BattleRife
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Some seven months ago I posted my tale of a new M14 here. Well, a whole summer of shooting fun has come and gone, and my reloading log suggests the gun has seen about 1100-1200 rounds, and there is a new batch of M14s available at Marstar, so I thought some people might be interested in hearing how my rifle has fared.
The rifle has stayed mostly stock, I have only changed things that really needed to be fixed. Those things were:
Stock- As I wrote in the first review, the op-rod was hitting the stock. A few minutes with some sandpaper relieved the stock enough to cure that.
Safety- I neglected to point this out last time, but my safety was a cast-iron wench to operate. It took a HARD squeeze of the index finger to get it on, and a HARD push of the thumb or two fingers to take it off again. This was not acceptable, so I stirred up a small batch of grease with some polishing rouge and applied it to the safety lever where it touches the hammer. I left it there for about a month, and tried to remember to move the safety on and off about ten times every single time I handled the rifle. After the month, the movement was a lot smoother and a little lighter, but still not good enough. So I disassembled the group, cleaned out all the grease, and took a Lansky stone to the shiny spot the polishing compound had made. The safety is fairly easy to operate with only the index finger without breaking a firing grip. It now works, and to hell with the fact that I don’t use safeties.
Rear sight- The screw that retains the rear sight elevation knob repeatedly came loose in firing. Finally, after much shooting at 300m convinced me of exactly where the elevation knob needed to be (nine clicks from bottom to 100m mark), I got the heaviest screwdriver blade I could find, set the rifle in a Workmate and torqued the b*tch hard. It hasn’t moved in the couple hundred rounds since, if it does I am going to Loctite the bejesus out of it.
Flash suppressor- The crack-like flaw, which had me quite mystified, grew for a couple of hundred rounds, then stopped. Nevertheless, I was keeping my eyes out for a replacement that was reasonably priced and finally found a USGI unit that was new, but had been dropped or struck so that it wouldn’t fit on a muzzle. I got it for much less than they normally go for, and a few minutes’ cold forming and polishing got it back up to snuff. Then I took the old one in to my workplace to see what the issue was.
I cut the suppressor longitudinally and ground the cut surface on a belt grinder to reveal the section. Looking at it, it turns out that this unit is not made as one piece, rather the rear is a casting, and the front is turned from bar stock, then the two are welded together. The crack-like flaw I could see was a massive lack-of-penetration defect in the weld. The photos show the unit after fine grinding then etching in 2% nital to reveal the macro-section. The weld metal is the lightest (you can also see the spot weld this way), the wrought bar stock is darker, and the casting is slightly darker still. There is also some porosity in the casting in the area that should have been the base for the bayonet lug.
Anyway, apart from those tweaks, the rifle is still stock. It runs well, having had only one stoppage that I can remember (a short-stroke) and though I didn’t take measurements at any point, I think the trigger has smoothed out some. I thought it would be interesting to see how it shoots now that it is thoroughly broken in, so I rounded up various ammos, including much of the same stuff as I tested back in April, and braved the 4 degree weather and blustery winds at SPFG yesterday to see if the grouping potential had changed at all.
All groups are ten shots, at 100m, mostly onto white paper that had a removable black bullseye on it at the time the group was fired:
All the Federal ammo is gone, so I replaced it with my load of WC-735 under arsenal-grade 147 FMJBTs. This is my standard 7.62 M80 load, and is probably 90% of the current diet for this gun. I was also out of the South African stuff, but I found a box of Israeli to throw in there. The other four types were tested before, and three of them did much better than last time. The most noticeable was the Malaysian stuff, which went from fairly pedestrian groups last time (191 and 165mm) to shoot the single best group this rifle has ever printed (89mm, very close to 3 MOA). The only ammo to do worse was the much-praised Portuguese, which was among the best last time but no better than average this time. I thought it was interesting that while the typical group size was much better now (no more 2-300mm groups), the best groups didn’t improve that much. This is now a 3-5 MOA gun with all ammo, rather than the “3-5 MOA with ammo it likes, 8-10 MOA otherwise” gun it was before. Of course, I did more shooting this summer than I have in the previous five combined, so maybe some of that improvement was me.
One thing that is strange about this beast is its ability to hit itself in the side with ejected cases. I may or may not address this some day, but it is slowly beating its stock to pulp.
Anyway, I hope this information is of interest or use to some of you. I saw a ton of Norinco M14s out at SPFG this summer, hopefully I’ll see even more next year.
The rifle has stayed mostly stock, I have only changed things that really needed to be fixed. Those things were:
Stock- As I wrote in the first review, the op-rod was hitting the stock. A few minutes with some sandpaper relieved the stock enough to cure that.
Safety- I neglected to point this out last time, but my safety was a cast-iron wench to operate. It took a HARD squeeze of the index finger to get it on, and a HARD push of the thumb or two fingers to take it off again. This was not acceptable, so I stirred up a small batch of grease with some polishing rouge and applied it to the safety lever where it touches the hammer. I left it there for about a month, and tried to remember to move the safety on and off about ten times every single time I handled the rifle. After the month, the movement was a lot smoother and a little lighter, but still not good enough. So I disassembled the group, cleaned out all the grease, and took a Lansky stone to the shiny spot the polishing compound had made. The safety is fairly easy to operate with only the index finger without breaking a firing grip. It now works, and to hell with the fact that I don’t use safeties.
Rear sight- The screw that retains the rear sight elevation knob repeatedly came loose in firing. Finally, after much shooting at 300m convinced me of exactly where the elevation knob needed to be (nine clicks from bottom to 100m mark), I got the heaviest screwdriver blade I could find, set the rifle in a Workmate and torqued the b*tch hard. It hasn’t moved in the couple hundred rounds since, if it does I am going to Loctite the bejesus out of it.
Flash suppressor- The crack-like flaw, which had me quite mystified, grew for a couple of hundred rounds, then stopped. Nevertheless, I was keeping my eyes out for a replacement that was reasonably priced and finally found a USGI unit that was new, but had been dropped or struck so that it wouldn’t fit on a muzzle. I got it for much less than they normally go for, and a few minutes’ cold forming and polishing got it back up to snuff. Then I took the old one in to my workplace to see what the issue was.
I cut the suppressor longitudinally and ground the cut surface on a belt grinder to reveal the section. Looking at it, it turns out that this unit is not made as one piece, rather the rear is a casting, and the front is turned from bar stock, then the two are welded together. The crack-like flaw I could see was a massive lack-of-penetration defect in the weld. The photos show the unit after fine grinding then etching in 2% nital to reveal the macro-section. The weld metal is the lightest (you can also see the spot weld this way), the wrought bar stock is darker, and the casting is slightly darker still. There is also some porosity in the casting in the area that should have been the base for the bayonet lug.
Anyway, apart from those tweaks, the rifle is still stock. It runs well, having had only one stoppage that I can remember (a short-stroke) and though I didn’t take measurements at any point, I think the trigger has smoothed out some. I thought it would be interesting to see how it shoots now that it is thoroughly broken in, so I rounded up various ammos, including much of the same stuff as I tested back in April, and braved the 4 degree weather and blustery winds at SPFG yesterday to see if the grouping potential had changed at all.
All groups are ten shots, at 100m, mostly onto white paper that had a removable black bullseye on it at the time the group was fired:
All the Federal ammo is gone, so I replaced it with my load of WC-735 under arsenal-grade 147 FMJBTs. This is my standard 7.62 M80 load, and is probably 90% of the current diet for this gun. I was also out of the South African stuff, but I found a box of Israeli to throw in there. The other four types were tested before, and three of them did much better than last time. The most noticeable was the Malaysian stuff, which went from fairly pedestrian groups last time (191 and 165mm) to shoot the single best group this rifle has ever printed (89mm, very close to 3 MOA). The only ammo to do worse was the much-praised Portuguese, which was among the best last time but no better than average this time. I thought it was interesting that while the typical group size was much better now (no more 2-300mm groups), the best groups didn’t improve that much. This is now a 3-5 MOA gun with all ammo, rather than the “3-5 MOA with ammo it likes, 8-10 MOA otherwise” gun it was before. Of course, I did more shooting this summer than I have in the previous five combined, so maybe some of that improvement was me.
One thing that is strange about this beast is its ability to hit itself in the side with ejected cases. I may or may not address this some day, but it is slowly beating its stock to pulp.
Anyway, I hope this information is of interest or use to some of you. I saw a ton of Norinco M14s out at SPFG this summer, hopefully I’ll see even more next year.
