The Ultimate AR-15 Meltdown Test

[su_heading size=”30″]He’s intentionally trying to see what the AR can endure before it has problems.[/su_heading]

Eric, from Moss Pawn & Gun, attempts to burn out an AR-15 upper on an M16 lower. There are several specific products being used including: SRC Relia-Bolt BCG, Geissele Super Gas Block and an AR barrel from Faxon Firearms.

There are so many things that can go wrong. Gas tubes are designed to fail before the firearm will be destroyed. Watch the video to find out what happens, you won’t be disappointed!

Video Transcription:
[Eric] Hi everybody welcome back, this is Eric here, from Moss Pond and Gun. Do you ever have one of those days where you just need an AR break? Well that’s what we’re doing today. This is gonna be Ultimate AR-15 Meltdown. We’re gonna see what the AR can take in full-auto before it starts to have issues, okay? We’re running a standard M-16 lower, and we’re gonna run a commercial-type spec’d-out upper on it. We’ve got a standard Anderson Upper with a Sharps Rifle Company Relia-Bolt Bolt-carrier group, we’re really gonna put this little thing through its paces today; we’ve got a Geissele rail right here, you know I don’t really expect any issues out of this mark-three rail, it’s a thirteen-inch; we’ve got a Geissele gas block, that’s got the bomb-proof installation, so we’re gonna kinda be testing that, see how that holds together. We’ve got a Faxon one-in-eight twist stainless barrel with the melonite finish, with a single chamber clockable Faxon break. Alright, let’s see what this little thing can do here.

Now what we’ve done is, because we wanna see what type of grief that we can but the extractor through on this bolt, I’ve opted for some steel-based ammunition because steel’s usually pretty rough on the bolts. There’s a couple of things that can happen here, guys. We could have a cook-off, you know, the firearm could get so hot that the rounds actually start to explode prematurely, the heat from the barrel can be so hot that it can set the round off and cook the powder without the firing pin hitting the primer, so. That could be an issue. We could melt the gas tube, we could melt the gas rings inside of the bolt, we could shear the gas key on the bolt, all kinds of things could happen, but we’re gonna check it out here, see what happens, pretty much with the AR-15 system, the gas tube itself-now this is a gas-tube impingement system- the gas tube itself is usually what is the fuse of the entire system. The gas tube is designed to fail before the weapon destroys itself. Will it? Let’s find out.

Alright. Here we go.

[Full-auto firing]

One down.

[Again]

[laughing]

[More fire]

Gas block is getting hot ladies and gentlemen.

[more fire]

Oh yeah, that’s hot. This gas tube, it’s about to go.

[more fire]

Maybe.

[more fire]

I tell you what, let’s try an X-50 drum.

[more fire]

One more for good taste. Uh-oh.

[more fire]

Well that ran like a champ, didn’t it? Alright. Oh that barrel is hot OOH it’s hot.

[more fire]

Did you hear that rate of fire pick up on that? This bad boy is getting hot. I don’t know, guys. But let’s keep going. That is one hot barrel. That sucker’s hot. Alright, we’re gonna stick with thirty-round mags. Oh, this is the hottest I’ve ever got an AR, this is getting a little bit crazy.

[more fire]

Oohoholy Moses! Yeah!

[more fire]

[laughter] oh that gas tube is freaking cooking, dude.

[more fire]

Woah nelly! This thing is gettin’ hot! Oh man.

[fire]

Oh this thing is getting warm! How about another X-50 to cool it off a little bit?

[more fire]

Ohohoman hahaha! You see how cherry-hot this thing is?

[click] [clearing the gun] [more fire]

She’s slowin’ down, I dunno, getting a little sluggish. We’re gonna keep runnin’ it, though.

[more fire]

My trigger finger’s getting tired.

[more fire]

That was, yeah. That started cooking off a little bit. We’re starting to cook off. You know what? One more.

[fire]

Yeah guys. We just… we just jettisoned the break off the end of the gun. Yeah. One more. Why not?

[one shot]

That was it. That was the gas tube. Done. That’s it, she’s done. Alright. We’ll see what happened.

Alright guys, well that was pretty freaking crazy. I’ve done a lot of crazy things with guns in my day, but that really surprised the heck out of me in terms of what happened. I mean, I knew the gun was gonna fail in some way or form, but I didn’t know the barrel was gonna bust. So our barrel failed. Gas block held, gas tube held, out Relia-bolt: just fine; and honestly the reliability of that thing, the entire rig just chugged along just fine until its utter demise. Not a single issue, I don’t see any problems with the bolt, we’re gonna start with the bolt and just disassemble it and have a look here.

And while I’m taking this thing apart, I do want to thank the guys out at QuietRiot for providing this M-16 lower for me today to use, because they knew that going into this that I could destroy the gun, but the lower? You know, you’re generally not gonna have any issues out of a lower. Usually with an AR design, your barrel is where all the pressure– it’s where all the magic happens. That’s why the rest of the firearm can be made out of aluminum, can be made out of polymer, really, that’s where the magic happens is with the barrel and everything. Firing pin looks good, powder pin looks good, this thing is still a little bit warm, that’s okay. Alright. Our cam pin looks good, our bolt looks good, gas rings look fine, extractor looks fine, gas key looks fine. There’s nothing wrong with this bolt. This bolt can go in any other gun and it would work fine and no-one would be any the wiser of what I did to it. Well, it’s going back in my gun. Alright, so the rest of the upper here: We’ve got the Geissele rail, did just fine, we did get one little bulge here on the side of the rail, that was from the barrel blowing, okay. now looking back at the slo-mo footage, we thought that maybe what had happened was like a sqib load or something, but according to the slow-motion footage, the round made it out, and then the round behind it made it out. I think we just got this barrel so hot that it couldn’t take it anymore.

Now you gotta think, that was eight-hundred thirty rounds of ammunition. Drum magazines, sticks, in a combat situation there’s a very very slim chance that you are going to fire this gun for that many shots in one sitting and actually get the thing hot enough to do that, ok, that shows the operational capacity of the AR-15, and it’s just really shocking. But what I’m going to try to do, I’m going to try to get the rail system off. Looking at the barrel, it looks like it did droop a little bit, some of you guys might be familiar with world-war-two and the germans running MG-42s and all different type of machine guns, well the MG-42 has a quick-change barrel system. Most heavy machine guns have a quick-change barrel system for the purposes of, you know, the barrel gets hot, you don’t cook your barrel off, you don’t start cookng off rounds, you don’t injure the gunner or the ammo-bearer or anything like that. You swap the barrel, and you get back to business. Ok. This gun? Not so much. It’s not designed for this type of abuse.

Alright, we’re gonna have a look at this Geissele rail over here, and see if we can get it off. I was getting a little bit nervous there near the end, that was kinda crazy. Don’t get me wrong, it’s one thing to have a little fun, but that was starting to freak me out a little bit. Let’s have a look here. Let’s see. Washers. Let’s not lose everything. See if maybe that thing will pop right off of there…

Hoho. Okay. One thing I like so much about Geissele’s rail systems, is the fact of how modular they are. I can swap these out, if I’ve got this one barrel knot, I can change it out to any type of rail system I want, so say it’s an operational environment: Oops, I screwed up my rail system, who cares, change it out, everything else is the same. Very quick change, very modular, very easy to take care of. Rail system’s fine other than the damage that occured when the barrel blew. I love that little rail. Now I’m gonna put my gloves back on. Guys, you know, we really just wanted to show how tough these little guns are, you know a lot of people talk a lot of smack about AR-15s, I personally am more of an AK guy, but I can certainly see the charm of the ARs. Modular, you can see how quickly I broke this down just in the field to clean and inspect what’s going on– well there ain’t no cleanin’ this.

So let’s look at the barrel, here. Now I’m not gonna touch it, because that booger is still hot. We’ve got some serious stuff going on there. The Geissele gas block: still holding up just fine, the bomb-proof installation –literally we did create a bomb with this thing, so the bombproof installation did its job. The Faxon barrel, you know, held up fine, as long as it’s good, but to give you an idea of how hot this thing really got, if you look down the barrel of this thing, it’s got so hot that for about the first ten inches of rifling, it’s just stripped it out. It got so hot that it was just carrying bits of rifling and– wow. It just really screwed this thing up. And of course our brake ended up working loose from the heat, and it’s somewhere downrange. It may have just fell right down here, we’re gonna look for the brake. But we did end up losing our brake, which I can imagine not being a common problem to happen. If you’re really running a lot of rounds out of this thing, that could happen.

Let’s have a look down from the muzzle end –and yes, it is unloaded guys, there’s no bolt in it, there’s no ammo in it. Yeah. Wow. That… that’s just so freakish. The wear of this barrel after getting it that hot and those amount of rounds– have you ever looked at like an oldschool twenty-two barrel, that had probably about 60,000 rounds put through it, and it’s probably about 120 years old like an old Winchester 1890 or something that looks like it’s got barely traces of rifling left because it’s been shot sixty-thousand times? It looks like that. It looks like Marlin Micro-Groove rifling, but like, worse. That’s exactly what it reminds me of. Wow.

I tell you what, the purposes of these videos, guys, is to learn something. I learned something. Yeah it cost us a little money, we burned up a little ammo, but hey. That’s the whole point of science, is to learn things and to document it. I guess that kinda makes me a scientist. Sort of. So guys I appreciate you watching this, hope you learned something from it. We had a lot of fun making it, we’ll catch you next time.

Source: Iraqveteran8888 Youtube