The UK's Finest Independent Forum for Shooters and Gun Owners. Est 2010.

Mattnall wrote: BTW, nice video, but the action is not the same as with rim fire rifles, as you surely know the bolt doesn't move anything like the distance that the full-bore one does and the shape of the bolt is totally different.

So are you saying that with a rimfire action it is possible to release the hammer before the bolt is fully in battery...? Because it seems like that's what you're saying...

Mattnall wrote:I have not set myself up as an expert on the AR, you have.

Umm, no, you stated:

''Some with less experience will disagree with me''. Implying you had more knowledge and that anyone that didn't agree with you was less experienced.

How many rimfire 22 ARs have you made?

If its more than CMMG, who have sold countless 10s of 1000's with forward assists, in the most litigious country on earth, then Ill listen to you.

If its more than me then Ill listen to you. Im currently on 200 odd CMMG's and about 70 22LR Ravens.

If its less, as I pretty much know it is, then your opinion is actually based on less experience than you claim to have.

While I still respect your opinion I don't agree with your reasoning at all.

The only down side to the CMMG forward assist is that its design is not so good and it can jam the action after a while.

But the most important point is that if the customer wants one then they can have one and if they don't then that's fine too.

neal455 wrote: Mine is a purpose built for the 12" S&W as it replaces the hand guard "cap" to keep the whole thing from flexing (which they do)

You do realise that by doing that you have just removed any freefloat that the barrel had. Any loading to the handguard from bipod or bag or brace will now go directly into the barrel and shift your POI.
Try it and watch your zero shift.
It does it bad enough on a CMMG with a triangle front sight , aluminium upper and standard handguards. The flex in the S&W plastic freefloat handguard took up some of the force. By attaching the handguard 'through' the suppressor you send all that force into the barrel and flexible polymer upper now.

So are you saying that with a rimfire action it is possible to release the hammer before the bolt is fully in battery...? Because it seems like that's what you're saying...

Yes it can, on both the 22 and the rim fire versions of the AR. It is easy to demonstrate with a full-bore AR but I haven't tried it with a 22.
The hammer can release before the bolt is fully closed, in the 223 this will mean it won't fire, in the 22lr version it means it could fire the round. I have witness someone firing rapidly with a 22AR and the rounds were regularly going off before the bolt had full closed, there was a lot of flash and brass bits coming out of the eject port and still it reloaded OK.

It is the use of forward assist on a rim fire round that I wouldn't advise. If you are having trouble with the bolt closing on a rim fire and take a look to see why the rifle failed to fire, if the bolt is half way back then the round most likely is bent and should be discarded as a damaged - I would also not advise attempting to shoot a damaged round.

If the bolt has ridden up over the rim then forward assist will damage the round further.
If the bullet is still in the mag and the bolt has stopped on the rim I would not advise the forward assist in this instance as it could fire the round.
Similarly if the bolt is almost home and failed to fire then the hammer has fallen, forward assist now will not work, and, depending upon the cause of the round failing to fully chamber, it could go off if attempting to force it home.

Personally if a round fails to chamber I would try to find out why and in so doing the bolt is pulled back. If it is a failure to fire then as a shooter I would have already assumed the bolt to be fully home otherwise I wouldn't have tried to fire in the first place, then perform your drills and fire on.

As someone mentioned earlier, if on a timed stage and a round fails to fire, the quickest and most likely action to take to remedy the situation is to manually cycle the action watching to see if a round clears and a new one chambers, then continue with the CoF.
Otherwise you are likely to waste more time. If the round fails to fire as sometimes happens forward assist won't help, if the round failed to fully chamber and the hammer has fallen forward assist will not help, if you are out of rounds forward assist will not help. The only situation I can think of where a failure to fire that a forward assist may help is if the bolt has not moved forward enough so that the disconnecter still has the hammer. However manually cycling the bolt and checking that a round chambers will solve the problem every time.
(If the firing pin has broken or there is another mechanical malfunction, that is another issue altogether and the forward assist won't help.)

In all instances the manual cycle of the bolt and checking of the chamber/bolt configuration will solve the problem or show up an issue needing a closer inspection, forward assist may only help in the vast minority of the cases. If I was a numbers man and playing for score then I would not use the forward assist method but the manual/check method.

I advise anyone not to use the forward assist on a 22lr round - I have seen a rim fire round go off in just this situation.
Others may say it is OK.
You chose how you want to proceed.

AR15 wrote:
If its more than CMMG, who have sold countless 10s of 1000's with forward assists, in the most litigious country on earth, then Ill listen to you.

I'm pleased you have more experience with building 22ARs than me, I don't want to get in to that market. But you once said you had to work a lot on the CMMGs to get them to function reliably, are they that bad? Do you actually build them or buy them in already assembled?
But I have fired many 100,000s of rounds through them, never needed a forward assist.

BTW, do any of their 22 uppers or rifles come with a forward assist as standard or are the forward assists bought and added later by the user as an after market item? Do CMMG actually sell a 22LR AR with a forward assist fitted? It is not clear on their website.

If the user buys it as a must have accessory rather than fitted as a needed part by the manufacturer then the manufacturer doesn't actually feel it is a required part to make the rifle function properly. It is just bling that has a disputed function added by a user without a necessary need to have one, only a desire to have one.

Mattnall wrote: Do CMMG actually sell a 22LR AR with a forward assist fitted? It is not clear on their website.

Yes they do, if you were really that interested in ARs you'd know this.

Not 22 ones.

Anyway, I still don't advise using a forward assist on a rimfire.

But will any of them actually work as reliably as my S&W.....?

Reading through yet another "AR rimfire thread", it seems not....

It might seem spiteful, but that gives me a warm feeling!

TattooedGun wrote:

Mattnall wrote: BTW, nice video, but the action is not the same as with rim fire rifles, as you surely know the bolt doesn't move anything like the distance that the full-bore one does and the shape of the bolt is totally different.

So are you saying that with a rimfire action it is possible to release the hammer before the bolt is fully in battery...? Because it seems like that's what you're saying...

Well, I think the theory is to add rigidity rather than attempting to free-float the barrel. There's an argument that if this didn't work better on the MP15-22 than free-floating, then S&W wouldn't have added the hand-guard cap in the first place.

I don't know what best approach or company is - that's why I started the thread :-)

Mattnall wrote:

AR15 wrote:
If its more than CMMG, who have sold countless 10s of 1000's with forward assists, in the most litigious country on earth, then Ill listen to you.

I'm pleased you have more experience with building 22ARs than me, I don't want to get in to that market. But you once said you had to work a lot on the CMMGs to get them to function reliably, are they that bad? Do you actually build them or buy them in already assembled?
But I have fired many 100,000s of rounds through them, never needed a forward assist.

BTW, do any of their 22 uppers or rifles come with a forward assist as standard or are the forward assists bought and added later by the user as an after market item? Do CMMG actually sell a 22LR AR with a forward assist fitted? It is not clear on their website.

If the user buys it as a must have accessory rather than fitted as a needed part by the manufacturer then the manufacturer doesn't actually feel it is a required part to make the rifle function properly. It is just bling that has a disputed function added by a user without a necessary need to have one, only a desire to have one.

Back when we were doing the most CMMG's they suffered dreadfully from very bad mags. They would feed at incorrect angles and given that the entire feedramp/ chamber setup is not too forgiving, they would jam a lot of the time.
The jams were all the same type and presented themselves as incomplete chambering of the round to varying depths. Having pulled and examined quite a few it became obvious what was causing this.
I quickly got bored of taking the mag off and then attempting to extract the live round. It was often the case that the extractor did not have the strength to remove the round that had distorted driving bands engaged with the bore and lands. So it then would be a more tedious affair of using a finger nail or pen knife blade to extract the round with the gun pointing in a safe direction.
What worked very well for 95% of the problems was pushing on the forward assist 2 or 3 times. This would result in the round going fully into battery and ejecting itself when subsequently fired.
I have done this countless times with no oob fire.

There were a lot of other problems with the CMMGs and we ended up machining bolt faces and bolt feed relief cuts, re shaping extractors, chamber mouth work, firing pin work etc etc etc. So all of the CMMGs we sold we worked on to try and get them to function their best. Even re crowning each one.
It was even the case that the bolt would hold slightly out of battery with the mag applied so a relief cut would have to be made on the mill on the underneath section to get it to close properly.

CMMG sell the rifles with the Forward Assist insert included, every gun we imported came with them already installed.

When a 22 is running properly the Forward Assist is redundant but rimfire ARs do throw curve balls and malfunctions can and do happen. I agree that some stoppages would be dangerous to forward assist, that's why I said that it should be used properly.