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Never used the MG-3, but I have heard them.  Drops rounds fast.  Wouldn't mind having that thing on mounted ops.  don't know the accuracy or recoil on it./

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Yup, gas piston was the most popular.



I feel like there was another part that was occasionally put in backwards, but I cant remember what it was for the life of me

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The m60 can be re-assembled incorrectly, The m240 cannot.



The M60 can be fired standing, the M240 cannot.



7.62X51mm ammo is heavy and I prefer to be able to dismount and use my machine guns so given the option I take the M60. Preferably E3 or E4

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As for other attributes, as mentioned above.... the M240b is built like a tank, and the barrel swaps are easier.
 

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Actually, it can be if you have a 3 position gas regulator (which are going out the window now).  If you put it in the wide open position which will give you damn near 1k RPM on a squeaky clean gun you can damage it. Other than that, that weapon is a thing of beauty.  Although, I did like the 60, just took more attention to detail when doing PMS on it.  
 

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http://images.usatoday.com/life/_photos/2006/10/26/rambo.jpg

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The M240 is the best GPMG ever devised. The M60 went through four or five generations before it worked well enough to be in service anywhere and that only happened after the M240 was adopted.

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Many would say the PKM is better than the M240.  

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M240 looks like it could survive an free fall from outer space, that thing is very robust.

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I have carried both and I was properly trained on the M60. That said, by the late nineties the M60's I encountered in the 25th ID were worn out rattle traps. They were so bad in fact that we had to dummy cord parts on them to keep from losing them out in the field. But I have used 60's that were in good shape, fairly reliable, and will be the first to admit that the weapon served the U.S. well.

As for which I prefer, hands down it is the M240B (as if my screen name isn't a hint). It was late 1997 when I went down to the arms room and took my newly assigned M240B out of the cardboard box. From that point on I never had a single stoppage when putting rounds down range with a GPMG. And to anybody with half a brain that fact alone negated it's heavier weight. But that simple truth alone can be attributed to the 240's being new versus the worn out 60's.

What really sold me on the 240's was it's accuracy compared to an M60. New or old one's, I never seen a M60 that shot like an M240. And where I could see that difference was the first stage of qualifying with a GPMG. In the Army the first stage is a big paper target that tests your ability to properly manipulate the traversing and elevation mechanism of the tripod. Example:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/fm/3-22-68/image887.gif


...With the M60 a 5-7 round burst would be all over one of those individual silhouettes. And there would usually be fliers. With an M240B there would be a 5-7 round burst that looked like a cloverleaf. No fliers, and for the whole 10m exercise with that target. Then you went on to the actual firing range.

End result was I qualified expert with the M60 a couple times. Never shooting a perfect. With the M240B I shot a perfect the first time we took them to the range. And I qualified expert every single time with it from that point on. So accuracy alone made me a believer.

As for other attributes, as mentioned above.... the M240b is built like a tank, and the barrel swaps are easier.
 

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OK, I'm assuming they took what they learned from the 60 & applied it to the 240 (at least one would hope so). Does anyone happen to know what those technical details were?

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I used to shoot perfect with the 60 every time. Ours weren't that bad.

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BS...when the 240 came out for issue, the M60 went away...same day..atleast in the units I knew of...and yes we bitched about the extra weight and all that..it sucked at first, the M60E3 was what I had and it was a good gun.

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I've never changed a barrel in combat, smoke it and get a new one if you warp it.

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After two years as an armorer, and a total of 25 years being the small arms go-to guy in most of the units I was in, mere words cannot describe the level of hatred I feel for the M60, and the people who foisted that abortion on us. The only thing saving the M60 from going down in history as the Worst Machine Gun, Ever(tm) would be the brief period of time we inflicted the Chauchat on ourselves.

Here's what you can install backwards, and still manage to assemble the weapon:

*Firing pin
*Gas piston
*Sear
*Bolt
*Firing pin sleeve and firing pin spring
*Bolt cam sleeve and firing pin retention plug (which leaves that little pin as an extra part, to get lost...)
*Pistol grip retention pins
*Spring plate that retains the retention pins

Of these parts, the worst choice of things to fuck up on is probably the firing pin. That leaves you with a non-firing weapon. The gas piston, you get a straight-pull, bolt-action belt-fed rifle. The sear gets you a runaway gun, assuming you're stupid enough to load a belt into a weapon the bolt won't stay back on. All the rest, well... You just have varying degrees of non-functionality and potential for parts to fall off while in the field. I once had a weapon returned to my arms room that had everything possible put back together wrong, and on top of that, the idiots had taken the safety wire off of the gas system. I still don't understand how they got the bolt onto the operating rod backwards, and then into the receiver. Took a mallet and brass drift to get that damn thing apart, afterwards...

A well-designed weapon will not allow itself to be reassembled in any other way than the one that it's meant to be. The M60 fails that test, miserably. On that factor alone, they should have sent the thing back to the designer with a big "Let's try this, again, shall we?" note applied to it. Instead, they bought tens of thousands of the damn things, and made it an issue item for decades.

Additionally, the damn things gas system required a series of fixes to be applied, because it had the habit of spontaneously self-disassembling itself. Any weapon requiring the armorer to use aircraft safety wire to hold the thing together? Well, let us simply say "Self-evident design failure". That's another point where someone should have said "Hmmm... Bad idea, start over...".

Let's not even get into the way that the bolt, operating rod, and sear had this lovely habit of beating each other to death. A set of stones had to be supplied to the armorer's tool kit, simply to keep the peening to a minimum. This problem was bad enough when they issued LSA as a lubricant, but when they went to BreakFree, the M60s started dying left, right, and center. My speculation is that the much thicker and tenacious LSA served as a cushion between the battering parts, and prevented the weapons from wearing out quickly. After BreakFree came in, the damn things suddenly demonstrated much lower reliability, higher maintenance, and much shorter serviceable lifespans. They should have stuck with LSA for everything besides the M16, in my opinion.

The M60 was an utter piece of shit, and my perennial maintenance and training nightmare for most of my career. I hear the guys who served in Vietnam laud the things to the sky, and all I can do is look at them in utter bewilderment, and wonder if we're talking about the same weapon. The M60 should never have made it out of troop trials in the form that it did, and the fact that it somehow won out over the MAG58 during those trials leads me to wonder what they were thinking. It's ironic that the MAG58 wound up being procured as the M240 for coax use in tanks, and then got back-doored into being our standard MG thirty years later, and without significant trials in that role. The success of the M240B speaks volumes as to the validity of those early trials which resulted in the M60 being fielded.

Both the M16 and M60 are indications that the Army's small arms procurement systems were broken mid-century, and the fact that those weapons were standard issue for as long as they were is something  that still amazes me. After the Ichord committee got done, they should have gone through the procurement system with fire and sword, fired everyone involved, and started fresh.

That they didn't? Well, that's why we're still trying to shoehorn the M16 into the 21st century as the M4, and why the Marines and Rangers had to do an end-run around the system to get the M60 replaced with the M240G and B models. Criminal incompetence.

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The M240D still comes  with the three hole gas regulator, higher rate of fire for aircraft guns. We ordered the 240D gas regulators for the 240's that dident have them.

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why they didnt  just stick with the MG42 is beyond me.
it was a perfect design.

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why they didnt  just stick with the MG42 is beyond me.
it was a perfect design.

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The m60 can be re-assembled incorrectly, The m240 cannot.

The M60 can be fired standing, the M240 cannot.

The 60 has a slowe rate of fire.

7.62X51mm ammo is heavy and I prefer to be able to dismount and use my machine guns so given the option I take the M60. Preferably E3 or E4

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The M60 was an abortion of the perfectly good MG42.  The 240 is an excellent weapon.

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Actually, it can be if you have a 3 position gas regulator (which are going out the window now).  If you put it in the wide open position which will give you damn near 1k RPM on a squeaky clean gun you can damage it. Other than that, that weapon is a thing of beauty.  Although, I did like the 60, just took more attention to detail when doing PMS on it.  
 

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Both the M16 and M60 are indications that the Army's small arms procurement systems were broken mid-century, and the fact that those weapons were standard issue for as long as they were is something  that still amazes me. After the Ichord committee got done, they should have gone through the procurement system with fire and sword, fired everyone involved, and started fresh.



That they didn't? Well, that's why we're still trying to shoehorn the M16 into the 21st century as the M4, and why the Marines and Rangers had to do an end-run around the system to get the M60 replaced with the M240G and B models. Criminal incompetence.

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why they didnt  just stick with the MG42 is beyond me.
it was a perfect design.

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The M60 was an abortion of the perfectly good MG42.  The 240 is an excellent weapon.

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My experience on the original M60 is limited, but what retard attached the bipod to the barrel?

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The 240 is a POS. Yeah it fires fine, but so does the 60. I've been in the infantry long enough that I've used both. The 240 is fine, if it's mounted. It sure wasn't made to hump. There is no where to hold it, especially when firing unless you are in the prone or it is mounted. Thank God it's days are numbered. We had guys test firing the new titanium 60 and from what I was told by them it will be entering service again and replacing the 240 in the near future.