Most of the "improvements" are in the form of converting the original paper "blue prints" into metric CAD file. This sounds like just a transcribing job but little things started coming out in this kind of work, which means people had to sit down, sort things out and make changes. This also means all the tolerance must be higher than the original, otherwise it won't be backwards compatible. Back in the late 80's, this could be a painful manpower intensive process (not as bad as in the WW2 with drafting tables...). Most of the places were still wielding sheet metal boxes in the 80's ( FN, Beretta, HK....other than Steyr who used plastic and aluminium die casting)
What we accepted as standard these days, such as "shot peening" of bolt, is the result of Diemaco's work back in those days. Other things like ditching the A2 sight for the A1 style sight is not really an improvement, just a change. That '180' improvements figure includes both.
The biggest technology change is the use of GFM CHF machines to make barrels. Colt in the US still use button rifling, which takes like 30 to 45 minutes to make one barrel.Fine if you have multiple machines that do 6 barrels each that are inherited from the days of Vietnam war, but you can use 1 CHF machines to do the same thing in like 5 minutes. Crunch the number, there is a reason no one uses button rifling to do mass production other than Colt. The problem is that Colt didn't have experience with CHF, so that technology came from Austria and basically Diemaco would need to hire GFM and possibly additional consultants to get this set up. The same technology sold to FN Herstal to make minimi / C9.
These things add up and that costed a million dollars to Cdn tax payers.
ha ha ha ha
