Originally Posted by
3ACR_Scout
I looked through photos of my Cavalry Troop at Fort Hood from Fall 2006, and nearly all of our A2s had KAC rails on them. I only saw a handful with the old plastic handguards. Those guys definitely deployed to Iraq with those rifles in 2007 after I left the unit, although I think they were plussed up with M4s in country. I’m not really sure why we had the rails, because no one even had vertical grips mounted, let alone any time of laser or light, in those training photos. The rails were basically just adding more weight to the rifles with no benefit.
One other thing to add: if you’re cloning an FN M16A2, don’t ever worry about mismatched uppers and lowers. I have photos from our unit of gray uppers with black lowers, purplish uppers, uppers with most of the finish worn off while the lower still looks pretty fresh, etc. These are all rifles that are in a fairly small serial number range, so I’m not sure if maybe some of them were partially refinished when they were reset or if FN just grabbed a bunch of mismatched parts from different sources.