10 Dec 02

"D" Ring

My colleague Jeff Chudwin, brought the "D" Ring to the attention of all of us earlier this year. I have now, belatedly, joined him in his endorsement of this product.

All military rifles have issues, and the AR-15 is no exception. One real weak point of the AR-15 system has been the extractor spring, which breaks at around 1,500 rounds. AR-15s with twenty-inch barrels that are fired only semi-auto are far less likely to experience this problem than are sixteen-inch rifles that have been exposed to heavy doses of full-auto fire. Even with the spring broken, the rifle may continue to fire normally, most of the time. However, a broken extractor spring will invariably cause the extractor to release the fired case too soon, causing a live round to be stuck under a fired case that is still partially chambered. This type of stoppage is particularly difficult to reduce and usually takes the rifle and the rifleman out of action for the better part of a minute, even if he knows what to do.

Until the bolt and extractor can be redesigned (or the whole rifle replaced), the interim solution has been to place a rubber ring ("D" ring) over the extractor spring. Installation takes about a minute and can be easily done at the user level. The "D" ring boosts the life of the extractor spring to 35,000 rounds and provides positive extraction and ejection even if the spring itself is broken. Seasoned operators worldwide have "D" rings installed in their ARs. I have them installed in all my ARs.

The "D: ring is available from MGI. You may contact Mack Gwinn at MACKG2@aol.com.

All light military rifles, when subjected to heavy doses of full-auto fire, will experience extensive parts breakage. Pins will shake loose. Bolt lugs will crack. Springs will break. The rifle will literally shake itself to pieces. Your weapon was designed as a military, autoloading rifle and should be used as such. Using it as a "machine gun" exceeds its design specifications and brings with it all kinds of negative issues, as noted above. When I was an infantry officer in Vietnam, the full-auto feature was added to every M16 rifle, so that any rifle could be magically turned into an "automatic rifle," which was supposed to substitute for a machine gun. Unfortunately, on full auto, the M16 heated up so quickly that its usefulness as a "machine gun" was nil. True machine guns feature heavy, quick-change barrels. Without that feature, a light rifle that merely fires full auto is of little use, because it will quickly overheat. It cannot be counted upon for sustained fire. In practice, one is well advised to leave full-auto fire to legitimate machine guns and train himself to hit individual targets with carefully aimed, individual shots.

/John