Did you ever try to procure Swiss parts from stocking dealers in Canada?
I picked up a very early 556 and tossed the abortion of handguards they put on there for a OEM 55x set I got from a dealer in Canada, this was in 2007.
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I'm going to assume these are OEM/USGI charging handles and not after market ones like BCM, Geissele, etc.?
Now that is interesting. Makes me glad that I have focused on USGI mags over the years instead of the rest, while I have the others (PMAGs/Lancers) I've always concentrated on USGIs.
There is a YouTube video where Mrgunsngear took a tour of Battleground Vegas and interviewed one of their head armorers, he had high praise for the SCAR 16 over AR's.
Would like to see the Battleground Vegas guys do a post/vid of MBRs (M14 vs. G3 vs. FAL vs. SCAR 17 vs. AR-10, etc.).
The AK and AR were fundamentally designed with different maintenance philosophies in mind. The U.S. Army always was a technically higher skilled army than the Soviets with much more robust maintenance functions at the unit level. Typically U.S. equipment does require regular maintenance but has a much longer service life than comparable Soviet/Russia designed equipment which needs less maintenance but may trade some long term durability.
If I can use car engines as an analogy. The U.S. may design car engines to last 300,000 miles. This engine is of higher performance than its Russian counterpart, however this engine needs the oil changed every 5,000 miles and belts changed every 50,000 miles.
In contrast the Russian engine is of lower performance but is designed to run without any maintenance at all. However this engine can only last 100,000 miles before it has to be completely rebuilt or simply scrapped.
So at the end of the day, which one is more reliable?
I've honestly never heard of a bolt breaking on an AK but I keep a few spares just in case. I believe the Polish military was testing barrels up to around 60K rounds. Barrels obviously are a pain in the ass to change out on the AK but they still do it which is why all the components are marked with numbers for inside dimensions to fit the corresponding barrel journals.
I've built a few AKs and I've never seen anything like this. Where are these marks? Every AK has these? Really?
For your reference file:
Attachment 51636
Attachment 51637
Most quality components are going to have uniform heat treatment but some manufacturers have been found to have questionable heat treatment which I don't use. The recent Zastava rifles have been noted to have heat treatment issues for instance, not sure if that has since been corrected but it was the reason I sold mine off.
Anyway, the journal codes I'm referencing are the four digit codes on the barrel itself, it represents the journal marking measurements. The barrel components are measured and sorted into bins according to the size of the ID of each individual component. When they build them they go by those codes and only use the parts from the pre-sorted bin corresponding to the barrel journal diameter codes. Most of these codes are found on the higher end former com block manufacturers.
Here's a picture of the four digit codes running from left to right from one of my spare 74 barrels;
Attachment 51643