crimsonfalcon07

Got a pair of new boots today. Belleville Sabres. Fit like a glove.

Waiting for the Primary Arms sales for Geissele triggers is pretty smart. I think I got my SSA-E for ~165 on one of those sales. I also won't ever shop from CTD again. They're *fine* unless there's a run on something. Then they're downright dishonest. There were a number of people I know who had orders in with them before the last ammo shortage. CTD actually cancelled their orders without so much as asking the customers if that was okay, and then relisted the SAME items at double the price the same day. They had outstanding orders that they had stock to meet, and chose to cancel them to gouge suckers out of even more money. If that's not illegal, it's downright sleazy, and worthy of never doing business with them again. They also stopped selling firearms for a while post Sandy Hook, rather than standing up for their and our rights. I hope they go out of business. Total scumbags. I have to admit, I do think less of anyone who knows about their rep, and still shops with them. It's your choice where to spend your money, but there are a lot of standup retailers, such as Primary Arms, SAA, Able Ammo, Manventure Outpost, Midway USA, SLR, CDNN, Grabagun, etc, who don't have shady or illegal business practices and are far more worthy of your hard earned buck. It's worth doing a little research into places before you place an order, IMO. YMMV.

Man, those are some smoking deals on the Seekins Precision lowers... :P

I think you'll love the trigger. I've got 2 of the M1 variant, and nothing else will do, really.

Just got in a Vortex Strikefire today, and some accessories for my Primary Arms scope (flip up caps). The only problem is, now I have an excess scope. You all know what that means... Time to build a new rifle! I'm thinking I don't have a 300 Blackout yet...

Which is often true of virtually any 308 AR part, it seems. Cross-compatibility isn't exactly the strong suit with 308's, considering the lack of milspec. Hence the oft-repeated advice to always buy a matched set.

I'm a bit skeptical after getting burned on the Radical Firearms one that Primary Arms had for even cheaper than these. That was out of spec and couldn't be headspaced.

Other stuff you may not be thinking about/may not have is the tooling. Do you have a good enough receiver block and/or reaction rod to install the barrel and muzzle device? You can't just screw them on haphazardly. On the upside, if you have the AP enhanced upper, you don't need to time the barrel nut. But you still need to put around 60 ft-lbs of torque, and if you are unlucky and try to cheap out, you'll break the receiver. You'll need a 1 3/8" crowfoot wrench for the barrel nut to go with your torque wrench. I don't see the muzzle device on the list, but I had to buy a new set for that. With the parts list you've got listed, your wallet would probably be better off getting a pre-built AP, although it's certainly fun to build an AR, and I'd never want to discourage someone from doing so.

Honestly, the steel I would pick is the one that the maker can heat treat the best. Any of those steels can do a great job. I'd probably pick 1095 or 5160 out of those three, although of course I'd prefer other steels if I had the option. If the maker can't tell you what kind of performance you can get from each type of steel with the heat treat, you may want to look elsewhere. 1075 is a pretty forgiving steel to heat treat. 1095 is harder to do well, but does a great job when you get it. 5160 is one of my favorite options for a beater, or something that needs to be tough. What thickness are we talking about? Can the maker work in other steels, or just simple carbon steels?

I certainly could be remembering it wrong. It's certainly a great steel. Too brittle for swords, IMO, but awesome for general cutting tasks. 5160 is indeed a leaf spring steel. Many of the best Nepalese khuks are made from leaf springs from Mercedes vehicles.

There are a lot of good steels. ATS-34 is Hitachi's version of 154CM, which is a perfectly nice steel, but what I'd consider a "good" steel, not a great/super steel. I also didn't include CTS-XHP, which is reportedly fantastic, but I have no personal experience with it yet. M390 beats heck out of all of the SXXV steels IMO though, and those are generally considered better steels than ATS-34/154CM or the better CPM 154 version.

Thanks for the good words fellas. The closest thing I have to a website is my photobucket, which has photos of a lot of my work. Next project is a katana design, along with some fighters. Not sure what the etiquette is here, but I'd be happy to run a giveaway contest here for y'all, in thanks for all the help you've given me with my build, if it's cool with the staff, and send one of you a free blade. I actually don't think Cold Steel's Carbon V is actually the same as Ka-bar's 1095CV, from what Uncle E (Ethan Becker) says. I recall reading that the Kabar 1095CV is a proprietary formula. I'd like to try out one of Cold Steel's CPM 3V blades. It's my favorite hard-use steel. I like M390 a lot for smaller blades. I've got a ton of different steels, including some expensive stuff like Elmax and CPM S110V. M390 performs the best out of the super steels, and 3V is just better than anything else for tough tasks and sword steels. Thing is, I make 3V blades myself, and have the heat treat done by one of the best guys in the business (Brad Stallsmith at Peter's Heat Treat, using Dan Keffeler's formula, Dan being the only two-time Bladesports World Champion, one of the best modernized sword makers in the business, and an all-around stand-up guy). So it's pretty tough to justify buying someone else's blades. 5160 and 52100 are darn good steels too. 5160 is my favorite cheap hard-use steel, and 52100 (which is the same thing as Busse's SR101, for the most part), is a fantastic slicy steel. I find metallurgy fascinating, and have recently been giving some thought to how it could benefit firearms builds. Certainly a high temp resistance/high wear resistance third gen powder steel would make an AMAZING barrel. It would be far more consistent than is possible with a carbon steel, and would last many times longer as well. But it would also be far harder to work because of the higher wear resistance, and the raw materials cost around 3-4 times as much.

I definitely like Cold Steel's cheaper stuff. The more expensive stuff isn't really worth it IMO, and their swords have questionable balance and are overbuilt. Good if you're a mall ninja interested in chopping down a tree, perhaps, but not so good for serious practitioners. I have a friend who's a former world champion who won't go near them. Later today, I'm going to get a group shot of most of the khukuri I have... in the meantime, here's a couple I made: Made this for a friend who recently died in a car accident. Hope it's serving his lady well. RIP, buddy.

I can confirm that the AP upper works with the Tac-ops charging handle. I have one in mine.

I'd also go for something with microserrations on the face of the rear. Makes sight acquisition much easier. I highly recommend the Dawson Precision Charger rear sight, and a tritium or fiberoptic front. DP will install tritium vials in the rear sight for an extra charge if you want. I had that done to both my PPQ's. 10-8 also makes superb sights.

Is that a Himalayan Imports? I've got several khuks. I'll have to get a group shot. Looking through my albums, I realized that I don't have any of my khuk collection. It's gonna have to wait til next week though, as I'm about to head out of town.

I'd be up for one of those. But yes. There's definitely a facet that the majority of shooters won't want to pay the currently exorbitant prices for a barrel made out of advanced materials, but then, we're probably not too far from making them cost effective. For instance, the carbon fiber nanotube armor I previously mentioned runs under 150. It's a lot more than a comparable steel plate, but pretty close to a kevlar plate, and weighs in at under a pound for IIIA protection. Carbon fiber nanotube production is getting much more feasible, and offers a lot of interesting possibilities. Costs for crucible powder steels have been dropping fairly steadily too. Materials advances will define the next age of technology, in my opinion.

Fluting, (when done correctly; mechanically speaking, it's not enough to just cut slots in), provides much more rigidity along a certain axis for a given amount of mass, functioning on a similar fashion to an I-beam. An easy way to illustrate the basic principles is to look at a ruler. You can flex it much more easily along one direction than another. Essentially, the idea is that there's more mass along the width of the ruler to resist flexion than there is along the thickness. Depending on the direction that force is applied, it has more material to resist flexion. Thus, a bull barrel of a given diameter will resist flex more than a fluted barrel of the same diameter, because the fluted barrel has less material (lower mass). However, the fluted barrel will also be lighter, and it will resist flex significantly more than a lightweight barrel of the same mass, because the orientation of the mass is mechanically situated to provide more resistance. But because mass does actually matter, in practice it becomes more confusing. For instance, barrel manufacturers most likely just flute barrels by cutting flutes into existing bull barrels, rather than engineering a barrel to have identical flexion resistance for the specific weight. Thus, you're trading weight for flexion, but at a better rate than you would if you just went lightweight. It's a compromise that's generally favorable if you want to reduce weight but not lose flexion resistance. However, even JUST using fluting, it is theoretically possible for a barrel manufacturer to construct a fluted barrel that has lower mass than a bull barrel, but equivalent rigidity. I am not aware of any barrel manufacturers making such claims, however, outside of the Teludyne folks, who use a very different principle than fluting. Some more food for thought. Flexion happens along a specifically defined harmonic curve defined by the material and its proportions. Steel, when heat treated, undergoes physical changes (austenite, martensite, etc), which alter the crystalline structure of the carbides. Certain of those structures fit very closely together, and as a result of the geometry, also have mechanical support that resists bending. That's why we heat treat knives or swords, for instance, to a different hardness than we do a tool that needs to resist longitudinal bending and return to true when it does. More, simple carbon steels often have impurities (which is why forging was important; it would work out the impurities and make the carbon structure more uniform). Modern metallurgy permits more uniform carbon structure, but the firearms industry by and large has yet to dip into really advanced steels, likely because of the increased cost, but also likely because of tradition. So, we could get significantly better barrels just from using better quality steel. But there's also more possibilities. Because different materials have different harmonic curves, it might be possible to have a lightweight steel barrel surrounded by layers of other materials with precisely placed harmonic curves that would resist each other (think, if steel followed a sin curve, and you had a material surrounding it that followed a cos curve, you might end up with a barrel that would significantly resist flexion). Of course, then heat transfer might be an issue as well. There may be other directions to go beyond just materials sciences. A barrel of the future might be able to use magnetic cooling, for instance, with an electrically generated field driven by the excess gas that gets vented. For that matter, the tech of the future might involve using the barrel to electrically accelerate the projectile, akin to the principle behind a rail gun. Anyways, short version is that if you want to save weight without compromising rigidity too much, a fluted barrel is a good bet. If you want the most rigid and thus accurate barrel, you want a bull barrel, the heavier the better. And if you want the best of both worlds, you can try a carbon fiber wrapped barrel, or see if the Teludyne folks really can make good on their rather impressive claims. I certainly look forward to seeing materials science advance to the point at which innovation becomes more cost effective.

And last time they made claims, they found out they'd screwed up the specs and got bitten hard.

I'm not positive that his math makes perfect sense. I've had a similar discussion about fullering in sword blades. The way that the math works with regards to stiffness is that a fullered (or in this case fluted) piece of metal will be more rigid than another piece of identical dimensions and mass. Therein lies the rub. It has to be equal mass. In his calculations, he doesn't use a fluted barrel of equal mass, which leads to flaws in his conclusions. Thus, a fluted barrel WILL be stiffer than a light profile barrel of similar mass. But it's going to be less rigid than a bull barrel of greater mass, although that bull barrel would be less rigid than a fluted barrel of equal mass to it. The point of fullering or fluting is that it decreases weight while mitigating loss of rigidity. So while it's wrong to say that fluting a barrel INCREASES rigidity, it will decrease weight while not significantly affecting rigidity. It provides a good balance. So it's ALSO wrong to say that fluting has no effect on rigidity. Does that mean that fullering or fluting is necessarily bad? No. Are there other options? Perhaps. I'm planning on testing out the Teludyne Tech Straightjacket system. They claim that their barrels are more rigid than a similarly sized bull barrel, but are lighter weight, and the proprietary resin or whatever that they use wicks heat away from the barrel. Because it's got a lot of surface area, it would then theoretically dissipate heat more effectively. Might be snake oil, and it's certainly expensive, but the math checks out for me, provided that the filler material does what it's supposed to. Materials science has certainly advanced to a sufficient point that it's possible. It's also flawed to say that the surface argument is complete fallacy. It's not. While he's right to say that proximity to the bore also has an effect on the rate of transfer of heat to the outside of the barrel, it's also true that surface area IS increased by fluting and surface area DOES have an effect on rate of transfer of heat to the external environment. Both are factors in cooling the barrel. I suspect that the next big advance in barrel tech will involve carbon fiber nanotube or graphene, or some combination thereof. Carbon fiber nanotubes enhance rigidity substantially (and in fact, AR500 has made IIIA body armor out of the stuff), and also have a very high heat transfer rate (something like 6 times higher than steel is theoretically possible, although it tends to be only twice as much). It would be interesting to see a barrel made out of a crucible powder steel like 3V or something similar (for its MUCH higher wear and temperature resistance and superior carbide construction), wrapped with a double helical carbon fiber nanotube weave, maybe suspended in graphene (which can transfer heat many times faster than steel).

Just finished this one up.

If the shoe fits... Loquacious, perhaps even garrulous.

Lol. Shot my build today. Got the gas block dialed in (didn't have to be fully open). I had a few issues at first. The Freedom Munitions rounds when I was first messing around before I fired it at all kept getting the bolt stuck in the chamber when I went to chamber them, and I had a bunch of issues with that even without ammo at firstt. We'll see if I can even use this Freedom Munitions stuff I bought. It loosened up a bit after I lubed it, and it shot just fine, so maybe it just needed some break-in. Haven't really zeroed the scope; just adjusted it for windage a bit. Was pretty easy to shoot same hole groups standing off-hand at the measly 25 yard range I have here. It will be fun to shoot this thing from prone. I like the scope a lot though. It's a lot nicer than I thought it might be.

You can also get a Seekins precision mag button; that helps. I use the Troy ambi mag release with the seekins button in my Aero build

I'm managing to resist so far. But boy, that's a good deal.