On The AR Platform

Andrew from Vuurwapen Blog posted this on Facebook last night and I thought it warranted a re-post here. He was talking to a friend who is an actual rocket scientist on the AR platform, and his friend said the following:

I think people forget that the AR platform is a 50-year-old design, it has been through all the testing to arrive at the configuration it is at. This includes material selection, tolerancing, quality assurance provisions (which would include nondestructive testing, inspection procedures). Because of that, people have become accustomed to the gun being relatively reliable save for some stories that invariably revolve around using the gun for what it was not designed, or that it was improperly maintained.

When someone starts from scratch in an attempt to build that gun, really just assemble a design, they can make it exactly the same from a visual standpoint. However, they do not have the testing procedures, the rationale behind the tolerances and the material selection, etc. sometimes, they cut corners or they think they are doing something better. I remember someone wanting to make an upper and lower out of inconel, and I couldn’t understand why. Heavy, expensive, just a crappy choice to make a lower and upper out of.

It reminds me of when a foreign country attempts to launch a satellite or some other rocket, and it fails on the pad or fails in midflight. We laugh and sneer at them. Everyone seems to forget that we’ve been doing it for 50 years, but it is still rocket science. It still requires all the knowledge for how to make the things, select the materials, put the property and quality assurance provisions in place.

I guess I’m saying that we’ve become so accustomed to things working that we forget where they came from and all the work it took to get them to the point where they regularly work reliably. And the scammers try to jump on the bandwagon thinking they can skip to the front of the line and make some quick dough off of the stupid people who don’t know any better.

And then you test and show that it’s just not there on a rifle that I am sure costs more than a Colt 6920 or even a 6940.