Left Handed Tavor Users Info

[Farmer Harv]

Not being too hopeful about seeing a left handed bolt for the Tavor I looked into making it less painful to shoot with right hand ejection. After a few failed attempts, promising starts, frozen fingers (I hate winter) and some minor facial injuries from hot brass I think I've got it!

And it's simple to boot. The basic premise is to keep the brass from smacking into the face while not impeding ejection, and that is all this does...nothing more, nothing less. It's just a piece of that indestructible packaging plastic with a tab and notch to hold it in place behind the deflector, and now the spent case smoothly slides across it to the side instead of snagging and burning across lips and/or chins.

In my case my chin just rests on the deflector which slopes down at about 20 degrees, and hasn't caused any problems in 50 rounds. It will direct toasty warm brass right down the neckline of anything not zipped up fully, though this is actually an advantage on a cold day like today.

The deflector itself is currently 2.5x5", and once it warms up I'll trim it down to see what the minimum required size is. Some method of cutting and bending this plastic nicely would be good also, as this is about as crude and ugly as it gets.

More to come as things (hopefully) progress...

 

[wheels]

why not a left-handed bolt from canadaammo ?

 

[Farmer Harv]

I'd love to get a LH bolt from them, but they don't have any. And apparently they've never had any, and it doesn't sound like any are forthcoming in the near future either.

Hopefully they'll show up soon, but until then the Tavor isn't what I would consider to be "Fully ambidextrous" as it's advertised.

 

[c_diddy]

... but until then the Tavor isn't what I would consider to be "Fully ambidextrous" as it's advertised.

Boo! "Fully ambidextrous" And to think I was considering one... It's a conspiracy against us lefties!

 

[agent_mango]

Everybody has it out for us lefties!!

With regards to bending the plastic, you need to heat it above its glass transition temperature. From some quick googling it seems common polymers used for that type of packaging are PVC (Tg = 81 0C) and PET (Tg = 69 0C). What you can try is immersing it in a pot of boiling water, bending it to a new shape, then while holding that shape dunk it in a pot of room temperature water. Maybe heating it with a heatgun on low setting might work too, but be careful, heatguns are powerful.

 

[Juster]

This is a really good idea, well done!

Everybody has it out for us lefties!!

Well, that video was out of focus, your own fault for colluding with the Bloc .

 

[Farmer Harv]

Tried a whole bunch of different materials and mounting methods, and finally ended up with about the simplest possible solution I could imagine. It's a piece of pre-bent indestructible packaging plastic held onto the rifle with a little screw. The plastic is flexible enough that I'm not worried about putting too much stress on the screw, and the molded corner is resilient enough to return to the correct position when the deflector is bent.

It'll never hold up to anything more than range or light field use, but if it allows me to actually fearlessly fire the rifle instead of bandaging my chin then that's more than good enough.

 

[Griffoneur]

Confused! Doesn't the Tavor eject LEFT or RIGHT sides?

 

[Farmer Harv]

Yep, it ejects to the right with a right handed bolt, and to the left with a left handed bolt. The way the bolt is manufactured the extractor and ejector can't be swapped across, or the bolt rotated, so a specific bolt must be used for the intended direction of brass launching.

 

[Farmer Harv]

Had a couple of requests for info on making the Tavor lefty friendly, so took a few pics this morning. The armorer's manual isn't very good in a couple of places, and I learned a few things the hard way. Hopefully this will help others that wish to swap things over to the dark side of the body...

A few things to note...in the pictures I have already moved everything to the lefty position, in order to remove the barrel the cocking bar MUST be removed first, and nothing should ever need to be "forced". If something won't slide or rotate smoothly don't ram or jam it, but take a close look and make sure everything is positioned correctly.

To start, make sure the rifle is unloaded, and then remove the bolt assembly from the buttstock...

There is a roll pin above the bolt that needs to be drifted over to the other side. There is another pin mentioned in the armorer's manual at the rear of the bolt assembly, but I believe moving it is only necessary when the LH bolt is installed.

To swap the safety lever and cap, move the safety to "R", depress the spring loaded plunger through the hole...

And then slide the lever off the dovetail. Swap sides, depress the plunger and slide them back on.

Remove the two screws at the front of the foregrip. They're Loctited on so may be quite snug. Swing the grip down and back to disengage the tab at the back.

Pull the little hairpin securing the front swivel and unscrew the two halves.

The cocking handle guide assembly will then slide ahead until it hits the flash suppressor.

The suppressor can either be removed (recommended) to let the assembly slide right off, or it can be "popped" off with a bit of finger pressure which will disengage the tracks.

Drift out the rollpin holding the handle to the cocking bar

And then remove the rail from the guide assembly by removing the two screws and releasing the tabs holding it on. This was the part I had the most difficulty with, until I found some bent-nose pliers that would fit in the smallish area to squeeze the two tabs together.

Swap the rail and cocking bar to the opposite sides, reinstall the roll pin in the handle, and snap the rail into place securing it with the two screws. Note the arrow on the rail which points forward when installed correctly.



For barrel removal I ground a large allen wrench down to fit in the slot, and it works quite well.

In order to rotate the barrel cam a lock on the opposite side must be depressed to allow rotation...

And then the cam can be rotated 180 degrees and the barrel slid forward and out of the stock. In this pic you can see the riser I've added, which is just an AR type riser that I hacksawed the ends off of so it would fit the opening. Nothing fancy at all, and it seems to be working very well (even though I don't have a decent optic on it yet).

After the barrel has been removed, the front shield at the front of the gas cylinder needs to be flipped over so the hole for the cocking bar is on the correct side...

And that's it. Reassemble the rifle, first installing the barrel and rotating the cam until the lock on the opposite side is fully engaged. Then reattach the cocking handle guide assembly. If the flash suppressor has been removed (recommended) then the assembly will slide on, but if not then the tracks on each side will need to be popped together so it'll slide into place. One thing to note here is to make sure the cocking handle lever is behind the lug on the top of the barrel before reassembly.

Reinstall the front grip (loctiting the screws), attach the sling swivel and install the little locking hairpin, slide the bolt assembly back in, do a dry function check of cocking bar, bolt and safety operation and you now have as fully lefty friendly a Tavor as you can at the moment.

When (if?) the left hand bolts arrive I'll update this with the bolt replacement and ejection port swap procedures, but until then slap a deflector on and enjoy.


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