Quote Originally Posted by Uglyduck View Post
Not to be impolite or a sharpshooter but I think that's the belief the WEVO staff intends to dispell by conducting this project

I was an AK guy long before I got into AR's and remained an AK guy even after being indoctrinated in the military. If anything the service helped to solidify my original belief in the simplicity of the AK system. I've built my fair share of AR's but have not seen one run as reliable as the most basic of AK rifles. I am a firm believer in the piston variant AR systems, however to truly design an AR as reliable as an AK it would take monumental design changes to the current system as a whole.

First the bolt would have to be reduced to a maximum three lug system, the extractor widened by nearly half as much more and undercut such that it gained full retention of the casing groove. The bolt itself would have the cam pin diameter cut by at least a third similar to some of the Knight's upgrades, in order to strengthen the bolt. The return system would have to utilize a captured spring assembly similar to an FN Para 50:63, since the buttstock tube is one of the weakest links on the AR rifle. The gas system would have to be a short stroke independent piston stabilized in a gas piston tube with an adjustable gas system- again similar to a FAL or even a SIG style system. The bolt carrier would have to have sand cuts added similar to an L1A1 to allow debris to clear the channel. The barrel would have to be a hammer forged chrome lined machine gun grade barrel which luckily exists in the Noveske line. Pretty much by the time you finished the project you would no longer have an AR but instead have an XCR or SIG 556 style rifle.

Now if you want to truly test the AR then you would conduct the same trials that some of the Com block countries conducted when they adopted the AK design. I truly don't believe an AR could stand up to that amount of abuse but it would be interesting. Drag the rifle 5 kilometers to the range behind a truck (Soviet), drop it off a 4 story building (Soviet), run over it high speed with a truck (Soviet), bury it in a creek bed for a month by accident (N. Viet Kong), bury the rifle in the snow in negative -40 degree temps (Alaska State HWY Patrol), freeze the rifle in ice (Swiss military), run 89K rounds without stoppage only to finally stop the testing due to a sheared extractor with four crushed shell casings laying in the back of the receiver (Yugo), run the rifle over 300K rounds (Bulgarian milled/Arsenal museum), and the final test would be to use the weapon in sixty years of combat (type 1 and type 2 Soviet rifles found in Afghanistan). Now those tests of course would be the extreme end of the reliability spectrum that one could hope to achieve but I hope it would humble anyone who honestly believes they could build an AR as reliable as an AK- it simply isn't possible.

However a piston has proven to be four times more reliable than DI as the military has shown with some of their sand testing. However despite the piston upgrade, I have not owned a piston AR that could be fed a steady diet of Russian surplus without the occasional FTE or FTF. If a system only functions on high end newly manufactured brass cased ammo, then it still wouldn't be fair to compare it to an AK system that has never even seen such fancy brass casing in it's lifetime of use. Basically, building an AR as reliable as an AK is a monumental task.

B