The first half of the video concerns overlubrication myth.
The second half he evidently shoots the gun successfully with no gas rings installed on the bolt.
Thoughts?
https://youtu.be/kKisBcqOXRY
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The first half of the video concerns overlubrication myth.
The second half he evidently shoots the gun successfully with no gas rings installed on the bolt.
Thoughts?
https://youtu.be/kKisBcqOXRY
Well, if someone was just trying to find out for themselves, then ok, but I guess I just don't understand why people do things with a firearm, just to prove you can shoot said gun outside of it's design standards. Like I said, if it floats his boat, then ok, but I will operate mine within it's design capabilities. JMHO
So does it run? I don't want to give him a view. Lol
Yes. He even holds the bolt up to the camera so you can see it doesn't have any bolt rings before he puts it back in the bolt carrier.
I've watched the video a couple of times looking for signs of an edit or where "one continuous shot" is not really an uninterrupted shot, but I haven't seen signs that the camera was stopped. Maybe someone else can catch an edit.
What prompted me to watch this video and start this thread is that I keep running across these posts on various forums where someone says "I've shot my AR for 20 years without replacing the gas rings" and similar posts. I thought it couldn't possibly be true (you know how people on the innernetz tend to exaggerate).
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Whatever floats your boat but without safety glasses ...why?
Maybe it's just me....
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My thought was that the purpose of the bolt rings is to compensate for a less-than-precise fit between the bolt and bolt carrier. In other words: his demonstration might work for some rifles and not others. A good fit between bolt and carrier might not necessitate having gas rings, but a bolt and carrier combo with just a few thousandths of slop in the fit might cause gas pressure problems.
Of course, I'm not an engineer, but it seems like common sense.
To a certain extent, I get why people do this; and I appreciate their efforts. It helps to know what the system is capable of, even in some very unrealistic scenarios. I think Pat Rogers actually discussed the idea of no gas rings in his final speech. He made a comment that even with no rings, an AR can run. Appears he was correct.
It's been long known that M16A1's would run without gas rings, given warm climates+ lube+ proper ammo+ clean base gun among a few other things. Take one variable away or more, then reliability goes away. I didn't watch the video, the info is old and known. The earlier predecessors did not have gas rings to begin with. The gas rings were added to improve reliability overall.
I'm just guessing but think the rings also keep the carbon from building up on the inside walls of the carrier making for a consistent stroke and reliable seal. I think carbon build up might be a problem without rings after awhile. Seems like you'd also get a lot of carbon blown up into the barrel extension/lug area.
The dumbest thing about the video was shooting a rifle filled with grease and no eye protection. Wow, that is really not smart.
My issued M16A2 had rings that were so worn down they might as well have not existed. I could hold the carrier bolt side down and the bolt would completely extend...no bolt flick necessary. It ran like a champ.
More often than not it's 20 years of ownership and probably 2 cases of ammo. Shoot a few hundred rounds today, another 100 7 months from now....etc..
There's very few forums where years of ownership = years of use. I see it all the time. " I've owned this Taurus for 37.6 years and I never had a problem!". ..."how much ammo did you shoot?".....*crickets*
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I always thought that was understood. Either lots of years owning, very little using, yet will make claims stating it is a Wunder weapon because it never failed in that time frame, even though we might put more rounds through a firearm in a day training than they did in 10, 20, or even more years. It is why it is really a better quantifier to tell someone how much you've shot opposed to how long you've had it. I know guys who have guns that they have owned for years, if not decades and still haven't shot. Hell I own a rifle myself that I have never fired, granted it is because it is older than dirt and kind of scares me, but still I cant say it is good or bad because I never fired the ****ing thing. I can however tell you quite a bit of my thoughts on other guns which I have shot tons, and I do mean literal tons, of lead out of. I'm talking 10s of thousands of registered rounds down range with the guns. Having done that I can also tell you that some guns will work even with parts are broken or very worn. On a side note so will reloaders, I have a thread somewhere bitching about breaking a ****ing reloader, trust me there were parts that were well past their service life, yet it still worked, I could even have man handled it to make it continue had I desired, doesn't mean that it would have been good for the machine, but I could have. Did not mean I should have tried. And I think that is the point. I is kind of nice knowing what something will do should you need to, but unless you absolutely need to, you are likely going to create worse issues than if you don't, a particular example I know of was a Remington 3200 that we had, wasn't having issues as far as not shooting, but the action was a bit loose, and the trigger had this really funky crunchy feel to it when you fired it. Anyway, Ended up having both firing pins broken, the gun would still kind of fire too, but neither here nor there, firing pin holes were oblong, which didn't help anything, and there was a bunch of other small issues. Ended up being about $900 worth of work that needed to be done to bring the gun back up to spec, and about a 3 month wait. Ended up with a gun that was just about new once we got it back, but proper maintenance and we wouldn't have been dropping the better part of a grand on work, and it likely would not have gone down during the state championship either. Lesson, maintenance cycles aren't written in stone, but they should at least be attempted to be followed to some degree. Also, ignoring issues can cost you, likely money in repairs, or on one case I know of specifically the entire gun when you refuse to heed the manufacturer tell you the that gun has been shot so much over the past 15 years that you need it rebuilt.
The reverse of that are people who will exaggerate claims ect. Be them making the gun look better, ergo your average gun rag, or looking for any small thing to make the item appear less than it is, IE your average AK doomsday preeper who claims AR jam if you don't detail clean them every 20 rounds.
The sole purpose of the gas ring is to provide a better seal between the bolt (piston) and the carrier cavity (cylinder). Armalite liked the idea of a "perfect seal" and put rings places most gun designers didn't/don't. Early AR-18s has rings on the piston as well. But, SVT-40s, FALs, Gew-43, M1s, etc. do not, and work perfectly fine without them.
With sufficient gas, any leakage can be compensated for. So yes, under certain combinations of buffer weight, gas port diameter and port location, the rings could be removed and the system will work. Since most civilian AR tend to be run on the lean side, which provides best part life and lower felt recoil, I'll bet pulling all three rings off your bolt will make the gun highly ammo dependent on whether it will run, if at all.
If you have too much gas more leakage is good.
If you have just enough gas, more leakage is bad.
to-may-toes - to-mah-toes, either way . . .
Although, if you have an over-gassed carbine, removing the rings is not what I would recommend as a "fix".
So....we may be onto something here.
If your carbine is overgassed and a heavier buffer hasn't solved function problems, then maybe remove the gas rings and go back to square one with the buffers?
This is an interesting thought, and is something I'd not ever really considered. It might be worth trying with a verifiably over-gassed rifle. In theory it might work, but I wonder what unintended side effects may surface in terms of reliability, carbon fouling, etc.
I think I pointed out in an earlier post that removing the rings would allow carbon to build up in the expansion chamber and up into the barrel extension and around the bolt lugs/extractor. So, in the long run its a bad idea and I believe it will eventually decrease reliability if it doesn't immediately. At a minimum it will increase the difficulty of cleaning.
If there wasn't a reason for the rings they wouldn't be there.
This is all very old news. You don't want the issues that arise from a poorer gas seal, there's many deficits there. If you fall within a combination that presents an excess of gas for your system, then it's better to meter that gas better by starting at the base presence of that pressure opportunity towards a later one for a few reasons. There is a given for that with this system that accepts some timing/mass/spring functions working within a certain relationship. A possible extension to that could be in tailoring some total reciprocating mass or masses within acceptable ranges for function primarily, but within a functional relationship with spring tensions for timing events.