and then some.

Id also like to thank my customers at the gun shop back in the 1980s, for bringing in their broken and home-assembled ARs. Were it not for their enthusiasm at experimentation and exuberance (and over-estimation) of their own skills and knowledge, I would not have begun this particular path of inquiry. The second group comprise all the fellow AR competitors whose experiences, experimentation and performance greatly enhanced my knowledge base. There is no lesson so inexpensive (and hard to actually learn) as the experience of others. Their experiments, excesses, successes and failures all informed my R&D.

Last, but far from least, is Brownells. Their AR-builder software lets you select all the goodies you want, see what the finished rifle would look like, and then simply hit order to have it all on the way. Well, that, and to see if your credit card can take the heat. Spontaneous combustion of plastic is not an unknown phenomenon in Montezuma, Iowa.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

T he AR-15/M-16 has been the service rifle of our armed forces for over 45 years. As a record, it is surpassed by only a few firearms: the 1911, for one, from 1911 to 1985; the M2HB, or .50 machinegun, from 1919 to the present. (I cant help but point out both were designed by John Moses Browning.) In most of that time, it has been hounded with a reputation of inaccuracy, unreliability, and lack of power. Well, the power thing may or may not be true, depending on just what your threshold of enough power may be. While the reports of skinnies taking multiple hits in Somalia is one source (and I am not prepared to argue the veracity of those reports) for the most part the lack of power in many instances is exaggerated but one made partially true because of the military selection of the M-855 green tip bullet, which most of us are not stuck with.

Here, instead of history (although youll get a good dollop of that) we are going to study just the selection and assembly of the rifle itself. Why selection? Because simply bolting on parts isnt enough. You have to know which ones, why and which ones, why not.

I learned the AR-15 on my own. I had lost some 3-gun matches while shooting .30 caliber rifles in the prehistoric days of IPSC, and I decided losing sucked. One I lost while using my match-conditioned Garand. It was the old-format Light Rifle Pop and Flop, from the Second Chance shoot. You had to run downrange and set 15 pins on their stands, then run back, load and shoot. Fastest time won. dropped 15 pins with 16 shots, and came in third. The winner used a Universal Carbine (gack) with a telescoping wire paratrooper stock (double-gack) a cheap scope in a side mount (triple-gack) and two 30-round magazines in a jungle clip. He shot so much he reloaded and still trounced my time. So, I acquired an AR, learned how they worked (I was a gunsmith then) and started building, adding to my collection, and modifying them. Until the AR was up and running, I lost a few club matches, getting my butt handed to me by people not using a manly rifle.