Thoughts on the k31?

[Slamfire]

I truly do find it troubling how much effort our military insists on putting into squeezing more blood from the Stoner turnip. It was originally designed with aerospace methods and practices in mind, and those by definition have a lot less headroom built into them than most; it's doing a set job with as little as you can. But when you subsequently demand more from the design, you start out much closer to the margin of what it can take than usual; we very rarely upgrade load ratings of aircraft components for this exact reason. They were designed to meet a certain requirement, but we can guarantee no more.

The basic problem with the Army Ordnance Department is that they are primarily experts in government contracting and they have lost their core technical competency in firearm design. The Army had designers and lost them all when Springfield Armory was shut down in the 60’s. While there are Mechanical Engineers, they tend to be the low achievers who could not find an industry job, and Government pay reflects this. Government engineers are paid about 25% less than industry. You will run into EEO types running programs who are clearly incompetent, people promoted because they fit into socioeconomic categories. Government employees are “managers”, not “doers”: they don’t do design work. For one thing, Security would not let them install design software programs on Government computers for fear of “viruses”. Instead these “Technical Experts” are ultimately Technical Contract Experts, very knowledgeable about contract changes, CDRLs’, forms, Wide Area Flow, the color of money, the Economy Act, the Anti Deficiency Act (very well trained on that one!) but it turns out, they are basically clueless about firearm design, firearm design history, and the technical aspects of firearm design. When they need someone who can think, they hire Support Contractors, and it is Support Contractors who do all the real technical work, such as mechanical modeling. Remember the movie “Sand Pebbles”?. Government employees are the crew, sitting on their butts, not wanting to take the rice bowl away from the coolies doing the work.

Especially when you compare how much the modern M4 has changed from the original M16, you do have to question the wisdom in how we've gotten this far by changing so little when it was a borderline design in the first place. History has shown we should at least consider resizing the bolt head a few mills larger so the lug-fracture phenomenon is non-existent, just like in practically every other design. Even .05" larger diameter would vastly improve the bolt strength, and as AR10's have shown, without noticeably changing the weapon size or weight (for that matter, why not use AR10 size bolts for everything?)

These guys are not changing anything ahead of time. They don’t fix things till they are broke and it has to be very broke for them to figure out they have a problem. This is due primarily to the lack of expertise within the management chain and the total inertia within the system. They don’t recognize problems until the tire tracks are on the back of their suits. Any one remember all the up armoring of HMMWV's? The Army was loading HMMWV’s around 8,000 pounds over gross and only then did they figure out they had a ball joint problem?

The Army bought the M16 , they did not design it, they don’t know the design margins, and don’t know how to come up with the design margins. I can assure you after reviewing enough DTIC reports, around the middle 70's it becomes apparent that the Government was sliding down the stupid slope at an increasing rapid pace. The technical quality of the reports and the work really show a dummying down over time. Ever read the book “Canticle for Leibowitz”? Remember the Blessed Blueprint, the Sacred Shopping List, and the Holy Fall out Shelter? The current crew is as clueless about firearm technical details as those fictional characters were about technology before the fictional nuclear holocaust.

[valkyrie.rider]

As mentioned above, dont cycle with your head on the stock. Especially if you are left handed....

[DennisCA]

I have a K-11 (which the model before the K31) and just love it, shoots accurate as hell and a recoil that is very manageable. Here's mine:


All matching numbers (including bayo)



With pig-sticker:

[barnbwt]

"As mentioned above, dont cycle with your head on the stock. Especially if you are left handed..."
If you keep telling them, they'll never learn . FWIW, my posture is such that I have no such issues; if your cheek bones prefer you to lean forward vs. to the side, you won't be so lucky.

TCB