Piston conversions

I bought a piston AR (Ruger actually) because when I do clean my rifle, it only takes 5 minutes to clean my bolt, carrier, chamber and receiver. The piston takes longer to deal with but oh well. I mostly attribute the ease of cleaning to the coating on the BCG so if cleaning isn't your thing, take the money you want to spend on a piston conversion kit and get a Nickel BCG and more ammo.
 
I got a Adams Arms kit about 2 years ago. I built a midlength 14.5" upper and its been great.

The only issue was trying to find the proper buffer weight and that took took range trips.

I have a bit more then 1000 rounds and haven't cleaned it yet.
 
I have a few piston setups and DI .

Here is the thing regarding cleaning, you can't argue the fact that piston systems leave the carrier / bolt / upper receiver much cleaner .

Having said that so what if its dirty ....unless you are OCD I seldom clean my DI .

I have KAC SR-15 that I have documented 800 rds and I have made a commitment to refrain from cleaning and guess what , it keeps running and running. When it gets sluggish to a point where it won't lock back on empty mag for example, I pull out the BCG and lube it up or squirt CLP into vent holes. i want to see how much crap I can get stuck on the bolt over time haha

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I have a LMT MRP Piston 10.5 upper and it cycles anything with over 1000rds no cleaning . I do pull out the piston assembly to look at it but haven't cleaned it yet. It's nice that the BCG is much cleaner than my KAC but so what . My factory MRP 10.5 upper would not lock back on emply mag with anything less than full power 5.56 pressure stuff. The piston MRP runs everything fine so seems to be a plus for the piston version. Please note that the DI 10.5" LMT uppers have relatively small gas port ( hence not full cycling with 223 ) since it was deigned to also run with a suppressor.

I have 7.62X39 upper with a Adam Arms carbine length kit . Took some tweaking since the AA kit is not suppose to work with the 7.62X39 out of the box . Once it was running though it keep chugging away with everything form handloads to factory US made, Com block stuff, to underpowered Wolf crap . When it was a DI it always had cycling issues with the Wolf . Most of this surplus burns dirty but BCG squeaky clean . I am very happy I did piston conversion for the 7.62X39

I also have a toy Adam Arms factory built 7.5" upper that just runs and runs on anything I feed it. Never been cleaned over 500+ rounds . I have put together two other 7.5" DI , and one ran everything fine, other would short cycle with low power stuff. I have never removed the piston assembly for cleaning either .

IMO if you are contemplating setup for a Grendel bench gun I think it wouldn't bring much benefit. If its like my 6.5 Grendel my round counts are much lower since I don't run and gun with it since very Lapua brass I loose brings a tear to my eye . Also you would most likely be hand loading , may of the go to powders such as CFE223 , VV N530 etc all burn clean .

I barely have time to go shooting , and load ammo so really don't want to spend it cleaning so I like my piston uppers for that reason. Certainly not a necessity as my DI SR15 has been going strong with no cleaning, its just a bit messy inside but so what.
 
I've owned numerous DI (internal piston) and a couple PWS (external long stroke piston) AR's. All were reliable, all would run way more rounds through them without cleaning than I was willing to let them go for. I'm talking about a couple thousand round between cleanings and just a couple drops of oil from time to time. I've never had to sit and scrape carbon for an hour on a DI rifle either, they clean up easy and don't need to be spotless.
I know more than one guy who runs his 3-gun AR all season without cleaning it, that includes practice and competition. They just give it a little oil before shooting and they never have any issues.

If you want a piston driven AR I would strongly suggest buying a PWS. I had over 5000 rounds through one of mine without a single failure, it would shoot 1 moa with match grade ammo, and after 5000 rounds it still looked like new inside and out.

Cleaning a DI rifle is no harder or time consuming than a piston rifle, if you're going to clean either you're going to take it apart and clean it, whether you're cleaning a piston or a BCG makes little difference and it's not like we're in the middle of a battlefield with bullets flying by, a minute or two difference is not going to add up to anything in the big picture.

I would not buy a piston conversion. As Jerry said, aftermarket piston systems are fine right up until the manufacturer quits making them and you can't get parts anymore. A DI rifle you can find parts everywhere and I doubt they will ever be hard to find (unless the Turdeau bans them).
DI costs less so for two AR's of the same retail price the DI rifle is likely to have better furniture and maybe a higher quality barrel than a piston rifle.

To me, an external piston system on an AR is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. The AR is a proven platform, it is still in service with the military because no matter what they've come up with since then it hasn't been enough of an improvement to justify spending billions of dollars on new rifles to replace a rifle that is working just fine and can be easily configured any way you need it for the task at hand.
Sure, fill it with sand and it will choke, so what, we're civilians and will never need to expose our rifles to those conditions. These are range only toys so there really is no need to have the best rifle in the world or to worry about whether one can shoot 500 more rounds between cleanings. Buy whatever you want and go make holes in paper and ring some gongs. The targets can't tell the difference between an DI or piston rifle.

They all work and they're all reliable. If you want a piston rifle buy a piston rifle but I wouldn't buy a conversion.
 
hbean said:
if you don't like cleaning that much than don't clean it that much, squirt some lube on your BCG after shooting, clean once every 500 rounds or so.
Click to expand...

^^this......I go a couple thorounds before cleaning. No need if good non corrosive Ammo is used.
 
ATRS answer to your questions is about as good as it gets. Don’t bother with one. Just run DI. I’ve shot over 1500 rounds through one of my AR’s before I even added any extra lube, still runs fine. If you have OCD, maybe this is the hobby for you?
 
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