Original A1 Profile 1/7 twist question

Having a discussion with someone on a local forum who served in Vietnam. He claims that his 1970 issued A1 was 1/7 twist. He claims that was the twist rate for the A1 profile until the A2 came out in 1/9. I explained that he was mistaken but he seems convinced. He claims that he has US Military production 1/9 twist barrels in his possession. I'm sure these are just some pre-ban Colts.

I do recall seeing a photo of an A1 profile FN barrel marked 1/7, but my understanding was that that was a late 70's or early 80's barrel and quite rare.

I can find no source to back up his A1 claim. Everything I have ever seen was 1/12 twist, excluding very early 1/14 barrels. What am I missing?

He is mistaken

A lot of Viet Nam vets still think you can interchange 7.62x39 with 7.62x51 also.................................

They must have had some really good weed in country.

Active military I've talked to usually don't care about the minutia of their rifles. I wouldn't expect anyone to remember any or every detail after 40+ years.

I have one of the original Colt LW 1/7 20" barrels but from my understanding they are very rare and were never used on US Military weapons.

ETA: I was told that the barrels were part of a special run of A1's built for export. I can't remember what country, maybe the Philippines or Taiwan but I could be way off base.

Yep. Some guys you talk to are real surprised that anyone obsesses about stuff like "what did your rifle look like?"

I can start a spit-slobbering insane heated argument/fight in 1 minute with a cohort here who is absolutely certain he used M16's in VN made by Mattel. You CANNOT convince him otherwise.

all of our guns were 20 MM and had 6 barrels when I was there in 1969.
Trying to be lots of help.LOL

I thought Phantoms only had missiles?

There's a well known MACV-SOG Vet that
claimed on a forum that the XM148 grenade
launcher was developed and manufactured
"in-Country" aka Vietnam.

The folks at Colt Labs would laugh as much
as myself when reading that...

Though the Veterans do deserve our respect,
some are definitely not reliable sources of info.


The bigger the blow-hard, the faster my bullshit detector goes off.

F4 C&D's carried a SUE 16 or 23 gun pod usually on the center line pylon with no sight just bore sighted on the nose and the F4E had the gun in the nose with a real sighting system..

Thanks guys. While I respect his service and try to thread lightly. I also don't like misinformation to be put on a public forum as fact.

His last post.
I can show you the FN military contract 1 in 9 barrels, the 1 in 7 I left back in the service but we did have them

To be honest i would love to see these. I think I'm going to tell him so, as I'm interested in any odd ball AR stuff.

Ah - the later models then. I'm not up on it, just what my friend Harry has told me - he was in country (well, in the Gulf of Tonkin) with VF96 in '64 just before the balloon really went up. He had a family and had served his time, so took the early out to make his wife happy. He was an RIO - still sharp as a tack. He was on Jeapordy once - the guy is a walking encyclopedia. Sorry if I got OT.

Didn't they have the 20mm vulcan on some of them too?

Sorry. Obsessive weapons talk with a vet.

I have two good buddies who served in 68 and 69 in Vietnam. One was in the thick of the bad stuff. One was in more of a support role and did not have much combat engagement from what he told me. Both are fuzzy on the details of their rifles. Both were Army. Both remember that their rifles did not have forward assists. This is a surprise to me as I thought the Army had forward assists by then. However, they are both pretty quick to admit that they do not remember all the specifics of their weapons. None of them carried carbines, although they saw them. I guess everyone has different recollections. But I have shown both of them my various retro clones. They usually say something like, yeah, that looks about right, but that is about it. When I ask them specifically about the forward assist, both say they didn't remember those. They don't remember things like the type of flash hiders or partial fences and the like. The one buddy of mine who was in the bad stuff said his favorite gun was the grease gun. He liked his m14, and didn't really care for the m16. He said it was just good for spraying bullets. Interesting stuff.

I had an A1 FN barrel. I picked it up near Ft. Bragg. I don't remember the twist rate. I put it on a retro rifle for my girlfriend's dad. I'll take a peek next time I go over to his house.

Yes that is the gun I was talking about the G. E. M61A1 vukcan

Your friend would be Navy then. Navy (and Marines) used the F-4B, N, J, and S models, none of which mounted a gun.


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The Navy did have it's own gun pod that, as far as I've read, was never used air to air and only very rarely for air to ground.

Twin barreled Mk 11 gun in a Mk 4 Mod 0 pod. 4,200 rounds per minute, 750 rounds of ammo.

Most of the pictures I've found of the Mk 4 Mod 0 gun pod show it on an A-4, but the F-4B, N, J and S were rated for it on the centerline station.

Odd you mention no sight for the F-4D, that was supposed to be a defining difference between the C and D variations.

No GUN sight sorry it did have bomb sighting system which as you say was the big difference between C & D.

F4ENUT who's AFSC was 4344 at that time F4 Maintenance Officer head full of useless information about F4's.

I also know a vn vet who will not take no for an answer on this. its always "dammit i was there, you werent, and i saw the mattel logo on there with my own 2 eyes, so stfu". highly respected guy with lots of credibility. i am amazed at how this urban legend (or jungle legend lol) can be so entrenched.

It is not just old vets who perpetuate the "Mattel M16 myth". Just a few weeks ago I heard one of my E7's telling a new group of soldiers how his A1 he shot in basic was made by Mattel. I offered him $100 if he could prove it. Haven't had to pay him yet.

I don't recall ever seeing a gun pod mounted on a J or S in my limited experience.

I understand that the F-4C & D did have a little reticle projected onto the glass, so it's not like the pilot was completely without aiming devices, but it was a far cry from a correct gun sight of the era. It didn't have anything that could be used for estimating target range, it did not automatically calculate lead, was of a horrible shape for use against maneuvering targets...Essentially it was just a little aiming mark, WW2 era gun-sights were more advanced.

The F-4B, G, N, J, and S could carry a gun-pod, including the SUU-16 or SUU-23, and the Mk.4. The Navy for some reason never used either of the SUU pods, and the Marines didn't use gun pods pods when operating from carriers. However, some USMC squadrons which flew from land bases did carry the SUU gun pods on their aircraft.

I don't know much about the Mk.4 pod. I knew a guy who was a USN F-4B RIO, and did two tours in Vietnam. He told me that the Mk.4 was, as far as he knew, deployed on the order of something like two pods per ship. He told me that the pods were very rare, and the F-4 crews all regretted that the pods existed at all. Apparently they were known to jam more often than not, took up space that could otherwise be used for extra fuel or bombs, and hampered aircraft performance.

A little Phantom trivia: Two separate versions of F-4 have carried the "F-4G" designation. The first F-4Gs were 12 aircraft converted in 1965 with a two-way data link in place of one of the fuel cells. Along with some other equipment already on the aircraft and one of the radars on board the carrier, the F-4G could be landed by remote control. Some of the F-4Gs also tested a camouflage scheme consisting of a solid OD green color over all of the aircraft's upper surfaces. The jets were converted back to F-4B standard in 1966.

That sounds like the joke about how many Vietnam Vets it takes to change a light bulb.

Answer: "F*ck you man, you weren't there, you don't know what it was like."

A lot of Viet Nam vets still think you can interchange 7.62x39 with 7.62x51 also.................................

They must have had some really good weed in country.

Think my HS history teacher had some too. They were even teaching that crap back in the mid 70's. Wish the gooks had tried to fire some good ole .308 out of their AK-47's. Might have saved a few lives. Don't know about today but they weren't very good with teaching anything about VN back then. When they finally figured out it was really all about exports it was off to the Suez canal and there we remain. Didn't even need to have a neighbor in the CIA to figure that one out. Kinda like AIDS in Africa. Yep it's a man made virus! Believe it. Pretty hard to screw a monkey but pretty easy for a baboon to screw a human without a weapon. Heck good ole Unka Samuel spends in excess of $500 million annually observing monkeys screwing.

There were actually some military barrels in 1:9 and 1:8 that were made for the M16A2 development program. Test items though none were "issued" for regular use, and most all to my recollection were done in the original midweight profile instead of the later A2 profile.

IIRC there were some fast twist barrels made in the Vietnam era for testing of that Canadian heavy bullet ammo.

Faulty memory, probably. Apart from the original Project Agile/SAWS 601s (416 guns), all Army rifles came with the forward assist (about 2.3 million of them). The Army insisted on it from the very first production contract in 1964, although the Army rifles were called/marked XM16E1 until the type classification was official some time in, IIRC, 1966 or early 67. However, most soldiers in Vietnam got next to no training on the M16A1. SF, the 1t Cavalry, the 82nd and 173rd Airborne were the only units that trained their men on the rifle as of 1968. The rest of them just issued the guns and let Joe figure it out –– and that was the combat arms guys. The USMC also provided minimal training on the M16A1.

Later, they added tapping the forward assist to all kinds of drills as if it were some kind of magical incantation. Not in the sixties or seventies, though. You just whacked it if your bolt carrier didn't close. My bolt never failed to close in 30 years, but I saw people cause that malfunction by riding the charging handle forward. The M16 will not fire with the bolt carrier out of battery, so your first clue you have done this is when the trigger doesn't do anything when you reef on it.

I expect that there would be variations for testing or export, that's why I asked. But he claims the A2 is 1/9 and the A1 1/7. Not some, not a few, all of them.

Well the A2 was supposed to be 1:9; but they noticed that tracer thing in the cold...

My postman is former Army 11th Air Assault, later became a cop in L.A. and was on a SWAT team. He is VERY familiar with the AR platform and bought my 604 because he was issued a slickside in '65. It surprised me too, but he was adamant about this point. Not a faulty memory at all. He carried a grease gun as a door gunner, but sounds like he was issued either a 602 or 604. I always understood that the Army's insistance on the FA was due to the problems they encountered with the first rifles mainly because of powder, but I'd have to recheck DeWatter's 5.56 timeline again. I think a guy as well trained as my friend, who has owned a number of Class III weapons in the past, Former SWAT, knows what a FA is. When the 11th Air Assault became the 101st he saw the new guys carrying 603's, but he was issued a slickside.

That is interesting Morg. My one friend who was there for two tours (including Tet 68') told me also that his good gear was always being picked off by the officers. He thinks they were sending a lot of stuff back home. Maybe they were taking the 603s and distributing out the older 602s or had some kind of access to the 604s and deemed them to be inferior rifles due to lack of a FA.

My buddy has been a grunt all of his life. He said the only good gear he ever had in VN was a pair of boots he traded off some Aussies for. That guy just flat out took whatever came his way and dealt with it. Got drafted out of high school, two tours in VN, then a street cop, then a construction guy. Again though, my buddy wouldn't swear that he never had a FA equipped rifle, that was just his recollection. But I do wonder if there is a lot more to the story of who got what and why.

Well, there were a lot of Pogues walking around with Tiger Stripe cammies and XM177's according to some books I've read. The one was just series of interviews with vets and was a real eye opener. I found it interesting how many mentioned that most of the Tiger Stripes they saw were worn by REMFs or ARVN, with a good number of them being officers. The one guy was a LRRP and it really pissed him off because they needed them and couldn't get them. I must have read 2 dozen books on Vietnam when I was doing research years ago. I'd like to go back and reread a lot of them. The only thing I've read recently were some LRRP accounts.

Another guy I know was AF security about the same time - they wore ERDL camo, went through Ranger school and took over the job from the Army of defending the airbases. They didn't just walk around the perimeter, they actively patrolled, according to him. They had slicksides too, which didn't surprise me - who knows if they were 602's or 604's, but he also mentioned that the only ones you saw carrying carbines were officers, and according to him, they didn't get out in the field much.

Ex-marine friend guarded missle silos in the early 70's with an issued slickside (not sure if 602 or 604 as his memory is fading on the actual differences and except in retroland they are actually pretty minute). He finally became a DI and is the person who showed me how to do the shell deflector trick many many years ago both being left handed shooters and made me aware of potentially hot flying brass long before I actually got my first taste.

I believe I've been told that a few different barrel twist rates were tested over time and I've also heard the 1-9 twist A-2 tracer story. I actually remember when the marines got their first A-2's (1-7) in the early 80's. I'd ride to Quantico most every weekend and pick up a couple recon buddies for a little off base excitement and they were actually pretty excited about the rifle changes. Both those guys were known for their ability to shoot very well but I believe their issue A-1's were pretty worn out at this time so anything would have probably been an improvement.

Ex- Colt employee I know swears he has a 1-14 twist 606 Hbar trials upper that I've yet to see but it's supposed to come my way when eventually cut loose. Says it's stamped 1-14 on barrel and wasn't ever offered for sale and supposedly he sold over 500K M-16's for export and saw most everything they produced from early 60's into the 70's.. I have personally seen his 65-67 sales catalogs but they don't get handled much and he's pretty nervous when he breaks them out. Lots of CAR-15 and LMG ads and options. If memory serves there were around 20 different flavors and very few changes from year to year in the catalogs except the colors used. I've seen yellow and white, red and white and blue and white all with B&W photos. These catalogs were used for selling rifles and carbines abroad and I remember the belt feed was in there.

I was not even issued a weapon the year is was over there but I do know that the ten I signed for when I was O.D. were 604"s and did not have a FA but I was in the Air Force. The 20 F4E fighters that I was the Maintenance Officer for were well armed when they flew

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