Post by wolffpack on Nov 2, 2016 12:36:52 GMT -5
Sorry guys, a little insecure here. Have people turning me head around on things.
A while back, I decided that with us importing terrorists into the country, and seeing how well that is working for a disarmed Europe, I decided to go ahead and buy a military-grade rifle. I thought I dud my research well enough, and chose an AR-15. A friend of mine builds them, and I asked him to help me build it, and I specified that I wanted maximum reliability over all else. He spec'ed out parts and I think I got a whole lot out of building my own rifle. It's proven its reliability pretty well. My standard was to shoot 9 magazines of Wolf out of it with no failures (that is the maximum number of magazines I foresee ever carrying with it.) and it did so.
Reasons I picked it were:
1.) Familiarity with the design. Granted, I shot mostly with the A2, and this is built as an A4, but other than ease of optics mounting and having a rail, they are identical.
2.) Others familiarity. This, coupled with a Glock is standard fare for police and security (and increasingly military as they transition to the G19), on duty or off. Hope is that upon quick sighting, they'll recognize "good guy" gear, and keep me from being instantly shot, in a Planet of the Apes Scenario.
3.) I'm not in a war zone. If I get into the proverbial "bad spot" others around the place that are not the enemy are friends and neighbors, and I want the shots to go where they need to. "Fliers" are not acceptable.
4.) Meat grinder. The 5.56 will f**k you up. I hear a lot about the 5.45 "poison bullet", but I don't want poison, poison is slow, I want the "Meat Axe". As horrifying as the Meat Axe is on flesh, it won't go through the block and brick outer walls that are predominant here, thus again protecting those friends and neighbors. Also accurate enough to thread through a window at a hostile.
This all sounded good. But now that I have the AR and have shot a few two-gun matches with it and took a carbine course, I get inundated by naysayers that it is a POS just waiting to fail on me. The Ak can be run over by a bus, eat pounds of dirt, and keep going. The bulelts will scream through bricks and cement blocks and tear up cars, etc (speaking of the AK47/7.62x39).
It doesn't require much maintenance beyond pissing in the receiver and pouring in used motor oil.
But I was looking at them. I see consistent problems with the squared off section of the back of the Tapco G2 hammer causing short-stroking. You either have to take the chance of screwing up the trigger group by grinding and polishing, or replace it with a different trigger group. To be able to forward mount a weapon light, you need either a barrel clamp or buy a rail set. Mounting optics to the rear means a replacement top cover, side, rail, etc. Add it all up, and either buying one wi th that stuff on it, or putting it on, and you're right up to the AR price.
Ammunition is certainly cheaper, unless the worst happens politically, and imports are banned. Then it's high-dollar domestic production.
The "reliability tests I kind of wonder about, too. I mean if my rifle gets run over by a bus, I probably have bigger problems to handle at the moment. Pounds of dirt? When would I be firing with te receiver open and someone pouring in dirt? Wile it's not the same, I did trip and eat shit running the AR, landed on top of it, dust cover (open) in the dirt. Just picked myself up, dustcover down, and smacked the opposite side of the rifle a couple of times to dislodge anything big, and went back to firing. She didn't miss a stroke.
I just don't see a lot of the "problems" cropping up in what I intend to do. I don't live in the desert, so don't have sandstorms to contend with. I don't see me surviving long enough in a firefight with only a few other guys to actually get the weapon dirty enough to fail. The biggest problems seem to be centered around using the rifle in a military context, where extended operations are the rule, not so much on partisan operations, where if you are duking it out with an enemy, you screwed up.
So, I'm wondering if I made a big mistake going with the AR over the AK, and why I wasn't warned about it beforehand when these guys knew I was in the market.
A while back, I decided that with us importing terrorists into the country, and seeing how well that is working for a disarmed Europe, I decided to go ahead and buy a military-grade rifle. I thought I dud my research well enough, and chose an AR-15. A friend of mine builds them, and I asked him to help me build it, and I specified that I wanted maximum reliability over all else. He spec'ed out parts and I think I got a whole lot out of building my own rifle. It's proven its reliability pretty well. My standard was to shoot 9 magazines of Wolf out of it with no failures (that is the maximum number of magazines I foresee ever carrying with it.) and it did so.
Reasons I picked it were:
1.) Familiarity with the design. Granted, I shot mostly with the A2, and this is built as an A4, but other than ease of optics mounting and having a rail, they are identical.
2.) Others familiarity. This, coupled with a Glock is standard fare for police and security (and increasingly military as they transition to the G19), on duty or off. Hope is that upon quick sighting, they'll recognize "good guy" gear, and keep me from being instantly shot, in a Planet of the Apes Scenario.
3.) I'm not in a war zone. If I get into the proverbial "bad spot" others around the place that are not the enemy are friends and neighbors, and I want the shots to go where they need to. "Fliers" are not acceptable.
4.) Meat grinder. The 5.56 will f**k you up. I hear a lot about the 5.45 "poison bullet", but I don't want poison, poison is slow, I want the "Meat Axe". As horrifying as the Meat Axe is on flesh, it won't go through the block and brick outer walls that are predominant here, thus again protecting those friends and neighbors. Also accurate enough to thread through a window at a hostile.
This all sounded good. But now that I have the AR and have shot a few two-gun matches with it and took a carbine course, I get inundated by naysayers that it is a POS just waiting to fail on me. The Ak can be run over by a bus, eat pounds of dirt, and keep going. The bulelts will scream through bricks and cement blocks and tear up cars, etc (speaking of the AK47/7.62x39).
It doesn't require much maintenance beyond pissing in the receiver and pouring in used motor oil.
But I was looking at them. I see consistent problems with the squared off section of the back of the Tapco G2 hammer causing short-stroking. You either have to take the chance of screwing up the trigger group by grinding and polishing, or replace it with a different trigger group. To be able to forward mount a weapon light, you need either a barrel clamp or buy a rail set. Mounting optics to the rear means a replacement top cover, side, rail, etc. Add it all up, and either buying one wi th that stuff on it, or putting it on, and you're right up to the AR price.
Ammunition is certainly cheaper, unless the worst happens politically, and imports are banned. Then it's high-dollar domestic production.
The "reliability tests I kind of wonder about, too. I mean if my rifle gets run over by a bus, I probably have bigger problems to handle at the moment. Pounds of dirt? When would I be firing with te receiver open and someone pouring in dirt? Wile it's not the same, I did trip and eat shit running the AR, landed on top of it, dust cover (open) in the dirt. Just picked myself up, dustcover down, and smacked the opposite side of the rifle a couple of times to dislodge anything big, and went back to firing. She didn't miss a stroke.
I just don't see a lot of the "problems" cropping up in what I intend to do. I don't live in the desert, so don't have sandstorms to contend with. I don't see me surviving long enough in a firefight with only a few other guys to actually get the weapon dirty enough to fail. The biggest problems seem to be centered around using the rifle in a military context, where extended operations are the rule, not so much on partisan operations, where if you are duking it out with an enemy, you screwed up.
So, I'm wondering if I made a big mistake going with the AR over the AK, and why I wasn't warned about it beforehand when these guys knew I was in the market.