#Lrb m14 safe act how to#
Those of us who do this for a living are familiar with the issues and know how to deal with them. That is why we have gunsmiths and armorers. The point is that building a rifle always involves a certain amount of hand fitting. I’m sure some of you have even more issues to site. I’ve seen connector holes deformed, uneven bottom surfaces and asymmetrical heals to mention a few more. Barrel thread timing is off, bolts won’t rotate, trigger housings don’t lock in place, head space is wrong, clip guides are too tight (and break the dove tail if forced), bolt lock pin bosses break, receiver bridge firing pin cam area cut wrong, magazine well angle off, magazine well too tight for magazine fit, core hardness too brittle (or too soft), case hardness too soft (or too hard), bolt roller contacts receiver rail (resulting in broken bolt roller), uneven contact between bolt lugs and recoil shoulders of receiver, rails too wide (or too narrow), step in flying rail not machined to spec, rear sight valley too narrow, rear sight ear holes misaligned. Issues with commercial receivers are common as I said. Even so we often found minor variations in tolerances in any given number of receivers, but they almost never were found unacceptable.
Those that were accepted had to be about perfect - they had all those precision gages to check every detail with. No one knows how many government M14 receivers were rejected and trashed during manufacturing. Of course they made so many and I only had access to a few. I don’t recall ever having a serious issue working on Government receivers. A drop in the bucket compared to the Garand and M1 Carbine. M14 rifle production for the military was somewhere in the 1.5 million range. Most other companies have produced anywhere from 230 to 4,000 or so, usually on the lower side. Companies strive to produce profitable products and in the case of the M14 to a very limited market. Manufacturing a commercial receiver is mostly about making money.
The problem is that the problems are common to all commercial receivers to some extent. A good deal has been said about the many problems some builders have had and the issues they encountered. I don’t wish to go into the subject of how good or bad any companies M14 receivers are.