27:28 I know of the Podcast statement that Karl is Referencing. And he is actually either wilfully or ignorantly misrepresenting what was said. The actual claim was conjecture between 2 former special operations veterans (whom I believe are actual advocates for the FA) that hypothesized that IF the forward assist were theoretically depressed by mistake (specifically, by an untrained infantryman) while bracing a rifle against a door frame upon room entry (which is an absolutely ridiculous, though technically POSSIBLE situation), it MAY cause a malfunction due to parts breaking and floating loosely in the upper receiver. At no point did either speaker say they have seen such a specific instance, only that they believed, in theory, under the most absurd of circumstances, was catastrophic failure POSSIBLE due to such misuse. Karl is a worthless source of information, and is an actual, LITERAL cuckold. His opinion is invalid. Thank you for your research into this topic.
Thanks for the clarification. Do you happen to remember which podcast specifically? I was aware of all the other stuff but I'm trying to keep it civil and on topic.
@@fullspectrum1616 P&S ModCast 100 - Gun Nerds 5: AR15 Theory th-cam.com/video/pyYODtiohzQ/w-d-xo.html At about 13:00 the topic is brought up, then again at 2:05:00, (and various points throughout). I got some of the details wrong, for example only one speaker was a special operations veteran, the other was in manufacturing for CMMG, and no one said "door frame" but rather "barricade". It should also be noted that half of the stuff everyone on that panel says, regardless of their experience or expertise, is inaccurate at worst, or purely anecdotal at best. The overall point is the same: Karl took hypothetical statements and presented them as definitive real world examples. Hope that helps.
@@fullspectrum1616 I posted links to this video on the brownells thread that was just posted today. Hopefully it'll A) educate some people and B) get you some views. Great video man.
@@fullspectrum1616 Your data analysis at 21:30 contradicts your assertions. I think you used a strange statistical figure to make the 191 FTEs from forward assist malfunction forcing to sound like a better scenario. You have to analyze any big Army TRADOC, TACOM, and Ordnance Board studies with a very jaded eye with no less than 2 decades of study into the subject with original source material and personal experience across multiple variants and high volume.
Thanks again, Chad. I believe the truth of the matter is working itself into the light as we speak. I feel the winds changing and that the FA is beginning to receive the proper judgement in the court of public opinion.
@@fullspectrum1616 I posted it again on my business page. It's good work. A small minority of the internet is real mad at me for joking about the F.A. for the past few days.
I have reviewed it and see many fundamental flaws and extrapolations I would never have made. The author needs to read Black Rifle Volume I and The Great Rifle Controversy, as well as Daniel Waters' 5.56 Timeline. Then a detailed study of the design changes from the Colt 601, 602, and XM16E1 should be undertaken. After that, an analysis of the different stick and ball propellants should be investigated to see how they affect port pressure and cyclic rate on a pressure trace graph. The more important aspects of refining the design will then jump out, and the infinitesimally inconsequential presence of the forward assist will become obvious.
The Forward Assist represents the incompetence and malfeasance of Army Ordnance Corps and those who managed the AR-15 production related to the Colt 602 and ball propellant change to M193. The rifle needed to be further tested with ball propellant M193, which resulted in the heavier buffer to act as a rate reducer.
@@LRRPFco52 The forward assist has saved soldiers lives and citizens lives too whether you like it or not. Used as prescribed in SPORTS it is absolutely a useful device.
@@LRRPFco52 The new buffer also cured the problem of bolt bounce malfunctions when use on full auto. The originol buffer had no weights and was basically just a spring guide..The stamped lower receiver AK had the same problem, which is why the Russians adopted the 5 piece "mistakenly called a rate reducer" to prevent bolt bounce..
@@hairydogstail Yup. I’ve been a deep student of all of this since the 1980s, including lots of archival data, books pre-internet, and post-internet analysis on what we thought we knew. If you get deep into the parts differences on the early guns between the prototype rifles, Colt 601, 602, XM16E1, and 603/604, you see all of these changes and notice how they match up along the timeline to address the various problems encountered. Firing pin mass and the firing pin retaining pin were other changes. Pivot pin, furniture materials, rear sight markings, ejection port door spring hole, buffer thread roll pin lock, no fence/partial fence/full fence lower receivers, barrel twist rate, cast vs forged front sight bases, charge handles, chromed BCG vs partially-chromed, and a laundry list of changes happened along the way. Best improvements were the chromed chamber, maintenance of tight reamer specs during production, and replacement of the Edgewater Spring Guide with the heavy 5.2oz rifle buffer. Those things really made the 603/M16A1 the reliable rifle that it was/is, as long as it’s lubed with thick CLP or long-lasting oil.
I have always taken what Karl and Ian say with a grain of salt. Their experience (while greater than most) is exclusively in competition, albeit rather adverse competition. That really shows with their disdain for the forward assist. Whole I was in the army (8 years) I WAS issued poorly maintained weapons, and the forward assist did help me chamber a round on numerous occasions. Soldiers don't have the luxury of choosing and maintaining their own equipment after a certain point. I have also (perhaps stupidly) forced slightly dented and misshapen brass into my rifle, and never had an issue. I've never needed to use it do to my rifle being dirty, but if you think that's an issue, by all means don't do it. It feels like this should be a dead argument at this point, but like every argument on the internet it persists. Great video, it confirms my bias.
the misuse of the forward assist is where distain and hate come from. i can relate with both of them. more times than not the F/A is used to cause timely malfunctions that would have been remedied easily. it's a failure of education and training 99.9% of the time. the forward assist does not cause issues but is used to worsen them very often.
They make recreative (hope I'm using right word) content, they are youtubers. You get very little scientific info in YT about anything, not just firearms
Karl Kasarda thinks he's the smartest guy on the planet and consistently refuses to entertain any viewpoint different than his, as he holds himself in high esteem. He knows some stuff, but not as much as he thinks he does. Ian seems like a good guy, but he is falling victim to his celebrity status. I still really enjoy his videos and appreciate his knowledge, but the fan boys who slavishly hang on his every word are really annoying.
Never heard of him nor seen him till you mentioned it. I've seen that forgotten firearms guy. Just saw a video with both of them in it and not that there is anything wrong with it but they seemed almost like a "couple" .
@@0neDoomedSpaceMarine I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but I suspect that tensions caused by Ian's higher profile was one of the factors that lead to him leaving InRange. I don't have access to any insider knowledge to base this on, it's purely speculation on my part, but it just feels right.
Kyle rittenhouse ar 15 had not gone into battery, and in an interview he says he hit his forward assist. It chambered and that's when he made the famous bicep shot on an attacker who was trying to shoot him in the head.
@@YTPrule Like what, affixing a bayonet? Woulda been metal, but not an option available to him. Slapping the bolt into battery and pulling the trigger is what I would have done, that shot had to come *immediately,* doesn't matter what happens with the rifle.
Solid argument. Karl is a Klown and the whole WWSD project was just a grift. My experience with the M16A2 as an infantryman proved to me that the FA is useful and necessary, if for no other reason than it is easy to use, easy to train, and much more of a gross motor skill solution than the charging handle prototype or the bolt scallop would offer. Slap>Pull>Observe>Release>TAP>Shoot. Plus when spending two weeks in the box at JRTC/NTC/JOTC, the FA is a godsend for running the rifle with blanks. Further, many, many recruits lack familiarity with guns, let alone the M16/AR15 platform and the FA is cheap insurance for assuring a round is loaded and the bolt fully closed when they ride the charging handle forward.
Very enlightening video. I had the opinion of not really being a fan of the forward assist since I do find it a little bit of an odd device to have, but glad I took some time to read into the AR15 design as a whole a little more. Biggest take away is that nothing is "completely useless" and such. FA wasn't some after-thought or no-purpose-at-all device just to satisfy the Army. It was carefully thought out and gave good consideration of not hindering the overall pros of the AR15 design. Much of the negativity, I honestly think, for the forward assist has some part of not just the understanding behind it, but also the controversial history it's part of. The M16 as we all know was pretty deep in political fire with the Ordinance Corps and the Army's general handling of servicing the weapon during its early adoption. Greatly appreciate the work put into this video and even leaving the sources in the description for some good reading for better details on the subject.
I've had to use the forward assist multiple times in my 8yrs in the US Army (2004-2012). Never once did it result in a failure to extract. Sometimes the environmental conditions, or wear and tear of equipment, require a little assistance when there is no opportunity to disassemble the rifle in the heat of the moment. The first time I can recall actually having to use the forward assist, I used it on every single round I fired out of the magazine I had loaded at the time. Sand had gotten into my M16A2 that I had at the time and was slowing the operation of the bolt carrier enough that it wouldn't cycle far enough to eject spent casings, or slide all the way home when charged. So in order to keep firing, I merely resorted to charging every round individually like a bolt action, to extract the spent casing and cycle the next round, and hit the forward assist to close the bolt. Every time the bolt would cycle on its own, just not enough to extra and feed the next round. Later I found I was able to fix the issue and restore the rifle to 100% functionality by popping the rear take down pin, removing the bolt group and charging handle, and merely wiping out the sand with my fingers very quickly and without concern for getting everything, and putting everything back together (took less than 30 seconds). Sometimes parts were wearing out, or a round was slow coming out of a bad magazine, and would slow the bolt enough to prevent fully seating. In these sorts of instances the forward assist was fully appropriate to use, and I did use it, with no issues. I didn't use it otherwise. All of my personal ARs have the forward assist because you never know when you might need it. Too many "old wives tales" still persisting out there in the gun community.
Yes this is an excellent example of what I mentioned about "enduring frictional elements" during cycling that required a cleaning of the rifle where re-racking will not remove the issue. Do you happen to remember if it was the chamber/barrel extension or in the general upper receiver area?
@@fullspectrum1616 The entire upper receiver area was full of fine grain sand. Charging handle, BCG, all of it. And I emptied about 20 rounds from it this way. You could hear the grating sound of the sand as the weapon cycled, and when i charged the bolt. It got in the chamber a little, but not a lot, as the sand got in the receiver while the bolt was forward.
@@rodiculous9464 It's amazing how a huge amount of criticism against the forward assist can be boiled down to *"... but what if I used the forward assist when I was having a double-feed or stove-pipe? What then, huh?!"* What if they put on their pants backwards, lmao
The sniper button lore seems like a meme that is overblown simply by the fact that it makes an easy video topic and accordingly easy money for professional guntubers. Consequently we more readily or only see easy surface level memes and opinions about the forward assist.
There is an underlying fault with all of your arguments. You assume that the Army Material Command and the remnants of Ordnance Department were developing the M16 in good faith and that all subsequent documentation carries this good faith. Considering the previous debacle of the M14, as well as the larger developmental problems associated with the M16, I would place less importance on the primary documents generated by the Army in the 1960s and more on the continuing use and experiences that have been generated during that time. Several specific questions and/or faults that I see. First, I would be very interested to hear Jim Sullivan's personal input on the adoption of the FA. I believe that it is highly unlikely that this has never come up between Ian and Sullivan considering their lengthy interviews. I also find your personal attacks to be disingenuous as they take into account neither personal experience with the weapons system nor research conducted on the M16/M4 after the Vietnam conflict. Second, and more specific to my own experience regarding increasing FTEs from use of the FA. the argument against the FA, that it makes a rifle jam is incorrect. The principal is that if a weapon does not go into battery it should be cleaned until it does, in order to avoid whatever percentage likelihood that it will develop a FTE after its FTF. Any time you force a weapon against mechanical sympathy, you are jeopardizing its function as well as the user's safety. All of this is not to say that there is never a use for the FA, silent loading, cold weather, and the case extraction you mentioned come to mind. However, suggesting that the FA is a panacea or that it is necessary or beneficial to the weapon platform is dubious in my eyes at best. I think that all of these concepts come down to understanding design philosophy. All systems have pros and cons and military doctrine is developed around these. All this being said, there's a lot of very interesting info here and thanks for the research. I can tell you put in you time.
First, I made this video to attack the consensus narrative and speculation about using the forward assist, not as a guide on how and when to use it. Perhaps that's a later video, but my intent is to have made a video that gives the facts of the matter so someone can come to a better and more informed conclusion if it should even be used at all in the first place or have a reasonable idea what will happen if used under certain circumstances given my analysis of the TECOM test data. I also conclude at the end that it does not solve everything but that I haven't seen a valid criticism. No one has proven the forward assist any which way or tested it since TECOM. / I have to assume good faith on the Army Infantry Board for recommending a forward assist device circa 1962 as those are the people that identified the need as referenced in the Nov63 TECOM test document. The other things to consider at that time and during the TECOM test were the worse waffle steel magazines in use as well as IMR4475 being the exclusive powder and likely gave a higher amount of FTEs than someone would see today. The TECOM test had 133 failures of the bolt to close and for the subsequent 133 times a forward assist was used it never presented any safety issue to the user under what appears to be very severe conditions to get so many FTE's. To say using the forward assist in a circumstance of a failure of the bolt to close will lead to a safety issue is again speculative and a non-data driven claim. Conceivably a cartridge could be out of spec and cause an overpressure issue, but this is seemingly less likely for military contract ammunition and, secondly, such a speculative issue has no data to assert that the forward assist would give any more likelihood of chambering an overpressure round than a normal operational cycle of the rifle. If such a case happened where the FA was exclusively capable of chambering an out of spec round it still is a matter of perspective of what is at fault between the FA and the ammunition. / Third, please note how I do not interject my anecdotal "experience" with the forward assist into any point in the video until the end and only about a comparison of comfort between different types of the forward assist. My experience contradicts Karl's, Aaron's, and Chris's - and even if I found 30 other people to agree with me about their experience it wouldn't prove anything. The entire reason we have such a mess of information about firearms on the internet is because of such a predisposition to extrapolation from anecdotes. That is EXACTLY how fuddlore gets started and EXACTLY how the ignorance of the forward assist narrative went on. This ignorant narrative, where everyone is drawing from, is a pool of information that is so bad that no other factual outcome other than false can be expected. I will stand by my "attacks" on the various individuals in my video as all of them are compensated money (which makes them professionals to one degree or another) to present information about the forward assist which I clearly demonstrate as wrong. Professionals should be held accountable for poor performance. Note that while I criticize Chris Bartocci's article I also use another one of his articles in citing information about the Mark 18 CQBR which is corroborated by military documents and other real world data.
Lots of arm chair engineers on TH-cam. For any complex mechanical system risk assessments are conducted. Reference- Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) is a step-by-step approach for identifying all possible failures in a design. If I boil down the work it come down to… Issue 1) Short stroke the charging handle and the round does not go into battery (Combat severity=high, Non-combat severity= low) x (Combat occurrence= medium, Non-combat occurrence=low). Mitigation could be 1) recharge a new round (training) or 2) add a forward assist (design). When you add a new design you need to analysis the potential unintended consequence. Forward assist good if the round does not go into full battery due to a round hang-up (low risk). Forward assist catastrophic if the round does not go into full battery due to fouled chamber and you use the forward assist causing a stuck case (combat=death, non-combat= low risk). So no way would Eugene want a forward assist!
Ian,even though he has researched for more than 10 years,sometimes he isn’t right,sometimes he changed his mind later.He rarely goes wrong,but he does However,I can’t tell particularly because that was months ago,and it appeared in different videos(2 videos with 2 different opinions on the same characteristic)
Not sure if this is necessarily in your wheelhouse, but I feel the claim of the T48 rifle being somehow better performing than the T44 (M14) in the Army rifle trials of the mid to late fifties would probably fall under similar levels of modern fuddlore. Would be great to know if you know of any sources regarding that topic.
I don't have much beyond a basic understanding. From what I know the T44 was able to be better tailored to the cold winter test(s) than the T48 because Springfield Armory was better aware of the test conditions beforehand whereas FN wasn't ready for it. For what it's worth the major criticisms of the M14 seem to be cost and development delays and not that it had any kind of similar problems to the M16's poor initial development. The people at Springfield Armory were smart enough to chrome line the chamber and bore of the M14 (not sure about T44), while FN did not. Stoner also for whatever reason had the seemingly backwards priority of the BCG to be chromed but left the barrel plain steel. The M14 also didn't have a oddly spec'ed powder like the AR-15 did with IMR 4475. This costs more and possibly delayed development but the M14 didn't seem have the wacky reliability issues that the M16 did in being issued to front line troops. It seems unfair then to criticize high costs, slower development, and also reliability at the same time when the M14 at least was a pretty dependable weapon when first mass issued compared to the M16 in part to the fact that Springfield Armory took the time to properly develop a rifle before it's issuance. Someone else please correct me on this if I'm wrong.
@@fullspectrum1616 my impression has been FN was not granted the ability to prep their test FAL for cold weather, while the Ordinance core (or some rebellious members) took great care to prepare the M14 prototype. This lead to field issues and eventual parts failure on the FAL, which was used to kinda rush the acceptance of the M14 over the FAL & AR10. Regardless of the trials happenings, like Armalight submitting an experimental steel-aluminum barrel - against Stoners’ wishes - & the Army refusing to test a standard replacement after the inevitable failure, the AR10 & FAL were much more forward-looking designs than the M14. The charge against the Ordinance department is they sacrificed the interests of the average soldier to bring a relic onto the battlefield. As for the M16’s early teething issues, I believe Small Arms Solutions has videos (and books) covering the whole range of issues, which range from the Army not using the specified powder for an adapted civilian design (the M16 was originally purchased off the shelf by the Air Force before being taken up by General Westmorland, or whoever was in command of ground troops at the time, & was not subjected to troop trials before initial deployment), to using the incorrect kind of aluminum for the lower receiver leading to rust issues. Check Small Arms Solutions videos on why he hates the M14 & the early history of the M16 in Vietnam.
@@kingnull2697 I covered the powder issue in my video. The Army would have to have repeated the whole or some parts of the test for the AR-10 to be re-included with the steel barrel, so there is some merit with a discontinued interest. Why didn't Fairchild properly T&E that barrel type? It is only right to dismiss rifles that are not properly designed. The wikipedia article says that Springfield did much more T&E on the T44 while the T48 did not have any special winter preparation. FN wasn't forced to not do any cold weather testing on their rifle; they could have done that at any point before the submission of their rifle, but apparently chose not to. There's nothing insidious about Springfield doing extra testing on their rifle. The article also says the M14 is a pound lighter and has fewer parts. There's a parallel here with the M16 of the Ordnance Corps types actually submitting a more reliable and developed rifle from the get go than their competitors at Fairchild or FN.
@@kingnull2697 I just read a great book on the topic, it's called Random Shots by Roy Rayle. It's $10 on Amazon and definitely worth the read and cost.
If you're building a particularly lightweight gun and you're looking to shave weight all over, sure, but I'd say that little bit of weight is otherwise well worth it and I'd rather have it than not.
Great video. Thanks for sharing. Some really good information in this. I first learned about this argument from Forgotten Weapons. I thought it convincing initially, but questioned it because I don't trust men with long hair, or other effeminate features, to give accurate information. I then leaned he was wrong, and this video confirms my position. Physiognomy is real, folks.
I remember Ian saying in a video once that part of the reason for his distinctive long hair and facial hair is that he knows that if he needs to, he could disappear into a bathroom with a pair of scissors and a razor, then walk out a few minutes later past a crowd of his fans without being recognised. He may well have been joking, but it's not a bad plan.
You present some interesting views here and pull together some disparate sources in a convenient location-thank you for taking the time to put this video together. I don't think the outcome is that the existence of the forward assist is "VINDICATED" (as splashed across the thumbnail), but you have certainly refuted some of the overstated claims which circulate. You note in conclusion that you "haven't seen a valid criticism of it yet"; surely time, cost, and complexity (at the programme level) would be valid criticisms? It seems fair to say that such an addition would (and should) be a minor consideration at that level, whether you are generally in favour of the FA or not. I would also respectfully add that, whilst it is right and proper professionals be held accountable for their work, you would benefit from taking a more polite and discursive approach to presenting your analysis of others' material. We can all get passionate about our specific research topics, but we should try to share knowledge and engage with one another in a courteous manner-and not assume bad faith in others.
Thanks for such a nice reply. / The issue even at a program management level is that the PIP program was already underway which means relatively speaking the forward would have likely had lower overhead costs in a larger PIP. No one has any specific idea of any kind of cost figure of the PIP's efforts in adding a forward assist, so no one can say with any degree of certainty what it did cost at the program level, and therefore to say it was expensive is speculation. So again, we are down to unverified considerations which are not good arguments considering I gave the cost per rifle down to the cent while every criticism of cost has been unsubstantiated. Surely, it has saved at least one life and people have attested to it in combat conditions, so there is also that benefit of some possible human life weighed against a speculative and completely unknown overhead development cost. / Consider also that all of the popular arguments against the forward assist have never been substantiated and that so called professionals who try to carry themselves above others for a more scientific approach are reduced to mere fuddlore, anecdotes, and superstition on whether the forward assist is harmful. / I thought for a while on exactly how I should address the others and after some deliberation and a reading of Polybius' Histories, using his example, I decided to rightly criticize what really is a thinly veiled amateur, vulgar, and superstitious approach to the forward assist. It was an apparent low hanging fruit to those people to simply reiterate a critical meta narrative about the forward assist and present themselves as professionals in regards to their questionable work on it. Interestingly when Ian coincidentally publishes a video on it two months after my work he uses the exact same thumbnail with Stoner on the side for some reason. He also paraphrased the Army's position wrong. While it is possible he referenced the TECOM trial document, it is fairly likely in my opinion Ian merely referenced secondary sources on the subject that I have demonstrated earlier in the comments that those authors conveniently omit key Army testimony in the matter. / Ian, Karl, and Aaron all take a smug tone in their limited experiences and extrapolate that to any attempt to use the forward assist is for cavemen who are not applying any higher form of logic. Each of them states how it's obtuse to just press the forward assist simply because it's there, and that it will likely make a problem worse. Each one of them relies on mere anecdote in an attempt substantiate their claims. Chris Bartocci, while a critic, is much more reasonable with the scope and degree of his criticism and I believe I took a much more agreeable tone with him. It was my intent to have a variety of critics in their degree, background, and approach to the subject. Each of the three amigos I used as examples all participated in belittling those who advocate for its use, while Chris never did. How am I too hard on those three professionals when they are punching down to amateurs? I also never state they were acting in bad faith, only that it was a possibility because of the high degree of how wrong their statements were. I let the viewer make their own conclusions about their intent. / If I didn't make this video, certainly no one else would have. If Aaron, Ian, Karl, and others had qualified their statements and conducted their assessments properly within their ability they would have had much less criticism from me, and I suppose, a little less revenue from ads and/or their audience.
@@fullspectrum1616 cool video! Still never have used the thing even overseas though. honestly most don’t like it because we have never really had a need and for LH shooters it is very annoying. Plus I don’t really see the point of it since if the bolt isn’t locking then you either have tons of dirt in it, is really dirty or has a malfunction. All which can be solved before hand or in different ways more effectively
Might want to keep your opinions to yourself. Some of us appreciate people not walking on eggshells. He was just calling out the BS. You are the type the is afraid to say "the king has no cloths" He was very polite and yet you still find reason to judge. Not sugar coated enough for your delicate sensibilities.
@@fullspectrum1616 If you read The Great Rifle Controversy and The Black Rifle, Vol I, you'll recall the cost analysis critique that Stoner made at the time. "Why are they wasting all this money on validating their stupid Forward Assist when they could have spent that money on chrome-lining the chamber at a minimum, and preferably the whole chamber and bore?" Had they: * Maintained tight controls on reamer dimensions, * Hard chromed the bore, * Validated the system with the ball propellant change from the tiny stick powders, * Added the heavy buffer in replacement of the Edgewater Spring Guide as a result to act as a rate reducer due to high gas port pressures.... There would have been zero perceived need for the Forward Assist. If you go back and read those resources, you will see that the FA became the hill the Army Ordnance Board and related Commands were willing to die on after being overridden so many times on the AR-15. Dr. Carten thought he killed the AR-15 already with his Army Ordnance Board "final report" sent to the Pentagon, then weeks later was directed by DoD to begin type classification of it as a service rifle. I've spent decades pouring over all this data and there is far more to cover than this. Some great resources are the ones I mentioned, plus Daniel Waters' 5.56 Timeline. There are also US Army and USAF high volume full auto test reports across many serialed rifles before the forward assist issue really started to gain traction, when bolt failures were a thing on the Colt 601.
I don't have that much experience with AR-15s yet, but in the military I used AK-based rifle. On a few occassions I ran into a failure to feed problem, which I fixed by slamming on the charging handle, basically the same thing that the forward assist is for. For this reason I've found this debate a bit bizarre, in my opinion it's a useful feature to have with little to no downsides, so why not have it?
It feels like Karl convinced Ian about the forward-assist, and he isn't thinking about the issue critically enough when brought up. I respect Ian a lot, but it really makes me cringe whenever he talks about the forward assist, because he really says some stupid stuff about it.
I frankly disagree with Chris Bartocci on a number of things, his opinions on the M1 rifle are outright nonsense, such as insisting that the gun should have used detachable 1918 BAR magazines, like those old Winchester prototypes. If he'd have familiarized himself more with the history of the BAR, and read more about those prototype conversions, perhaps he would have learned that the magazines the BAR uses were actually not of very good design or quality, and damaged easily, and that the converted rifles generally did not work very well. More, he ignores completely the logistical and economical reasons for the use of en-bloc clips, as well as the fact that the M1 would still ultimately provide a far greater volume of fire than 9 out of 10 infantry rifles US soldiers would encounter in Europe or the Pacific. It seems to me he just saw some pictures of these guns, and then thought it would be like an M14 and thus better, which would actually be strange considering his bias *against* the M14. Perhaps he's reputable and well read on some subjects, but I always second guess his claims.
Once you are well read enough, you see all the experts screw up now and then, even the ones that do glance at primary sources. If you see a weird inexplicable decision, you need to look into it deeper to see the thought and planning that went into it, not just assume "oh, those guys were just luddite idiots" or "yeah, paid shills for X company" especially when their brothers in arms would live and die by their decisions.
The M1 SHOULD have used a detachable box magazine. The reason they used an en bloc clip was because the army in its infinite wisdom felt that being able to shoot from the prone position was more important than ammo capacity and reload time. Even the Soviets and Germans had magazine fed rifles with the svt-40 and gewehr 43.
@@Deltaworks23 En-bloc clips are far faster and cheaper to manufacture to correct specs in huge volumes, Bartocci suggested BAR magazines because he doesn't know that original US BAR magazines are junk. Also, the en-bloc clips load super fast, the gun locks open on the last round and straight up spits the spent clip out, then you can just insert a new one and let the oprod go and the gun is loaded, with practice this is faster than reloading an M14, so for comparable magazine capacity it's superior, it's also far superior to all the bolt-action rifles which American troops would be facing 99% of the time. For the Russian SVT-40 and German Gewehr 43, these had magazines which were detachable, yes, but they were NOT used as modern detachable magazines, you got ONE magazine inserted in your gun, this magazine stayed in your gun and you loaded it from the breech end with two 5rd stripperclips at a time, and then you got ONE spare magazine, which you had for emergencies. Further, magazines will not interchange freely between SVT-40 rifles due to the inconsistent manufacturing of the time, and you would only ever have two magazines guaranteed to be matched to your rifle at any time, unless maybe you were some special forces guy. In practice, the M1 rifle is superior to both due to being far more widely available and being able to maintain a higher rate of fire consistently. It's also far higher quality in manufacture to either, both the SVT40 and the G43 are rough to look at and hold.
@@0neDoomedSpaceMarine "It seems to me he just saw some pictures of these guns, and then thought it would be like an M14 and thus better, which would actually be strange considering his bias against the M14" - Not strange at all. The M14 departed from the M1 design in a way that made it harder to manufacture in mass production settings and it failed to satisfy the major selling point which was using the M1 Garand tooling.
A lot of people disagree with Chris B on a lot of things. I stopped taken anything he said seriously when he claimed that a mid length gas system increases dwell time in comparison to a carbine length gas system, on a 16 inch barrel.
Your video is missing critical data, particularly the joint Army/USAF high volume fire studies where they were experiencing bolt failures under full auto fire. It undermines your assertion that USAF drove and compromised the development. During those tests, which involved mostly Colt 601s, they discovered that hard-chromed bolts were hydrogen-embrittled, which led to cracking around the cam pin hole, with a few shorn lugs on the sample rifles. As a result, the hard chrome bolt specification was dropped during production of the Colt 602 and the XM16E1 upper receivers, and armorers told to replace bolts with newer phosphated bolts. The assertion that the USAF was driving the testing and specifications of the AR-15 is not supported by the historical or archival record.
My point was that USAF was the first service to request and authorize ball powder and that they did so in a way that made ball powder the exclusively used powder for them which is in response to the common argument that the Army was the initiator/requestor for ball powder. It was also to add to the case of the USAF not being an excellent authority to defer to in matters of small arms development.
@@fullspectrum1616 But USAF was working directly with the US Army very early-on to address problems with the rifles. There were a lot of cooks in the kitchen, which actually helped improve the rifle design incrementally over the years. Ordnance Board started out obstructing, delaying, and fighting the development of the AR-15, even though a minority within them drove its selection for SCHV in 1957.
The so called "intent" of the ordnance board has always been described from the most biased of sources such as Stoner. For instance Mr. Ito (later a representative of Colt) was part of the Army during the Alaskan tests that Stoner describes as "sabotage." Mr. Ito notes how every single deficiency his test board noted was actually acted upon at page 4585 of the Ichord hearings.
@@fullspectrum1616 Stoner didn't like that they removed the FSBs, lost the taper pins, then replaced them with sections of welding rod, which canted the FSBs making zeroing impossible if I recall. Just little basic attention to detail things that should not have happened. I've since wondered if the reason for removing the FSBs was to open the gas ports for reliable function in Arctic conditions. One of the biggest changes post-Fort Greeley tests was tightening the twist rate from 1/14 to 1/12 to provide gyroscopic stability in the more dense air (higher drag coefficient causes earlier departure from stable flight). That change was incorporated into the Colt 602.
@@LRRPFco52 DuPont could not manufacture the required amount of IMR powder the military needed once the Vietnam war started, so they replaced the stick powder with ball. Colt M-16 rifles could not pass the cycle rate test with ball powder, so the government allowed Colt to keep using IMR powder for their testing so Colt's rifles would pass inspection. The military knew full well the rifles were going to be issued with ball powder. The Air Force was the first branch to adopt ball powder, as they claimed they had experienced no problems using ball powder during their testing..So much for the legitimacy in air force testing..
Honestly all the arguments I've heard prior to this video always had an air of "he-said-she-said," as in people like the on youtuber you mentioned saying "It *could* have made the situation worse," implying he never even had to use it? I've always heard a bunch of "Could have," or "Might have," when in reality, I as well never experienced the issue with my own, but I had seen people with me while shooting out in the desert have a failure that was rectified by the forward assist and no other failures occurred. (Using he-said-she-said after I literally just mentioned it, lol. Also I guess exposure bias or whatever since I've only ever seen it happen twice which isn't a fair evaluation, lol.) Honestly this is easily up there with the "Sherman's were death traps!" level of U.S. Military myths and stories.
It's actually fine to use an anecdote to refute a principle such as "the forward assist will always make problems worse," with an example, because they would have to walk back their argument to say that you were merely lucky. Their argument then changes from a principle of "it's always bad and never works" to probability "well sometimes it can work." In fact you could even refute their arguments based on "experience" of "never having seen it do any good" with "I've only seen it do good." Conversely, it's not a great idea to assert a principle with an anecdote unless you don't have any real data to go on.
Those shouting "But Eugene Didn't Want It!" really need to sit down and watch the video. You actually show test results and everyone is just ignoring that fact. People need to remember the mentality of people at the time as well. It was a complete cluster of "I'm right!" "No I'm right!" ever since the early 1940s. Designers never take criticism and critiques well, and no design is perfect from the get-go (except Glock Perfection).
A famous example was Hugo Borchardt, he thought his C93 pistol was perfect and needed no more improvement, he refused to develop it further when requested. Instead, Georg Luger got to work on it, and turned it from a borderline carbine, into a sleek and efficient automatic pistol that went unrivaled for years as a sidearm, and was more than good enough to keep around decades after being surpassed.
He drew the opposite conclusions from the test data though. 191 FTEs after forcing the cartridges into battery during the mud tests is not what you want to reference in support of FA, especially with multiple variable failure nodes (magazines). To eliminate multiple failure nodes, and control variables, you would force the rounds in with FA, remove the mudded magazine, insert a clean magazine, then continue for each iteration. Those mud tests had flawed premises as well, since AR-15s are so resilient to mud ingestion. A well-lubricated AR-15 does extremely well in the elements. Look at how few malfunctions there were during the Fort Greeley Extreme Cold Climate Center tests at -65°F, for example. I've done Arctic and sub-Arctic dead-of-winter high volume shooting from 2005-2016 in Finland with FDF, and don't recall any malfunctions with TDP AR-15s. This is multiple rifles in courses with 10-20 attendees. We have had various AKs experience FTEx or FTFeed malfs in those courses. This video is an example of someone who thought they were conducting good research, but came to the wrong conclusions, likely from a position of validating FA before they began.
An AR feels awesome without it, slick, tubular, forward-thinking, streamlined, lightweight. Adding the forward assist detracts from these design features, but isn't a show-stopper. It's a show-stopper when you go to force a cartridge into the chamber that is resisting going into battery due to debris around the neck or case wall. You really should have racked the CH in that instant, and there's no way to know if you're causing a stuck case or not unless you force it in. So far, most of the archival data he references in this video invalidate his position, especially the high volume mud/sand and Arctic tests conducted in the early days. I drew the exact opposite conclusions looking at all that data, which has been out there, along with other test data from the era. This video is more about an inability to logically analyze test data and draw the correct conclusions from someone who doesn't have much experience researching or dealing with large sample size test projects.
@@LRRPFco52 The fact the FA saved Kyle Rittenhouses life seems to evade your opinion about the FA. All the anecdotal opinion won't change this fact. If Kyle would have not had a FA, he would be dead right now..Theorizing why his rifle was not lubed, or was not mill spec, etc takes a long second to the fact the FA worked as designed and saved his life...
@@hairydogstail Forward Assist was so important that after years of senior SOF CQB instructor input, they got rid of the reciprocating charge handle on the SCAR, which is the only way to force the bolt carrier forward on that weapon. I think that puts the FA discussion in context pretty well. All the time wasted on arguing about FA should really be about lube, mags, training, inspections, armorer support, etc.
Great video. I had to use the FA several times in cold weather when stationed in JBER. It also helps if you don't want to make a loud noice when chambering a round.
Over an 11 year period shooting multi-day high volume courses day/night in Finland, in extreme cold weather conditions, I never touched the forward assist. We're talking ice, snow, can't see the ground due to snow levels. Lube is important for that. White-gloved weapons from the arms room stripped of lube make it more likely to experience FTFeed in any conditions.
@@LRRPFco52 I have used it numerous times while hunting in cold weather..Rifles using the o-ring in the extractor are over sprung causing failures of the extractor to slide over the case rim if the rifle is not charged properly..This is where the FA is very useful..
@@hairydogstail I just remove the O-ring from any bolt before I even think about putting that bolt in my rifles. While hunting, I chamber a round at the drop-off point before going into the areas where I might take a shot. My build process exceeds that of what even the highest price point AR-15 manufacturers can do in a custom setting, let alone mass production. It has evolved considerably over the past few decades to the point where it doesn’t even feel like working on the same rifle.
@@LRRPFco52 interesting, since I've got to force out of battery malfunctions on our Finnish Kalashnikov-pattern service rifles to close manually. At least for soldiers, there's a wide variety of adverse conditions on the field where the action will get friction-y and prone to feed-/carrier inertia-based OOB failures. You aren't always in a position to keep the rifles as clean as possible, and on the field there'll be the odd tripping into dirt or getting dirt into action (not an uncommon occurrence in proper field combat, especially not with the Finnish way of advancing with short dives into prone at the next tree, pit or whatever cover), which are inavoidable in a large setting. So are freeze issues and such, when firing weapons in sub-zero conditions and staying long times on the field, which will cause melting and re-freezing and such. Standard FDF 5W-40 gun oil will also accumulate with dirt in the trigger assembly and other moving parts, and without pedantic cleaning it will be causing issues over time, especially in the winter (FDF recommends running the Kalashnikov-pattern rifles mostly dry, except for extreme cold where lamp oil is used to lubricate the action, as 5W-40 is too thick for cold weather). OFC the full auto Kalashnikov action has its own features in regard to the OOB causes, mainly the spring-loaded OOB safety (many people call it incorrectly "full auto sear") which is the main cause of late OOB, as if the bolt carrier doesn't have enough inertia to push it down, there'll be an OOB failure, or more accurately, at that point the bolt is already in battery and locked, but the bolt carrier is not all the way to the front and hence the OOB safety is not down. The ATF-legal semi-autos don't have the OOB safety, so it's not present on civilian Kalashnikovs, except for some rare occasions in Europe (the rare Zastava M76 on the civilian market).
@@XoravaX Extremely good comment. Your point on fouling, foreign dirt, or anything else providing friction somewhere to slow down and stop a moving carrier is a critical one. There can be _nothing at all_ obstructing the chamber of a rifle and this can still stop the show, which is why it's good to be able to assist your bolt, whether with a connected handle or a separate plunger. With the AR15 specifically you will want to make sure that your extractor has engaged the groove on your cartridge, so tapping the assist to ensure that is worth doing even if you intend to throw the round out and load the next one.
Thanks for sharing this and all of the work of your research, also after hearing from Kyle R.'s testimony it really makes a lot of sense. I was one of those who were under the impression that the F.A. was a "make the problem worse button" now I'm glad my rifle has a Forward Assist.
I was too, but I saw Karl and Aaron talk about how the FA doesn't work that far back and I knew that was wrong. I decided to do some research after confirming the FA does indeed work that far back and the constant discovery of narratives and development contrary to popular opinion motivated me more and more to make this video. I've also come to learn quite a few new uses for it as well.
@@Valorius Sage Dynamics absolutely does have 11-series relevant experience in Infantry Combat arms, PSD contract work, then LE SRT/Sniper, FTO, etc. Same for the rest of Sage Dynamics staff. Ranger Regiment and 11 series guys who are thinkers that want to see the data plus tons of hands-on experience. I've looked at Sage Dynamics with a very critical eye for years now, and have observed an extremely unique attention to detail and dedication to chasing perfection.
@@LRRPFco52 a lot of people do seem to really like their channel. And he definitely shoots a lot. But if he is against the forward assist he is still wrong
I purposefully underweight recoil buffers to get the spent cartridges ejecting forward (hate to be the guy raining brass on neighbors at the range). The forward assist is a God-send (immediate action when bolt carrier bounce ensues)
Holy jeez dude I didn't know the Air Force authorized the ball powder first as an IMR substitute. Not a single source I've found until now has mentioned that fact. Wild.
There was really only one specific thing and obscure thing that tipped me off to this which is Daniel Watter's 5.56 timeline (it's the looserounds.com source in my description). Specifically he talks about the powder overview in one of the appendixes at the end. The more I've read into the whole M16/M14/FAL/Ordnance Corps mess the more I've learned that what has been ultimately transmitted to us in popular media can really only be succinctly stated as "holistically wrong."
USAF was the lead after Army Ordnance Corps declared the AR-15 wholly inadequate as an infantry rifle. USAF had lost spare parts supply for M-1/M-2 Carbines after Korea because the Army ceased spares orders for those carbines. USAF wasn't going to saddle SPs with M-14s, which is why they needed a solution, not that they just wanted a new rifle. Dr. Carten at Ordnance Board was a big fan of their T65 and M14 they helped develop, and didn't agree with the SCHV concept. A minority of engineers within Ordnance got the SCHV concept into test & evaluation phase, but Carten eventually killed it (so they thought) with the help of the majority of the other engineers. ArmaLite developed the AR-15 from Stoner's AR-10 to answer the SCHV concept in 1957, proving to have the better rifle compared with the M-1 Carbine variant necked-down and the Springfield and Winchester conventional rifles in .224 chamberings. MacDonald (IIRC) was promoting the AR-15 at the infamous July 4th birthday, where Curtis LeMay shot the watermelons and then declared that this should be the Air Force's new rifle. He was Deputy Chief of Staff, getting ready to be the Chief, so his clout mattered. This was within weeks of Dr. Carten killing the AR-15 with his final report sent to the Pentagon about what an entirely inadequate rifle the AR-15 was. Within short order, Carten got orders from the Pentagon to begin type classification of the AR-15 for the USAF, which really threw a wrench into how he and the M14 designers saw things moving forward. Once SF, SAS, SEALs, and Airborne forces got their hands on it, and the Fort Benning field studies on FORMAT-E with the AK were observed, the M14 was done and AR-15 moved forward as the service rifle for Army, USAF, and Marines.
@@LRRPFco52 There is not a single part of the rifle that Gen LeMay fired that's present on the M16A1 since all of those parts needed updates, revisions, etc. Even beyond this point it was not ready for adoption as evidenced by the poor selection of IMR powder that was not suitable to meet its advertised performance characteristics and all of the other parts that wore out or became otherwise unservicable before an M14's would. It's not that unreasonable to recommend against the AR-15 in light of the chronic budgetary constraints that could barely fund the ordnance corps in developing the M14 when all the funding was being diverted towards the air force and our expanding nuclear arsenal and new technological projects like air defense (Nike Zeus program), M61 Vulcan developed by Ordnance Corps for USAF, etc. Now they would have to do it all over again for a new rifle that clearly wasn't ready and would (and did) get men killed because of it?
@@fullspectrum1616 The real failure with the M14 was its chambering and overall design based on the Garand. They advertised it as benefitting from more modern manufacturing processes (forged receiver then finish-machined), which never played-out and the machining operations for the barrel are extensive due to the op rod guide, gas block, and muzzle device threads. After all the lessons-learned from the late 1800s, early 1900s post-Great War, and having to re-learn them in WWII about optimal cartridge configuration, they still reverted to a full sized battle-rifle cartridge with excessive recoil, limited soldier's load, and excessive weight for ammo, mags, and rifle. Once the FORMAT-E exercises were conducted at Fort Benning with force-on-force using AKs vs M14s, the writing was on the wall. That discussion has been kept out of the light because of the nature of those types of programs. Same with MiG-21 tactical exploitation vs YF-16 & YF-17 over the Nevada Test & Training Range, which was instrumental in selection of the YF-16. M14 got plenty killed because you can't sustain the fight with that rifle. You could burn through half a basic load in one base of fire even before bounding. US conventional ground forces didn't deploy en masse to Vietnam until March 8, 1965 with 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade to Da Nang. The Colt 601 production rifle went from 1959-1963. 2nd production model went from 1963-1964. As you've already read I'm sure, multiple field trials had been conducted with the early rifles at Fort Benning, Fort Greeley Alaska, and Vietnam with ARVN units. Neither of those rifles were developed to handle the ball propellant M193 and neither had a chrome-lined chamber. 602 barrels were produced with worn reamers, which really was the worst thing that could happen towards causing malfunctions. It would be several more years (Dec 1966) until Edgewater spring guides were replaced.
@@LRRPFco52 Ball powder was able to be used in every other rifle and machine gun that the Army had without issue for years before ball powder was ever an issue with the M16. See page 4755 of the Ichord Hearings. Even with the extensive machining of the M14 on the competitive-price contracts it was 2/3rds the price of the M16 and similarly priced on the non-competitive contracts (as to enable many different sources of production.) While an intermediate cartridge is better, the M14 allowed for fully loaded 20 round magazines and you could be sure that it would fire all the rounds without FTEs in normal conditions. It is interesting to note that senator Ichord never was able to see a demonstration of the AR15 where it didn't jam even in mild flat range conditions. The M16 could only reliably shoot 18 per magazine even IF it didn't fail to extract. The point is that the M14 program was not rushed and the design was more fully validated than what Stoner gave to Colt or even what Colt presented to the Army. Hesitancy to adopt such a rifle was warranted and the Army was not at liberty to further develop upon the proprietary IP of the design themselves.
the major issue with the forward assist is lack of training and education. the hate/distain i have for it is not because of it but because of the operator behind the rifle. small issues that could have easily been fixed turn into long drawn out sessions of beating on it because of the "tap,rack,slap" training we all received. that combined with the absolute soaking of the action with clp. the amount of different scenario's that can happen are either not trained or barely trained for non combat roles. the magic get your gun up and rolling button doesn't work as most of us were trained. the competency of people back when the original test/trials were conducted was also far greater than the current generation. basic mechanics and function of how a firearm works was widely known as guns were a part of the household more so than they are now. also know that not all BCG's have F/A cuts to the extent of the original patent and even if they do there is about 1.5in of travel at the rear most travel where the F/A cannot engage the BCG "buffer length can change this +/-". I obviously don't agree with some things said/covered here however i do agree with you on how the F/A can be useful and has a purpose. unfortunately the problems i have encountered personally through other peoples ignorance lead me to believe that not having it wouldn't be such a bad idea either. the best solution is to just train everyone thoroughly on the platforms we use. thank you for the video.
That's why I made this channel. I want to fill in the knowledge gaps a lot of other guys leave out. This one was mostly to address the common criticisms of the forward assist. My second forward assist video covers some of the finer points of consideration in immediate action and covers the consequences of uncontrolled feed that I glossed over in this first one. My cleaning video, for instance, shows a way to clean a rifle to nearly arms room ready and lubed in 15 mins only by using cleaning solvents and supplies authorized in the Army -10 TM for use with the M4. My lube video demonstrates the superiority of LSA over CLP for reliability, which is also still authorized per the TM (and also incidentally the utility of the forward assist especially with suppressed rifles.) It might be a while from now, but I intend to make a shorter video about a better and more reliable immediate action technique that can reference these longer and more boring as a foundation for why we need to address tap/rack/bang, SPORTS, etc. with a better drill. I'm just stuck working overseas again so it will be a minute until then.
just curious, if it cost more to make the forward assist. then why do aftermarket manufacturer's charge so much more for an upper, without forward assist. that just don't make since to me, besides supply and demand and most of all greed
Different times. The slick side upper was the "dominant" variant when the FA was requested, meaning that all the forgings did not include the nub and nobody factored in the costs of manufacturing the pawl, spring, retainer pin, button and drilling the hole. So requiring a FA meant designing new forging dies and introducing an extra step in manufacturing. Now if you want a slick side upper, everyone is using forgings that have the nub and a company would need to order the forging plant to do a run with different dies. Or machine it off.
very well done video. I don't own an AR15, but the arguments against forward assist are so weak. "The AR is a weapon that needs to be maintained". Okay carl, good luck maintaining your rifle during a firefight that lasts 8+ hours where you fire a thousand rounds or more. Some of those guys in vietnam were going into the jungle with over a thousand rounds, blasting full auto into the brush, just look up the SOG stories. Those same guys also used the FA to silently close the bolt. Good luck "thumbing" the scallop on the bolt when you have blood on your hands or sweat or it's raining. Most people never use their forward assist because they aren't in the extreme adverse conditions it was intended for, the argument that "I've never had to use it in my 20 years of going to the range" is so freaking stupid. It doesn't detract from the weapon in any way. It only adds, and at a small cost. Therefore there's no reason not to have one, especially on a military weapon. Carl's story about the forward assist blowing up a rifle is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard, especially considering Ian's "sniper button" story in his FA video, where Kurds were pushing the FA while firing because they thought it made the rifle more accurate. My 2 cents anyways. I've stopped watching inRange, Carl's attitude has really rubbed me the wrong way of late. Just look at the stupid things he posts on facebook, he's a full blown communist but hides it so he doesn't lose his audience. Still love Ian though.
MAC also tested the blowing up a rifle myth, someone in the comments said that it would be possible that the bolt cycling broke the FA and pushed it out of the hole, and the tale goes from "my FA broke" to "my upper asploded!". The law folders also retain the bolt in position in case you fire with the stock folded and they don't cause the rifle to blow up.
I love the paperwork. When others are flapping gums about this and that you are showing legitimate sources and research. I noticed Aaron Cohen when saying that the forward assist wouldnt help him in his situation could have tapped on it a few times to 100% prove his hypothesis in the interest of truth but he conveniently did not.
The moment you find yourself challenging people with this much experience with AR-15s, be prepared to back up your claims with equal or better research and experience. Short answer when it comes to Sage Dynamics: You will fail.
@@LRRPFco52 Ok. He could have tapped on the forward assist a few times to 100% prove his hypothesis in the interest of truth but he conveniently did not. The fact of whether or not it would have helped is unknown, it very well could be he is correct. But he didn’t prove it with any demonstrations. Any vids where he uses the forward assist? Regardless does SD’s research cancel out the documented military testing data?
@@filasophies4423 all the field study results have been posted in this video. It takes a special kind of I know everything gun guy to ignore them. Apparently you are here to fill that role
@@filasophies4423 This documented data shown from 18:00 forward here addresses the different designs of early FA devices, one a Charge Handle-based approach, the other a modified upper receiver with plunger mechanism and notches machined into the bolt carrier. These devices were tested in extreme mud tests on AR-15s immersed for 15 seconds in sand/clay/water. Unless I missed it, no control rifles without any FA were tested alongside the FA-equipped test articles. The author of this video made extrapolations as if lack of FA present could be statistically represented, with percentages claimed. The premise of this argument is flawed in many ways: 1. Extreme mud immersion tests ignored the true problems of the Colt 602 rifles, which were under-spec, non chrome-lined chambers fed ball propellant M193 that never had rifles adapted to it by that point, and no cleaning kits issued to soldiers. 2. These mud tests were specifically meant to test and validate which FA device was better at ignoring the rifle designer's recommendations, not whether FA was a valid concept. If you read Black Rifle Vol I and The Great Rifle Controversy, you will see that Ordnance Board and TECOM had already decided that FA was needed, after being whipped about by the SECDEF and his "whiz kids". 3. The mud tests themselves concealed any relevant reliability data because rifles don't work when you allow sand to get into the chambers. They have to be flushed because there simply isn't enough room for the cartridge and debris. Same with bolt face, bolt lugs, bolt bore in the carrier, cam pin and hole, etc. Army Ordnance had been humiliated repeatedly by USAF, Stoner, and McNamara and finally chose to die on the hill of the Forward Assist. Stoner commented that they could have avoided all that if they had just controlled chamber specs and chrome-lined the chambers. They had been working on FA well before the 1967 M16A1/Colt 603. The first uppers that got FA in the field were XM16E1, which was a new FA upper that still had the second 3-prong flash hider design, slapped onto a partial fence 602 complete lower receiver group. These still had the Edgewater spring guide, which did not play nice with WC846 ball propellant and its 10,000-20,000psi higher gas port pressures. Edgewater spring guides didn't start to be replaced until Dec 1966. If I recall, the Colt 602 production began in 1963, since 601 was 1959-1963. If someone wants to make a video about early AR-15 development, they need to become intimately familiar with the innards of the 601, 602, and XM16E1. They also need a solid grasp of how different types of propellants behave, chamber reamer specs and wear characteristics, how the AR-15 gas system truly behaves (most are misinformed on this and mislabel it entirely), the different Army and DoD organizations, and the detailed history at least from 1955-1967. It takes substantially-more research than this, plus a grasp of the intellectual standards.
@@Valorius Fila was referencing Sage Dynamics, not this video. This video is full of problems and fallacies, incorrect assumptions and side-steps, which I have identified. I see why you thought it validated the FA though. See my comments above that dismantle those inaccuracies.
It's the usual: read the Atlantic article, Ezell+Stevens, choice snippets of the Ichord hearing, and maybe some Bartocci on the subject. There's almost no way for a normal person to get into AR15 history without coming away with a bad understanding.
lmao this made some people mad. They should probably stop getting their information about what does and doesn't work in combat from someone who thinks his little 2 gun matches are in any way similar to combat. Subbed
Although I think this has some unneeded interpersonal stuff, this is a good video and I appreciate you looking at the sources and history. Disappointing that the initial testing included what would happen if it was depressed when fired, but the myth it would blow up still took root.
If you go to the meat and potatoes at 18:00 forward, you will see fundamental flaws in his data interpretation. He's referencing the early charge handle FA ratchet design next to plunger mod receiver designs in the early days of XM16E1 development during the mud tests with both. This is covered in Black Rifle Volume I, complete with photos of the different FA devices, modified receivers, and conclusions. Trying to extrapolate much data other than which rifle made malfunctions worse (by forcing a round into the chamber needlessly in a mud-fouled gun), doesn't support anything other than what we already knew: The plunger FA design is more effective at forcing rounds into the mud-fouled chamber. That isn't equivalent to saying, "FA is better to have and use than not having it." It's a red herring argument that evades the real question, which is, "Why do you have a mud-fouled AR-15 with all of its sealed features, and why are you trying to force rounds into the chamber?" In those tests, we only see rifles with different FA devices being improperly treated either way. The correct test would be how quickly can you flush them of mud to get them free of debris, not how can you make things worse.
@@fullspectrum1616 they were range control. Emphesis on CONTROL. It ended with a huge shouting match until the civie dudes that fix guns stepped in and told them all was fine and they fucked off.
How does this vindicate anything, in the text you yourself cite Stoner is saying this system is pointless and saying more or less exactly what Ian stated. He chose that system because it was the easiest to delete, you're playing at semantics to justify a completely worthless addition to the rifle that in any true failure will cause catastrophic fuckery. Honestly, you literally ignored the text of Stoner you yourself put up to try and claim it supports you.
I didn't ignore it, you (and it seems many others) chose to ignore the implications of his total lack of involvement with any of them and weighing in only superficially on the subject. Go back, analyze his statement, and then do a little critical thinking of how Stoner himself could be wrong. I only included everything Stoner said about it in the Ichord Hearings so that I would not be cherrypicking anything he said so the viewer could come to that conclusion on their own if they were reasoning it for their self and be aware of popular bad arguments made without context. I see you skipped all of that and went straight to the part of appealing to authority fallacy, so perhaps you should double back. While his superficial understanding of the specific forward assists should have immediately made it clear that he was unqualified to comment on the subject, he was also wrong in his reasoning. Specifically, his recommendation that the charging handle solution from Springfield be implemented because it would be easier to remove is wrong since the Springfield solution modifies the bolt carrier as you should have seen in the video as well as introduced a camming plate (you would also know this if you looked at the TECOM document) that was added into the upper receiver. In either case the extant and the Springfield forward assist designs introduce irreversible changes to the AR-15 which makes his point at best moot. Moreover, the Springfield one changes how the gas key interfaces to the bolt carrier and without any extensive testing who knows the what the effect would have been on the durability of the gas key bolts that do already see some infrequent failures from the original design and has the possibility of more potential harm to the gun than if the current FA was removed and plugged the FA housing. Stoner, also, was unaware of the testing TECOM had done and of course was not able to weigh in on the evidence they presented. You should stop making an argument from authority fallacy and consider the actual merit of Stoner's fairly pathetic argument against it amounting to "I never needed it once my guns ran like a top!" when he references the rifle's demonstrations with the Asian/Pacific militaries. Beyond that he is never able to substantiate anything about it beyond the fact that he doesn't like it on HIS design that, interestingly, he had Sullivan do most of the design work while he was busier trying to sell AR-10's WITH forward assists as requested by the Portuguese. It seems interesting two militaries ended up requesting a feature on his rifle designs that he was seemingly blindly against. Perhaps these two militaries were wrong, or maybe the more likely explanation is that Stoner didn't want to admit his idea was deficient? Either way it's not like he had a stake in it anymore being a consultant at Colt and wasn't put on the team with Sturtevant to help out so it's of no consequence to him either way, except when rifle sales are on the line with his AR-10; THEN he will put it on the gun willingly.
@@hairydogstail No he fucking did not, he hit it in a panic moment the rifle was not jammed or anything. Coulda fucked himself over in that situation. It was feeding perfectly fine he was just hitting shit because he was a scared 17 yuear old being attacked by a fucking mob.
@@ErgonomicChair Yes he did, his AR went out of battery during the scuffle and he used the forward assist to push the bolt back into battery. It saved his life.
Thanks for letting me know. TH-cam seems to have trimmed them when I was uploading the video. They should be fixed now. dtic.mil seems to have removed the mk18 powerpoint presentation, sadly. I just tested them after an edit and they should be working now.
In military circumstances clips are usually still issued with ammunition replenishment in the field, so that people can refill their empty magazines quickly. For instance, in Vietnam you'd get a cloth bandolier which held 10rd clips in a bunch of pockets, you'd refill your magazines and then throw away that bandolier. Though intended as expendable and not made to last, some people would use them for carrying their spare magazines.
@@0neDoomedSpaceMarine those types of clips are used only load magazines. You can't load a clip into an Ar15 or M16. And in the context stated in the video it's apparent they are talking about a magazine when the word clip is said, except in the one instance when they are talking about the clips of the M1 Garand.
@@realeyesrealize388 I didn't state as such, just that clips are used to refill empty magazines, you attach a little guide on the (not inserted) magazine and it lets you quickly and neatly load 10 rounds into it. There's some other rifles which can have their detachable magazines loaded from the breech with clips though, such as the M14 and the Vz.58
A four percent increase in price for the addition of a forward assist is surprisingly large, I would not have expected such a large increase, if you are procuring some million rifles four percent of that is already 40 000 rifles, not a trivial amount, though I suppose there are loads of features on the rifle you could get rid of if budget were the main concern.
Even on a strictly material and budgetary basis, in 1969 SGLI maximum coverage was increased to $15,000 from $10,000 dollars. With a cost of $4.53 per rifle it would pay for itself if it saved the life of one soldier out of 3312 rifles issued considering a $15,000 dollar payout. This isn't even the only cost of a soldier dying, so that is a very conservative number. With the $10,000 figure it is one life saved per 2208 rifles issued to pay for itself. This is, of course not putting any immaterial valuation on human life, which coincidentally was part of the Army's advocation for the forward assist - the fact that saving lives is beyond a mere budgetary concern.
no it's cheaper. Not because it "saves lives" necessarily but because it means you don't have to mess around with the logistical requirements of actually getting the rifles cleaned every 300 rounds or so. Putting the forward assist in creates an innate "interrupt" that triggers soldiers to clean their rifles, if they forgot to do it. It also means you can keep the rifles around longer. I guarantee the army was aware of this fact. They knew if you cleaned the rifles after each engagement you would never need the forward assist but it doesn't really matter. That's never going to happen in actual reality. Attempting to do so would cost more money in the end. The forward assist is the cheap solution and really doesn't have any downsides.
@@ZeroTron The Army "knew" the forward assist was a requirement from the TECOM trials and the initial evaluations of the rifle, which were NOT from a lack of maintenance. Furthermore, I doubt that anyone could substantiate the increased cleaning cost of the rifles as being greater than the cost of the forward assist. This is yet another speculative and highly baseless claim against the forward assist. Sad!
A most thorough citation of evidence, whether that be trial data or modern videos, all while maintaining civility. What better vindication could one want?
This is absolutely fantastic. Never have I seen what appears to be a hobbyist youtube channel take such a serious and academic approach to firearms. We need more content out there like this. I really do hope to see more from you.
That video your referencing is the "Stoner tapes" and it is Stoner referencing (circa 1980s) a meeting with Col. Yount in Washington at a hotel for the Congressional/Ichord hearings in 1967. It was some time shortly before the hearings or after where Col. Yount explained how as the project manager of the rifle he had no substantiation for it since TECOM and the others had been working on the project independently before Yount's position existed and had not forwarded the test data and noted deficiencies from the earlier tests. If you go to the Congressional hearings link and scroll to the last pages you will see Col. Yount presenting the (new to him) test data justification that was provided to him at the last part of the hearings. If you watch my video again you will also see Stoner mention he was not involved in the development of the forward assist.
I'm stopping about 7 minutes into video because you've proven the exact opposite of what you set out to do. Ian and Karl were wrong, but your screenshots still prove that Stoner didn't want one. He didn't think it was necessary to the design, that it was just there to meet an on paper requirement, and he picked the one he did because it was the least intrusive to his design and could be removed when the army discovered the forward assist wasn't necessary. I really don't like Karl, but your claim is extraneous to the argument you're attempting to make and the evidence you cite goes against your thesis.
Whether or not Stoner didn't want a forward assist isn't material to my argument, it's whether he was involved in the creation of one or not and only a very minor consideration as to what specific grounds he was opposed. Secondly, consider when Kalashnikov was opposed to the idea of the AK-74 despite the rifle being just as good (and better by later AK-74M models) with 5.45x39 being wholly a superior competitor to the AKM with 7.62x39. In both cases the designers were opposed to changes on their rifles for what amounts to petty reasons that were not backed up by testing.
@@fullspectrum1616 You're saying that it's not relevant to your argument and I would agree. It shouldn't matter that Stoner wasn't the creator of the forward assist mechanism or whatever Karl wants to ramble on self importantly about. It's an irrelevant point that introduces arguments against your thesis that aren't addressed. What it says to me is your argument is poorly thought out or written and doesn't incentivize me to continue watching. I'd love to listen to more but I can only take so much autism from someone who isn't myself. Also I would disagree that the Kalashnikov argument is a valid argument against it. The addition of a forward assist to a gun is radically different thing than changing a caliber. Besides, I don't expect my engineers to be good ballisticians and make decisions about calibers, it's out of Kalashnikov's realm of expertise, whereas the function and features of his rifle are part of Stoner's.
@@leecline5759 My entire intent by using a dialectical method is to call into question the authority of forward assist critics (and thus remove the grounds for the current consensus against the device) who use horribly bad information to make an erroneous case. I can't do that without presenting the sincere conclusions of others as well as addressing them in their entirety. Karl is just a target, among many, that use the same kind of horribly bad arguments, data, theory, and history to make a point against the forward assist. Karl is also simply convenient to use as within just a few clips from TH-cam and a screenshot from Facebook I can get most arguments against the forward assist presented succinctly, within a few minutes, to the viewer so that the viewer can get an understanding of why the consensus about the forward assist is so horribly formed. Karl is not unique in his positions on the forward assist either as he gets his understanding from the overall consensus and scant public information about it. I don't want to misrepresent them either, so I show literally everything Stoner attested to in the Congressional hearings, under oath, so the viewer can decide what the correct take is. You're really missing out as later in the video there is plenty of publicly accessible, but almost certainly never seen before, information about the forward assist.
@@fullspectrum1616 So, I watched the whole video. Same problems persist throughout and it would be tedious and probably pointless to go count them all. I just have to say 26:25 is a fucking agregious safety violation. Never use a live cartidge to extract a case that's had a head separation. I hope you didn't post that thread because it was taken down because that's a very fast way to make your situation VERY much worse that it is.
@@leecline5759So is a soldier supposed to not point his gun at an enemy line while trying to use a standard issue case extractor before unloading his rifle and showing clear to everyone standing behind a red line?
Funny Ian and Karl have posted tape of Eugene Stoner himself speaking about the forward assist. The early history of the AR-15 to M16 is a circle jerk of people pointing fingers and making contradictory statements. The spring loaded firing pin would have been an improvement. The crazy specific AR primer specification and dent left on all chamered rounds is obvious. My experience with using the forward assist has be very mixed, it's worked about the same number of times its made it worse, usally requing tools and dissasebly of the rifle.
That footage didn't exist in the public domain until after this video was made, and second he doesn't say anything new but only reiterates himself and smirks while pressing it. Still no substantiation because there's never been a test of it since the second TECOM test and he never did any analysis then or now.
@@fullspectrum1616, exactly. There has never been a second test. Between the bad decisions: 6061 recivers prone to corrode and the peeling chrome becouse Colt didn't spring for the specified airctaft grade chrome process and well as Icorrd documented grunts who were told their guns were self cleaning and not issued cleaning kits along with the horrible fouling of the ball ammunition ( I've fired 68-75 ammunition and it fouls bad) as well as gas tubes clogging there has been no test to see if the forward assist clears more problems than it solves. In my case it's a rub, two fixed two that use of the forward assist exasperated the problem requiring dissasebly. The forward assist saved Kyle Rittenhouse: no denying. Was his rifle clean, properly lubricated, or even broken in? "Definitively" rules out operator error. I don't feel that is proven.
@@christinepearson5788 I'm looking at the second test results right now from Oct 63 apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA030946 Kyle's AR had less than 150 rounds through it from new. His AR was in a state that is not out of the ordinary for a military rifle to be in even if it was never cleaned. M&P Sports come with oil from the factory (just watch any unboxing video.) Both TECOM tests prove that the FA is not causal to stuck cases and the FA successfully chambered every single round that failed to chamber. TECOM's test data allows us to say whether the FA is systemically causal to stuck cases. Your anecdote doesn't prove that the use of the FA causal, only that it preceded it, in that if you had done a tap rack it could have also led to the rifle needed disassembly as well. You and I will never know because you don't have enough data to say otherwise.
If the bolt doesn't go into battery, you can't disassemble the rifle, so that alone is justification to have a way to manually close the bolt completely.
@@Watchdog_McCoy_5.7x28, yes you can depending on where BCG is stuck if it's not 2" sunk into the buffer tube pull front and rear pins it slides forward pretty easily.
i like your video, anything that btfos irtv is good on me! i like the FA, if you dont wanna use it then dont use it, it doesn't hurt anything. also i think it looks cool and is one of the cool signature features on the AR platform
Eugene stoner made several forward assists... some ar10s got them and when the army asked for one he designed one but so did colt and they went with colt's design
Stoner's forward assist on the AR-10 required a charging handle under the carry handle which had been an eliminated feature on the AR-15. Stoner admits he had no part in the design of any of the AR-15's forward assists as demonstrated in my video.
Excellent video, another example of "DeRanged" channel pushing a false narrative. Videos like this and from true professionals, "like The School Of The American Rifle" is a breath of fresh air..
I remember when I heard Karl Kasarda suggest that the forward assist could cause the rifle to fail catastrophically if pressed while firing, and I think my jaw dropped because that was one of the most nonsensical things I had ever heard in my life.
@@0neDoomedSpaceMarine Yeah, just got done watching a “Middle East fud law video” apparently it’s known as the sniper button. Push and hold for single shot super accurate fire. Who knew.
@@pmacamfg7655 I wonder if some of that comes from seeing like designated marksmen making sure their bolt is seated before taking aim, and if someone who was familiar with really old fashioned sporters figured that it could maybe be like a set trigger. People that don't actually know copy each other imperfectly, and you eventually get weird stuff like trying to hold the assist down.
Stoner didn’t think it was necessary, the military thought differently and FA was added to the rifle. End of story, anything else is extraneous detail.
The biggest case to have a forward assist is a popped primer landing in your internals and making it impossible to slide the carrier forward again. You simply use the forward assist to get it into battery and then break the rifle apart like you normally would.
Blown primers either drop out the mag well, fall into the Fire Control Group pocket, or stay inside the barrel extension. None of those possibilities are improved by pushing on the malfunction-assist device.
@@LRRPFco52 that was just a single example that has happened in the real world. Use any example you like, having a way to get the bolt into battery so you can break the rifle down in the field is important. There are many other great reasons a duty/serious use rifle should have a forward assist.
@@CoryHobbs2178 I don’t think it really matters and I have seen a lot of real-world use with this family of weapons across a vast set of environmental and geographic conditions, to include large sample sizes of carbines and rifles, as well as researching far more historical records and technical data of the AR-15 family from the 1950s-forward. I’m definitely in the "Stoner was right camp", but I don’t think it hurts to have it there, as long as you DON’T touch it. Serious duty weapons like the Son Tay Raiders’ GUA-5A/As, USAF CTTs and PJ's GAU-5A/As, British SAS Commando Carbines and rifles, and British SBS carbines and rifles, were put to far more serious use than pretty much any US Infantry Battalion when looking at round counts and deployments. Son Tay Raiders spent months working in the shoot houses in NC and mockup at Eglin AFB before deploying to Thailand in 1970 for the mission into North Vietnam, during which they slaughtered dozens of North Vietnamese soldiers and guards. SAS and SBS used FA-less rifles and carbines for over 40 years. SAS was one of the first users in Borneo in SEA in the 1960s, in thick jungle terrain and all that goes with that. Units have done exceptional work with FA-less Carbines and Rifles for decades proving that it isn’t a necessary device. They don’t really care that it’s there, but they don’t use it either way.
@@CoryHobbs2178 Guys with improper and bad training from big Army try to and do use it all the time attempting to do things that are pointless or detrimental. On the SOF side in the US, UK, and NATO, they don’t touch it and really haven’t. Maritime SOF might have exceptions to that if they forgot muzzle plugs for over-the-beach, but everyone is running suppressed there most of the time anyway.
Watched both videos. Nice job Full Spectrum. You did your homework. I would say yes "Vindication". The reason history always repeats is people do not bother to read up on it. Its easier to make proclamations without investigation. I appreciate the historical investigation you put into this.
There's a lot of people that have read the history concerning this, but works like Ezell's Black Rifle and Forgotten Weapon's video for instance do a disservice to the history of the forward assist. Ordinarily going to such resources is all that regular people would need, but the record here makes a much better case. I've had a lot of great critiques in the comments here that have prompted further research and will have a little more thoroughness and focus on the whole story of it rather than simply responding to bad arguments like in this video.
This video was extremely well done, the editing and inclusion of b roll clips was awesome thank you for making it! That said I still fail to see where a FA would work over cycling the action, the two examples used at the end of the video (one where the rifle was frozen to the point water was required to actuate the controls and could also have been used on the chamber but wasn’t, the second with the ftf from the magazine where you don’t know the cause of the ftf and actuating the FA could be making a bad problem worse, where there is no risk in cycling the action) I disagree with your assessment that cycling the action takes more time than actuating the forward assist You mention elsewhere you are considering doing a video on when to use a FA, I’d love to see it. I absolutely disagree with your conclusion and stand by the assertion that cycling the action will more reliably resolve any issues over using a FA - I would love to be proven wrong. I think it is also telling that there was an industrial shift away from the original tear drop FA, If the FA had more merit, as suggested, the tear drop would still be widely used, manufactured and supported - but it isn’t for the reason that an FA has a small amount of uses that again can be remediated by cycling the action That all said this was very well made and I am certainly subscribing for more even if I don’t agree, thanks for your time
I mention the use of the forward assist in some circumstances can be faster. Cycling the action under certain conditions will 100% induce a double feed as witnessed in the cold test video. This is the consequence of the AR-15 having an uncontrolled feed like most assault rifles and I demonstrate this fact on my own AR-15 at 36:30. Further, the action spring in some cases does not provide enough force to fully chamber even in attempts with multiple rounds as shown in the TECOM sand test as well as the cold weather video where you will be cycling the rifle multiple times without fruition. The forward assist is able to apply in some cases an order of magnitude more force than the action spring is capable of, so it stands to reason that in either of those cases the forward assist can be faster than clearing a double feed or racking the rifle multiple times. / Secondly, you are also operating under the assumption that using the forward assist will make a problem worse. The TECOM test would have substantiated this claim if it were true but it is not. There is no data to support the use of the forward assist being causal to making anything worse. / The shift away from the teardrop appears to be due to the 1982 M16A2 PIP ran by the Marines. An assumption of the change being good predicates on the Marines acting with substantive justification of which was surprisingly sparse for the A2. There were a number of changes they did which used prima fascie scientific justification but in reality were a reification of unfounded Marine desires for typical Marine things. One of these was the forward assist profile (allegedly because of snagging). If the allegation is true it is quite an interesting one. This would mean somehow the Marines were somehow getting stuff snagged on the teardrop FA but not on the charging handle, or carry handle for instance (where a slight change in profile would fix snag issues if it were the case). If the Marines had a genuine concern I think they would have addressed that. Now interestingly they also added a case deflector, and a large rear sight windage drum that somehow wouldn't also be a snag point on the rifle. Granted the case deflector shape isn't that bad, but it is an extra protrusion on the rifle that wasn't there before. / The rationale of this decision was made by someone who clearly didn't understand the nuances of the M16A1's development and was very much shortsighted for ulterior motives behind development. The subject of the M16A2 is a video I have already conducted preliminary work on, as even though there is greater awareness about the A2 development process, there are a few points of narrative that are I have very rarely seen and add some insight to the overall picture. / Thanks for your contribution to the comments.
I’m not sure how valid the point of polymer lowers receiving more damage than aluminum ones is, especially given the relatively mediocre quality of most of the ones currently on the market. I may be missing something but I’m fairly certain that splintered metal pieces would do greater damage than polymer ones.
It's not really a big deal to use a polymer lower. I'm just pointing out that his safety concerns aren't consistently applied by himself. Secondly, the aluminum lower receivers do not fragment like the polymer ones as they are just strong enough to not do so - not that I would have any real concern over using either in regards to an out of battery explosion.
The CAV15 lower receiver which Karl and Ian are so fond of was actually pretty good as far as lower receivers go, their observation is that most other polymer lowers are just plastic shaped like a typical aluminum lower, a geometry which isn't suitable for these kinds of materials, and given that those kinds of lowers always snap their buffer tube housing after a few hundred rounds, their observation would seem pretty valid. I wouldn't call it the end-all be-all of lower receivers, I like having a carbine stock and being able to choose my own pistol grip, but if one was looking to make a particularly lightweight AR15 build, it would genuinely be a very good choice.
@@frenchonion4595 Right, but the reason the lower works and doesn't just break from shooting it a little is because it has a good geometry for that material. If they had shaped it like a typical lower, it would have just been remembered as another goofy idea that didn't work.
Great video! I'm a fan of the InRange guys, and it's sad to see their research seems to be relying more on anecdotal evidence rather than the wealth of empirical data provided by the actual military testing. That being said, I think their assertion that the FA is pointless can be salvaged if you're add the qualifier of "for civilian applications". You're far less likely to run into the conditions that will necessitate the use of a FA as a civilian than someone will in the service. If you're going to be using it for three gun/two gun/whatever, maybe losing an ounce or two by removing the FA is more advantageous than being able to expediently seat a round. Or if you have a home defense situation where you're pulling your already immaculate (or at least not filled with dirt and mud) rifle and firing maybe 4-8 rounds. Additionaly, their whole WWSD project was to make a rifle as Stoner would given modern materials, they could've just used the fact that Stoner didn't have a FA on his original design as more than enough justification to not include one in their build. Once again, great video, and I look forward to more! PS: subbed!
The first issue is that Stoner is making the AR-15 in regards to martial and not civil considerations, if you go down the reductionist path you end up with no one needing anything but 30-30s, R700s, etc. To use concessions for civil use detracts from a design for the military and necessarily makes it a worse gun for it's raison d'etre. / If it's strictly what Stoner would do we just have to look at the SR-25 and SR-15 to know he would do circa 1990s, since he was a designer for them, so it's not very speculative given his historical statements and more recent work that it might or might not be on a new one if he was allowed to be the exclusive authority on a new rifle. The other issue is that IRTV doesn't adhere just to an abstract concept of WWSD, where there is no certainty on the subject, but also tries to simultaneously justify everything from a practical consideration, which is where the bad history, logic, and speculation come from that, in part, motivated me to make this video. I don't think there would be very much controversy over their WWSD rifle except maybe the polymer lower receiver seeing as how Stoner didn't go that route on the SR-25/15 and maybe the handguard since carbon fiber was a common enough DoD aviation material at the time. It's hard to say as the SR-25/15 was a little over 20 years ago and there isn't much that has changed since then. In any case IRTV doesn't just stick to Stoner's intent where their actions are defensible, but tries to associate Stoner's questionably elevated authority as well as what is practical in a military rifle altogether for justification which is where I criticize them where it relates to the forward assist.
I've had worn magazines not feed rounds perfectly, enough to slow down the operation of the bolt group to prevent the bolt from fully seating. in those cases the forward assist is fully justified, as there is nothing wrong with the ammo or chamber. I have experienced this enough times in my years in the military to absolutely Want a forwards assist in such instances where environmental conditions, parts wear, dinged shell casings, bad magazines..... warrant the use of the forward assist. Some civilians have had cause to use their civilian ARs in self defense, and a person might want an assist just in case that is the moment Murphy decides to make an appearance. I'd rather have it and never need it or never use it, that need it and not have it.
@@fullspectrum1616 remember that 2017-2020 polimers, molding technology, designs have vastly improved since 1990's, and it's way more tried and tested technology nowadays, so it doesn't surprise me that Stoner didn't bother to use those. The opinion on polimer guns has generally shifted and designing rifles is not only about "what works best", but also "what will actually sell", so their use of polimer lower receiver is not "against" theoretical Stoner's design of 2017-2020. Also, they went for "what works best", and not just "good enough", so carbon fiber makes sense, while weapon designer of 1990's would avoid that simply due to excessive cost. A lot has changed in 20 years when it comes to manufacturing and materials, gun design hasn't changed that much, same with petrol engines, because the general principle is over 100 years old in both cases.
@@bezimienny_andzej6425 The AR design does not work well with polymers. They had excellent polymers when Stoner was alive such as the HK series, Aug and Glock. Stoner's expertise was aluminum and he was still a big supporter of aluminum, especially with the advent of cnc machinery..Nothing wrong with polymers, but if Stoner was to adopt polymers I would bet the family farm he would have designed a rifle for it's use rather than try to ad hoc it into his AR rifle..
torture testing a skeletonized "custom competition rifle" like it's some sort of battle rifle? That doesn't support any argument against the forward assist. It's not the application it's intended for.
It's more about the demonstration of a real double feed as well as multiple real FBCs in a row. The fact that both of these were captured on video successively is also convenient for showing the viewer the issues quickly and is the only reason I included it. This was an unrelated cold weather video made by Kalashnikov Group that used all kinds of different ARs to demonstrate a relative weakness of the AR in cold weather compared to the AK. Although it is a gamer setup rifle, the principles of the malfunction could have applied to any of the other tested rifles or any milspec/duty style of rifle.
@@fullspectrum1616 I wasn't criticizing your assessment nor inclusion of the video, rather I am critical of the people trying to make the AR15 and/or forward assist look bad by putting a "toy"/"show" rifle through battlefield conditions.
@@SoloRenegade They also used two HK 416s and a bushmaster in their test. It's Russia where they have much less access to stuff outside of euro brand AR15s we've never heard of so you have to give them a little slack. You won't see BCM, Noveske, DD, etc. guns in Europe.
@@fullspectrum1616 I get that, but a skeletonized AR15 is going to have malfunctions in less than ideal conditions. The AK47 actually suffers from this too. Lots of large openings where debris can get where you absolutely don't want it. The Stoner design largely keeps large debris from entering the rifle. No mechanical system will never malfunction or not be stopped by debris somehow. But I find the Stoner approach to be superior to the AK47 approach, for example. Would I use an AK47? Yes, but in most cases it would not be my first choice. But these skeletonized "cool" guns ruin the function of the AR platform in less than ideal conditions. Plenty of skeletonized ARs in the US too. But most people don't understand engineering or realize there are 2 theories of tolerance at work. One approach is to have loose tolerances and allow for debris. The other is to hold much tighter tolerances and prevent large debris from even getting in. The AR platform, in my nearly 20yrs experience with it, has never suffered a single malfunction from being dirty that I couldn't fix in less than 5min. Every other malfunction was the result of a worn/damaged/faulty magazine or ammunition. I will also point out that I am in no way one of those people that keep my firearms pristine and clean either. I'd go weeks without cleaning my rifles in the Army even, and still never had issues. I knew when it was dirty enough to warrant proper cleaning, and I didn't/don't have time to be OCD about it. If it couldn't handle a little dirt/abuse, then I would not be a fan of it or rely on it now would I? The tighter tolerances theory of the AR means that when debris that can stop the rifle manages to get in, it's also rather quick and easy to get it back out too. The only way most large debris gets in is through an open dust cover or an empty mag well, with the bolt to the rear. This should rarely ever happen. I close the dust cover religiously, and don't open the bolt but for for very short/deliberate moments (reloading or unloading) when not in a ideal cleaning environment. Skeletonized ARs introduce a multitude of new failure points.
Being an old retired Air Force Combat Arms Instructor, I have a LOT of trigger time on the platform and was still in when we switched over to the A-2 that had the FA. I don't see them as a determent to the rifle but I can't say I've ever had a real need for it either. About the only time I ever used it was at a 4 day training event some years back and when it got up to around 500+ rounds, I noticed with 2 older magazines that I had it needed a bump when loading. But here's my issue. Most proponents of the FA I've talked to say that it's used in the case where the bolt doesn't close all the way "when firing." So I ask, "when firing, how do you know it didn't close all the way?" I usually get a tilt of the head out of that, so I press on... The only way to know, when firing, that the bolt didn't fully lock is when you pull the trigger and hear "CLICK." At that point, the hammer has already been released from the sear so pushing the FA won't help anyway because the hammer is no longer cocked. The only purpose I see to it is when loading with crappy magazines and a very dirty rifle. As I normally keep my rifles clean and normally have good quality magazines, this has never been a real issue for me. That said, I really like the tear drop FA plunger too. As it's nearly impossible to find an AR without the FA, it might as well look good.
On full auto you will have a dead trigger with the hammer still being held by the auto sear. Going from shooting 1/3rd of the time in full auto as was the case in Vietnam to almost exclusively semi auto has reduced a lot of opportunity for this. Secondly, even with a fallen hammer you don't know if the extractor has engaged the rim of the case and using the forward assist before manual extraction is a much surer way to avoid an induced doublefeed. I cover these two points in my second video more thoroughly.
This man took "you don't need a forward assist" personally. I don't care either way if it has it. I do like the look of ni forward assist, and if you have a flat side upper you can have a more reinforced 3d printed lower. But on my go-to rifle there's a forward assist but it wouldn't bother me if it was gone
I'm confused on the mud test, cold test, and dust test. Even after looking at the data and the preface. Was the test performed with _out_ the mag in the rifle, and then the rifle is loaded with a 20-round mag then fired, or is the rifle put under adverse conditions with the magazine in the rifle?
In the mud and dust test the rifle was fully loaded, dust cover closed, and selector placed on safe before being exposed. The mud test had an additional measure of the muzzle being taped shut for safety. This would mean the magazine was loaded and inserted in the rifle before being exposed to the conditions. The cold test does not specify a fully loaded rifle so it seems it may have not been loaded in that test of being exposed to the elements for the two hours it sat in the cold (maybe for safety?) However, the cold test was more interested in temperature than foreign debris as a variable.
I am frustrated by your accusations of poor citation and support of others, considering you do the same at multiple points of this video. Otherwise, this was an interesting video.
Thanks for letting me know. TH-cam seems to have trimmed them when I was uploading the video. They should be fixed now. dtic.mil seems to have removed the mk18 powerpoint presentation, sadly. I just tested them after an edit and they should be working now.
Wow this is impressively researched...always liked the forward assist...never understood why these young kids didn't like 'em...now I know. Those two fellas need to STOP with these LIES about something that can get you KILLED...GOD bless Eugene Stoner
@@joshuagunderson6593 I dont think itll get them killed, its just a matter of training them to a point that they actually understand how the rifle operates. A great deal in atleast the POG world could benefit from this information.
This is very odd. I've been posting replies and they've shown up on my Google - My Activity, yet I refresh and it's gone. So it entered TH-cam's servers and now it's gone. I'll have to check if there's a problem on my end before I can post comments here. I'm trying to tell people Rittenhouse had other options besides his forward assist and that if the forward assist wasn't there, he'd have used another of those options. Chrome messing up so I used Firefox. Deciding to post one comment here instead of to everyone who thinks forward assists are the only choice Rittenhouse had.
While he may or may not have had other options such as thumbing the "scallop" or re-racking the charging handle, Kyle stated it was about an inch out of battery he hit the forward assist and then it fired. So we know that the chamber was "empty" and a new live round was in the feeding/chambering process. That being the case the extractor would have most likely not have slipped over the rim of the cartridge yet (considering that the extractor slips over the rim just before the locking process starts and not 1 inch OOB) and re-racking the charging handle would have then caused a double feed since the extractor wouldn't be able to pull the previously loaded round out. That narrows it down to using the scallop or forward assist. The forward assist seems faster to use, and Kyle was in imminent danger of being shot at any time with a pistol pointed at him, so thumbing the carrier may have been slower or may have not allowed enough force to chamber. I'm going to take a guess that thumbing the carrier in this case was probably enough to overcome a minor friction stoppage of the cycling, but I do think it's slower than thumbing the carrier and that the convenient location, mechanical advantage, and lack of precision needed for the actuation of the FA (compared to having to stick your thumb much more precisely on the carrier) lent itself to saving Kyle's life, especially under the threat of death. Can't say for sure concerning speed as we will never know exactly when Gaige was going to pull the trigger, but that's what I genuinely believe.
@@fullspectrum1616 I really don't have the time for this sadly. Sleepy now too. In the video, his forward assist usage wasn't just a thumb flick. There were reasons like the drop kick and weapon grab that justified a poor load angle and slower response but he fumbled a bit with the forward assist. It wasn't speedy enough to say it was his fastest choice. Had he not had a forward assist, the whole seconds used could be used on another procedure. And Kyle's own descriptions are lacking. Others pointed out, more eloquently than I can, about parts he misidentified. He's trained but what he says is an ejection port cover and misidentified parts throw me off. I think he meant the bolt? Rewatchimg after a nap. Though at least you're talking about Kyle. Other guy was saying irrelevant stuff unrelated to Kyle.
@@YTPrule Cut him a little slack as neither of you are properly seasoned in formal debate. He's a quite likely a boomer that probably knows more about the exactness of what makes a quality AR than either of us by orders of magnitude. What it appears he was going to get at if you entertained him a little was that the common knowledge of M&P Sport II's being $700ish and often having bad QC examples doesn't necessarily mean Kyle's AR was bad or good and isn't enough to make a determination from alone; only that it can be determined to be bad or good depending on the measurements, machining, finishes, etc. When he refers to his expertise he is saying that he can know definitively what specifically makes any particular AR good outside of simply relying on consumer reports of brands in general. In the sense he's getting at it's Shroedingers AR where a specific AR should be treated simultaneously bad and good until known better (measured.) In that while there are (probably) many more bad M&P AR15s by rate than there are BCMs you wouldn't know for certain whether the gun was made poorly or not since their manufacture specs are the same (in regards to the specs relevant to cycling), only the level of QC is different of whether the manufacture was done well or not. This would mean there are some M&P15s that will run even better than some BCMs necessarily, for instance. I do share his opinion, though, that using the forward assist is faster than tap rack. While Kyle probably had enough time for someone like Jerry Miculek to do a reload, tap rack, and forward assist bump all at once, Kyle had to operate within the limits of his ability of a normal, less experienced, person who had just been running a lot and struck in the head by a skateboard, rioters, etc. I, and I suppose hairydogstail, don't believe Kyle could have done anything other than use the forward assist to clear the malfunction before Gaige shot him.
@@fullspectrum1616 I’ve been in far more formal debates. I also try to have standards typing. And far from it. Boomers I’ve known told me about their experiences. Multiple boomers and AR owners. My time in the firearms community let me encounter a bunch of dudes. Why assume he’s anything when he can’t stick to a subject? He genuinely didn’t know about the M&P Sport II Kyle used (police reports easily said) repeatedly mistook metaphors as literal, and in my experience, boomers do better. Age doesn’t mean they’re dumb or playing a fool.The more experienced firearm owners I discussed with were all praising Kyle for his competence under his circumstances, his budget and openly saying exactly what I did, that his performance with his cheap gear is exceptional. They told me their own experience with S&W. They’re the kind who can and have built their own ARs. It’s them altogether who told me not to go for it. They consistently told me to steer clear of the model Kyle had out of lack of quality control and they take the circumstances as evidence that it wasn’t a better one. He had barely shot it before the night, doubtfully even time to break in a gun, the malfunction alone when they’ve shot far more than me on more used (and even rare “holy shit did you clean that” times”). One guy even asked why the gear should be praised if it’s only because of its owner’s wits that he fixed a problem that could’ve killed him. There’s evidence leaning towards the poor side. He could’ve lucked out, only to hit bad luck later, the more good luck he fought dummies. When he refers to his expertise, he only says “lol name this” while never providing any naming himself. I’m telling him that unless it’s directly related to Kyle, it’s not relevant to my point. The kind like that like to derail you so you better keep them straight. He ain’t actually backed his statements. How many of my or his own questions did he answer? He claims he’s an expert but he asks more questions than he answers. I ain’t falling for that trick. Anyone can bluff and his lack of evidence, and my time with experienced AR users, suggesting he’s hot air. And he deliberately steers away from Kyle when I ask him about Kyle. This means that he can’t answer about Kyle. Just the fact that he has to ask how can I tell Kyle’s gun wasn’t some high budget gun when reports about his equipment already exist, including names, means that he’s either not done his homework or he legit can’t recognize price ranges for a budget AR. What, did he inherit all his stuff or get it gifted? He can’t see the price tag for the same kind Kyle got? I guess he got his really early and inflation hit and he wasn’t keeping track of recent prices. Guys even told me there’s an increase in demand BECAUSE it was the model Kyle used. The boomers and experienced AR owners I know can give answers. They recognized quick that a boy of Kyle’s circumstances is unlikely to afford some high end gear. If he knew what he was talking about, he’d pick up on what a joke/jab I made means rather than assuming literal meaning too. About the forward assist, my gripe with people is when they treat it like Kyle only had 0.1 attoseconds and did the only move ever that could’ve saved him. I know he used it, it saved him, etc. He’s only a human and while good reflex, he clearly didn’t do everything 100 optimal even for the FA. I don’t blame him, many older and had their firearms longer than he’s been around admit they wouldn’t do as well. In his shoes, I can safely say I wouldn’t do as well. He did better than anyone could’ve experienced. But some of the arguments I’ve seen in favor of the forward assist don’t present an accurate picture. That’s what I’m not happy about. Thanks for your time btw. I can tell it takes time to write longer replies. Most joes wouldn’t give the time. I appreciate it.
Lots of arm chair engineers on TH-cam. For any complex mechanical system (especially for US military) risk assessments are conducted. Begun in the 1940s by the U.S. military, failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) is a step-by-step approach for identifying all possible failures in a design. If I boil down the work it come down to… Issue 1) Short stroke the charging handle and the round does not go into battery (Combat severity=high, Non-combat severity= low) x (Combat occurrence= medium, Non-combat occurrence=low). Mitigation could be 1) recharge a new round (training) or 2) add a forward assist (design). When you add a new design you need to analysis the potential unintended consequence. Forward assist good if the round does not go into full battery due to a round hang-up (low risk). Forward assist catastrophic if the round does not go into full battery due to fouled chamber and you use the forward assist causing a stuck case (combat=death, non-combat= low risk). So no way would Eugene want a forward assist!
If you actually watched the video you would have known I demonstrated that stuck cases are not caused by the forward assist and that they occur independent of the forward assist's use, so your bullshit risk assessment is moot. Secondly, it's apparent no engineering "risk assessment" was ever conducted on the AR-15 (at least in regards to the forward assist question) as Eugene Stoner could only defend the lack of including one based on his anecdotal previous military demos to Asian armies, of which apparently never needed it once despite the US Army's testing noting from the very beginning first round feeding issues were quite common as well as the later TECOM test. Perhaps they weren't as rigorous as the Army was in demonstrating the AR-15, much like the Air Force. Stoner also never cited a risk assessment to defend himself or criticize the Army, so again it seems more likely than not that Stoner never had a formal process and data in whether or not to include one.
You, being an experienced engineer should know that engineers don't get to pick and choose features. This idea that any engineer that is employed by someone gets to tinker around and make their dream widget a load of garbage. As it turns out, his opinion didn't count.
It's a very well put together video and I appreciate your passion for the subject, but I think you gloss over the outright incompetence of Army Ordinance a little too much (in this case, that would be fuddlore circlejerk as their incompetence did create a Congressional hearing after all), nor does the environment that the M14 and M16 really get the due discussion it probably should with the tone of your work being so definitive. During the 1920s the Army spent lots of time, money, and effort not only researching the SCHV intermediate cartridge concept, but actually adopted the M1 in .276 Pedersen. Now, that was correctly amended to keep .30-06 in light of switching and supplying a mainline infantry rifle caliber used by no other weapon in the US arsenal on the verge of World War. However that doesn't change the fact that in the '20s that the intermediate caliber concept was identified as the wave of the future; and independently proven to be verified and pursued by the Germans, the Brits, also the Soviets, and ANOTHER test by the Infantry Board in 1956. Despite all this, Army Ordnance wasted all the countless dollars and hours put into their own studies, eschewed and technical progress by any other major power in the postwar years, and adopted .308. Army Ordnance, sold the M14 as a cheap upgrade that could be easily made on easily converted machines and tooling, with near 100% parts compatibility with the M1 and therefore the existing inventory would also help mitigate costs as parts and easy "conversions". As everyone knows, this was not the case, on top of this, these same minds manage to screw up putting a box mag on the Garand (and I mean that. Redesigning the gas system from full auto ruined it, rendering it much less reliable and the rifle virtually incapable of holding zero. Then, due to the uncontrollable recoil in full auto the functionality was totally disabled on the guns). So, Ordnance had a culture of BS and bias long before the M16 came on the scene. During the Congressional hearings on the M16, the forward assist itself came up and was the topic of a lot of testimony. Colonel Howard Yount, who had been a project manager at the Rock Island arsenal in 1963 and who throughout the hearings bore the burden of explaining the ordnance corps’ decisions, was asked how this change could have been justified. Not on the basis of complaints or of prior tests, Colonel Yount said. It was justified “on the basis of direction.” "Direction from where?" a congressman asked. Direction from his superiors on the Army staff, was all he would say. Later the Army presented documents that defended the forward assist thus: “The frequency or infrequency of the type of malfunction correctable by a manual bolt closure capability is immaterial. The knowledge among troops that such as malfunction is merely possible would lower confidence in a weapon lacking (such) a device.” In short, I have a hard time believing the same mental giants who messed up 1, making a box-mag fed Garand, then 2, thought A.)playing with buffer weights, B.) deleting chrome lining from the bolt, carrier group, chamber, and barrel, C.) changing the powder twice, the second time completely changing type and composition of powder, increasing chamber pressure about 10,000 PSI with (0 input from Stoner or Colt), and D.) issuing a *standard infantry rifle without a cleaning kit or any provision to clean it in the field* (regardless of if they believed the Colt marketing, were trying to sink the M16, etc.) were all fine ideas - knew what they were doing by adding a Forward Assist.
Thank you for the kind words. I'd like to point out the ordnance corps was not in existence in 1963, thus they couldn't have "forced" the forward assist. But let's rather consider if there was still a "good ol' boys club" in the Army of these ex ordnance corps officers and they still had an impact or were incompetent as commonly asserted. / I'm familiar with all of Col. Yount's testimony. What's strange is that the data for these trials was presented (page 5011) during the congressional hearings by the Army after Col. Yount's testimony about being directed to put it on without any specification as to why his superiors chose to do so (page 4701). So it is strange that Yount was either not familiar with these tests or that he wasn't convinced by them but it would make sense in that case why he isn't able to or not willing to defend the forward assist. It appears Yount was not trying to introduce the forward assist onto the M16 and was not in any part of its development. Ironically, Yount is former ordnance corps assigned as the project manager for the M16's Technical Coordinating Committee, so you could argue that in some part the recently decommissioned (1962) and at that time nonexistent ordnance corps was either against or ambivalent to the forward assist. What we can definitively take away here is that Col. Yount at least was not in part of the Army or a circle of people that were pushing for it. / I don't think we will ever be able to definitively know the exact who, what, and why of the forward assist directive and whether it included justification or not. What I think appears to be the case is that certain elements of the army saw the need for it (in their previous tests) and requested these TECOM trials to Army staff command after having Yount's TCC shoot them down due ot the Air Force not wanting it. That Army staff command or some subordinate submitted a solicitation for a forward assist, based on the earlier BRL, ODCSOPS, USADC (defense command), US Army Infantry School, Aberdeen Proving Grounds, and US Army Arctic Test Board recommendations (page 5007-5008). Colt responded with the plunger type and Springfield Armory with the charging handle device. Army staff got USATECOM to run the tests to determine which solution was best. Col. Yount wasn't bothering with the forward assist project since the Air Force protested it and Yount wasn't going to waste time when there was an all services agreement requirement for changes to the M16 by the TCC. He was more likely concerned and busy with the Air Force's request for ball powder at around the same time. Army staff would then have had to go above Col. Yount's TCC to get DoD and then SecDef approval for the forward assist change using the earlier tests as well as the multiple TECOM tests to justify it. Yount's TCC probably didn't care and just went with following orders since he would not be liable for this specific change and thus not need to justify it, whereas the Army and DoD elements who directed this likely DID have a good reason such as everything I already mentioned. Notice how the congressmen never seem to attack Col. Yount in the same way they did the Air Force's Major Smith and General Anderson over the ball powder even after Yount testifies he has no basis for it because they may have already been familiar with the TECOM test result documents before discussing it. / The issue here is that if (former) US Ordnance was so involved with this they would have "forced" the higher ups to approve the Springfield Armory one if they were acting the same way they did with the M14 as to secure themselves and their friends at Springfield Armory relevance with further M16 developments. It makes more sense to me that amongst all those different and non-ordnance elements within the Army that there was a genuine observation of the need for a forward assist and to use their observations and data to justify it through higher channels than the TCC as the TCC wasn't in a position to override the Air Force's objection on their own authority. / My argument predicates on the Air Force not being a good authority of what is necessary for a combat rifle. I think I have already shown that. While it is not often done, it is easier to defend the Army than the Air Force. The decision to remove the chrome plating on the exterior bolt carrier and bolt was justified because of the flaking of the chrome material. Colt offered to chrome the chamber and bore but it was vetoed by SecDef for cost considerations as the original M16 was already not chrome lined, which goes against Stoner/Sullivan's authority as designers (as well as the experience Stoner attests to in his demonstrations in Asia about never seeing a condition where the forward assist was needed). Ordnance chromed lined the barrel/bore of the M14 and likely criticized the AR-15 for not having it. Further, Yount of the TCC offered to let the Air Force use a lower chamber pressure via a waiver and reduce velocity for their issue of blown primers with IMR 4475, and the Air Force refused it to allow velocity to be reduced and went with ball powder along with its associated increased cyclic rate waiver. The Army never increased chamber pressure as the 3250 FPS was from the original COTS load of IMR 4475 that was designed by Stoner himself in partnership with Remington. Yount also expands upon that the original IMR 4475 load was never validated like ball powder since it was COTS with the rifle from the beginning. The buffer weight change also DID fix the cyclic rate issues of ball powder and is present in all rifle length buffer systems to this day. Further on powders, it was Col. Yount's desire to have at least two different types of powder authorized at all times for competitive purposes (4631). This was quite evident in the numerous IMR powders that become authorized alongside the WC846 ball powder during early Vietnam. Regarding the cleaning kit issuance, there was a lack of cleaning kits amongst ALL services not just the Army, so they are all just as bad as each other in that respect. / I didn't want to include this as my video was over 40 minutes and I didn't want to get into too much speculation. These are also the kind of arguments that regular people also do not come across even when researching the topic, so I didn't want to go too crazy with the tangents. EDIT: Please note that I covered the "pyschological need" of the forward assist in my video already presented by the Army that was IMMEDIATELY followed by their aforementioned test analysis regarding a deficiency of not being able to force the bolt close. Most people seem to stop reading there and forget to include the very next page that goes over this. / EDIT 2: Yount found out about the test data I mention AFTER he was initially asked on page 4701. Looks like everyone forgot to read that part. See page 5004.
@@fullspectrum1616 Thanks for such a thorough and detailed reply. It's really rare to see a gun youtuber provide such definitive, sourced content instead of generic arguments and for that I cannot commend you enough. I hope this wasn't just a one-of example and we keep seeing content from you.
If you read Edward Ezell's book The Great Rifle Controversy the adoption of the M16 is a lured tale of the Army's desire to avoid the M16 at almost any cost. However the Army decided to require the forward assist in 1963 and at that time according to Ezell "Even though everybody, including Colt, Stoner and Yount, opposed the bolt closure device, the Army got its way." (Ezell at 199). In addition the Army also changed the twist of the rifling, eliminated the requirement for chrome plating the barrel and changed to ball propellant. It is probably well known, but worth repeating that the AR15/M16 was adopted and fielded outside of the normal procurement procedure and that the through testing that should have been done prior to its fielding was never done. In fact you could make the argument that Vietnam constituted the operational testing the M16 should have had. I would add that Stoner was attempting to develop a light weight rifle. That was the goal and every ounce counted. We seem to have forgotten that as we have abandoned the idea of a light weight rife and loaded up the AR15 platform with heavy barrels and other accessories. It would be interesting to have a through side by side test of rifles with and without the forward assist to see if Stoner was correct in his assessment that the forward assist was not needed.
@@michaelberry9706 I've never seen any evidence that Yount was in opposition to the forward assist except on page 4701 of the congressional report and that wasn't outright opposition but speculation out of ignorance before he became aware of the test data identifying the need, where he then personally presented the test data on page 5007. Does Ezell source this claim outside of the Congressional hearings? Secondly, the Army never required the Air Force to purchase the forward assist which is why they got M16s and Army/Marines got XM16E1s. This allowed the Army to bypass an all services agreement on the forward assist since the Air Force wasn't forced to order one. Secondly, how did the Army remove the chrome on the barrel when the Colt 601 was already non chrome lined? The TCC only removed chromed bolts and carriers that DID have flaking issues. I've also never read that Colt was opposed to the forward assist. It would be strange that Colt would oppose the forward assist while simultaneously having their head product engineer design a solution that became adopted so that Colt could profit even more off the rifle. You would think if they were opposed (on the idea that it was bad) that they would let Springfield Armory be the sole organization responding to the forward assist solicitation and let them be responsible for any of the bad that would occur from its use later. / As a side note it's not possible to have a capable modern rifle for war under 10 pounds these days. If it is, it's missing something. Take a look at my gun in the video. If you don't include the suppressor and magnifier it weighs over 10 pounds loaded and every thing on that gun is a necessity in the modern era. It has a government profile 10" barrel which is as light of a barrel as you can get, too. If you want to argue about the weight of the optic you could save 8 ounces with an Aimpoint T2 but that still has it above 10 pounds. We've abandoned the idea because we have lights, lasers, and optics that didn't exist in the 1960's. As a base rifle it is lightweight which makes it lighter overall with accessories than other rifles that would also have the same attachments put onto those rifles anyway.
@@fullspectrum1616 Ezell cites: US House of Representatives, Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on the M-16 Rifle Program, 4701ff. I think you are too hard on the Air Force. It is the Army that was responsible for procuring and type classifying small arms for general military use. It is their job to generate specifications and conduct the testing. And they were too invested in the M14. They did not want the AR15/M16 and would have sooner eat dirt than adopt it. LeMay wanted it for the purposes of the Air Force and the AR15 without the forward assist was fine for their purposes. Let's remember that by 1963 Colt was trying to sell rifles and if Army approval was required and if the Army wanted a forward assist (to emulate the M1, M14 and M1 Carbine) Colt was not not going to argue. Look the story of the adoption of the M16 is complicated and involved and I really can't remember all the ends and outs. If you have not done so you really need to read Ezell's books Including "The Black Rifle". They may not change your conclusions, but they are the basic texts with which a student of the AR15/M16 needs to be familiar. At the very least you can then say: Ezell says this and I disagree for these reasons. Ezell after all was curator of the National Firearms Collection at the Smithsonian and updated Smith's Small Arms of the Word.
I'm only a minute in and every single thing you've said is false. Please research what you're talking about before misinforming people. Also, please for the love of god get a new mic, the lip smacking is really intense.
Its ugly and I've never used one in my decade of shooting ar 15s. Except my clone builds, every one of my ars has an aero upper with no forward assist.
@@whodat9198 lol all my army friends that have done multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq have never used it beyond training. One of which was present at cop Keating battle.
As far as I'm concerned, it just gets in the way of left-handed operation, and doesn't do anything that the *bolt carrier scallop* doesn't let me do in the first place. You may argue arctic ops, but to that I argue that the magazine catch has a tendency to stick and freeze up anyways, so by that point just get a bloody AK and be done with it.
The scallop is a lot more uncomfortable and provides far less leverage than a nice convenient button. Using the scallop to close the bolt the rest of the way when stealthily slow loading the M110 was standard operating procedure and sniper teams hated it. The lack of a forward assist to make that much more convenient and comfortable was one of the major complaints, and that’s why the M110A1 has one.
On more than one occasion, I have observed ARs with their BCG unable to be retracted due to the forward assist being stuck in the forward position, hanging up on the bolt carrier's FA notches. Fixing this required beating on the FA's housing to free it. Without the FA, one can just as easily push forward on the the bolt carrier's relief cut to help fully seat a cartridge. If the bolt continually fails to go into battery, you need to try and unfuck your rifle, not keep on attempting to force the bolt home. Judicious use of the dust cover and making sure the rifle is properly lubricated based on what environment you're in are the best ways to ensure the rifle does not fail in the first place. The forward assist adds a needless potential point of failure to the rifle, forced added cost onto upper receiver production, and adds unnecessary weight - however small - to the rifle. "Muh fuddlore, muh ecelebs, muh circle jerk." The brownies have gone to your head.
That is BS, the forward assist ratchets and won't hang up when retracting the bolt carrier.. Kyle Rittenhouse used his forward assist to save his life shooting a DeRanged supporter..
@@blackbird_actual th-cam.com/video/1oUi2YRRtYw/w-d-xo.html What did you do, weld it shut?? There is no way any forward assist will lock in the down position. Please explain how you have seen a forward assist lock up the bolt carrier more than once with the pin in the down position. BS!
@@hairydogstailYes, I've seen this video. Where did I say that the rifle would explode? It won't, that's what the vent holes in the carrier are for. Did you notice how it did exactly what I said it would do and the BCG was prevented from cycling by the forward assist being held in?
@@hairydogstail It's pretty simple, the FA mechism get's stuck in the forward position either by getting debris into it or as a result of poor QC. It isn't a common occurrence, I'll give you that, but it is by no means impossible or so uncommon that it isn't something to worry about. Might as well not have that possibility in the first place.
27:28
I know of the Podcast statement that Karl is Referencing. And he is actually either wilfully or ignorantly misrepresenting what was said.
The actual claim was conjecture between 2 former special operations veterans (whom I believe are actual advocates for the FA) that hypothesized that IF the forward assist were theoretically depressed by mistake (specifically, by an untrained infantryman) while bracing a rifle against a door frame upon room entry (which is an absolutely ridiculous, though technically POSSIBLE situation), it MAY cause a malfunction due to parts breaking and floating loosely in the upper receiver.
At no point did either speaker say they have seen such a specific instance, only that they believed, in theory, under the most absurd of circumstances, was catastrophic failure POSSIBLE due to such misuse.
Karl is a worthless source of information, and is an actual, LITERAL cuckold. His opinion is invalid.
Thank you for your research into this topic.
Thanks for the clarification. Do you happen to remember which podcast specifically? I was aware of all the other stuff but I'm trying to keep it civil and on topic.
@@fullspectrum1616
P&S ModCast 100 - Gun Nerds 5: AR15 Theory
th-cam.com/video/pyYODtiohzQ/w-d-xo.html
At about 13:00 the topic is brought up, then again at 2:05:00, (and various points throughout).
I got some of the details wrong, for example only one speaker was a special operations veteran, the other was in manufacturing for CMMG, and no one said "door frame" but rather "barricade".
It should also be noted that half of the stuff everyone on that panel says, regardless of their experience or expertise, is inaccurate at worst, or purely anecdotal at best.
The overall point is the same: Karl took hypothetical statements and presented them as definitive real world examples.
Hope that helps.
Karl is a cuckold, a satanist, and a SJW communist. And yes, he is completely wrong about the FA.
@@fullspectrum1616 I posted links to this video on the brownells thread that was just posted today. Hopefully it'll A) educate some people and B) get you some views.
Great video man.
@@fullspectrum1616 Your data analysis at 21:30 contradicts your assertions. I think you used a strange statistical figure to make the 191 FTEs from forward assist malfunction forcing to sound like a better scenario.
You have to analyze any big Army TRADOC, TACOM, and Ordnance Board studies with a very jaded eye with no less than 2 decades of study into the subject with original source material and personal experience across multiple variants and high volume.
Your video is way underappreciated.
Thanks again, Chad. I believe the truth of the matter is working itself into the light as we speak. I feel the winds changing and that the FA is beginning to receive the proper judgement in the court of public opinion.
@@fullspectrum1616 I posted it again on my business page. It's good work.
A small minority of the internet is real mad at me for joking about the F.A. for the past few days.
I have reviewed it and see many fundamental flaws and extrapolations I would never have made. The author needs to read Black Rifle Volume I and The Great Rifle Controversy, as well as Daniel Waters' 5.56 Timeline. Then a detailed study of the design changes from the Colt 601, 602, and XM16E1 should be undertaken.
After that, an analysis of the different stick and ball propellants should be investigated to see how they affect port pressure and cyclic rate on a pressure trace graph.
The more important aspects of refining the design will then jump out, and the infinitesimally inconsequential presence of the forward assist will become obvious.
@@LRRPFco52 Read the M-16 rifle system reliability -qa-evaluation 1968 . It covers the stick vs ball propellants reliability..
The forward assist, from here on known as the Kenosha assist or the forward Rittenhouse or the bicep button.
Everyone pick your favorite!
I favor the Bicep Button
@@Splash111 i like that one too!
I like the Rittenhouse button myself.
@@Valorius Nice 👍
Thank you for this, I've never understood people's distain for the forward assist.
The Forward Assist represents the incompetence and malfeasance of Army Ordnance Corps and those who managed the AR-15 production related to the Colt 602 and ball propellant change to M193.
The rifle needed to be further tested with ball propellant M193, which resulted in the heavier buffer to act as a rate reducer.
@@LRRPFco52 The forward assist has saved soldiers lives and citizens lives too whether you like it or not.
Used as prescribed in SPORTS it is absolutely a useful device.
@@LRRPFco52 The new buffer also cured the problem of bolt bounce malfunctions when use on full auto. The originol buffer had no weights and was basically just a spring guide..The stamped lower receiver AK had the same problem, which is why the Russians adopted the 5 piece "mistakenly called a rate reducer" to prevent bolt bounce..
@@hairydogstail Yup. I’ve been a deep student of all of this since the 1980s, including lots of archival data, books pre-internet, and post-internet analysis on what we thought we knew.
If you get deep into the parts differences on the early guns between the prototype rifles, Colt 601, 602, XM16E1, and 603/604, you see all of these changes and notice how they match up along the timeline to address the various problems encountered.
Firing pin mass and the firing pin retaining pin were other changes. Pivot pin, furniture materials, rear sight markings, ejection port door spring hole, buffer thread roll pin lock, no fence/partial fence/full fence lower receivers, barrel twist rate, cast vs forged front sight bases, charge handles, chromed BCG vs partially-chromed, and a laundry list of changes happened along the way. Best improvements were the chromed chamber, maintenance of tight reamer specs during production, and replacement of the Edgewater Spring Guide with the heavy 5.2oz rifle buffer.
Those things really made the 603/M16A1 the reliable rifle that it was/is, as long as it’s lubed with thick CLP or long-lasting oil.
@@LRRPFco52 The older LSA lube is still the best lube I have used and will use nothing else unless I'm in sub zero weather..
I have always taken what Karl and Ian say with a grain of salt. Their experience (while greater than most) is exclusively in competition, albeit rather adverse competition. That really shows with their disdain for the forward assist. Whole I was in the army (8 years) I WAS issued poorly maintained weapons, and the forward assist did help me chamber a round on numerous occasions. Soldiers don't have the luxury of choosing and maintaining their own equipment after a certain point. I have also (perhaps stupidly) forced slightly dented and misshapen brass into my rifle, and never had an issue. I've never needed to use it do to my rifle being dirty, but if you think that's an issue, by all means don't do it. It feels like this should be a dead argument at this point, but like every argument on the internet it persists. Great video, it confirms my bias.
the misuse of the forward assist is where distain and hate come from. i can relate with both of them. more times than not the F/A is used to cause timely malfunctions that would have been remedied easily. it's a failure of education and training 99.9% of the time. the forward assist does not cause issues but is used to worsen them very often.
They make recreative (hope I'm using right word) content, they are youtubers. You get very little scientific info in YT about anything, not just firearms
I still think you did a great job with the video.
Thanks, again; it means a lot coming from you.
Karl Kasarda thinks he's the smartest guy on the planet and consistently refuses to entertain any viewpoint different than his, as he holds himself in high esteem. He knows some stuff, but not as much as he thinks he does. Ian seems like a good guy, but he is falling victim to his celebrity status. I still really enjoy his videos and appreciate his knowledge, but the fan boys who slavishly hang on his every word are really annoying.
Never heard of him nor seen him till you mentioned it. I've seen that forgotten firearms guy. Just saw a video with both of them in it and not that there is anything wrong with it but they seemed almost like a "couple" .
@@Physics072 Karl was kinda the sidekick on Ian's show InRange.
@@0neDoomedSpaceMarine I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but I suspect that tensions caused by Ian's higher profile was one of the factors that lead to him leaving InRange. I don't have access to any insider knowledge to base this on, it's purely speculation on my part, but it just feels right.
Kyle rittenhouse ar 15 had not gone into battery, and in an interview he says he hit his forward assist. It chambered and that's when he made the famous bicep shot on an attacker who was trying to shoot him in the head.
He could've used other options at his disposal. The forward assist isn't the only thing.
@@YTPrule Yet he didn't and he's still here. The end.
@@NarcolypticNinja He was also drop kicked and made many mistakes but he’s still alive. And his use of it was not the fastest.
@@YTPrule Like what, affixing a bayonet? Woulda been metal, but not an option available to him.
Slapping the bolt into battery and pulling the trigger is what I would have done, that shot had to come *immediately,* doesn't matter what happens with the rifle.
@@YTPrule Sure, he's no green beret, but he's also a kid who thought and acted real quick in an incredibly bad situation.
Solid argument. Karl is a Klown and the whole WWSD project was just a grift. My experience with the M16A2 as an infantryman proved to me that the FA is useful and necessary, if for no other reason than it is easy to use, easy to train, and much more of a gross motor skill solution than the charging handle prototype or the bolt scallop would offer. Slap>Pull>Observe>Release>TAP>Shoot. Plus when spending two weeks in the box at JRTC/NTC/JOTC, the FA is a godsend for running the rifle with blanks. Further, many, many recruits lack familiarity with guns, let alone the M16/AR15 platform and the FA is cheap insurance for assuring a round is loaded and the bolt fully closed when they ride the charging handle forward.
Very enlightening video. I had the opinion of not really being a fan of the forward assist since I do find it a little bit of an odd device to have, but glad I took some time to read into the AR15 design as a whole a little more.
Biggest take away is that nothing is "completely useless" and such. FA wasn't some after-thought or no-purpose-at-all device just to satisfy the Army. It was carefully thought out and gave good consideration of not hindering the overall pros of the AR15 design. Much of the negativity, I honestly think, for the forward assist has some part of not just the understanding behind it, but also the controversial history it's part of. The M16 as we all know was pretty deep in political fire with the Ordinance Corps and the Army's general handling of servicing the weapon during its early adoption.
Greatly appreciate the work put into this video and even leaving the sources in the description for some good reading for better details on the subject.
I've had to use the forward assist multiple times in my 8yrs in the US Army (2004-2012). Never once did it result in a failure to extract. Sometimes the environmental conditions, or wear and tear of equipment, require a little assistance when there is no opportunity to disassemble the rifle in the heat of the moment. The first time I can recall actually having to use the forward assist, I used it on every single round I fired out of the magazine I had loaded at the time. Sand had gotten into my M16A2 that I had at the time and was slowing the operation of the bolt carrier enough that it wouldn't cycle far enough to eject spent casings, or slide all the way home when charged. So in order to keep firing, I merely resorted to charging every round individually like a bolt action, to extract the spent casing and cycle the next round, and hit the forward assist to close the bolt. Every time the bolt would cycle on its own, just not enough to extra and feed the next round. Later I found I was able to fix the issue and restore the rifle to 100% functionality by popping the rear take down pin, removing the bolt group and charging handle, and merely wiping out the sand with my fingers very quickly and without concern for getting everything, and putting everything back together (took less than 30 seconds). Sometimes parts were wearing out, or a round was slow coming out of a bad magazine, and would slow the bolt enough to prevent fully seating. In these sorts of instances the forward assist was fully appropriate to use, and I did use it, with no issues. I didn't use it otherwise. All of my personal ARs have the forward assist because you never know when you might need it. Too many "old wives tales" still persisting out there in the gun community.
Yes this is an excellent example of what I mentioned about "enduring frictional elements" during cycling that required a cleaning of the rifle where re-racking will not remove the issue. Do you happen to remember if it was the chamber/barrel extension or in the general upper receiver area?
@@fullspectrum1616 The entire upper receiver area was full of fine grain sand. Charging handle, BCG, all of it. And I emptied about 20 rounds from it this way. You could hear the grating sound of the sand as the weapon cycled, and when i charged the bolt. It got in the chamber a little, but not a lot, as the sand got in the receiver while the bolt was forward.
But but but Eugene stoner, 😂.
Wow you actually used it judiciously and correctly instead of slapping it like some kind of magical "clear every malfunction " button? Crazy concept
@@rodiculous9464 It's amazing how a huge amount of criticism against the forward assist can be boiled down to *"... but what if I used the forward assist when I was having a double-feed or stove-pipe? What then, huh?!"*
What if they put on their pants backwards, lmao
Also the “sniper button” lore from Afghanistan doesn’t help the “catastrophic failure” argument
The sniper button lore seems like a meme that is overblown simply by the fact that it makes an easy video topic and accordingly easy money for professional guntubers. Consequently we more readily or only see easy surface level memes and opinions about the forward assist.
Sorry, I don't watch videos featuring "Gun Jesus" and his satan-worshipping friend Karl.
If it makes you feel better, they don't seem to be friends anymore.
You need to make more videos on topics like these. Most are these paid channels starting to be like old gun articles.
I see this video has picked up viewers for a certain reason…..
There is an underlying fault with all of your arguments. You assume that the Army Material Command and the remnants of Ordnance Department were developing the M16 in good faith and that all subsequent documentation carries this good faith. Considering the previous debacle of the M14, as well as the larger developmental problems associated with the M16, I would place less importance on the primary documents generated by the Army in the 1960s and more on the continuing use and experiences that have been generated during that time. Several specific questions and/or faults that I see. First, I would be very interested to hear Jim Sullivan's personal input on the adoption of the FA. I believe that it is highly unlikely that this has never come up between Ian and Sullivan considering their lengthy interviews. I also find your personal attacks to be disingenuous as they take into account neither personal experience with the weapons system nor research conducted on the M16/M4 after the Vietnam conflict. Second, and more specific to my own experience regarding increasing FTEs from use of the FA. the argument against the FA, that it makes a rifle jam is incorrect. The principal is that if a weapon does not go into battery it should be cleaned until it does, in order to avoid whatever percentage likelihood that it will develop a FTE after its FTF. Any time you force a weapon against mechanical sympathy, you are jeopardizing its function as well as the user's safety. All of this is not to say that there is never a use for the FA, silent loading, cold weather, and the case extraction you mentioned come to mind. However, suggesting that the FA is a panacea or that it is necessary or beneficial to the weapon platform is dubious in my eyes at best. I think that all of these concepts come down to understanding design philosophy. All systems have pros and cons and military doctrine is developed around these. All this being said, there's a lot of very interesting info here and thanks for the research. I can tell you put in you time.
First, I made this video to attack the consensus narrative and speculation about using the forward assist, not as a guide on how and when to use it. Perhaps that's a later video, but my intent is to have made a video that gives the facts of the matter so someone can come to a better and more informed conclusion if it should even be used at all in the first place or have a reasonable idea what will happen if used under certain circumstances given my analysis of the TECOM test data. I also conclude at the end that it does not solve everything but that I haven't seen a valid criticism. No one has proven the forward assist any which way or tested it since TECOM.
/
I have to assume good faith on the Army Infantry Board for recommending a forward assist device circa 1962 as those are the people that identified the need as referenced in the Nov63 TECOM test document. The other things to consider at that time and during the TECOM test were the worse waffle steel magazines in use as well as IMR4475 being the exclusive powder and likely gave a higher amount of FTEs than someone would see today. The TECOM test had 133 failures of the bolt to close and for the subsequent 133 times a forward assist was used it never presented any safety issue to the user under what appears to be very severe conditions to get so many FTE's. To say using the forward assist in a circumstance of a failure of the bolt to close will lead to a safety issue is again speculative and a non-data driven claim. Conceivably a cartridge could be out of spec and cause an overpressure issue, but this is seemingly less likely for military contract ammunition and, secondly, such a speculative issue has no data to assert that the forward assist would give any more likelihood of chambering an overpressure round than a normal operational cycle of the rifle. If such a case happened where the FA was exclusively capable of chambering an out of spec round it still is a matter of perspective of what is at fault between the FA and the ammunition.
/
Third, please note how I do not interject my anecdotal "experience" with the forward assist into any point in the video until the end and only about a comparison of comfort between different types of the forward assist. My experience contradicts Karl's, Aaron's, and Chris's - and even if I found 30 other people to agree with me about their experience it wouldn't prove anything. The entire reason we have such a mess of information about firearms on the internet is because of such a predisposition to extrapolation from anecdotes. That is EXACTLY how fuddlore gets started and EXACTLY how the ignorance of the forward assist narrative went on. This ignorant narrative, where everyone is drawing from, is a pool of information that is so bad that no other factual outcome other than false can be expected. I will stand by my "attacks" on the various individuals in my video as all of them are compensated money (which makes them professionals to one degree or another) to present information about the forward assist which I clearly demonstrate as wrong. Professionals should be held accountable for poor performance. Note that while I criticize Chris Bartocci's article I also use another one of his articles in citing information about the Mark 18 CQBR which is corroborated by military documents and other real world data.
Lots of arm chair engineers on TH-cam. For any complex mechanical system risk assessments are conducted. Reference- Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) is a step-by-step approach for identifying all possible failures in a design.
If I boil down the work it come down to… Issue 1) Short stroke the charging handle and the round does not go into battery (Combat severity=high, Non-combat severity= low) x (Combat occurrence= medium, Non-combat occurrence=low). Mitigation could be 1) recharge a new round (training) or 2) add a forward assist (design). When you add a new design you need to analysis the potential unintended consequence. Forward assist good if the round does not go into full battery due to a round hang-up (low risk). Forward assist catastrophic if the round does not go into full battery due to fouled chamber and you use the forward assist causing a stuck case (combat=death, non-combat= low risk).
So no way would Eugene want a forward assist!
@@knudge6334 Stoner also didn't believe a chrome chamber or bore were necessary..Most of Browning's designs were modified before adoption..
Ian,even though he has researched for more than 10 years,sometimes he isn’t right,sometimes he changed his mind later.He rarely goes wrong,but he does
However,I can’t tell particularly because that was months ago,and it appeared in different videos(2 videos with 2 different opinions on the same characteristic)
Saved the kenosha kids life
Kyle showed us
Not sure if this is necessarily in your wheelhouse, but I feel the claim of the T48 rifle being somehow better performing than the T44 (M14) in the Army rifle trials of the mid to late fifties would probably fall under similar levels of modern fuddlore. Would be great to know if you know of any sources regarding that topic.
I don't have much beyond a basic understanding. From what I know the T44 was able to be better tailored to the cold winter test(s) than the T48 because Springfield Armory was better aware of the test conditions beforehand whereas FN wasn't ready for it. For what it's worth the major criticisms of the M14 seem to be cost and development delays and not that it had any kind of similar problems to the M16's poor initial development. The people at Springfield Armory were smart enough to chrome line the chamber and bore of the M14 (not sure about T44), while FN did not. Stoner also for whatever reason had the seemingly backwards priority of the BCG to be chromed but left the barrel plain steel. The M14 also didn't have a oddly spec'ed powder like the AR-15 did with IMR 4475. This costs more and possibly delayed development but the M14 didn't seem have the wacky reliability issues that the M16 did in being issued to front line troops. It seems unfair then to criticize high costs, slower development, and also reliability at the same time when the M14 at least was a pretty dependable weapon when first mass issued compared to the M16 in part to the fact that Springfield Armory took the time to properly develop a rifle before it's issuance.
Someone else please correct me on this if I'm wrong.
@@fullspectrum1616 my impression has been FN was not granted the ability to prep their test FAL for cold weather, while the Ordinance core (or some rebellious members) took great care to prepare the M14 prototype. This lead to field issues and eventual parts failure on the FAL, which was used to kinda rush the acceptance of the M14 over the FAL & AR10. Regardless of the trials happenings, like Armalight submitting an experimental steel-aluminum barrel - against Stoners’ wishes - & the Army refusing to test a standard replacement after the inevitable failure, the AR10 & FAL were much more forward-looking designs than the M14. The charge against the Ordinance department is they sacrificed the interests of the average soldier to bring a relic onto the battlefield.
As for the M16’s early teething issues, I believe Small Arms Solutions has videos (and books) covering the whole range of issues, which range from the Army not using the specified powder for an adapted civilian design (the M16 was originally purchased off the shelf by the Air Force before being taken up by General Westmorland, or whoever was in command of ground troops at the time, & was not subjected to troop trials before initial deployment), to using the incorrect kind of aluminum for the lower receiver leading to rust issues.
Check Small Arms Solutions videos on why he hates the M14 & the early history of the M16 in Vietnam.
@@kingnull2697 I covered the powder issue in my video. The Army would have to have repeated the whole or some parts of the test for the AR-10 to be re-included with the steel barrel, so there is some merit with a discontinued interest. Why didn't Fairchild properly T&E that barrel type? It is only right to dismiss rifles that are not properly designed. The wikipedia article says that Springfield did much more T&E on the T44 while the T48 did not have any special winter preparation. FN wasn't forced to not do any cold weather testing on their rifle; they could have done that at any point before the submission of their rifle, but apparently chose not to. There's nothing insidious about Springfield doing extra testing on their rifle. The article also says the M14 is a pound lighter and has fewer parts. There's a parallel here with the M16 of the Ordnance Corps types actually submitting a more reliable and developed rifle from the get go than their competitors at Fairchild or FN.
@@kingnull2697 I just read a great book on the topic, it's called Random Shots by Roy Rayle. It's $10 on Amazon and definitely worth the read and cost.
Some have said weight is valid reason not to have FA. Pretty weak claim as it does not add much weight.
If you're building a particularly lightweight gun and you're looking to shave weight all over, sure, but I'd say that little bit of weight is otherwise well worth it and I'd rather have it than not.
You will never need the forward assist until you need it.
Love the use of some VN footage I've never seen!
This is great
Great video. Thanks for sharing. Some really good information in this.
I first learned about this argument from Forgotten Weapons. I thought it convincing initially, but questioned it because I don't trust men with long hair, or other effeminate features, to give accurate information. I then leaned he was wrong, and this video confirms my position.
Physiognomy is real, folks.
I remember Ian saying in a video once that part of the reason for his distinctive long hair and facial hair is that he knows that if he needs to, he could disappear into a bathroom with a pair of scissors and a razor, then walk out a few minutes later past a crowd of his fans without being recognised. He may well have been joking, but it's not a bad plan.
You present some interesting views here and pull together some disparate sources in a convenient location-thank you for taking the time to put this video together. I don't think the outcome is that the existence of the forward assist is "VINDICATED" (as splashed across the thumbnail), but you have certainly refuted some of the overstated claims which circulate. You note in conclusion that you "haven't seen a valid criticism of it yet"; surely time, cost, and complexity (at the programme level) would be valid criticisms? It seems fair to say that such an addition would (and should) be a minor consideration at that level, whether you are generally in favour of the FA or not.
I would also respectfully add that, whilst it is right and proper professionals be held accountable for their work, you would benefit from taking a more polite and discursive approach to presenting your analysis of others' material. We can all get passionate about our specific research topics, but we should try to share knowledge and engage with one another in a courteous manner-and not assume bad faith in others.
Thanks for such a nice reply.
/
The issue even at a program management level is that the PIP program was already underway which means relatively speaking the forward would have likely had lower overhead costs in a larger PIP. No one has any specific idea of any kind of cost figure of the PIP's efforts in adding a forward assist, so no one can say with any degree of certainty what it did cost at the program level, and therefore to say it was expensive is speculation. So again, we are down to unverified considerations which are not good arguments considering I gave the cost per rifle down to the cent while every criticism of cost has been unsubstantiated. Surely, it has saved at least one life and people have attested to it in combat conditions, so there is also that benefit of some possible human life weighed against a speculative and completely unknown overhead development cost.
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Consider also that all of the popular arguments against the forward assist have never been substantiated and that so called professionals who try to carry themselves above others for a more scientific approach are reduced to mere fuddlore, anecdotes, and superstition on whether the forward assist is harmful.
/
I thought for a while on exactly how I should address the others and after some deliberation and a reading of Polybius' Histories, using his example, I decided to rightly criticize what really is a thinly veiled amateur, vulgar, and superstitious approach to the forward assist. It was an apparent low hanging fruit to those people to simply reiterate a critical meta narrative about the forward assist and present themselves as professionals in regards to their questionable work on it. Interestingly when Ian coincidentally publishes a video on it two months after my work he uses the exact same thumbnail with Stoner on the side for some reason. He also paraphrased the Army's position wrong. While it is possible he referenced the TECOM trial document, it is fairly likely in my opinion Ian merely referenced secondary sources on the subject that I have demonstrated earlier in the comments that those authors conveniently omit key Army testimony in the matter.
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Ian, Karl, and Aaron all take a smug tone in their limited experiences and extrapolate that to any attempt to use the forward assist is for cavemen who are not applying any higher form of logic. Each of them states how it's obtuse to just press the forward assist simply because it's there, and that it will likely make a problem worse. Each one of them relies on mere anecdote in an attempt substantiate their claims. Chris Bartocci, while a critic, is much more reasonable with the scope and degree of his criticism and I believe I took a much more agreeable tone with him. It was my intent to have a variety of critics in their degree, background, and approach to the subject. Each of the three amigos I used as examples all participated in belittling those who advocate for its use, while Chris never did. How am I too hard on those three professionals when they are punching down to amateurs? I also never state they were acting in bad faith, only that it was a possibility because of the high degree of how wrong their statements were. I let the viewer make their own conclusions about their intent.
/
If I didn't make this video, certainly no one else would have. If Aaron, Ian, Karl, and others had qualified their statements and conducted their assessments properly within their ability they would have had much less criticism from me, and I suppose, a little less revenue from ads and/or their audience.
@@fullspectrum1616 cool video! Still never have used the thing even overseas though. honestly most don’t like it because we have never really had a need and for LH shooters it is very annoying. Plus I don’t really see the point of it since if the bolt isn’t locking then you either have tons of dirt in it, is really dirty or has a malfunction. All which can be solved before hand or in different ways more effectively
@@fullspectrum1616 *"Surely, it has saved at least one life"* As illustrated by some recent events :^)
Might want to keep your opinions to yourself. Some of us appreciate people not walking on eggshells. He was just calling out the BS. You are the type the is afraid to say "the king has no cloths" He was very polite and yet you still find reason to judge. Not sugar coated enough for your delicate sensibilities.
@@fullspectrum1616 If you read The Great Rifle Controversy and The Black Rifle, Vol I, you'll recall the cost analysis critique that Stoner made at the time. "Why are they wasting all this money on validating their stupid Forward Assist when they could have spent that money on chrome-lining the chamber at a minimum, and preferably the whole chamber and bore?"
Had they:
* Maintained tight controls on reamer dimensions,
* Hard chromed the bore,
* Validated the system with the ball propellant change from the tiny stick powders,
* Added the heavy buffer in replacement of the Edgewater Spring Guide as a result to act as a rate reducer due to high gas port pressures....
There would have been zero perceived need for the Forward Assist. If you go back and read those resources, you will see that the FA became the hill the Army Ordnance Board and related Commands were willing to die on after being overridden so many times on the AR-15.
Dr. Carten thought he killed the AR-15 already with his Army Ordnance Board "final report" sent to the Pentagon, then weeks later was directed by DoD to begin type classification of it as a service rifle.
I've spent decades pouring over all this data and there is far more to cover than this. Some great resources are the ones I mentioned, plus Daniel Waters' 5.56 Timeline.
There are also US Army and USAF high volume full auto test reports across many serialed rifles before the forward assist issue really started to gain traction, when bolt failures were a thing on the Colt 601.
Was that the "Forgotten firearms" guy spreading the misinformation on FA? Seems he forgot history.
Honestly, I think he was just following Karl's lead mostly on this one.
I don't have that much experience with AR-15s yet, but in the military I used AK-based rifle. On a few occassions I ran into a failure to feed problem, which I fixed by slamming on the charging handle, basically the same thing that the forward assist is for. For this reason I've found this debate a bit bizarre, in my opinion it's a useful feature to have with little to no downsides, so why not have it?
It feels like Karl convinced Ian about the forward-assist, and he isn't thinking about the issue critically enough when brought up. I respect Ian a lot, but it really makes me cringe whenever he talks about the forward assist, because he really says some stupid stuff about it.
Karl is rather hot headed and sounds convincing when he speaks. He's just as fanatical about red dots
I frankly disagree with Chris Bartocci on a number of things, his opinions on the M1 rifle are outright nonsense, such as insisting that the gun should have used detachable 1918 BAR magazines, like those old Winchester prototypes.
If he'd have familiarized himself more with the history of the BAR, and read more about those prototype conversions, perhaps he would have learned that the magazines the BAR uses were actually not of very good design or quality, and damaged easily, and that the converted rifles generally did not work very well. More, he ignores completely the logistical and economical reasons for the use of en-bloc clips, as well as the fact that the M1 would still ultimately provide a far greater volume of fire than 9 out of 10 infantry rifles US soldiers would encounter in Europe or the Pacific.
It seems to me he just saw some pictures of these guns, and then thought it would be like an M14 and thus better, which would actually be strange considering his bias *against* the M14.
Perhaps he's reputable and well read on some subjects, but I always second guess his claims.
Once you are well read enough, you see all the experts screw up now and then, even the ones that do glance at primary sources. If you see a weird inexplicable decision, you need to look into it deeper to see the thought and planning that went into it, not just assume "oh, those guys were just luddite idiots" or "yeah, paid shills for X company" especially when their brothers in arms would live and die by their decisions.
The M1 SHOULD have used a detachable box magazine. The reason they used an en bloc clip was because the army in its infinite wisdom felt that being able to shoot from the prone position was more important than ammo capacity and reload time. Even the Soviets and Germans had magazine fed rifles with the svt-40 and gewehr 43.
@@Deltaworks23 En-bloc clips are far faster and cheaper to manufacture to correct specs in huge volumes, Bartocci suggested BAR magazines because he doesn't know that original US BAR magazines are junk.
Also, the en-bloc clips load super fast, the gun locks open on the last round and straight up spits the spent clip out, then you can just insert a new one and let the oprod go and the gun is loaded, with practice this is faster than reloading an M14, so for comparable magazine capacity it's superior, it's also far superior to all the bolt-action rifles which American troops would be facing 99% of the time.
For the Russian SVT-40 and German Gewehr 43, these had magazines which were detachable, yes, but they were NOT used as modern detachable magazines, you got ONE magazine inserted in your gun, this magazine stayed in your gun and you loaded it from the breech end with two 5rd stripperclips at a time, and then you got ONE spare magazine, which you had for emergencies. Further, magazines will not interchange freely between SVT-40 rifles due to the inconsistent manufacturing of the time, and you would only ever have two magazines guaranteed to be matched to your rifle at any time, unless maybe you were some special forces guy.
In practice, the M1 rifle is superior to both due to being far more widely available and being able to maintain a higher rate of fire consistently. It's also far higher quality in manufacture to either, both the SVT40 and the G43 are rough to look at and hold.
@@0neDoomedSpaceMarine "It seems to me he just saw some pictures of these guns, and then thought it would be like an M14 and thus better, which would actually be strange considering his bias against the M14" - Not strange at all. The M14 departed from the M1 design in a way that made it harder to manufacture in mass production settings and it failed to satisfy the major selling point which was using the M1 Garand tooling.
A lot of people disagree with Chris B on a lot of things. I stopped taken anything he said seriously when he claimed that a mid length gas system increases dwell time in comparison to a carbine length gas system, on a 16 inch barrel.
Your video is missing critical data, particularly the joint Army/USAF high volume fire studies where they were experiencing bolt failures under full auto fire. It undermines your assertion that USAF drove and compromised the development.
During those tests, which involved mostly Colt 601s, they discovered that hard-chromed bolts were hydrogen-embrittled, which led to cracking around the cam pin hole, with a few shorn lugs on the sample rifles. As a result, the hard chrome bolt specification was dropped during production of the Colt 602 and the XM16E1 upper receivers, and armorers told to replace bolts with newer phosphated bolts.
The assertion that the USAF was driving the testing and specifications of the AR-15 is not supported by the historical or archival record.
My point was that USAF was the first service to request and authorize ball powder and that they did so in a way that made ball powder the exclusively used powder for them which is in response to the common argument that the Army was the initiator/requestor for ball powder. It was also to add to the case of the USAF not being an excellent authority to defer to in matters of small arms development.
@@fullspectrum1616 But USAF was working directly with the US Army very early-on to address problems with the rifles. There were a lot of cooks in the kitchen, which actually helped improve the rifle design incrementally over the years. Ordnance Board started out obstructing, delaying, and fighting the development of the AR-15, even though a minority within them drove its selection for SCHV in 1957.
The so called "intent" of the ordnance board has always been described from the most biased of sources such as Stoner. For instance Mr. Ito (later a representative of Colt) was part of the Army during the Alaskan tests that Stoner describes as "sabotage." Mr. Ito notes how every single deficiency his test board noted was actually acted upon at page 4585 of the Ichord hearings.
@@fullspectrum1616 Stoner didn't like that they removed the FSBs, lost the taper pins, then replaced them with sections of welding rod, which canted the FSBs making zeroing impossible if I recall. Just little basic attention to detail things that should not have happened.
I've since wondered if the reason for removing the FSBs was to open the gas ports for reliable function in Arctic conditions.
One of the biggest changes post-Fort Greeley tests was tightening the twist rate from 1/14 to 1/12 to provide gyroscopic stability in the more dense air (higher drag coefficient causes earlier departure from stable flight).
That change was incorporated into the Colt 602.
@@LRRPFco52 DuPont could not manufacture the required amount of IMR powder the military needed once the Vietnam war started, so they replaced the stick powder with ball. Colt M-16 rifles could not pass the cycle rate test with ball powder, so the government allowed Colt to keep using IMR powder for their testing so Colt's rifles would pass inspection. The military knew full well the rifles were going to be issued with ball powder. The Air Force was the first branch to adopt ball powder, as they claimed they had experienced no problems using ball powder during their testing..So much for the legitimacy in air force testing..
Honestly all the arguments I've heard prior to this video always had an air of "he-said-she-said," as in people like the on youtuber you mentioned saying "It *could* have made the situation worse," implying he never even had to use it? I've always heard a bunch of "Could have," or "Might have," when in reality, I as well never experienced the issue with my own, but I had seen people with me while shooting out in the desert have a failure that was rectified by the forward assist and no other failures occurred. (Using he-said-she-said after I literally just mentioned it, lol. Also I guess exposure bias or whatever since I've only ever seen it happen twice which isn't a fair evaluation, lol.)
Honestly this is easily up there with the "Sherman's were death traps!" level of U.S. Military myths and stories.
It's actually fine to use an anecdote to refute a principle such as "the forward assist will always make problems worse," with an example, because they would have to walk back their argument to say that you were merely lucky. Their argument then changes from a principle of "it's always bad and never works" to probability "well sometimes it can work." In fact you could even refute their arguments based on "experience" of "never having seen it do any good" with "I've only seen it do good." Conversely, it's not a great idea to assert a principle with an anecdote unless you don't have any real data to go on.
Those shouting "But Eugene Didn't Want It!" really need to sit down and watch the video. You actually show test results and everyone is just ignoring that fact. People need to remember the mentality of people at the time as well. It was a complete cluster of "I'm right!" "No I'm right!" ever since the early 1940s. Designers never take criticism and critiques well, and no design is perfect from the get-go (except Glock Perfection).
A famous example was Hugo Borchardt, he thought his C93 pistol was perfect and needed no more improvement, he refused to develop it further when requested.
Instead, Georg Luger got to work on it, and turned it from a borderline carbine, into a sleek and efficient automatic pistol that went unrivaled for years as a sidearm, and was more than good enough to keep around decades after being surpassed.
Fun fact: The NYC black supremacist terrorist who just shot up a subway had his attack cut short when his glock jammed.
As to Glock perfection, they have an outstanding marketing team. I'll leave it at that.
Glock: Worst recorded 0 rounds fired failure in INRangeTV mud tests. Also: Complete 0 round failure in the Garand Thumb arctic tests.
Perfection!
He drew the opposite conclusions from the test data though. 191 FTEs after forcing the cartridges into battery during the mud tests is not what you want to reference in support of FA, especially with multiple variable failure nodes (magazines).
To eliminate multiple failure nodes, and control variables, you would force the rounds in with FA, remove the mudded magazine, insert a clean magazine, then continue for each iteration.
Those mud tests had flawed premises as well, since AR-15s are so resilient to mud ingestion.
A well-lubricated AR-15 does extremely well in the elements. Look at how few malfunctions there were during the Fort Greeley Extreme Cold Climate Center tests at -65°F, for example.
I've done Arctic and sub-Arctic dead-of-winter high volume shooting from 2005-2016 in Finland with FDF, and don't recall any malfunctions with TDP AR-15s. This is multiple rifles in courses with 10-20 attendees. We have had various AKs experience FTEx or FTFeed malfs in those courses.
This video is an example of someone who thought they were conducting good research, but came to the wrong conclusions, likely from a position of validating FA before they began.
Based. Everyone has always shit on the forward assist, and I feel an AR feels weird without it. Great video.
An AR feels awesome without it, slick, tubular, forward-thinking, streamlined, lightweight. Adding the forward assist detracts from these design features, but isn't a show-stopper. It's a show-stopper when you go to force a cartridge into the chamber that is resisting going into battery due to debris around the neck or case wall.
You really should have racked the CH in that instant, and there's no way to know if you're causing a stuck case or not unless you force it in.
So far, most of the archival data he references in this video invalidate his position, especially the high volume mud/sand and Arctic tests conducted in the early days.
I drew the exact opposite conclusions looking at all that data, which has been out there, along with other test data from the era.
This video is more about an inability to logically analyze test data and draw the correct conclusions from someone who doesn't have much experience researching or dealing with large sample size test projects.
@@LRRPFco52 The fact the FA saved Kyle Rittenhouses life seems to evade your opinion about the FA. All the anecdotal opinion won't change this fact. If Kyle would have not had a FA, he would be dead right now..Theorizing why his rifle was not lubed, or was not mill spec, etc takes a long second to the fact the FA worked as designed and saved his life...
@@hairydogstail Possibly. If your plan is to not lube the AR and you set it up to Failure to go into Battery, then the FA is definitely for you.
@@LRRPFco52 OK, that was just a stupid comment..You can do better..
@@hairydogstail Forward Assist was so important that after years of senior SOF CQB instructor input, they got rid of the reciprocating charge handle on the SCAR, which is the only way to force the bolt carrier forward on that weapon. I think that puts the FA discussion in context pretty well. All the time wasted on arguing about FA should really be about lube, mags, training, inspections, armorer support, etc.
Great video. I had to use the FA several times in cold weather when stationed in JBER. It also helps if you don't want to make a loud noice when chambering a round.
Over an 11 year period shooting multi-day high volume courses day/night in Finland, in extreme cold weather conditions, I never touched the forward assist. We're talking ice, snow, can't see the ground due to snow levels. Lube is important for that. White-gloved weapons from the arms room stripped of lube make it more likely to experience FTFeed in any conditions.
@@LRRPFco52 I have used it numerous times while hunting in cold weather..Rifles using the o-ring in the extractor are over sprung causing failures of the extractor to slide over the case rim if the rifle is not charged properly..This is where the FA is very useful..
@@hairydogstail I just remove the O-ring from any bolt before I even think about putting that bolt in my rifles. While hunting, I chamber a round at the drop-off point before going into the areas where I might take a shot. My build process exceeds that of what even the highest price point AR-15 manufacturers can do in a custom setting, let alone mass production. It has evolved considerably over the past few decades to the point where it doesn’t even feel like working on the same rifle.
@@LRRPFco52 interesting, since I've got to force out of battery malfunctions on our Finnish Kalashnikov-pattern service rifles to close manually. At least for soldiers, there's a wide variety of adverse conditions on the field where the action will get friction-y and prone to feed-/carrier inertia-based OOB failures. You aren't always in a position to keep the rifles as clean as possible, and on the field there'll be the odd tripping into dirt or getting dirt into action (not an uncommon occurrence in proper field combat, especially not with the Finnish way of advancing with short dives into prone at the next tree, pit or whatever cover), which are inavoidable in a large setting. So are freeze issues and such, when firing weapons in sub-zero conditions and staying long times on the field, which will cause melting and re-freezing and such. Standard FDF 5W-40 gun oil will also accumulate with dirt in the trigger assembly and other moving parts, and without pedantic cleaning it will be causing issues over time, especially in the winter (FDF recommends running the Kalashnikov-pattern rifles mostly dry, except for extreme cold where lamp oil is used to lubricate the action, as 5W-40 is too thick for cold weather).
OFC the full auto Kalashnikov action has its own features in regard to the OOB causes, mainly the spring-loaded OOB safety (many people call it incorrectly "full auto sear") which is the main cause of late OOB, as if the bolt carrier doesn't have enough inertia to push it down, there'll be an OOB failure, or more accurately, at that point the bolt is already in battery and locked, but the bolt carrier is not all the way to the front and hence the OOB safety is not down. The ATF-legal semi-autos don't have the OOB safety, so it's not present on civilian Kalashnikovs, except for some rare occasions in Europe (the rare Zastava M76 on the civilian market).
@@XoravaX Extremely good comment. Your point on fouling, foreign dirt, or anything else providing friction somewhere to slow down and stop a moving carrier is a critical one. There can be _nothing at all_ obstructing the chamber of a rifle and this can still stop the show, which is why it's good to be able to assist your bolt, whether with a connected handle or a separate plunger.
With the AR15 specifically you will want to make sure that your extractor has engaged the groove on your cartridge, so tapping the assist to ensure that is worth doing even if you intend to throw the round out and load the next one.
Thanks for sharing this and all of the work of your research, also after hearing from Kyle R.'s testimony it really makes a lot of sense. I was one of those who were under the impression that the F.A. was a "make the problem worse button" now I'm glad my rifle has a Forward Assist.
I was too, but I saw Karl and Aaron talk about how the FA doesn't work that far back and I knew that was wrong. I decided to do some research after confirming the FA does indeed work that far back and the constant discovery of narratives and development contrary to popular opinion motivated me more and more to make this video. I've also come to learn quite a few new uses for it as well.
@@fullspectrum1616 You oughta demonstrate some of those new uses on video some time.
@@fullspectrum1616 They have no practical military combat arms field experience to even make such statements in a first person fashion.
@@Valorius Sage Dynamics absolutely does have 11-series relevant experience in Infantry Combat arms, PSD contract work, then LE SRT/Sniper, FTO, etc.
Same for the rest of Sage Dynamics staff. Ranger Regiment and 11 series guys who are thinkers that want to see the data plus tons of hands-on experience.
I've looked at Sage Dynamics with a very critical eye for years now, and have observed an extremely unique attention to detail and dedication to chasing perfection.
@@LRRPFco52 a lot of people do seem to really like their channel. And he definitely shoots a lot. But if he is against the forward assist he is still wrong
You had me at "fuddlore circlejerk."
I purposefully underweight recoil buffers to get the spent cartridges ejecting forward (hate to be the guy raining brass on neighbors at the range). The forward assist is a God-send (immediate action when bolt carrier bounce ensues)
Holy jeez dude I didn't know the Air Force authorized the ball powder first as an IMR substitute. Not a single source I've found until now has mentioned that fact. Wild.
There was really only one specific thing and obscure thing that tipped me off to this which is Daniel Watter's 5.56 timeline (it's the looserounds.com source in my description). Specifically he talks about the powder overview in one of the appendixes at the end. The more I've read into the whole M16/M14/FAL/Ordnance Corps mess the more I've learned that what has been ultimately transmitted to us in popular media can really only be succinctly stated as "holistically wrong."
USAF was the lead after Army Ordnance Corps declared the AR-15 wholly inadequate as an infantry rifle. USAF had lost spare parts supply for M-1/M-2 Carbines after Korea because the Army ceased spares orders for those carbines. USAF wasn't going to saddle SPs with M-14s, which is why they needed a solution, not that they just wanted a new rifle.
Dr. Carten at Ordnance Board was a big fan of their T65 and M14 they helped develop, and didn't agree with the SCHV concept. A minority of engineers within Ordnance got the SCHV concept into test & evaluation phase, but Carten eventually killed it (so they thought) with the help of the majority of the other engineers.
ArmaLite developed the AR-15 from Stoner's AR-10 to answer the SCHV concept in 1957, proving to have the better rifle compared with the M-1 Carbine variant necked-down and the Springfield and Winchester conventional rifles in .224 chamberings.
MacDonald (IIRC) was promoting the AR-15 at the infamous July 4th birthday, where Curtis LeMay shot the watermelons and then declared that this should be the Air Force's new rifle. He was Deputy Chief of Staff, getting ready to be the Chief, so his clout mattered.
This was within weeks of Dr. Carten killing the AR-15 with his final report sent to the Pentagon about what an entirely inadequate rifle the AR-15 was.
Within short order, Carten got orders from the Pentagon to begin type classification of the AR-15 for the USAF, which really threw a wrench into how he and the M14 designers saw things moving forward.
Once SF, SAS, SEALs, and Airborne forces got their hands on it, and the Fort Benning field studies on FORMAT-E with the AK were observed, the M14 was done and AR-15 moved forward as the service rifle for Army, USAF, and Marines.
@@LRRPFco52 There is not a single part of the rifle that Gen LeMay fired that's present on the M16A1 since all of those parts needed updates, revisions, etc. Even beyond this point it was not ready for adoption as evidenced by the poor selection of IMR powder that was not suitable to meet its advertised performance characteristics and all of the other parts that wore out or became otherwise unservicable before an M14's would.
It's not that unreasonable to recommend against the AR-15 in light of the chronic budgetary constraints that could barely fund the ordnance corps in developing the M14 when all the funding was being diverted towards the air force and our expanding nuclear arsenal and new technological projects like air defense (Nike Zeus program), M61 Vulcan developed by Ordnance Corps for USAF, etc. Now they would have to do it all over again for a new rifle that clearly wasn't ready and would (and did) get men killed because of it?
@@fullspectrum1616 The real failure with the M14 was its chambering and overall design based on the Garand. They advertised it as benefitting from more modern manufacturing processes (forged receiver then finish-machined), which never played-out and the machining operations for the barrel are extensive due to the op rod guide, gas block, and muzzle device threads.
After all the lessons-learned from the late 1800s, early 1900s post-Great War, and having to re-learn them in WWII about optimal cartridge configuration, they still reverted to a full sized battle-rifle cartridge with excessive recoil, limited soldier's load, and excessive weight for ammo, mags, and rifle.
Once the FORMAT-E exercises were conducted at Fort Benning with force-on-force using AKs vs M14s, the writing was on the wall. That discussion has been kept out of the light because of the nature of those types of programs.
Same with MiG-21 tactical exploitation vs YF-16 & YF-17 over the Nevada Test & Training Range, which was instrumental in selection of the YF-16.
M14 got plenty killed because you can't sustain the fight with that rifle. You could burn through half a basic load in one base of fire even before bounding.
US conventional ground forces didn't deploy en masse to Vietnam until March 8, 1965 with 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade to Da Nang.
The Colt 601 production rifle went from 1959-1963. 2nd production model went from 1963-1964.
As you've already read I'm sure, multiple field trials had been conducted with the early rifles at Fort Benning, Fort Greeley Alaska, and Vietnam with ARVN units.
Neither of those rifles were developed to handle the ball propellant M193 and neither had a chrome-lined chamber. 602 barrels were produced with worn reamers, which really was the worst thing that could happen towards causing malfunctions.
It would be several more years (Dec 1966) until Edgewater spring guides were replaced.
@@LRRPFco52 Ball powder was able to be used in every other rifle and machine gun that the Army had without issue for years before ball powder was ever an issue with the M16. See page 4755 of the Ichord Hearings. Even with the extensive machining of the M14 on the competitive-price contracts it was 2/3rds the price of the M16 and similarly priced on the non-competitive contracts (as to enable many different sources of production.) While an intermediate cartridge is better, the M14 allowed for fully loaded 20 round magazines and you could be sure that it would fire all the rounds without FTEs in normal conditions. It is interesting to note that senator Ichord never was able to see a demonstration of the AR15 where it didn't jam even in mild flat range conditions. The M16 could only reliably shoot 18 per magazine even IF it didn't fail to extract. The point is that the M14 program was not rushed and the design was more fully validated than what Stoner gave to Colt or even what Colt presented to the Army. Hesitancy to adopt such a rifle was warranted and the Army was not at liberty to further develop upon the proprietary IP of the design themselves.
the major issue with the forward assist is lack of training and education. the hate/distain i have for it is not because of it but because of the operator behind the rifle. small issues that could have easily been fixed turn into long drawn out sessions of beating on it because of the "tap,rack,slap" training we all received. that combined with the absolute soaking of the action with clp. the amount of different scenario's that can happen are either not trained or barely trained for non combat roles. the magic get your gun up and rolling button doesn't work as most of us were trained. the competency of people back when the original test/trials were conducted was also far greater than the current generation. basic mechanics and function of how a firearm works was widely known as guns were a part of the household more so than they are now. also know that not all BCG's have F/A cuts to the extent of the original patent and even if they do there is about 1.5in of travel at the rear most travel where the F/A cannot engage the BCG "buffer length can change this +/-".
I obviously don't agree with some things said/covered here however i do agree with you on how the F/A can be useful and has a purpose. unfortunately the problems i have encountered personally through other peoples ignorance lead me to believe that not having it wouldn't be such a bad idea either. the best solution is to just train everyone thoroughly on the platforms we use.
thank you for the video.
That's why I made this channel. I want to fill in the knowledge gaps a lot of other guys leave out. This one was mostly to address the common criticisms of the forward assist. My second forward assist video covers some of the finer points of consideration in immediate action and covers the consequences of uncontrolled feed that I glossed over in this first one. My cleaning video, for instance, shows a way to clean a rifle to nearly arms room ready and lubed in 15 mins only by using cleaning solvents and supplies authorized in the Army -10 TM for use with the M4. My lube video demonstrates the superiority of LSA over CLP for reliability, which is also still authorized per the TM (and also incidentally the utility of the forward assist especially with suppressed rifles.)
It might be a while from now, but I intend to make a shorter video about a better and more reliable immediate action technique that can reference these longer and more boring as a foundation for why we need to address tap/rack/bang, SPORTS, etc. with a better drill. I'm just stuck working overseas again so it will be a minute until then.
just curious, if it cost more to make the forward assist. then why do aftermarket manufacturer's charge so much more for an upper, without forward assist. that just don't make since to me, besides supply and demand and most of all greed
Different times. The slick side upper was the "dominant" variant when the FA was requested, meaning that all the forgings did not include the nub and nobody factored in the costs of manufacturing the pawl, spring, retainer pin, button and drilling the hole. So requiring a FA meant designing new forging dies and introducing an extra step in manufacturing.
Now if you want a slick side upper, everyone is using forgings that have the nub and a company would need to order the forging plant to do a run with different dies. Or machine it off.
@@ChucksSEADnDEAD The upper being used with the wwsd rifle is a regular forging with the nub milled off..
👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
Just watch the video of Stoner telling it the way it is.
very well done video. I don't own an AR15, but the arguments against forward assist are so weak. "The AR is a weapon that needs to be maintained". Okay carl, good luck maintaining your rifle during a firefight that lasts 8+ hours where you fire a thousand rounds or more. Some of those guys in vietnam were going into the jungle with over a thousand rounds, blasting full auto into the brush, just look up the SOG stories. Those same guys also used the FA to silently close the bolt. Good luck "thumbing" the scallop on the bolt when you have blood on your hands or sweat or it's raining. Most people never use their forward assist because they aren't in the extreme adverse conditions it was intended for, the argument that "I've never had to use it in my 20 years of going to the range" is so freaking stupid. It doesn't detract from the weapon in any way. It only adds, and at a small cost. Therefore there's no reason not to have one, especially on a military weapon. Carl's story about the forward assist blowing up a rifle is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard, especially considering Ian's "sniper button" story in his FA video, where Kurds were pushing the FA while firing because they thought it made the rifle more accurate. My 2 cents anyways. I've stopped watching inRange, Carl's attitude has really rubbed me the wrong way of late. Just look at the stupid things he posts on facebook, he's a full blown communist but hides it so he doesn't lose his audience. Still love Ian though.
MAC also tested the blowing up a rifle myth, someone in the comments said that it would be possible that the bolt cycling broke the FA and pushed it out of the hole, and the tale goes from "my FA broke" to "my upper asploded!". The law folders also retain the bolt in position in case you fire with the stock folded and they don't cause the rifle to blow up.
Will you consider a video like this on the M14? So much misinformation on the rifle and it's development program.
Probably not. It was a lot of work to do this subject justice and I'm not familiar with the M14 enough. Looking at the M16A2 next.
@@fullspectrum1616 Understandable. Looking forward to your future videos. Facts over feelings 👊
Ah yes, a video to confirm my opinion bias.
I love the paperwork. When others are flapping gums about this and that you are showing legitimate sources and research. I noticed Aaron Cohen when saying that the forward assist wouldnt help him in his situation could have tapped on it a few times to 100% prove his hypothesis in the interest of truth but he conveniently did not.
The moment you find yourself challenging people with this much experience with AR-15s, be prepared to back up your claims with equal or better research and experience. Short answer when it comes to Sage Dynamics: You will fail.
@@LRRPFco52 Ok. He could have tapped on the forward assist a few times to 100% prove his hypothesis in the interest of truth but he conveniently did not. The fact of whether or not it would have helped is unknown, it very well could be he is correct. But he didn’t prove it with any demonstrations. Any vids where he uses the forward assist? Regardless does SD’s research cancel out the documented military testing data?
@@filasophies4423 all the field study results have been posted in this video. It takes a special kind of I know everything gun guy to ignore them. Apparently you are here to fill that role
@@filasophies4423 This documented data shown from 18:00 forward here addresses the different designs of early FA devices, one a Charge Handle-based approach, the other a modified upper receiver with plunger mechanism and notches machined into the bolt carrier. These devices were tested in extreme mud tests on AR-15s immersed for 15 seconds in sand/clay/water. Unless I missed it, no control rifles without any FA were tested alongside the FA-equipped test articles.
The author of this video made extrapolations as if lack of FA present could be statistically represented, with percentages claimed.
The premise of this argument is flawed in many ways:
1. Extreme mud immersion tests ignored the true problems of the Colt 602 rifles, which were under-spec, non chrome-lined chambers fed ball propellant M193 that never had rifles adapted to it by that point, and no cleaning kits issued to soldiers.
2. These mud tests were specifically meant to test and validate which FA device was better at ignoring the rifle designer's recommendations, not whether FA was a valid concept. If you read Black Rifle Vol I and The Great Rifle Controversy, you will see that Ordnance Board and TECOM had already decided that FA was needed, after being whipped about by the SECDEF and his "whiz kids".
3. The mud tests themselves concealed any relevant reliability data because rifles don't work when you allow sand to get into the chambers. They have to be flushed because there simply isn't enough room for the cartridge and debris. Same with bolt face, bolt lugs, bolt bore in the carrier, cam pin and hole, etc.
Army Ordnance had been humiliated repeatedly by USAF, Stoner, and McNamara and finally chose to die on the hill of the Forward Assist.
Stoner commented that they could have avoided all that if they had just controlled chamber specs and chrome-lined the chambers. They had been working on FA well before the 1967 M16A1/Colt 603.
The first uppers that got FA in the field were XM16E1, which was a new FA upper that still had the second 3-prong flash hider design, slapped onto a partial fence 602 complete lower receiver group. These still had the Edgewater spring guide, which did not play nice with WC846 ball propellant and its 10,000-20,000psi higher gas port pressures.
Edgewater spring guides didn't start to be replaced until Dec 1966. If I recall, the Colt 602 production began in 1963, since 601 was 1959-1963.
If someone wants to make a video about early AR-15 development, they need to become intimately familiar with the innards of the 601, 602, and XM16E1. They also need a solid grasp of how different types of propellants behave, chamber reamer specs and wear characteristics, how the AR-15 gas system truly behaves (most are misinformed on this and mislabel it entirely), the different Army and DoD organizations, and the detailed history at least from 1955-1967.
It takes substantially-more research than this, plus a grasp of the intellectual standards.
@@Valorius Fila was referencing Sage Dynamics, not this video. This video is full of problems and fallacies, incorrect assumptions and side-steps, which I have identified. I see why you thought it validated the FA though. See my comments above that dismantle those inaccuracies.
looks like wendigoon didn't watch your video
It's the usual: read the Atlantic article, Ezell+Stevens, choice snippets of the Ichord hearing, and maybe some Bartocci on the subject. There's almost no way for a normal person to get into AR15 history without coming away with a bad understanding.
lmao this made some people mad. They should probably stop getting their information about what does and doesn't work in combat from someone who thinks his little 2 gun matches are in any way similar to combat.
Subbed
Yup :)
Kyle Rittenhouse used his forward assist to save his life shooting a DeRanged supporter..
Although I think this has some unneeded interpersonal stuff, this is a good video and I appreciate you looking at the sources and history. Disappointing that the initial testing included what would happen if it was depressed when fired, but the myth it would blow up still took root.
If you go to the meat and potatoes at 18:00 forward, you will see fundamental flaws in his data interpretation.
He's referencing the early charge handle FA ratchet design next to plunger mod receiver designs in the early days of XM16E1 development during the mud tests with both. This is covered in Black Rifle Volume I, complete with photos of the different FA devices, modified receivers, and conclusions.
Trying to extrapolate much data other than which rifle made malfunctions worse (by forcing a round into the chamber needlessly in a mud-fouled gun), doesn't support anything other than what we already knew: The plunger FA design is more effective at forcing rounds into the mud-fouled chamber.
That isn't equivalent to saying, "FA is better to have and use than not having it."
It's a red herring argument that evades the real question, which is, "Why do you have a mud-fouled AR-15 with all of its sealed features, and why are you trying to force rounds into the chamber?"
In those tests, we only see rifles with different FA devices being improperly treated either way.
The correct test would be how quickly can you flush them of mud to get them free of debris, not how can you make things worse.
We once used a similar technique to remove a ruptured .50cal casing. Just keep that between us though. Fort Dix's range civies are fucking pricks.
They let civilians do something other than range control? Why aren't your NCO's running the range?
@@fullspectrum1616 they were range control. Emphesis on CONTROL. It ended with a huge shouting match until the civie dudes that fix guns stepped in and told them all was fine and they fucked off.
How does this vindicate anything, in the text you yourself cite Stoner is saying this system is pointless and saying more or less exactly what Ian stated. He chose that system because it was the easiest to delete, you're playing at semantics to justify a completely worthless addition to the rifle that in any true failure will cause catastrophic fuckery. Honestly, you literally ignored the text of Stoner you yourself put up to try and claim it supports you.
I didn't ignore it, you (and it seems many others) chose to ignore the implications of his total lack of involvement with any of them and weighing in only superficially on the subject. Go back, analyze his statement, and then do a little critical thinking of how Stoner himself could be wrong. I only included everything Stoner said about it in the Ichord Hearings so that I would not be cherrypicking anything he said so the viewer could come to that conclusion on their own if they were reasoning it for their self and be aware of popular bad arguments made without context. I see you skipped all of that and went straight to the part of appealing to authority fallacy, so perhaps you should double back.
While his superficial understanding of the specific forward assists should have immediately made it clear that he was unqualified to comment on the subject, he was also wrong in his reasoning. Specifically, his recommendation that the charging handle solution from Springfield be implemented because it would be easier to remove is wrong since the Springfield solution modifies the bolt carrier as you should have seen in the video as well as introduced a camming plate (you would also know this if you looked at the TECOM document) that was added into the upper receiver. In either case the extant and the Springfield forward assist designs introduce irreversible changes to the AR-15 which makes his point at best moot. Moreover, the Springfield one changes how the gas key interfaces to the bolt carrier and without any extensive testing who knows the what the effect would have been on the durability of the gas key bolts that do already see some infrequent failures from the original design and has the possibility of more potential harm to the gun than if the current FA was removed and plugged the FA housing. Stoner, also, was unaware of the testing TECOM had done and of course was not able to weigh in on the evidence they presented.
You should stop making an argument from authority fallacy and consider the actual merit of Stoner's fairly pathetic argument against it amounting to "I never needed it once my guns ran like a top!" when he references the rifle's demonstrations with the Asian/Pacific militaries. Beyond that he is never able to substantiate anything about it beyond the fact that he doesn't like it on HIS design that, interestingly, he had Sullivan do most of the design work while he was busier trying to sell AR-10's WITH forward assists as requested by the Portuguese. It seems interesting two militaries ended up requesting a feature on his rifle designs that he was seemingly blindly against. Perhaps these two militaries were wrong, or maybe the more likely explanation is that Stoner didn't want to admit his idea was deficient? Either way it's not like he had a stake in it anymore being a consultant at Colt and wasn't put on the team with Sturtevant to help out so it's of no consequence to him either way, except when rifle sales are on the line with his AR-10; THEN he will put it on the gun willingly.
Kyle Rittenhouse used his forward assist to save his life shooting a DeRanged supporter.. Vindicated!
@@hairydogstail No he fucking did not, he hit it in a panic moment the rifle was not jammed or anything. Coulda fucked himself over in that situation. It was feeding perfectly fine he was just hitting shit because he was a scared 17 yuear old being attacked by a fucking mob.
@@ErgonomicChair Yes he did, his AR went out of battery during the scuffle and he used the forward assist to push the bolt back into battery. It saved his life.
@@EternalDeath14 YEah, gonna need a citation on that superchief. I saw him rack the charging handle, not hit the pointless worthless fucking BFA.
No Wheeler Button Is Needed 😎
th-cam.com/video/YgzsX9UtB7U/w-d-xo.html
Every one of your source links is either an error or something totally unrelated to the forward assist/ ar15/ firearms.
Thanks for letting me know. TH-cam seems to have trimmed them when I was uploading the video. They should be fixed now. dtic.mil seems to have removed the mk18 powerpoint presentation, sadly. I just tested them after an edit and they should be working now.
I didn't know the AR15 or M16 variants used clips. I was under the impression they only used magazines. Interesting.
In military circumstances clips are usually still issued with ammunition replenishment in the field, so that people can refill their empty magazines quickly.
For instance, in Vietnam you'd get a cloth bandolier which held 10rd clips in a bunch of pockets, you'd refill your magazines and then throw away that bandolier. Though intended as expendable and not made to last, some people would use them for carrying their spare magazines.
@@0neDoomedSpaceMarine those types of clips are used only load magazines. You can't load a clip into an Ar15 or M16. And in the context stated in the video it's apparent they are talking about a magazine when the word clip is said, except in the one instance when they are talking about the clips of the M1 Garand.
@@realeyesrealize388 I didn't state as such, just that clips are used to refill empty magazines, you attach a little guide on the (not inserted) magazine and it lets you quickly and neatly load 10 rounds into it.
There's some other rifles which can have their detachable magazines loaded from the breech with clips though, such as the M14 and the Vz.58
@@0neDoomedSpaceMarine I'm a veteran. Well aware.
Here's a question for you that isn't as obtuse as your observation: does the M1 Garand have a magazine?
A four percent increase in price for the addition of a forward assist is surprisingly large, I would not have expected such a large increase, if you are procuring some million rifles four percent of that is already 40 000 rifles, not a trivial amount, though I suppose there are loads of features on the rifle you could get rid of if budget were the main concern.
Even on a strictly material and budgetary basis, in 1969 SGLI maximum coverage was increased to $15,000 from $10,000 dollars. With a cost of $4.53 per rifle it would pay for itself if it saved the life of one soldier out of 3312 rifles issued considering a $15,000 dollar payout. This isn't even the only cost of a soldier dying, so that is a very conservative number. With the $10,000 figure it is one life saved per 2208 rifles issued to pay for itself. This is, of course not putting any immaterial valuation on human life, which coincidentally was part of the Army's advocation for the forward assist - the fact that saving lives is beyond a mere budgetary concern.
no it's cheaper. Not because it "saves lives" necessarily but because it means you don't have to mess around with the logistical requirements of actually getting the rifles cleaned every 300 rounds or so. Putting the forward assist in creates an innate "interrupt" that triggers soldiers to clean their rifles, if they forgot to do it. It also means you can keep the rifles around longer. I guarantee the army was aware of this fact. They knew if you cleaned the rifles after each engagement you would never need the forward assist but it doesn't really matter. That's never going to happen in actual reality. Attempting to do so would cost more money in the end. The forward assist is the cheap solution and really doesn't have any downsides.
@@ZeroTron The Army "knew" the forward assist was a requirement from the TECOM trials and the initial evaluations of the rifle, which were NOT from a lack of maintenance. Furthermore, I doubt that anyone could substantiate the increased cleaning cost of the rifles as being greater than the cost of the forward assist. This is yet another speculative and highly baseless claim against the forward assist. Sad!
A most thorough citation of evidence, whether that be trial data or modern videos, all while maintaining civility. What better vindication could one want?
This is absolutely fantastic. Never have I seen what appears to be a hobbyist youtube channel take such a serious and academic approach to firearms. We need more content out there like this. I really do hope to see more from you.
There's video of Stoner saying he was forced to develop a forward assist by the army. He had a lengthy and humorous anecdote.
That video your referencing is the "Stoner tapes" and it is Stoner referencing (circa 1980s) a meeting with Col. Yount in Washington at a hotel for the Congressional/Ichord hearings in 1967. It was some time shortly before the hearings or after where Col. Yount explained how as the project manager of the rifle he had no substantiation for it since TECOM and the others had been working on the project independently before Yount's position existed and had not forwarded the test data and noted deficiencies from the earlier tests.
If you go to the Congressional hearings link and scroll to the last pages you will see Col. Yount presenting the (new to him) test data justification that was provided to him at the last part of the hearings. If you watch my video again you will also see Stoner mention he was not involved in the development of the forward assist.
Perfectly explained, a lot of misinformation on this subject..Well done.@@fullspectrum1616
Very good video, lots of interesting information.
I'm stopping about 7 minutes into video because you've proven the exact opposite of what you set out to do.
Ian and Karl were wrong, but your screenshots still prove that Stoner didn't want one. He didn't think it was necessary to the design, that it was just there to meet an on paper requirement, and he picked the one he did because it was the least intrusive to his design and could be removed when the army discovered the forward assist wasn't necessary.
I really don't like Karl, but your claim is extraneous to the argument you're attempting to make and the evidence you cite goes against your thesis.
Whether or not Stoner didn't want a forward assist isn't material to my argument, it's whether he was involved in the creation of one or not and only a very minor consideration as to what specific grounds he was opposed. Secondly, consider when Kalashnikov was opposed to the idea of the AK-74 despite the rifle being just as good (and better by later AK-74M models) with 5.45x39 being wholly a superior competitor to the AKM with 7.62x39. In both cases the designers were opposed to changes on their rifles for what amounts to petty reasons that were not backed up by testing.
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You're saying that it's not relevant to your argument and I would agree. It shouldn't matter that Stoner wasn't the creator of the forward assist mechanism or whatever Karl wants to ramble on self importantly about. It's an irrelevant point that introduces arguments against your thesis that aren't addressed. What it says to me is your argument is poorly thought out or written and doesn't incentivize me to continue watching. I'd love to listen to more but I can only take so much autism from someone who isn't myself.
Also I would disagree that the Kalashnikov argument is a valid argument against it. The addition of a forward assist to a gun is radically different thing than changing a caliber. Besides, I don't expect my engineers to be good ballisticians and make decisions about calibers, it's out of Kalashnikov's realm of expertise, whereas the function and features of his rifle are part of Stoner's.
@@leecline5759 My entire intent by using a dialectical method is to call into question the authority of forward assist critics (and thus remove the grounds for the current consensus against the device) who use horribly bad information to make an erroneous case. I can't do that without presenting the sincere conclusions of others as well as addressing them in their entirety. Karl is just a target, among many, that use the same kind of horribly bad arguments, data, theory, and history to make a point against the forward assist. Karl is also simply convenient to use as within just a few clips from TH-cam and a screenshot from Facebook I can get most arguments against the forward assist presented succinctly, within a few minutes, to the viewer so that the viewer can get an understanding of why the consensus about the forward assist is so horribly formed.
Karl is not unique in his positions on the forward assist either as he gets his understanding from the overall consensus and scant public information about it. I don't want to misrepresent them either, so I show literally everything Stoner attested to in the Congressional hearings, under oath, so the viewer can decide what the correct take is. You're really missing out as later in the video there is plenty of publicly accessible, but almost certainly never seen before, information about the forward assist.
@@fullspectrum1616 So, I watched the whole video. Same problems persist throughout and it would be tedious and probably pointless to go count them all.
I just have to say 26:25 is a fucking agregious safety violation. Never use a live cartidge to extract a case that's had a head separation. I hope you didn't post that thread because it was taken down because that's a very fast way to make your situation VERY much worse that it is.
@@leecline5759So is a soldier supposed to not point his gun at an enemy line while trying to use a standard issue case extractor before unloading his rifle and showing clear to everyone standing behind a red line?
Funny Ian and Karl have posted tape of Eugene Stoner himself speaking about the forward assist. The early history of the AR-15 to M16 is a circle jerk of people pointing fingers and making contradictory statements. The spring loaded firing pin would have been an improvement. The crazy specific AR primer specification and dent left on all chamered rounds is obvious.
My experience with using the forward assist has be very mixed, it's worked about the same number of times its made it worse, usally requing tools and dissasebly of the rifle.
That footage didn't exist in the public domain until after this video was made, and second he doesn't say anything new but only reiterates himself and smirks while pressing it. Still no substantiation because there's never been a test of it since the second TECOM test and he never did any analysis then or now.
@@fullspectrum1616, exactly. There has never been a second test. Between the bad decisions: 6061 recivers prone to corrode and the peeling chrome becouse Colt didn't spring for the specified airctaft grade chrome process and well as Icorrd documented grunts who were told their guns were self cleaning and not issued cleaning kits along with the horrible fouling of the ball ammunition ( I've fired 68-75 ammunition and it fouls bad) as well as gas tubes clogging there has been no test to see if the forward assist clears more problems than it solves. In my case it's a rub, two fixed two that use of the forward assist exasperated the problem requiring dissasebly. The forward assist saved Kyle Rittenhouse: no denying. Was his rifle clean, properly lubricated, or even broken in? "Definitively" rules out operator error. I don't feel that is proven.
@@christinepearson5788 I'm looking at the second test results right now from Oct 63 apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA030946
Kyle's AR had less than 150 rounds through it from new. His AR was in a state that is not out of the ordinary for a military rifle to be in even if it was never cleaned. M&P Sports come with oil from the factory (just watch any unboxing video.) Both TECOM tests prove that the FA is not causal to stuck cases and the FA successfully chambered every single round that failed to chamber. TECOM's test data allows us to say whether the FA is systemically causal to stuck cases. Your anecdote doesn't prove that the use of the FA causal, only that it preceded it, in that if you had done a tap rack it could have also led to the rifle needed disassembly as well. You and I will never know because you don't have enough data to say otherwise.
If the bolt doesn't go into battery, you can't disassemble the rifle, so that alone is justification to have a way to manually close the bolt completely.
@@Watchdog_McCoy_5.7x28, yes you can depending on where BCG is stuck if it's not 2" sunk into the buffer tube pull front and rear pins it slides forward pretty easily.
i like your video, anything that btfos irtv is good on me! i like the FA, if you dont wanna use it then dont use it, it doesn't hurt anything. also i think it looks cool and is one of the cool signature features on the AR platform
The image in the video @ 3:09 reads paragraph 22b, but your description and narration reference paragraph 12b.
It's a typo on their part. You can look at FM 23-5 for yourself.
First rate presentation. NutCoal Forever Thank you
Eugene stoner made several forward assists... some ar10s got them and when the army asked for one he designed one but so did colt and they went with colt's design
Stoner's forward assist on the AR-10 required a charging handle under the carry handle which had been an eliminated feature on the AR-15. Stoner admits he had no part in the design of any of the AR-15's forward assists as demonstrated in my video.
Excellent video, another example of "DeRanged" channel pushing a false narrative. Videos like this and from true professionals, "like The School Of The American Rifle" is a breath of fresh air..
I remember when I heard Karl Kasarda suggest that the forward assist could cause the rifle to fail catastrophically if pressed while firing, and I think my jaw dropped because that was one of the most nonsensical things I had ever heard in my life.
Probably heard it from his wife's boyfriend.
Catastrophic to your thumb
@@pmacamfg7655 Nah, there's really not much travel, it'll just give you a rap on the thumb at most.
@@0neDoomedSpaceMarine Yeah, just got done watching a “Middle East fud law video” apparently it’s known as the sniper button. Push and hold for single shot super accurate fire. Who knew.
@@pmacamfg7655 I wonder if some of that comes from seeing like designated marksmen making sure their bolt is seated before taking aim, and if someone who was familiar with really old fashioned sporters figured that it could maybe be like a set trigger.
People that don't actually know copy each other imperfectly, and you eventually get weird stuff like trying to hold the assist down.
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I only made it 53 seconds. I can't watch this shit. What I know about the forward assist is from the "Eugene Stoner Tapes."
Sad to hear that you're missing out. You will be missed!
Just watch Kyle Rittenhouse save his own life with the FA. That's all you really need to know.
Man that's one in-depth video on this small subject, very nice.
Stoner didn’t think it was necessary, the military thought differently and FA was added to the rifle. End of story, anything else is extraneous detail.
I didn't know right and wrong were extraneous details.
Stoner also didn't think the chamber and bore needed to be chrome lined. Was the military wrong about that too and Stoner right??
The biggest case to have a forward assist is a popped primer landing in your internals and making it impossible to slide the carrier forward again. You simply use the forward assist to get it into battery and then break the rifle apart like you normally would.
Blown primers either drop out the mag well, fall into the Fire Control Group pocket, or stay inside the barrel extension.
None of those possibilities are improved by pushing on the malfunction-assist device.
@@LRRPFco52 that was just a single example that has happened in the real world. Use any example you like, having a way to get the bolt into battery so you can break the rifle down in the field is important. There are many other great reasons a duty/serious use rifle should have a forward assist.
@@CoryHobbs2178 I don’t think it really matters and I have seen a lot of real-world use with this family of weapons across a vast set of environmental and geographic conditions, to include large sample sizes of carbines and rifles, as well as researching far more historical records and technical data of the AR-15 family from the 1950s-forward. I’m definitely in the "Stoner was right camp", but I don’t think it hurts to have it there, as long as you DON’T touch it.
Serious duty weapons like the Son Tay Raiders’ GUA-5A/As, USAF CTTs and PJ's GAU-5A/As, British SAS Commando Carbines and rifles, and British SBS carbines and rifles, were put to far more serious use than pretty much any US Infantry Battalion when looking at round counts and deployments.
Son Tay Raiders spent months working in the shoot houses in NC and mockup at Eglin AFB before deploying to Thailand in 1970 for the mission into North Vietnam, during which they slaughtered dozens of North Vietnamese soldiers and guards.
SAS and SBS used FA-less rifles and carbines for over 40 years. SAS was one of the first users in Borneo in SEA in the 1960s, in thick jungle terrain and all that goes with that.
Units have done exceptional work with FA-less Carbines and Rifles for decades proving that it isn’t a necessary device. They don’t really care that it’s there, but they don’t use it either way.
@@LRRPFco52 I would rather have it and not need it, than the other way around. But the use case is pretty rare, I'll concede that.
@@CoryHobbs2178 Guys with improper and bad training from big Army try to and do use it all the time attempting to do things that are pointless or detrimental. On the SOF side in the US, UK, and NATO, they don’t touch it and really haven’t. Maritime SOF might have exceptions to that if they forgot muzzle plugs for over-the-beach, but everyone is running suppressed there most of the time anyway.
Watched both videos. Nice job Full Spectrum. You did your homework. I would say yes "Vindication". The reason history always repeats is people do not bother to read up on it. Its easier to make proclamations without investigation. I appreciate the historical investigation you put into this.
There's a lot of people that have read the history concerning this, but works like Ezell's Black Rifle and Forgotten Weapon's video for instance do a disservice to the history of the forward assist. Ordinarily going to such resources is all that regular people would need, but the record here makes a much better case. I've had a lot of great critiques in the comments here that have prompted further research and will have a little more thoroughness and focus on the whole story of it rather than simply responding to bad arguments like in this video.
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This video was extremely well done, the editing and inclusion of b roll clips was awesome thank you for making it! That said I still fail to see where a FA would work over cycling the action, the two examples used at the end of the video (one where the rifle was frozen to the point water was required to actuate the controls and could also have been used on the chamber but wasn’t, the second with the ftf from the magazine where you don’t know the cause of the ftf and actuating the FA could be making a bad problem worse, where there is no risk in cycling the action)
I disagree with your assessment that cycling the action takes more time than actuating the forward assist
You mention elsewhere you are considering doing a video on when to use a FA, I’d love to see it. I absolutely disagree with your conclusion and stand by the assertion that cycling the action will more reliably resolve any issues over using a FA - I would love to be proven wrong. I think it is also telling that there was an industrial shift away from the original tear drop FA, If the FA had more merit, as suggested, the tear drop would still be widely used, manufactured and supported - but it isn’t for the reason that an FA has a small amount of uses that again can be remediated by cycling the action
That all said this was very well made and I am certainly subscribing for more even if I don’t agree, thanks for your time
I mention the use of the forward assist in some circumstances can be faster. Cycling the action under certain conditions will 100% induce a double feed as witnessed in the cold test video. This is the consequence of the AR-15 having an uncontrolled feed like most assault rifles and I demonstrate this fact on my own AR-15 at 36:30. Further, the action spring in some cases does not provide enough force to fully chamber even in attempts with multiple rounds as shown in the TECOM sand test as well as the cold weather video where you will be cycling the rifle multiple times without fruition. The forward assist is able to apply in some cases an order of magnitude more force than the action spring is capable of, so it stands to reason that in either of those cases the forward assist can be faster than clearing a double feed or racking the rifle multiple times.
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Secondly, you are also operating under the assumption that using the forward assist will make a problem worse. The TECOM test would have substantiated this claim if it were true but it is not. There is no data to support the use of the forward assist being causal to making anything worse.
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The shift away from the teardrop appears to be due to the 1982 M16A2 PIP ran by the Marines. An assumption of the change being good predicates on the Marines acting with substantive justification of which was surprisingly sparse for the A2. There were a number of changes they did which used prima fascie scientific justification but in reality were a reification of unfounded Marine desires for typical Marine things. One of these was the forward assist profile (allegedly because of snagging). If the allegation is true it is quite an interesting one. This would mean somehow the Marines were somehow getting stuff snagged on the teardrop FA but not on the charging handle, or carry handle for instance (where a slight change in profile would fix snag issues if it were the case). If the Marines had a genuine concern I think they would have addressed that. Now interestingly they also added a case deflector, and a large rear sight windage drum that somehow wouldn't also be a snag point on the rifle. Granted the case deflector shape isn't that bad, but it is an extra protrusion on the rifle that wasn't there before.
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The rationale of this decision was made by someone who clearly didn't understand the nuances of the M16A1's development and was very much shortsighted for ulterior motives behind development. The subject of the M16A2 is a video I have already conducted preliminary work on, as even though there is greater awareness about the A2 development process, there are a few points of narrative that are I have very rarely seen and add some insight to the overall picture.
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Thanks for your contribution to the comments.
This is a well made video and I appreciate the well researched argument; but the forward assist is still dumb.
Subscribed
I’m not sure how valid the point of polymer lowers receiving more damage than aluminum ones is, especially given the relatively mediocre quality of most of the ones currently on the market. I may be missing something but I’m fairly certain that splintered metal pieces would do greater damage than polymer ones.
It's not really a big deal to use a polymer lower. I'm just pointing out that his safety concerns aren't consistently applied by himself. Secondly, the aluminum lower receivers do not fragment like the polymer ones as they are just strong enough to not do so - not that I would have any real concern over using either in regards to an out of battery explosion.
The CAV15 lower receiver which Karl and Ian are so fond of was actually pretty good as far as lower receivers go, their observation is that most other polymer lowers are just plastic shaped like a typical aluminum lower, a geometry which isn't suitable for these kinds of materials, and given that those kinds of lowers always snap their buffer tube housing after a few hundred rounds, their observation would seem pretty valid.
I wouldn't call it the end-all be-all of lower receivers, I like having a carbine stock and being able to choose my own pistol grip, but if one was looking to make a particularly lightweight AR15 build, it would genuinely be a very good choice.
@@frenchonion4595 Right, but the reason the lower works and doesn't just break from shooting it a little is because it has a good geometry for that material. If they had shaped it like a typical lower, it would have just been remembered as another goofy idea that didn't work.
Great video! I'm a fan of the InRange guys, and it's sad to see their research seems to be relying more on anecdotal evidence rather than the wealth of empirical data provided by the actual military testing.
That being said, I think their assertion that the FA is pointless can be salvaged if you're add the qualifier of "for civilian applications".
You're far less likely to run into the conditions that will necessitate the use of a FA as a civilian than someone will in the service. If you're going to be using it for three gun/two gun/whatever, maybe losing an ounce or two by removing the FA is more advantageous than being able to expediently seat a round.
Or if you have a home defense situation where you're pulling your already immaculate (or at least not filled with dirt and mud) rifle and firing maybe 4-8 rounds.
Additionaly, their whole WWSD project was to make a rifle as Stoner would given modern materials, they could've just used the fact that Stoner didn't have a FA on his original design as more than enough justification to not include one in their build.
Once again, great video, and I look forward to more!
PS: subbed!
The first issue is that Stoner is making the AR-15 in regards to martial and not civil considerations, if you go down the reductionist path you end up with no one needing anything but 30-30s, R700s, etc. To use concessions for civil use detracts from a design for the military and necessarily makes it a worse gun for it's raison d'etre.
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If it's strictly what Stoner would do we just have to look at the SR-25 and SR-15 to know he would do circa 1990s, since he was a designer for them, so it's not very speculative given his historical statements and more recent work that it might or might not be on a new one if he was allowed to be the exclusive authority on a new rifle. The other issue is that IRTV doesn't adhere just to an abstract concept of WWSD, where there is no certainty on the subject, but also tries to simultaneously justify everything from a practical consideration, which is where the bad history, logic, and speculation come from that, in part, motivated me to make this video. I don't think there would be very much controversy over their WWSD rifle except maybe the polymer lower receiver seeing as how Stoner didn't go that route on the SR-25/15 and maybe the handguard since carbon fiber was a common enough DoD aviation material at the time. It's hard to say as the SR-25/15 was a little over 20 years ago and there isn't much that has changed since then. In any case IRTV doesn't just stick to Stoner's intent where their actions are defensible, but tries to associate Stoner's questionably elevated authority as well as what is practical in a military rifle altogether for justification which is where I criticize them where it relates to the forward assist.
I've had worn magazines not feed rounds perfectly, enough to slow down the operation of the bolt group to prevent the bolt from fully seating. in those cases the forward assist is fully justified, as there is nothing wrong with the ammo or chamber. I have experienced this enough times in my years in the military to absolutely Want a forwards assist in such instances where environmental conditions, parts wear, dinged shell casings, bad magazines..... warrant the use of the forward assist. Some civilians have had cause to use their civilian ARs in self defense, and a person might want an assist just in case that is the moment Murphy decides to make an appearance. I'd rather have it and never need it or never use it, that need it and not have it.
@@fullspectrum1616 remember that 2017-2020 polimers, molding technology, designs have vastly improved since 1990's, and it's way more tried and tested technology nowadays, so it doesn't surprise me that Stoner didn't bother to use those. The opinion on polimer guns has generally shifted and designing rifles is not only about "what works best", but also "what will actually sell", so their use of polimer lower receiver is not "against" theoretical Stoner's design of 2017-2020.
Also, they went for "what works best", and not just "good enough", so carbon fiber makes sense, while weapon designer of 1990's would avoid that simply due to excessive cost.
A lot has changed in 20 years when it comes to manufacturing and materials, gun design hasn't changed that much, same with petrol engines, because the general principle is over 100 years old in both cases.
That's a fair point about the lower receiver at least.
@@bezimienny_andzej6425 The AR design does not work well with polymers. They had excellent polymers when Stoner was alive such as the HK series, Aug and Glock. Stoner's expertise was aluminum and he was still a big supporter of aluminum, especially with the advent of cnc machinery..Nothing wrong with polymers, but if Stoner was to adopt polymers I would bet the family farm he would have designed a rifle for it's use rather than try to ad hoc it into his AR rifle..
torture testing a skeletonized "custom competition rifle" like it's some sort of battle rifle? That doesn't support any argument against the forward assist. It's not the application it's intended for.
It's more about the demonstration of a real double feed as well as multiple real FBCs in a row. The fact that both of these were captured on video successively is also convenient for showing the viewer the issues quickly and is the only reason I included it. This was an unrelated cold weather video made by Kalashnikov Group that used all kinds of different ARs to demonstrate a relative weakness of the AR in cold weather compared to the AK. Although it is a gamer setup rifle, the principles of the malfunction could have applied to any of the other tested rifles or any milspec/duty style of rifle.
@@fullspectrum1616 I wasn't criticizing your assessment nor inclusion of the video, rather I am critical of the people trying to make the AR15 and/or forward assist look bad by putting a "toy"/"show" rifle through battlefield conditions.
@@SoloRenegade They also used two HK 416s and a bushmaster in their test. It's Russia where they have much less access to stuff outside of euro brand AR15s we've never heard of so you have to give them a little slack. You won't see BCM, Noveske, DD, etc. guns in Europe.
@@fullspectrum1616 I get that, but a skeletonized AR15 is going to have malfunctions in less than ideal conditions. The AK47 actually suffers from this too. Lots of large openings where debris can get where you absolutely don't want it. The Stoner design largely keeps large debris from entering the rifle. No mechanical system will never malfunction or not be stopped by debris somehow. But I find the Stoner approach to be superior to the AK47 approach, for example. Would I use an AK47? Yes, but in most cases it would not be my first choice. But these skeletonized "cool" guns ruin the function of the AR platform in less than ideal conditions. Plenty of skeletonized ARs in the US too. But most people don't understand engineering or realize there are 2 theories of tolerance at work. One approach is to have loose tolerances and allow for debris. The other is to hold much tighter tolerances and prevent large debris from even getting in. The AR platform, in my nearly 20yrs experience with it, has never suffered a single malfunction from being dirty that I couldn't fix in less than 5min. Every other malfunction was the result of a worn/damaged/faulty magazine or ammunition. I will also point out that I am in no way one of those people that keep my firearms pristine and clean either. I'd go weeks without cleaning my rifles in the Army even, and still never had issues. I knew when it was dirty enough to warrant proper cleaning, and I didn't/don't have time to be OCD about it. If it couldn't handle a little dirt/abuse, then I would not be a fan of it or rely on it now would I? The tighter tolerances theory of the AR means that when debris that can stop the rifle manages to get in, it's also rather quick and easy to get it back out too. The only way most large debris gets in is through an open dust cover or an empty mag well, with the bolt to the rear. This should rarely ever happen. I close the dust cover religiously, and don't open the bolt but for for very short/deliberate moments (reloading or unloading) when not in a ideal cleaning environment. Skeletonized ARs introduce a multitude of new failure points.
DENIERS BTFO
Being an old retired Air Force Combat Arms Instructor, I have a LOT of trigger time on the platform and was still in when we switched over to the A-2 that had the FA. I don't see them as a determent to the rifle but I can't say I've ever had a real need for it either. About the only time I ever used it was at a 4 day training event some years back and when it got up to around 500+ rounds, I noticed with 2 older magazines that I had it needed a bump when loading.
But here's my issue. Most proponents of the FA I've talked to say that it's used in the case where the bolt doesn't close all the way "when firing." So I ask, "when firing, how do you know it didn't close all the way?" I usually get a tilt of the head out of that, so I press on...
The only way to know, when firing, that the bolt didn't fully lock is when you pull the trigger and hear "CLICK." At that point, the hammer has already been released from the sear so pushing the FA won't help anyway because the hammer is no longer cocked.
The only purpose I see to it is when loading with crappy magazines and a very dirty rifle. As I normally keep my rifles clean and normally have good quality magazines, this has never been a real issue for me.
That said, I really like the tear drop FA plunger too. As it's nearly impossible to find an AR without the FA, it might as well look good.
On full auto you will have a dead trigger with the hammer still being held by the auto sear. Going from shooting 1/3rd of the time in full auto as was the case in Vietnam to almost exclusively semi auto has reduced a lot of opportunity for this.
Secondly, even with a fallen hammer you don't know if the extractor has engaged the rim of the case and using the forward assist before manual extraction is a much surer way to avoid an induced doublefeed. I cover these two points in my second video more thoroughly.
The proper use for the forward assist is as the last step of the sports drill to fully seat the bolt, if needed.
This man took "you don't need a forward assist" personally. I don't care either way if it has it. I do like the look of ni forward assist, and if you have a flat side upper you can have a more reinforced 3d printed lower. But on my go-to rifle there's a forward assist but it wouldn't bother me if it was gone
It is about all of the misinformation being spread about the FA and this well made video rectifying the truth..
I'm confused on the mud test, cold test, and dust test. Even after looking at the data and the preface. Was the test performed with _out_ the mag in the rifle, and then the rifle is loaded with a 20-round mag then fired, or is the rifle put under adverse conditions with the magazine in the rifle?
In the mud and dust test the rifle was fully loaded, dust cover closed, and selector placed on safe before being exposed. The mud test had an additional measure of the muzzle being taped shut for safety. This would mean the magazine was loaded and inserted in the rifle before being exposed to the conditions. The cold test does not specify a fully loaded rifle so it seems it may have not been loaded in that test of being exposed to the elements for the two hours it sat in the cold (maybe for safety?) However, the cold test was more interested in temperature than foreign debris as a variable.
Nice
Great video. Very informative.
Great vid, glad to see well put together videos in a time of ecelebs riding on hype instead of facts to gain view counts
I am frustrated by your accusations of poor citation and support of others, considering you do the same at multiple points of this video. Otherwise, this was an interesting video.
Perhaps you could be more specific?
Why are almost all your links in the description bogus?
Thanks for letting me know. TH-cam seems to have trimmed them when I was uploading the video. They should be fixed now. dtic.mil seems to have removed the mk18 powerpoint presentation, sadly. I just tested them after an edit and they should be working now.
Wow this is impressively researched...always liked the forward assist...never understood why these young kids didn't like 'em...now I know. Those two fellas need to STOP with these LIES about something that can get you KILLED...GOD bless Eugene Stoner
Matt Land OK boomer
@@joshuagunderson6593 I dont think itll get them killed, its just a matter of training them to a point that they actually understand how the rifle operates. A great deal in atleast the POG world could benefit from this information.
@@joshuagunderson6593 REPORTED
This is very odd. I've been posting replies and they've shown up on my Google - My Activity, yet I refresh and it's gone. So it entered TH-cam's servers and now it's gone. I'll have to check if there's a problem on my end before I can post comments here.
I'm trying to tell people Rittenhouse had other options besides his forward assist and that if the forward assist wasn't there, he'd have used another of those options. Chrome messing up so I used Firefox. Deciding to post one comment here instead of to everyone who thinks forward assists are the only choice Rittenhouse had.
While he may or may not have had other options such as thumbing the "scallop" or re-racking the charging handle, Kyle stated it was about an inch out of battery he hit the forward assist and then it fired. So we know that the chamber was "empty" and a new live round was in the feeding/chambering process. That being the case the extractor would have most likely not have slipped over the rim of the cartridge yet (considering that the extractor slips over the rim just before the locking process starts and not 1 inch OOB) and re-racking the charging handle would have then caused a double feed since the extractor wouldn't be able to pull the previously loaded round out. That narrows it down to using the scallop or forward assist. The forward assist seems faster to use, and Kyle was in imminent danger of being shot at any time with a pistol pointed at him, so thumbing the carrier may have been slower or may have not allowed enough force to chamber.
I'm going to take a guess that thumbing the carrier in this case was probably enough to overcome a minor friction stoppage of the cycling, but I do think it's slower than thumbing the carrier and that the convenient location, mechanical advantage, and lack of precision needed for the actuation of the FA (compared to having to stick your thumb much more precisely on the carrier) lent itself to saving Kyle's life, especially under the threat of death. Can't say for sure concerning speed as we will never know exactly when Gaige was going to pull the trigger, but that's what I genuinely believe.
@@fullspectrum1616 I really don't have the time for this sadly. Sleepy now too. In the video, his forward assist usage wasn't just a thumb flick. There were reasons like the drop kick and weapon grab that justified a poor load angle and slower response but he fumbled a bit with the forward assist. It wasn't speedy enough to say it was his fastest choice. Had he not had a forward assist, the whole seconds used could be used on another procedure.
And Kyle's own descriptions are lacking. Others pointed out, more eloquently than I can, about parts he misidentified. He's trained but what he says is an ejection port cover and misidentified parts throw me off. I think he meant the bolt? Rewatchimg after a nap.
Though at least you're talking about Kyle. Other guy was saying irrelevant stuff unrelated to Kyle.
@@YTPrule Cut him a little slack as neither of you are properly seasoned in formal debate. He's a quite likely a boomer that probably knows more about the exactness of what makes a quality AR than either of us by orders of magnitude. What it appears he was going to get at if you entertained him a little was that the common knowledge of M&P Sport II's being $700ish and often having bad QC examples doesn't necessarily mean Kyle's AR was bad or good and isn't enough to make a determination from alone; only that it can be determined to be bad or good depending on the measurements, machining, finishes, etc. When he refers to his expertise he is saying that he can know definitively what specifically makes any particular AR good outside of simply relying on consumer reports of brands in general. In the sense he's getting at it's Shroedingers AR where a specific AR should be treated simultaneously bad and good until known better (measured.) In that while there are (probably) many more bad M&P AR15s by rate than there are BCMs you wouldn't know for certain whether the gun was made poorly or not since their manufacture specs are the same (in regards to the specs relevant to cycling), only the level of QC is different of whether the manufacture was done well or not. This would mean there are some M&P15s that will run even better than some BCMs necessarily, for instance.
I do share his opinion, though, that using the forward assist is faster than tap rack. While Kyle probably had enough time for someone like Jerry Miculek to do a reload, tap rack, and forward assist bump all at once, Kyle had to operate within the limits of his ability of a normal, less experienced, person who had just been running a lot and struck in the head by a skateboard, rioters, etc. I, and I suppose hairydogstail, don't believe Kyle could have done anything other than use the forward assist to clear the malfunction before Gaige shot him.
@@fullspectrum1616 I’ve been in far more formal debates. I also try to have standards typing. And far from it. Boomers I’ve known told me about their experiences. Multiple boomers and AR owners. My time in the firearms community let me encounter a bunch of dudes. Why assume he’s anything when he can’t stick to a subject? He genuinely didn’t know about the M&P Sport II Kyle used (police reports easily said) repeatedly mistook metaphors as literal, and in my experience, boomers do better. Age doesn’t mean they’re dumb or playing a fool.The more experienced firearm owners I discussed with were all praising Kyle for his competence under his circumstances, his budget and openly saying exactly what I did, that his performance with his cheap gear is exceptional. They told me their own experience with S&W. They’re the kind who can and have built their own ARs. It’s them altogether who told me not to go for it. They consistently told me to steer clear of the model Kyle had out of lack of quality control and they take the circumstances as evidence that it wasn’t a better one. He had barely shot it before the night, doubtfully even time to break in a gun, the malfunction alone when they’ve shot far more than me on more used (and even rare “holy shit did you clean that” times”). One guy even asked why the gear should be praised if it’s only because of its owner’s wits that he fixed a problem that could’ve killed him. There’s evidence leaning towards the poor side. He could’ve lucked out, only to hit bad luck later, the more good luck he fought dummies.
When he refers to his expertise, he only says “lol name this” while never providing any naming himself. I’m telling him that unless it’s directly related to Kyle, it’s not relevant to my point. The kind like that like to derail you so you better keep them straight. He ain’t actually backed his statements. How many of my or his own questions did he answer? He claims he’s an expert but he asks more questions than he answers. I ain’t falling for that trick. Anyone can bluff and his lack of evidence, and my time with experienced AR users, suggesting he’s hot air. And he deliberately steers away from Kyle when I ask him about Kyle. This means that he can’t answer about Kyle. Just the fact that he has to ask how can I tell Kyle’s gun wasn’t some high budget gun when reports about his equipment already exist, including names, means that he’s either not done his homework or he legit can’t recognize price ranges for a budget AR. What, did he inherit all his stuff or get it gifted? He can’t see the price tag for the same kind Kyle got? I guess he got his really early and inflation hit and he wasn’t keeping track of recent prices. Guys even told me there’s an increase in demand BECAUSE it was the model Kyle used. The boomers and experienced AR owners I know can give answers. They recognized quick that a boy of Kyle’s circumstances is unlikely to afford some high end gear. If he knew what he was talking about, he’d pick up on what a joke/jab I made means rather than assuming literal meaning too.
About the forward assist, my gripe with people is when they treat it like Kyle only had 0.1 attoseconds and did the only move ever that could’ve saved him. I know he used it, it saved him, etc. He’s only a human and while good reflex, he clearly didn’t do everything 100 optimal even for the FA. I don’t blame him, many older and had their firearms longer than he’s been around admit they wouldn’t do as well. In his shoes, I can safely say I wouldn’t do as well. He did better than anyone could’ve experienced. But some of the arguments I’ve seen in favor of the forward assist don’t present an accurate picture. That’s what I’m not happy about.
Thanks for your time btw. I can tell it takes time to write longer replies. Most joes wouldn’t give the time. I appreciate it.
Well done. So much fuddlore/groupthink gets accepted and never questioned even among people who should know better.
Lots of arm chair engineers on TH-cam. For any complex mechanical system (especially for US military) risk assessments are conducted. Begun in the 1940s by the U.S. military, failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) is a step-by-step approach for identifying all possible failures in a design.
If I boil down the work it come down to… Issue 1) Short stroke the charging handle and the round does not go into battery (Combat severity=high, Non-combat severity= low) x (Combat occurrence= medium, Non-combat occurrence=low). Mitigation could be 1) recharge a new round (training) or 2) add a forward assist (design). When you add a new design you need to analysis the potential unintended consequence. Forward assist good if the round does not go into full battery due to a round hang-up (low risk). Forward assist catastrophic if the round does not go into full battery due to fouled chamber and you use the forward assist causing a stuck case (combat=death, non-combat= low risk).
So no way would Eugene want a forward assist!
If you actually watched the video you would have known I demonstrated that stuck cases are not caused by the forward assist and that they occur independent of the forward assist's use, so your bullshit risk assessment is moot. Secondly, it's apparent no engineering "risk assessment" was ever conducted on the AR-15 (at least in regards to the forward assist question) as Eugene Stoner could only defend the lack of including one based on his anecdotal previous military demos to Asian armies, of which apparently never needed it once despite the US Army's testing noting from the very beginning first round feeding issues were quite common as well as the later TECOM test. Perhaps they weren't as rigorous as the Army was in demonstrating the AR-15, much like the Air Force. Stoner also never cited a risk assessment to defend himself or criticize the Army, so again it seems more likely than not that Stoner never had a formal process and data in whether or not to include one.
Switching alt accounts to spam your pasta isn’t a very good way to to convey your point.
You, being an experienced engineer should know that engineers don't get to pick and choose features. This idea that any engineer that is employed by someone gets to tinker around and make their dream widget a load of garbage.
As it turns out, his opinion didn't count.
Kyle Rittenhouse used his forward assist to save his life shooting a DeRanged supporter..Evidence enough!
@@hairydogstail He used a forward assist when he could've done other stuff too. Do charging handles and thumbs not exist?
It's a very well put together video and I appreciate your passion for the subject, but I think you gloss over the outright incompetence of Army Ordinance a little too much (in this case, that would be fuddlore circlejerk as their incompetence did create a Congressional hearing after all), nor does the environment that the M14 and M16 really get the due discussion it probably should with the tone of your work being so definitive.
During the 1920s the Army spent lots of time, money, and effort not only researching the SCHV intermediate cartridge concept, but actually adopted the M1 in .276 Pedersen. Now, that was correctly amended to keep .30-06 in light of switching and supplying a mainline infantry rifle caliber used by no other weapon in the US arsenal on the verge of World War. However that doesn't change the fact that in the '20s that the intermediate caliber concept was identified as the wave of the future; and independently proven to be verified and pursued by the Germans, the Brits, also the Soviets, and ANOTHER test by the Infantry Board in 1956. Despite all this, Army Ordnance wasted all the countless dollars and hours put into their own studies, eschewed and technical progress by any other major power in the postwar years, and adopted .308. Army Ordnance, sold the M14 as a cheap upgrade that could be easily made on easily converted machines and tooling, with near 100% parts compatibility with the M1 and therefore the existing inventory would also help mitigate costs as parts and easy "conversions". As everyone knows, this was not the case, on top of this, these same minds manage to screw up putting a box mag on the Garand (and I mean that. Redesigning the gas system from full auto ruined it, rendering it much less reliable and the rifle virtually incapable of holding zero. Then, due to the uncontrollable recoil in full auto the functionality was totally disabled on the guns).
So, Ordnance had a culture of BS and bias long before the M16 came on the scene.
During the Congressional hearings on the M16, the forward assist itself came up and was the topic of a lot of testimony. Colonel Howard Yount, who had been a project manager at the Rock Island arsenal in 1963 and who throughout the hearings bore the burden of explaining the ordnance corps’ decisions, was asked how this change could have been justified. Not on the basis of complaints or of prior tests, Colonel Yount said. It was justified “on the basis of direction.” "Direction from where?" a congressman asked. Direction from his superiors on the Army staff, was all he would say.
Later the Army presented documents that defended the forward assist thus: “The frequency or infrequency of the type of malfunction correctable by a manual bolt closure capability is immaterial.
The knowledge among troops that such as malfunction is merely possible would lower confidence in a weapon lacking (such) a device.”
In short, I have a hard time believing the same mental giants who messed up 1, making a box-mag fed Garand, then 2, thought A.)playing with buffer weights, B.) deleting chrome lining from the bolt, carrier group, chamber, and barrel, C.) changing the powder twice, the second time completely changing type and composition of powder, increasing chamber pressure about 10,000 PSI with (0 input from Stoner or Colt), and D.) issuing a *standard infantry rifle without a cleaning kit or any provision to clean it in the field* (regardless of if they believed the Colt marketing, were trying to sink the M16, etc.) were all fine ideas - knew what they were doing by adding a Forward Assist.
Thank you for the kind words. I'd like to point out the ordnance corps was not in existence in 1963, thus they couldn't have "forced" the forward assist.
But let's rather consider if there was still a "good ol' boys club" in the Army of these ex ordnance corps officers and they still had an impact or were incompetent as commonly asserted.
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I'm familiar with all of Col. Yount's testimony. What's strange is that the data for these trials was presented (page 5011) during the congressional hearings by the Army after Col. Yount's testimony about being directed to put it on without any specification as to why his superiors chose to do so (page 4701). So it is strange that Yount was either not familiar with these tests or that he wasn't convinced by them but it would make sense in that case why he isn't able to or not willing to defend the forward assist. It appears Yount was not trying to introduce the forward assist onto the M16 and was not in any part of its development. Ironically, Yount is former ordnance corps assigned as the project manager for the M16's Technical Coordinating Committee, so you could argue that in some part the recently decommissioned (1962) and at that time nonexistent ordnance corps was either against or ambivalent to the forward assist. What we can definitively take away here is that Col. Yount at least was not in part of the Army or a circle of people that were pushing for it.
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I don't think we will ever be able to definitively know the exact who, what, and why of the forward assist directive and whether it included justification or not. What I think appears to be the case is that certain elements of the army saw the need for it (in their previous tests) and requested these TECOM trials to Army staff command after having Yount's TCC shoot them down due ot the Air Force not wanting it. That Army staff command or some subordinate submitted a solicitation for a forward assist, based on the earlier BRL, ODCSOPS, USADC (defense command), US Army Infantry School, Aberdeen Proving Grounds, and US Army Arctic Test Board recommendations (page 5007-5008). Colt responded with the plunger type and Springfield Armory with the charging handle device. Army staff got USATECOM to run the tests to determine which solution was best. Col. Yount wasn't bothering with the forward assist project since the Air Force protested it and Yount wasn't going to waste time when there was an all services agreement requirement for changes to the M16 by the TCC. He was more likely concerned and busy with the Air Force's request for ball powder at around the same time. Army staff would then have had to go above Col. Yount's TCC to get DoD and then SecDef approval for the forward assist change using the earlier tests as well as the multiple TECOM tests to justify it. Yount's TCC probably didn't care and just went with following orders since he would not be liable for this specific change and thus not need to justify it, whereas the Army and DoD elements who directed this likely DID have a good reason such as everything I already mentioned. Notice how the congressmen never seem to attack Col. Yount in the same way they did the Air Force's Major Smith and General Anderson over the ball powder even after Yount testifies he has no basis for it because they may have already been familiar with the TECOM test result documents before discussing it.
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The issue here is that if (former) US Ordnance was so involved with this they would have "forced" the higher ups to approve the Springfield Armory one if they were acting the same way they did with the M14 as to secure themselves and their friends at Springfield Armory relevance with further M16 developments. It makes more sense to me that amongst all those different and non-ordnance elements within the Army that there was a genuine observation of the need for a forward assist and to use their observations and data to justify it through higher channels than the TCC as the TCC wasn't in a position to override the Air Force's objection on their own authority.
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My argument predicates on the Air Force not being a good authority of what is necessary for a combat rifle. I think I have already shown that. While it is not often done, it is easier to defend the Army than the Air Force. The decision to remove the chrome plating on the exterior bolt carrier and bolt was justified because of the flaking of the chrome material. Colt offered to chrome the chamber and bore but it was vetoed by SecDef for cost considerations as the original M16 was already not chrome lined, which goes against Stoner/Sullivan's authority as designers (as well as the experience Stoner attests to in his demonstrations in Asia about never seeing a condition where the forward assist was needed). Ordnance chromed lined the barrel/bore of the M14 and likely criticized the AR-15 for not having it. Further, Yount of the TCC offered to let the Air Force use a lower chamber pressure via a waiver and reduce velocity for their issue of blown primers with IMR 4475, and the Air Force refused it to allow velocity to be reduced and went with ball powder along with its associated increased cyclic rate waiver. The Army never increased chamber pressure as the 3250 FPS was from the original COTS load of IMR 4475 that was designed by Stoner himself in partnership with Remington. Yount also expands upon that the original IMR 4475 load was never validated like ball powder since it was COTS with the rifle from the beginning. The buffer weight change also DID fix the cyclic rate issues of ball powder and is present in all rifle length buffer systems to this day. Further on powders, it was Col. Yount's desire to have at least two different types of powder authorized at all times for competitive purposes (4631). This was quite evident in the numerous IMR powders that become authorized alongside the WC846 ball powder during early Vietnam. Regarding the cleaning kit issuance, there was a lack of cleaning kits amongst ALL services not just the Army, so they are all just as bad as each other in that respect.
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I didn't want to include this as my video was over 40 minutes and I didn't want to get into too much speculation. These are also the kind of arguments that regular people also do not come across even when researching the topic, so I didn't want to go too crazy with the tangents. EDIT: Please note that I covered the "pyschological need" of the forward assist in my video already presented by the Army that was IMMEDIATELY followed by their aforementioned test analysis regarding a deficiency of not being able to force the bolt close. Most people seem to stop reading there and forget to include the very next page that goes over this.
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EDIT 2: Yount found out about the test data I mention AFTER he was initially asked on page 4701. Looks like everyone forgot to read that part. See page 5004.
@@fullspectrum1616 Thanks for such a thorough and detailed reply. It's really rare to see a gun youtuber provide such definitive, sourced content instead of generic arguments and for that I cannot commend you enough. I hope this wasn't just a one-of example and we keep seeing content from you.
If you read Edward Ezell's book The Great Rifle Controversy the adoption of the M16 is a lured tale of the Army's desire to avoid the M16 at almost any cost. However the Army decided to require the forward assist in 1963 and at that time according to Ezell "Even though everybody, including Colt, Stoner and Yount, opposed the bolt closure device, the Army got its way." (Ezell at 199). In addition the Army also changed the twist of the rifling, eliminated the requirement for chrome plating the barrel and changed to ball propellant. It is probably well known, but worth repeating that the AR15/M16 was adopted and fielded outside of the normal procurement procedure and that the through testing that should have been done prior to its fielding was never done. In fact you could make the argument that Vietnam constituted the operational testing the M16 should have had.
I would add that Stoner was attempting to develop a light weight rifle. That was the goal and every ounce counted. We seem to have forgotten that as we have abandoned the idea of a light weight rife and loaded up the AR15 platform with heavy barrels and other accessories.
It would be interesting to have a through side by side test of rifles with and without the forward assist to see if Stoner was correct in his assessment that the forward assist was not needed.
@@michaelberry9706 I've never seen any evidence that Yount was in opposition to the forward assist except on page 4701 of the congressional report and that wasn't outright opposition but speculation out of ignorance before he became aware of the test data identifying the need, where he then personally presented the test data on page 5007. Does Ezell source this claim outside of the Congressional hearings? Secondly, the Army never required the Air Force to purchase the forward assist which is why they got M16s and Army/Marines got XM16E1s. This allowed the Army to bypass an all services agreement on the forward assist since the Air Force wasn't forced to order one. Secondly, how did the Army remove the chrome on the barrel when the Colt 601 was already non chrome lined? The TCC only removed chromed bolts and carriers that DID have flaking issues. I've also never read that Colt was opposed to the forward assist. It would be strange that Colt would oppose the forward assist while simultaneously having their head product engineer design a solution that became adopted so that Colt could profit even more off the rifle. You would think if they were opposed (on the idea that it was bad) that they would let Springfield Armory be the sole organization responding to the forward assist solicitation and let them be responsible for any of the bad that would occur from its use later.
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As a side note it's not possible to have a capable modern rifle for war under 10 pounds these days. If it is, it's missing something. Take a look at my gun in the video. If you don't include the suppressor and magnifier it weighs over 10 pounds loaded and every thing on that gun is a necessity in the modern era. It has a government profile 10" barrel which is as light of a barrel as you can get, too. If you want to argue about the weight of the optic you could save 8 ounces with an Aimpoint T2 but that still has it above 10 pounds. We've abandoned the idea because we have lights, lasers, and optics that didn't exist in the 1960's. As a base rifle it is lightweight which makes it lighter overall with accessories than other rifles that would also have the same attachments put onto those rifles anyway.
@@fullspectrum1616 Ezell cites: US House of Representatives, Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on the M-16 Rifle Program, 4701ff.
I think you are too hard on the Air Force. It is the Army that was responsible for procuring and type classifying small arms for general military use. It is their job to generate specifications and conduct the testing. And they were too invested in the M14. They did not want the AR15/M16 and would have sooner eat dirt than adopt it. LeMay wanted it for the purposes of the Air Force and the AR15 without the forward assist was fine for their purposes.
Let's remember that by 1963 Colt was trying to sell rifles and if Army approval was required and if the Army wanted a forward assist (to emulate the M1, M14 and M1 Carbine) Colt was not not going to argue.
Look the story of the adoption of the M16 is complicated and involved and I really can't remember all the ends and outs. If you have not done so you really need to read Ezell's books Including "The Black Rifle". They may not change your conclusions, but they are the basic texts with which a student of the AR15/M16 needs to be familiar. At the very least you can then say: Ezell says this and I disagree for these reasons. Ezell after all was curator of the National Firearms Collection at the Smithsonian and updated Smith's Small Arms of the Word.
I'm only a minute in and every single thing you've said is false. Please research what you're talking about before misinforming people. Also, please for the love of god get a new mic, the lip smacking is really intense.
Short attention spans and ignorance is bliss, is it not?
Its ugly and I've never used one in my decade of shooting ar 15s. Except my clone builds, every one of my ars has an aero upper with no forward assist.
Good for you. I used mine twice in my first 8 weeks of Marine Corps Boot Camp during grass week.
@@whodat9198 I'm sure that 100% happened.
@@anonymousanglo1169 and I'm 100% sure you're a fudd
@@whodat9198 ok crayon eater
@@whodat9198 lol all my army friends that have done multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq have never used it beyond training. One of which was present at cop Keating battle.
your ar is a pos if you need a forward assist
Kyle Rittenhouse used his forward assist to save his life shooting a DeRanged supporter..Safe queens like what you have need not apply..
Unfortunately, piece of shit, cheap, poorly maintained ARs are a fact of life, especially in the military.
As far as I'm concerned, it just gets in the way of left-handed operation, and doesn't do anything that the *bolt carrier scallop* doesn't let me do in the first place. You may argue arctic ops, but to that I argue that the magazine catch has a tendency to stick and freeze up anyways, so by that point just get a bloody AK and be done with it.
The scallop is a lot more uncomfortable and provides far less leverage than a nice convenient button.
Using the scallop to close the bolt the rest of the way when stealthily slow loading the M110 was standard operating procedure and sniper teams hated it. The lack of a forward assist to make that much more convenient and comfortable was one of the major complaints, and that’s why the M110A1 has one.
On more than one occasion, I have observed ARs with their BCG unable to be retracted due to the forward assist being stuck in the forward position, hanging up on the bolt carrier's FA notches. Fixing this required beating on the FA's housing to free it. Without the FA, one can just as easily push forward on the the bolt carrier's relief cut to help fully seat a cartridge. If the bolt continually fails to go into battery, you need to try and unfuck your rifle, not keep on attempting to force the bolt home. Judicious use of the dust cover and making sure the rifle is properly lubricated based on what environment you're in are the best ways to ensure the rifle does not fail in the first place. The forward assist adds a needless potential point of failure to the rifle, forced added cost onto upper receiver production, and adds unnecessary weight - however small - to the rifle.
"Muh fuddlore, muh ecelebs, muh circle jerk." The brownies have gone to your head.
That is BS, the forward assist ratchets and won't hang up when retracting the bolt carrier.. Kyle Rittenhouse used his forward assist to save his life shooting a DeRanged supporter..
@@hairydogstail Get an AR, hold in the forward assist, and then try to pull the bolt carrier back. It ain't fucking going anywhere.
@@blackbird_actual th-cam.com/video/1oUi2YRRtYw/w-d-xo.html What did you do, weld it shut?? There is no way any forward assist will lock in the down position. Please explain how you have seen a forward assist lock up the bolt carrier more than once with the pin in the down position. BS!
@@hairydogstailYes, I've seen this video. Where did I say that the rifle would explode? It won't, that's what the vent holes in the carrier are for. Did you notice how it did exactly what I said it would do and the BCG was prevented from cycling by the forward assist being held in?
@@hairydogstail It's pretty simple, the FA mechism get's stuck in the forward position either by getting debris into it or as a result of poor QC. It isn't a common occurrence, I'll give you that, but it is by no means impossible or so uncommon that it isn't something to worry about. Might as well not have that possibility in the first place.