Quote Originally Posted by 17K View Post
I thought the change that helped the carbines back then was the heavier buffers and the copper extractor spring and black insert?!
That was a whole separate thing from the bolts breaking. The way I heard it, a few dozen barrels came with a minor flaw in the chambers, causing extraction issues. Much like the "bending" A1 barrels, they jumped to conclusions and assumed the extractors didn't have enough oomph to handle the violent extraction of the shorties. Unlike the A1 debacle though this had a happy ending because it led to some very high quality extractor springs that were a big improvement using new materials that didn't exist at the time of the ARs initial development.