I've been in the place where they designed and manufactured M1s and M14s.

It has some advantages that might be getting lost here.

There was a lot of parts commonality and since there were barrels of hammers, sears, triggers, rear sights, trigger guards, safeties, etc., Hell, there are leftover forgings today from the M1 production that never got finished because they were never needed.

Much of the tooling was the same and didn't need to be replaced.

Also, the work force didn't need to be retrained.  The manufacturing process was very similar.

Until the mid-1960s, small arms manufacturing in the United States was owned by the Springfield National Armory/Ordnance Corps.  It was a government plant.  That doesn't take away from the contracts that were issued to companies like TRW, HRA, Winchester, but of those three, only TRW was a contractor that had not been previously building M1s.  With minor retooling, they were able to use the same process to build M14s.

I mean, even the stock blanks were pretty much the same.

Nobody had CNC mills back then.

Anyway, once you factor the cost of tooling and the cost of retraining, plus, the cost of not being able to reutilize parts from the previous generation of rifles, the math comes out differently, but it is what it is.

Was it the best choice long-term?  Clearly not.

Was it a cheap solution for the Army logistics bean counters after someone raised the factors I've stated?  Obviously.

Thanks!  You're right!  

Those are the only common parts. (Maybe throw in the rear sling swivel.) That's it. You just named all of them.
The trigger guards do not interchange. Neither does the sear/disconnector (redesigned for select-fire).
The elevation wheel was different too, because they switched to meters.

No, it wasn't. Every other part (except the above) was different.

No, there was nothing cheap about it.
"Minor re-tooling" was a lie told by Ordnance to swing adoption in their favor. It was a big deal to change production.

I'm not going to debate the FAL, as it uses a great deal of machining as well, and I assume @ least the upper receiver is forged.  I suspect given the 2 part receiver it's easier to make, but that would be difficult to demonstrate.

Comparing the M-14 to the G3 is straightforward, even given kk7sm's comments above.

The history of 20th Century manufacturing is one of always seeking the less expensive production process - today, most non-structural parts are made of injection-molded plastic.  Before we got to widespread adoption of plastic, stamped sheet metal was where it was at - and still is in many cases, most notably in the automotive industry.

Long before CNC machines, machinists made a good living.  It's a skilled trade, and even today, machine time is expensive.  I dunno how many individual machining steps it takes to make an M-14 receiver, but clearly it takes a bunch.  The G3 uses a modern automotive approach - stamped sheet steel & spot welds.

Why was the M1A1 submachine gun replaced by the M3 Grease Gun?  Not b/c the Thompson lacked performance - it's b/c the receiver was machined out of a solid block of steel, and thus was expensive to make, even during wartime w/ fixed wages.  The Grease Gun was stamped out by General Motors by the thousands b/c a stamping plate, while a high initial investment, is a crapload cheaper than paying machinists for each individual cut on each individual receiver.  Even the Soviets converted the AK back to a stamped receiver as soon as they mastered the technique.

The G3 certainly has machined parts - trunion, bbl, etc, but it has far fewer machining steps than the M-14, and the largest part of the receiver is produced using a much more efficient process.  As kk7sm pointed out, Springfield wasn't set up for stamped steel production techniques, nor were the other two gunmaking vendors.  However, had the US adopted the G3 in some alternate universe, the bidders certainly would have been companies w/ stamped steel experience, just like when GM won the M3 submachine gun contract.

If you're working in steel, if a stamped part will do the job, it's almost always cheaper to use the stamped part rather than a roughly cast or forged and then machined part.  Hence the replacement of several parts on the M1903 in the 2nd WW models - stamped was cheaper than machined.

Now that Ruger - and perhaps the corporate Springfield Armory - have mastered investment casting, precision casting may be less expensive than stamped steel.  Notably, SIG has moved to fully machined unitary slides rather than the two part stamped & cast slides of the original P226 & P228.  But in the 1960's, stamped steel was the answer, and the G3 was designed to take advantage of a less expensive manufacturing technique that was widely known as less expensive than extensive machining.

I had a young armorer once tell me the phosphate coating on the bolt carrier was burnt powder.  Handed me a box of brillo pads, told me to scrub it until it was shiny chrome again.  This was on an M16A2 in 1992  Either he was terminally stupid, or it was "fuck with ROTC cadets Day."

Identifying that problem and analyzing the parts required the invention of a completely new technique, which Springfield would label the Magnetic Analysis Comparator.

Let's not pretend that H&R rifles were made to the same standards of quality as the others. Their rejection rate tells the tale there. They had problems making M1s too.

1.3 million rifles in 6 years? Pathetic. Garand production peaked at 122,001 per month, at an average cost lower than that of the M14. There were congressional hearings about M14 production but you guys want to act like nothing was wrong.

Hahaha. The military has done a very shitty job on teaching weapons maintenance.

I'm curious how many muzzles and crowns have been fucked up by blank adaptors put on too tightly.

What manufacturer didn't have issues manufacturing the M1 at some point, or are you suggesting that everything went just swimmingly and no revisions were made during production from before 1940 until the mid 1950s?

Lol...

Garand production probably peaked at 122,001 a month because it was wartime?  What sense of urgency or National Emergency was the US experiencing during M14 production from 1957-1963?

6,000,000 rifles later and over a decade of production, and the fully developed M1 rifle was cheaper to make than the new M14?  I'm shocked!

H&R rifles that were accepted by ordnance dept inspectors either met QC standards for RAM-D or they didn't.  If they didn't, they were either reworked until they did, or scrapped.  It's that simple.  H&R production managers and engineers didn't just sit around while rejected rifles cost the company profits.  By the time an M14 was issued from the unit armory, the person signing for that weapon wasn't at an operational disadvantage just because his rifle was made by HRA while his peers were issued rifles made by Winchester, TRW, or SA.

Every weapon has its production problems, and always has.  M14 production was like any other platform selected by DoD no matter how dramatic you want to try to make it.  It was like being told Detroit MI (D) M1A1s were better than Lima OH (L) M1A1s during NETT, yet both production lines made a product that worked as well as the other by the time we used them in either combat or peacetime.

The EM2 lost TWO NATO rifle contests.

Bullpups are stupid.

That makes a lot of sense in a nuclear-focused military who thought that small conflicts were over.

It shows a lack of overall maturity that is understandable for a Nation with no enemies on its borders, separated from the world by two massive oceans, but it was still short-sighted and didn't take into account the lessons learned from the Great War and World War II.

The Brits, Belgians, Germans, and Russians came to drastically different conclusions about small arms, and whereas the Soviets were free to pursue their small arms mix, the NATO allies were pulled into the single cartridge 7.62 NATO concept, which proved to be the Achilles heel of NATO small arms development.

Anything will choke in beach sand.  SEALs used M14s for photo ops, not much more.

Outside of all the praise from post-War victory dancing around the Garand, real world experiences with it in the Pacific and ETO showed plenty of malfunctions related to conditions, which comes with the territory when dealing with extreme conditions and mechanical systems.

Surprisingly, the AR15 is one of the most robust systems I've seen in humid and extreme cold (Arctic) climates when shot in volume and subjected to extended duration patrolling in those conditions.  The Garand's exposed bolt is probably one of the worst designs for that, followed by the AK.

Bullshit.

The whole reason Sage developed the EBR stock was because SEAL teams were actively using the M14, wanted it shorter for storage/transport, and wanted to attach more SOPMOD accessories to it.

The only team members who routinely expose their weapons to water are the scout/swimmer pair. It’s very rare that SEALs fire any weapons on/around a beach, despite what the movies show.

I don’t think you know much about SEALs.

Sure. That’s why they improved the gas system in the M14.

Tell us more about your arctic experience with the M14.

I've been looking over my FAL receiver.

From what I can tell, it looks much simpler with far less machine operations compared to the M14 receiver.

The M14 counters that with parts count being almost a 3rd of the FAL, but some of that is using a old era wooden stock vs separate handguards from the buttstock with the FAL.

I also assume that the fact that M14s don't vertical string like FALs would play a significant factor in choosing the M14, even though the type of shooting that illustrates that has almost not practical relevance for a general infantry rifle.

All of these things are solved and improved in the AR10, which is not only a better infantry rifle, but a better platform for a DMR as well.  When you look at the British cartridge development, it would have been an even better infantry rifle and DM platform, especially with the Dutch optics-mounted variant.

The FAL receiver design allows for less stringent manufacturing tolerances in that locking shoulders of various sizes are used to set headspace between the bolt and barrel.  The Commonwealth "inch pattern" SLRs went even further by allowing correct barrel torque by using a washer of various thicknesses between the receiver face and barrel shoulder, instead of direct contact between barrel and receiver.

I'd say the FAL was easier to manufacture, but that's not necessarily a virtue given the better sights and overall better accuracy of the M-14.

Better or worse, I still like either and admire the G3 design as well.  They all have their positives and negatives.

Yes, the decision was already made by Army Ordnance that .276 Pedersen (really a .284 cal/7mm) was the Army's new service rifle cartridge.

That was overridden by MacArthur.

That decision set the chain of events in motion that ultimately laid the foundation for the 7.62 NATO, instead of a high efficiency intermediate cartridge, as opposed to a low efficiency intermediate cartridge like the 7.92x33 Kurz.

The history looks like this to me:

6mm Lee Navy (was ahead of its time, excellent infantry cartridge even by modern standards)
.30-40 Krag
M1 .30 Cal 1906
.276 Pedersen (missed opportunity with lasting effects to this day)
7.62 NATO (overkill, brings all the same problems that were ID'd post-WWI)
5.56 NATO (this was a fluke that by all accounts should never have been possible, but prevailed)

You have to build the gun around the cartridge and magazine. Full power .30 cal means big, heavy, cumbersome, excessive recoil & muzzle blast, and low round count in the basic load.

Take 6mm Lee Navy, .276 Pedersen, and 5.56 NATO, put them in a blender and you'd have a great intermediate cartridge with better hit probability and range than a 7.62 NATO.

you're willing to bet but not to do the research to find out? What is your wager then?

I would agree....It can still take that rd out to distance and drop a Commie if that is what is needed....

A good rifleman can take any off the platforms we are discussing and make them do what they were built for...

My experience with SEALs is limited to:

* Watching them fail at Recon in JRTC by violating basic patrolling techniques, resulting in early compromise during insertion and infiltration phases of their mission (Pretty sure it was DEV.  They used M60E3s as part of their Recon Patrol weapons mix in that circus.)
* Using one of their remote compounds on a certain Army post as a Recce target for our Area Recon training
* Deploying alongside them as part of CJSOTF in PACOM for 28 days.
* Living with them for 14 months in the Special Operations Medical Training Center
* Deploying to areas in CENTCOM adjacent to them, but not part of their TF

Yes, in the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s, they liked to do a lot of photo ops with M14s, including Arctic and Desert recruiting video footage.  I wouldn't look any further into it than that.  Looked cool for advertising, but the only performance advantages would be focused on the 7.62 NATO cartridge and not the M14, which was mostly displaced once they got SR25s.  They were one of the first units to get SRs in the early 1990s.





Notice the backwards Elcan


My arctic experience with the M14 is limited to the summer weeks, where the guns choked after being exposed to beech sand and were cleaned.  The following day from that event, even after detail-cleaning, we still saw malfunctions from magazines that still had some sand in them.

Since the M14's action is so open, even after you clean it, there is a high likelihood that your mags are full of sand, so you need to break them down too.  My large frame AR ran fine after being cleaned of the beech sand during that same period.

My other experiences with the M14 are from Korea on the DMZ, where we had them in our Recon Platoon, brand new National Match rifles that were MTOE&D to be M21s I think, but no optics for them since all the ART scopes had crapped the bed in the 1980s.  Very nice rifles, but no logistics support at the Battalion armorer level at that time in the Army anymore (mid-1990s).  We instituted a DM training program for the Battalion under the impetus from our Recon Platoon Leader running by the Battalion Commander (who just happened to be LTC Milley-now Army CoS).  This was in 1996.

I like the M14, but I would never choose to go outside the wire with one now that I'm older and have been able to look at everything in hindsight, unless that's all that was available where a 7.62 NATO DMR was needed.  When I was younger, even a more experienced E-6, I was a big fan of it and wanted one before we deployed for OIF.  For some reason, my Battalion never got them, whereas other units in the Division did.

Was that at Ft. Lewis?  Because I was there as cadre around that time.  

Not all bullpups are stupid.  Bullpup top-fed SMGs are GTG.  The FN tactical Tuna was nice too.  While the thing was ammo dependent, the FAMAS was pretty rock solid.  If I had a choice of action give me semi-bullpup where the ammo feed is near the trigger (sterling, M-60, FG42).

The side, through both lungs and the heart.

@barnbwt

Bragg

So, after 10 pages we can safely conclude that the G3 is the superior battle rifle, right?



Even the God Emperor agrees.

Attached File

NO!!!!

What have you people done to that poor rifle?

We 21st century now!

They made it wish it was an M4.

BORK BORK BORK!!!

It is my hope and prayer that no upright German is ever forced to cast his eyes upon such an abomination to mankind and the natural order.

Fuck it, I can come up with a better idea than the G3, FAL and M14, before ww2 the military should have looked at what the FBI was doing with the Colt Monitor's use as a fighting rifle.... Modify the BAR for use with 276 Perderson and after ww2 look at converting the BAR to 280 British.... Not a great Squad Automatic Rifle but could have been a good battle rifle if it was worked with..... Maybe I have a case of the tards.....

Too heavy for an Infantry Rifle, but I get where you're headed. 16lbs empty, but a nice, slow cyclic rate that was controllable.

The new stock makes a big difference when it comes to controllability, and the forend is lighter than the standard one.

The smartest kid on the short bus is still retarded.

No.

Your people have defiled a Teutonic masterpiece born of an epic struggle between East and West; a literal fight to the death. The G3 is the embodiment of engineering perfection and form over function right off the production line.  It was made as perfectly as it could be (given the limitations suffered by all German designers due to an unhealthy fetish for complexity and without being an M14, of course).

Wodan weeps.

Making it short action would help in theorey as well, hell a BAR in 223 would be the tits... The HCAR could be even better with a few more tweaks....

@swede1986

What stock is that?

We took Germanic engineering to the next level by incorporating superior Swedish space-age technology.

It's the Mjölner of the new millennium.

Both the stock and the forend is made by Spuhr. He sells them commercially, Mile High Shooting is the US distributor IIRC.

All of this lusting over the "design for manufacturability" of the G3 over the M14 has failed to mention a couple of key facts about each rifle:

The receiver body for the G3 is a stamping, as many have pointed out.  What they have NOT mentioned is that the tooling to create that stamping is a set of large "progressive dies" that create the stamped piece from flat stock in a series of steps.  For most of the steps of the process prior to welding the folded piece, a human never touches the part.  All the blanking, forming, punching and piercing is done in a series of steps where the piece is moved down the line from station to station automatically.

This progressive die set very sophisticated, and very complicated.  I would guess (based on my knowledge of tooling) that such a setup could cost in excess of $1 million dollars, and that does NOT include the actual presses into which these dies are installed.

In addition, these dies all have finite lives, so expect to replace them on a regular basis as they wear during production.

Switching from manufacturing rifles from the traditional (and now obsolescent) method of dedicated machine tools to progressive die stampings is not a trivial exercise when you have thousands of dedicated machine tools that will be replaced by new capital investments.   I am certain that would be a factor in selecting a new rifle design for production.  (Germany had no such issues to contend with, relatively speaking.  All of their machine tool capacity had been bombed into oblivion by the Allies 10 years earlier.)

The M1 (and it's descendant, the M14) is a difficult rifle to manufacture, at least in some key parts.   SA managed to achieve volume production by brute force during WWII, and they shared their sucess stories with the commercial contractors.   The amount of gauging and inspection that was done on the production line is mind boggling when compared to modern production methods.  They did this because of the critical nature of so many of the key parameters, coupled with the limitations of the tooling and manufacturing methods available at the time.

Today, we would have ways to eliminate that sort of insanely expensive and time consuming stuff with better tooling and other more sophisiticated inspection methodologies.  None of that would be possible until the days of CNC and modern QC methods introduced first by the Japanese in the 1960's.

In a nutshell, the fact that SA tended to gravitate towards wanting to build the M14 as a derivative of the M1, rather than something altogether new such as a G3 or FAL was driven by factors of reuse of production methodology as much as anything. It also demonstrated how production methods can wind up driving product decisions when your factory is "owned" by the same people who use the end product.

Very good points.  It also shows how the US, after cranking out tens of thousands of aircraft, had a lot of production capacity and know-how that was serendipitously-geared for production of forged Aluminum receiver plates, which could then be finish-machined into AR receivers, showing that the AR10 really was the design to beat in 1955, but the Army Ordnance used the incident of the barrel bursting (on the bi-metal barrel ArmaLite insisted on using for the submission) to dismiss the AR10 in favor of their home-grown M14.

Which makes it pretty amazing that despite all that they were still costing the same amount to make as an M4.

The M14 is a clear case of bureaucrats bullying to get their way for no other reason than to justify their own existence by doing what they do best: resisting progress by any and all means necessary, up to and including every dirty trick in the book.

Not really.

In light of the fact that many Ordnance and infantry officers were perfectly satisfied with the performance of the .30 caliber M1 during WWII (other than not being select fire or firing from a box magazine), the lighter T-44E4 / M14 firing the shorter, non-corrosive T-65E3 cartridge (adopted as the 7.62 X 51 MM NATO) loaded with ball propellants and firing a bullet weighing only 3 grains lighter than M2 .30 caliber ball seemed like quite the improvement to those who saw no reason to change "what wasn't broke" in their eyes.

There were other officers that saw merit in the SCHV concept and were fully enamored with Stoner's AR15 rifle and the potential it offered.  It really came down to choosing between a known quantity (with improvements) that worked in the last war vs. what was then a radical departure from established norms (that were known to work even if imperfect").  IIRC, it was CONARC that stated something to the effect that warfare hadn't changed enough to warrant a change in caliber that had proven itself in the last and previous wars.

Debates over logistics, doctrine, and other aspects of future warfare have always raged on in committees, commands, PME schools, and in professional journals just like they did in the post-WWII era and like they do now.  As they say, "hindsight is 20/20."

It's definitely easy for us to sit back and criticize all these guys who were hard at work trying to develop the next service rifle for the US Army in the 1950s.

There are several circles of influence that work together, and whether or not they take into consideration things that are important that happened within 10 years, it was their responsibility to do the best they could.

These groups included:

The Army Combatant Commands
The Army Ordnance Corps & Aberdeen Proving Grounds
The newly-formed CONARC of 1955
US Army Armories
Military Intelligence FORMAT Exploitation Units (In their infancy at that time)

On one hand, we often see the argument that they couldn't foresee the future, and therefore the nuclear military structure allows for oversight in small arms development.  But I can counter that with the fact that we just got out of the Korean War in 1953, which involved massive amounts of small arms use, as well as air power and combined arms.

I think one of the main contributing factors to the failure of the M14 and ".30 Caliber Light Rifle" concept was the requirement for one shoulder-fired infantry weapon to replace:

M1 Garand
M1 Carbine
M1 & M1928 Thompson SMG
M3 .45 ACP SMG

While the M14E1 SAW was to replace the BAR, and the M60 to replace the 1919A4 MG.

At the time, one of the primary weapons used by the newly-formed SF was the M1 or M2 Carbine, with different LMGs for fire support.  The USAF also used the M1/M2 Carbines for its Security Forces to guard airfields.

Since we had plenty of captured Stg44s from the war, and the Soviets started cranking out AK and AKMs within the 2 decades after the war, someone really dropped the ball when it came to our failure to develop our own assault rifle in the 1950s in the Ordnance Corps.  In their defense, however, a minority did solicit for the SCHV rifle to be developed, which was a concept that paralleled with the Assault Rifle, but instead of firing a cartridge with a bore between .24 and .28 caliber like the 6mm Lee Navy or .276 Pedersen, they wanted to drive a .224 bullet as fast as possible in order to inflict drastic wounds via impact velocity.

The AR15 is our main redeeming project from that era, even though the system fought very hard to kill it in its infancy.  The story about Ordnance Corps declaring the AR15 totally unsuitable for Infantry use, then within weeks being ordered to begin type classification of it for the USAF sticks out as one of the most comical, yet history-making of the whole process.

Nah man they straight up cheated nato out of an assault rifle in an intermediate caliber for no other reason than to perpetuate the illusion of their own relevance.

While the M16 was good in Vietnam, they probably would have been better off if they had started widely issuing 30 round mags and 14.5" barreled carbines at that time.

Part of the Colt CAR-15 family was an Infantry Leader's Carbine, the Model 605A and 605B:

What's going on with the selector?