Running Guns Hard

What happens when you stop treating an AR-15 like a safe queen and start running it hard? Which parts fail first, and how can you spot the warning signs before they take your rifle out of the fight?

In this episode of Built to Last, Tim and Jude sit down with Chad Albrecht, founder of the School of the American Rifle (SOTAR) for a deep dive into running guns hard and the wear and tear to look out for.

Known throughout the firearms industry for his meticulous inspections, technical expertise, and no-nonsense approach to the AR platform, Chad shares what he has learned from evaluating thousands of rifles. From common failure points and accelerated wear patterns to maintenance practices that actually matter, this conversation separates internet myths from real-world experience.

Tim, Jude, and Chad discuss what breaks first when rifles see high round counts, how parts quality impacts longevity, and the critical inspection points every AR owner should understand. They also explore gas system issues, bolt and carrier wear, preventative maintenance, and the differences between rifles that survive hard use and those that don't.

Whether you're a competitive shooter, professional user, dedicated enthusiast, or someone who simply wants to get the most life out of your rifle, this episode is packed with practical knowledge you can apply immediately.

If you've ever wondered how hard you can push an AR, what warning signs deserve attention, and how to keep your rifle running when it matters most, this is an episode you won't want to miss.

This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. Please speak to a qualified firearm professional for any industry-related questions or decisions. The views and opinions expressed in this episode are solely those of the host and guests and do not reflect the official policy or position of any company. This content is intended for audiences 21 years or older. Viewer discretion is advised. 

Transcript

0:02

Welcome to another episode of Built Alas with Brownells. I'm your host, Tim, alongside our co-host Jude, recording in the Ram Room at Brownells. Today's guest is Chad Albrecht, founder of the School of the American Rifle, master gunsmith, and one of the most sought-after AR-15 technical instructors in the country. Chad has serviced over 30,000 rifles and built his reputation on diagnosing real-world failures in guns that are actually being run hard. He teaches armorers, builders, and professionals how to inspect, gauge, and understand the AR platform at a mechanical level, not just assemble it. His work focuses on the mechanical truth of the platform, identifying common manufacturing inconsistencies, headspace issues, and assembly mistakes that can lead to failures. His philosophy is simple: all AR parts are imperfect. Reliability comes from knowing how those imperfections interact under stress. Chad, welcome to Built to Last. Glad to be on, Tim. First of all, I do want to say I love your website. Uh the age verification when you come in asking you to run it or gauge it. Yeah, that's funny. I love it. And I might have not passed the first time that I went to that site because I was uh, you know, I'm kind of Oh, Tim, shame on you. I know. I'm I've learned a lot in uh a few years that details do matter. Yeah. So for for listeners that don't know, the first thing his age requirement question when you get to his website is you have an AR 15, do you gauge it or do you run it? And it's a choice. And if you pick to run it instead of gauge it, it's like you're not too you're not old enough to go on this website. That's that's hilarious. I've gotten many messages uh asking if my website was hacked because of where it takes you. And um no, it's intentional. So how often do you think most AR owners get close to running their AR hard? Um this this is something we we discuss in class pretty uh extensively, but the truth is is that most AR owners, I would say if I had to throw a number at 99% of them do not run them hard and never will run them hard. Um there's a variety of reasons. Some of it could be ammo costs, uh maybe they don't have the facilities to really like shoot fast, some ranges, you know, one shot every so many seconds. Lots of reasons, but most people, a vast majority of them will never run their guns hard. And this is also why some people that own an AR-15 sometimes get offended by what I teach because they've never experienced a problem because they never pushed their gun hard. And um that's really where uh where I believe my educational aspect shines is regardless of the purpose of the gun, whether it's precision work or a uh defensive duty gun, I want to extract the most out of the firearm as possible, regardless of the service it's going to be pushed into. So what does running a rifle hard mean to you from your perspective? Um, from my perspective, it would be uh I would say a case of ammo in maybe two days. So let's say a thousand rounds in two days, sometimes even in one day, you take a class where there's, you know, a lot of training going on. And uh you could push your gun pretty hard. And that also means in a real-world environment, being inside of a temperature-controlled range where there's not dust flying around and dirt that you're putting the rifle into if you lay down prone, all those things are some things that some people never experience unless they've been through training classes or in some type of job that puts them in that role. So most people don't experience it, but you know, getting some some dust in your gun, getting some dirt in your gun, uh, a muzzle break will kick up some stuff and that'll find its way into the action. Um, shooting with a suppressor will make the gun dirtier than without one. So whether or not you shoot with a suppressor can be a factor. How you maintain and lubricate the gun can be a factor. All those things can be factors, but a gun that's capable of running hard should be able to run hot, cold, wet, dry, dirty, clean. Um, when the guns get ran hard, what usually is the first thing to fail? Um normally uh what I see, and this is where some of the gauging aspects that I teach comes into play. So the first thing that I push when it comes to gauging is just be consistent when checking headspace on your farm, regardless of the caliber. Most people assume that because AR-15s are um common and sort of taught as being Legos, that you don't have to check headspace. And I would say about one in ten ARs on the market that are assembled or maintained by someone have a short headspace condition where the chamber is a little too short. And where that becomes a problem is when your gun gets hot, the chamber will increase in size, but headspace shrinks. And if you if you want to do some, you know, looking, googling after uh your audience listens to the show, um, you can look at like the headspace dimensions for like uh 249 saw and uh an M4 carbine, and they're very different, almost 30,000ths longer for the 249 saw. They both shoot 556, but one of them shoots a lot faster. And the reason it's a longer headspace is because it has to deal with not just the caliber and the pressure, but the rate of fire that weapon is supposed to do. And if your headspace is on the short side, not dangerously short, when you get that gun hot, headspace gets a little shorter. Fouling also occupies space, and that can make things a little tighter depending on where it's building up, whether it be the uh shoulder in the chamber, the face of the bolt, behind the lugs, inside the extension, all those things can add up. As your bolt heats up, your bolt also expands in size, which in essence makes the chamber shorter. If your ammunition is hot, if it's sitting out in the sun, it expands a little bit. If it sits in the chamber and the chamber's hot, it expands a little bit. So what you can have is you can have a failure to go in the battery, or you can have a failure to extract because the pressure is increased with hotter propellant and uh the chamber shorter, and it has trouble getting that fired brass out of the chamber in addition to fouling. So that's the most common thing that I see. Sometimes it's just lack of lubrication. I really don't care about what lube people pick, but your gun should have a little bit of uh lubrication in it, it helps it. And beyond that, it's usually the cheaper stuff. Running too light of a buffer, uh, running cheaper springs that fail. Um, the main thing that we teach in class beyond caging is uh it's not my uh my acronym, but there's an acronym you'll hear if you take a COLT Armor's class or a class from other manufacturers, it's called the MEAL acronym. So that means use good magazines, good extractor and ejector, good ammunition, good lubrication, and then we add an S to the N meals for good springs. And there's a lot of guns on the market with substandard springs because if you don't shoot the gun a lot, good springs aren't really important until you do shoot a lot. You'll never run into the issue or the failure if you're not pushing it out to that upper limit. Exactly. Exactly. So manufacturers are aware of this, and I'm not saying that they're they're intentionally cheaping out on stuff, but if your market is uh you know budgeting for a gun that maybe retails for $500, you you can't throw a lot of high-end stuff in there and still make money. Right. So is the failure to extract or um failure to go into battery one of the first warning signs that usually comes up before it fails completely? Um sometimes you get a failure to fire because if the bolt doesn't go in the full lockup, it won't allow the firing pin to stick out of the bolt face. It's sort of like the safety mechanism, the AR. So you'll get a failure to fire. And most people will just assume that there's something wrong with the hammer or the firing pin, and it's just that it didn't go in the battery. When you roll the gun over, the bolt is then forward because when the hammer falls, it gives it that little extra punch and push, and then it goes into lockup when you pull the trigger. But it wasn't in lockup when you did pull the trigger, you just didn't see it go forward. So that's usually one of the issues, or it just has difficulty extracting, or it limps casings out until it gets a little dirty or a little hotter, and then just failure to extract. And this is a variable with ammunition, whether or not it's suppressed. There's a lot of a lot of moving parts, but those are the main things that I've seen in my career. Guns that are fine when they're delicately lubricated and very clean, but when you know the real world smacks them in the face, the gun starts choking. So you brought up something that I'd like to get your professional uh perspective on the forward assist button. Yay or nay? And why? Um, I'm not a tactics instructor. So um I tell people that the tactics side will have their own take on this. But if the gun does uh pop a primer from the casing, it usually will find its way in one of three places inside of the weapon, which will cause a stoppage. One will be in the fire control group, usually under the trigger. Okay. Another one will be in the carrier key. When the gun does unlock and vent gas out of the side, there's actually uh a vacuum effect that's occurring in the mouth of the carri key. So if your primer has dislodged from the casing as it leaves the gun, there's literally a miniature vacuum happening right there. And it won't suck it completely into the opening of the key, but it'll sit there, and then when the carrier comes back home, the gas tube will be like, uh, you're gonna go in there now, and it'll shut the gun down. Um, you could usually still fire it, but it's a single shot at that point. And then the last place is if it misses the carrier key, it will actually go down where the cam has to rock back and forth to lock and unlock the bolt, and it'll go in front of the campin, which means that if you try to pull the bolt carrier back with the charging handle, the cam pin can't go to 12 o'clock because that that primer is occupying that space. And if that happens, you can't verify if the weapon's loaded or unloaded. And you sometimes can't pull the upper off because the bolt carrier has traveled into the receiver extension, right? Which limits your ability to pull the upper off. So I view it as a safety issue. If you don't have a forward assist, it's a potential problem if you pop a primer that you won't be able to verify the gun's safe so you can case it and safely store it because you can't verify there's nothing in the chamber. Unless you want to look down the front of the gun, which is a bad idea. Let's not do that. Let's not do that. Um, so I tell people if you have the forward assist, it's not to jam live ammunition into the chamber, it's so I can literally beat the bolt carrier close, so I can then remove the upper. And at that point, even if I can't get the bolt carrier back, I've pulled the upper off the lower, which is generally rendered it safe. Right. So I view it as a safety item when something like that happens. And some people have never experienced a pop primer, so they scratch their head when I talk about it. But if you take a bolt carrier and you hold it in your hand, imagine putting like a rock or something in front of the campin and trying to get the campin to go to 12 o'clock. It won't happen. If the primer's hollow, you can crush it if you hit that four to this hard enough. But uh otherwise, it's uh it's not gonna happen. Sometimes it goes behind it too. But either way, it it jams the gun up hard. And I've seen it enough to where the Ford assist will allow me to uh at least mash the bolt home so I can get the gun apart and then troubleshoot. Nice, nice. That's that's a unique perspective. I've always seen it or envisioned it as getting that round into the chamber so you can fire, not necessarily getting the bolts to seat so you can then disassemble the rifle and fix the actual issue of why it's not cycling properly. Yep, yep, and that's how most people view it. But uh, and to go back with what we talked about, if you had short head space on your gun when you get it hot and dirty, maybe the for the forward assist is the thing that helps it get there. But if the gun is right, that shouldn't come into play unless there's some outside uh contamination of the weapon that's causing things to get seized up. So let's talk about, you know, we're running our guns hard. What's usually the first things that break? Like which components fail first and why do they do that? That does go back to that MEALS acronym. So there's there's we we spend a lot of time in my class talking about magazines and not necessarily which one are the best, which is what people want to hear. Um, they want advice on what to buy. I try to tell people to diversify in their magazine selection because some ARs don't behave well with some magazines. And uh it's an unfortunate thing, but maybe the follower in magazine A doesn't make good contact with the bolt hold open finger and it completely misses it. Or maybe the spring in that magazine can't keep up with the speed of the bolt carrier because your gun is a little bit overgassed, which makes your carrier move faster. Or maybe the sound suppressor you put on there is one of the older designs, the non-flow throughs, and carrier speed also picks up. So magazines I teach to number them for troubleshooting purposes and understand that um they are a perishable item. The springs can become a problem either due to corrosion, breakage, or just use wear. The followers can wear out the little tab on the back of your follower. If that gets worn out, it won't lock the bolt open consistently, and people will start chasing gas problems when it's just just the magazine. I work with a lot of uh police departments, and when I come in and do inspections on their firearms, if they just adopted a new rifle, it's really common that they'll they'll get a new AR system and then they'll still use the old magazines they've had in service for 20 plus years. And those should have been retired long ago. And the military is guilty of this too. They'll use magazines that are way past their usable service life, either just should wear and use or just damage. You drop them on the ground and they're made of steel or aluminum. You might bend the feed lips. Right. But magazines are a huge problem, and that's sort of why it's the first part of the acronym. Um, and then from there you get into springs, which we did a little, we did a little bit of uh discussion on that. Uh just substandard springs for hard use. They'll work fine for the range toy, but for hard use, uh, there's not a whole lot of springs out there that I trust. And we do teach how to identify potential spring problems, either measuring them or looking at them for damage or for corrosion. All right. Uh good that kind of leads me into that whole heat, pressure, and stress um portion. Uh, some people might not realize that you know when your gun starts getting hot and those springs get hot, the tension starts to decrease. You don't get the same amount of tension on those springs if they've been through a a couple of big heat cycles. Is there anything else that is misunderstood or anything else that heat changes or does to the system that can cause some uh misfeeds or failures? Well, this comes down to the uh the all parts are imperfect things. So if you pull up like the some people refer to them as the mill spec drawings or the the technical data package, the parts are are made in a certain dimension. So there's a certain amount of clearance between parts that marry together, parts that have to work with each other. And if you don't understand the proper clearances of those parts, when the dun gun does start to change its temperature, whether it gets colder or hotter, uh how they interface can change. And if they're not married together properly, that can cause the parts to either crash because they're too tight, or if they're too loose, they can accelerate wear. And maybe in a lower round count, things start to fail because they're sort of just like slopping around. That's the thing that I try to emphasize. And then some people try to put too much spring in a gun because they're told or they read something that you know they need a heavier buffer spring or they need a heavier extractor spring. It's possible to put too strong of an extractor spring in. And if you look at the way the AR bolt works, the extractor has a ramp. It has to ride over the cartridge in order for the bolt to go fully forward and turn and lock. And I've seen it hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times where people put too strong of a spring, they'll put the little donut, the insert, and like a five-coil. And a lot of the times it's too much, and they have failure to go in the battery because they put too much spring in the gun. And then they get the gun hot, and like you said, the spring sort of gets a little bit more give to it, and the rubber gets a little more give to it, and then it starts working. And they think they broke it in. They just got the gun warm. What else changes under sustained fire or with heat? Mainly the springs. Um, the lubrication you pick can sometimes make or break a gun depending on the environment it's using in. If you have a uh like something like a CLP type product, uh they're they're supposed to clean, lubricate, and protect. So clean off dirty surfaces for the cleaning purpose, lubricate for moving parts under operation, and protect from corrosion. The unfortunate part is most of them on the market don't do either of those three things very well. They do, but they don't do it very well. But the biggest downside is because it has cleaners in it, it tends to either uh cook off, evaporate, whatever proper term you want to use. But uh with a high round count day, it's not there halfway through the day. Yeah, it's just gone. So I like to use a thicker lubricant on the gun that stays put, but that can become a problem if it's really cold. So it's surely based on what you're doing and the environment of what you're doing in. But lubrication can be bake or break. I've seen guys create lube for the summer and then lube for the winter, and they go through and they see which one works best in certain temperatures, and they'll switch out lube halfway through the season, depending on where they're at in the country. If if it gets really cold in the wintertime, some of that lube that works well in the summer, it's too sticky in the wintertime and it causes things to gum up. Is that kind of what you're talking about there? Exactly, exactly. And and people are like, well, I don't like to change up stuff because that's work. Well, even if you don't like to clean your gun, um, you if it's a gun that you're depending on for something for like defensive purposes, you should be doing some, you know, at least some annual, if not bi-annual, checks on it. And that's the opportunity to strip all the previous lubricant off, especially if it's contaminated. And that's part of the uh the maintenance process for a firearm is getting it down to you know a clean surface so you can examine the parts to look for any abnormal wear, maybe some peening or rolling over of some metal, uh cracks, anything that looks off. And uh take the opportunity to do that and then just switch out your your lube based on the environment. But I do the same thing. I have basically my cold winter stuff, and then I have my the rest of the year stuff. And the rest of the year stuff is uh is thicker than the cold stuff. Let's talk about suppressors because you brought up a little bit earlier. When people start running suppressors, what besides just running dirtier, what other stresses tend to show up in the system when you start putting a suppressor on? I'm not the only one that teaches this in other classes that I've taken. I agree wholeheartedly. Uh the general rule is is whatever wear components you have in the gun, and I think we're gonna we're gonna talk about that, but whatever wear components you have, the general consensus is that if they were gonna last, let's say, you know, 5,000 rounds, if you use the suppressor, cut that lifespan in half. Just cross the board for all the different components? Yeah, yeah. But that was the older consensus with the older suppressors. And one of the things that I'm thankful for, uh, not everybody likes them because they're not as quiet, but the flow-through suppressors really do shine on gas operator guns. Whether it's an AR or an external gas gun, they really do shine because it minimizes the amount of pressure that's captured by the device and pushed back into the gas system. Now you're always going to get pressure from the chamber. Fouling's gonna come from the chamber, whether it's a flow-through or the older Baffle design suppressors, but your gun will run cleaner with a flow-through suppressor. And the AR doesn't have to be clean to run, but it's uh it's a good thing not to have as much crud being thrown back into the gun. And again, regardless of the gun, it's better not to have this much crud thrown back. But the uh the carrier speed is greatly reduced with a flow-through suppressor, which can make or break some guns. I've seen it again countless times where a gun runs fine, an AR runs fine without a suppressor. They put an older suppressor design on the gun, and the carrier speed picks up enough to where it either won't pick up ammunition out of the magazine because it outruns the follower. The magazine can't present ammunition fast enough, or it outruns the bolt hold open device because the carrier comes back and forward before that can trip and actuate and catch the bolt. Are there any parts that tend to suffer the most when running a suppressor? The things that deal with gas, so your gas rings will suffer. Uh, and your firing pin retaining pin will suffer because your firing pin retaining pin keeps your firing pin from falling out to the rear. So if your carrier speed goes up when the bolt carrier comes to the rear, the firing pin, when it comes to when the bolt carrier comes to a stop, wants to leave the gun. And the firing pin retaining pin, it's like, no, you can't leave today. But uh with higher speeds, it takes more of a or more of a beating. So your retaining pin might get uh beat up in a very low round count along with your gas rings. I never thought about that until just now. But yeah, that that firing pin is not stopping because the the bolt carrier group stops, it's gonna continue to go until it hits that pin. You got it. And one of the other things this goes towards the gauging part, people don't think about it, but inside the carrier, there's two places that have to seal the gas that's introduced. One is the gas rings against the inner walls of the carrier, and the second Is the tail of the bolt itself has to seal itself in the hole that it sits in. So if you have a very undersized bolt tail, maybe somebody went, you know, a little scrapey scrapey with some Scotch Brite to clean it up, they're undersizing it, allowing more gas to flow past that surface. And the firing pin flange is like a piston itself. It slams right into it and wants to blow it out of the gun. Interesting. Um, let's talk about the bull carrier group when we're talking about what breaks first. Uh so I've heard it referred to that the the BCG or the bull carrier group is the heart of the system. Would you agree with that uh statement? I would. I would agree with that. I would say um, and a lot of people like to use car analogies too. So I'll usually tell people it's it's the engine if it's the car. The the gas system itself is like the fuel delivery system along with the ammunition, and the buffer system is the transmission. I love that analogy. I'm gonna start using that one. I had that you're the first person I've heard uh refer to it in in that way. Thank you. Thank you. Uh if you think about it, like the buffer system is what controls the speed, right? Of the way things move. And your transmission controls the speed of your vehicle based on the gear that it's in. So I uh I like to use it because it clicks with most people. Even if they're not like in the cars, they use a vehicle, so they're like, oh, okay, I got that. So we kind of talked about what what the parts in in the bolt carrier group that can cause problems, the extractor, um, the cams, getting, you know, if you get a primer blown back in there can cause issues as well. Uh is there any specific part of that bolt carrier group that gets the most abuse when you're running some of these ARs really really hard? Uh the gas rings are the primary one, but the second one is the campin. Um, so regardless of you know what it's made of, the the big thing that I teach in my classes, and I even discuss it in my videos that I put on YouTube and such, is once the campin starts to take wear, you get those little grooves on the surfaces, and the canpin has more slop, left, right, forward, back. So when that bolt locks and unlocks, the shock is increased on the bolt itself, which then wants to stretch the hole the campin lives in. And if you shot enough ARs, you've seen one crack where the campin is before. So staying on top of the campin, replacing it when wear is necessary to replace, then you're gonna make your bolt last longer. Um, if the bolt's made of the wrong stuff, or if it hasn't been tested and inspected properly, maybe it'll fail prematurely regardless of how well the campin fits. But if your campin takes a lot of wear, it's very possible that it can help contribute to reducing the overall life of the bolt itself, which is much more expensive than replacing the campin many, many times. That makes a lot of sense. You're so you're stretching out that hole, and then eventually you're having it rattle around back and forth is gonna make the the bolt itself crack. Yep. Very interesting. Yep. And due to my testing, I've seen uh basically I have measurements to where I can determine based on the amount of stretch that has occurred whether or not that bolt is gonna fail soon. Now, even if you don't have a gauge like that, what we teach in classes is when your AR is clean, you're doing your maintenance, your firing pin should move nice and easy in your bolt when you're doing your inspections, with and without the cam pin in place, because sometimes the cam pin can be misdrilled and it binds the firing pin up. Okay. But if your firing pin has always moved freely and then you start experiencing failures to fire, I'll tell students, look at your hammer spring. Maybe your hammer spring is broken. But if it's not, check the tip of the firing pin to see if there's damage or it's broken off. Or uh check your protrusion, how much it sticks out. But if everything else looks fine, your hammer protrusion's good, the the hand, the the fire, or I'm sorry, your fire pin protrusion is good, the fire pin tip isn't damaged, the hammer spring's intact, your firing pin will start to bind on the bolt when the bolt starts to stretch successfully, because it never stretches perfectly straight. When it starts to crack, it sort of takes like a banana shape, and that binds the firing pin up, which can cause a failure to fire. So so interesting on this. So you actually have a product that you joined in with Ford Controls designed to make a campin. So do you wanna do you wanna tell the audience a little bit about that? Like you have a dimpled campin to show direction? Yes. Yes. So the idea is that you put the cam pin it consistently because they can go one of two ways. And usually people don't pay attention to it when you take apart the gun, maintain it, just inspect it, whatever, put it back together. But if you switch it, you essentially can you'll you'll get very distinctive marks maybe on the front top and the back bottom. And then if you take it apart and flip it around, now the opposing side takes that wear. So notice that uh instead of having two points of wear on the campin, you have four points. So your slop in relation to the bolt increases. That's the primary reason for consistently putting the campin in. The secondary reason that I usually don't talk about openly, but I'll uh I'll be happy to share it in this uh this podcast, is the campin is also a bearing surface for the upper receiver. If you look in an upper receiver that's been shot a lot, you'll see on the left edge, the side the side opposing the ejection port, you'll see a slight bit of wear where the head of the campin is sliding back and forth. And it's doing that because when the bolt is trying to strip ammunition out of the magazine and push the ammunition up the ramps into the barrel, the bolt wants to turn. But it can't because the campin is riding in a track and it says no, no, no, until it reaches that cutout in your upper, and then the bolt can start its rotation. So if you keep switching your campin, there's a left and right side to the head of the campin. And when you put it in the same way, that left edge becomes married to the inside of your upper, and they have this wonderful relationship, right? They're mated, and then you take the gun apart, you flip the campin not realizing, and now you have a brand new surface on the other side of the campin that's going to slightly accelerate the wear. And where this becomes a problem is that wear line and the aluminum upper receiver gets too deep. The bolt can then prematurely turn a little bit. And if you visualize the bolt trying to come home and go into the barrel extension, the lugs don't line up anymore and they crash. And that causes failure to feed or failure to go in the battery. Aaron Powell See, something like this is so interesting to me. Like you've put so much thought into this. And obviously you've got a ton of experience seeing failures happen. But like so, Caleb was explaining this product to me a couple weeks ago. He says hi, by the way. Solomon said hello too. But uh anybody that takes apart their bull carrier group to do maintenance on it, like routine maintenance, they're gonna pull the pin, drop the firing pin, drop everything out, and dump it on the table. That's what I do. Tell me which direction that campaign was facing. You can't tell. And you can't. No. Most of the time. There are a couple other uh products out there. People are starting to put arrows on it and stuff like that. And I saw them a while ago and I was like, I don't really know why they're doing that. I think it looks nice. But then Caleb was telling me about this product from you guys, and I was like, holy cow, that's crazy. It's just that is such a good indicator of the attention to detail that Sotar has to the AR-15 as a firing system. I think it's fantastic. I sincerely appreciate that. I picked up a new uh thing to look out for when I'm breaking my AR down now. Because I I was one of those that you take the the BCG apart and you just, yeah, I just dump it all on the table, clean it up, and then throw it in however I pick it up, and that's the way it goes in. So going back to the car analogy, take the pistons out of your car and just like, you know, shuffle them up. Shuffle around, just throw them all back in. Throw them back in where they're like wherever. It's fine. Yeah, you don't do that, right? If you ever see anybody working on an engine, they'll even pair like the lifters and the push rods, like they don't switch valves around. Like you keep the parts where they where they married up. Yeah, right. Because it's very distinctive. So break-in is a real thing. It is where it needs to be. It is. And it and as soon as you've messed that up, are you like you you're losing all the advantage that you gained. Yep. And actually, you know, making the problem worse. That's fantastic. Even if you don't adopt what I'm teaching about the campin, I I and I encourage people, if they've got a brand new bolt carrier group, put it into their upper, lubricate it, put a couple hundred rounds through the gun, and take the bolt carrier out, extend the bolt, and wipe both sides of the campin down without looking at anything. And you'll notice the left side, the non-injection port side, is gonna have a little bit of wear on it. The right side will have almost none. And that's because that left side is the bearing surface. And if you look at the other side of the campin that hasn't worried, it's gonna be a little bit rougher. So you keep switching that back and forth, you're gonna have two different surfaces constantly sliding against the anodizing. And in a battle of aluminum and steel, steel wins. Yeah, every time. Let's uh let's move on to talking about springs a little bit. You mentioned a few different ones. Uh which ones tend to fail first or fastest or first when you're running your AR hard? Uh the first one that tends to fail are uh the action or buffer spring. Cole calls it the action spring, and the extractor and ejector springs. Those those are the three primary ones. Um and those are the ones that I encourage people, if they're not sure of the provenance of them, to replace them. And people are like, well, where do I get a good a good buffer spring that's not expensive? And I tell people, it I shop a lot from you guys, and I say, you know, go to Brownells and they sell, you know, like a colt buffer spring, I think it's like less than $10. Put a known quality buffer spring in there because the one of unknown provenance might be too long and cause cycling issues too short and cause feeding issues. Because if your buffer spring is too light, it can't generate enough forward momentum to strip rounds out of the magazine cleanly. If the extractor spring's too weak, it might not extract the fired cartridge from your gun. Well, it does when you pull live ammo out, but in a real world, there's more resistance when the gun's firing live ammo. Uh and the ejector spring can be weak. And those are rather cheap items, the extractor and ejector spring. I think the most expensive ones you guys sell on your site are maybe like six dollars a piece. So $12, it's like a bridge too far for some people, and it makes me scratch my head because uh they'll they'll you know get all this unnecessary doodads for their gun. It's like just put better springs in there and you have a better experience. Is there a certain round count that you look at? Like, oh, you definitely need to change this out by this so many rounds, or is it more just how often you're shooting? Um, it it can you your springs can fail just from letting the guns be stored and not protected properly. They can corrode just not being shot. But generally speaking, uh you can measure them, determine if they're bad, or just do a visual check. You can see you know the corrosion on it. The standard, let's just call mill spec springs, it's probably smart to replace the extractor, ejector, and buffer spring at 5,000 rounds if you just want to throw a number out there. Uh in a worst case, 10,000 rounds. Cole teaches 5,000 rounds if I remember correctly. Um, I'm not too fond of a round count-based replacement schedule because and you guys are around gun people, you deal with guns, right? Do most people honestly know the round count of their firearms? Nobody's got a clue. No idea. There there are a couple. There are there are two people that actually know, and they they don't they don't really socialize that much. Yeah. So if you don't know the round count, but you teach to replace stuff at a round count, it seems to be counterproductive. It's a generality. Yeah, yeah. And uh so I I try to teach based on things that I can visually identify and teach people to look for. And then if you know what the good measurement of a spring is, basically too long is bad, too short is bad. And that's where I try to go with it. And if it's unknown, like if you don't know the round count on your ejector spring and your extractor spring, they're cheap enough to justify replacement just as a precaution, if that makes sense. So so let's give let's give our listeners something to do. So you're saying replace those springs right now with those parts that you're talking about with good quality stuff, and then what are those things that they're looking for? So the the too long, too short, is that it? Or there or is there more to it? And it's just like now here's your basis, here's your baseline. And when you see these things, replace them. Um basically if you suspect there's corrosion, replace it. If you see uh if it looks like there's any damage, so one of the big things people mess up when they're putting the extractor spring in on the extractor, it's sort of self-contained. They'll crush it really aggressively to get it to seat in that pocket. And you can take a good spring that may have lasted that 5,000 rounds and turn it into a 1,000 round spring by damaging it. So putting it in properly is important. You can look for things like the buffer spring. You can have a buffer spring that looks fine on the outside, but if the roll pit on your buffer is sticking out a little bit too much, as the buffer goes in and out of that spring as it cycles to the front and rear, it can wear a groove in the buffer spring and cause it to lose tension or fail premature. I actually had a law enforcement agency last week that I told to look at for this and they sort of shrugged their shoulders. And then they sent me a picture the other day and said, look at this buffer spring, it broke in three pieces from the buffer roll pin walking. I've never heard of that myself. That's crazy. So, yeah, that does make a lot of sense, though. That roll pen that's in the backside of the buffer is gonna actually be cutting as it's cycling into the spring. Yep. And some detractors will get mad at me and they'll be like, You're just trying to get me to buy a buffer. I was like, well, number one, I don't sell a buffer. You can talk to Brown Else about that. But this is where you just you know put on your gunsmith hat. You don't even have to be a gunsmith. Just take a file and take the part that's sticking up proud down and the problem solved. That's why I'm just digesting that because I'm I'm thinking of my own buffers now. Tim, look, like if you were to look at your buffer before this conversation and you saw it was sticking out a little proud, you like one, you probably wouldn't even notice it. And two, if you did notice it, you'd probably slap it in there anyway, right? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I think most of the time. Because like, what's it gonna do? Yeah, what's the big deal? It digs into your spring. Have you guys ever watched like one of the um the slow motion cutaway videos of when the AR fires, that spring's just like woo-woo woo up and down. Yes. It's like a wave. So just try to visualize that. That that pin's sticking up proud and that spring is just whipping up and down inside that tube. At any point as that oscillates, that becomes a friction point. And regardless of the life of your spring, that changes the speed of your bolt carrier going to the rear and returning, which can make cycling inconsistent. So you might be thinking you have a gas issue when really your recoil spring is is prematurely wearing, or you got a rough edge on there somewhere that's caused that uh spring to lose effectiveness. Exactly. Exactly. Well, I do that all the time. Like if you're if you're at the range and you're like you're diagnosing something or whatever, you take you break the gun in half, you start looking at it, you know, you're inspecting everything that happens in the upper receiver. And then like maybe you get to the decision of I need a different buffer, you know, so you take that out. But like never once are you gonna take the spring out and look at the inside channel of it. I can't tell you what I can't even tell you the last time I looked at the inside of my buffer spring. Of course not. Yeah. Well, now I got some homework tonight. The the buffer tube itself, not all buffer tubes are like smooth glass on the inside. So if you have a buffer tube that's rough, it doesn't mean you can't use it. It just means that it's prudent to put a little bit of lubrication on the spring because that anodized rough surface, even though it's aluminum under it, is pretty hard. And it will wear the outer edge of the outside of the cools of your buffer spring, which can potentially weaken the spring and cause it to fail prematurely, or it can reduce the life of it. Um, so those are also things to look out for. I mean, the spring might be measured and right, but you have a lot of wear on it. Replace the spring regardless of the round count because it's an important part of the gun. The gun will not work without a proper buffer spring in it. So that's an interesting thing that you just brought up. So you're saying introduce lubrication into that system because you're promoting the wear. And then that way, when you do replace that spring eventually, now you have a much smoother surface on the interior. You can do that, or you if you keep the lubrication present, it just cuts down on it. So just like a little swipe of uh a thinner grease or uh uh a light cuddle oil just to prevent the friction from the rough surfaces wearing the spring down. Oh it's still gonna wear it, it's just not gonna wear it as much with lubrication present. But now it becomes a little bit more of a pain to clean the inside of that when you do maintenance. So there's always gonna be a trade-off. There's always gonna be a trade-off. There's no free lunch. And I I tell people this all the time you bought this dude ad for your gun to make it do this better, you're probably losing something else. People don't like to hear that, but that's usually the trade-off. Um, and if you understand that going in, great. But there's no free lunch. Interesting. I did not think springs. Like, honestly, when I think of the my AR, like the springs are like, eh, they're they're they're fairly important, but mainly like your gas system's way more important than your springs are. And now I have a new perspective of they actually add quite a lot into uh making it run the way it's supposed to or designed to. Well, it's a yin the yang, you know. You got it, it's a complete system. So let's move on to to gas and talking about the gas system and how that contributes to long-term wear in a rifle. Is there anything when it comes to that system that you encourage people to look out for, similar to the the tips you gave us for the springs? It's difficult to evaluate how the gas system deals with the amount of gas that's introduced into it. Um and this is where the gauges come into play. So without having a visual display, um, you have your gas port in your barrel, gas gets fed up through that hole into your gas block or sight base, into your gas tube, then down into your carrier key, and then into your carrier that pressurizes the inside of the carrier and causes the unlocking sequence. So if your uh front sight base or your gas block doesn't fit tightly against the barrel, if you're shooting a gun with a stainless steel barrel, you're gonna see the black gases leaving the gas block. And you'll see the same thing around your gas tube if you have a stainless steel gas tube. So if you have a poor fit between the gas tube and the gas block, and the gas block and the barrel, you're gonna lose gas. So if your gas port is 0.080, it's not really getting 0.080 of gas because it's bleeding. So it's behaving like maybe it's getting an 070 gas size. Does that make sense? Yeah. And maybe the gun, when it's new, doesn't cycle because the parts are a little rough. And then I'm doing air quotes. You guys can't see me. But they they broke it in, right? The gun starts working after they put a couple hundred rounds through it, but it didn't break in due to rough surfaces. It was on the verge of being under gassed. And when that front end of the gas system that has no moving parts sealed up, it started getting enough gas to cycle. They plugged up all the uh the gaps. It's a problem solved. Yeah. Right. Until until they're done shooting, what do most people do after they shoot? They're gonna clean it. Yeah, clean it up. They clean their gun. And then those cleaners are designed to attack those hard deposits to seal the gas system up. Right. And then they go back out next time, and now we've got cycle problems. Man, that's crazy. Yeah, because they're gonna see the they're gonna see the deposit around their gas block on their stainless steel barrel and be like, I need to clean that up, dab it up, and then all of that solvent is gonna be going into that gap and attacking those things. And the better fit you have between those parts, the less likely the gun will behave differently whether it's perfectly clean or fouled up. So I tend to leave that stuff alone. And they all leak no matter how good the fit is until they sort of like clot. But um, that's something people don't think about. Do you think somebody needs to come out with a gasket? Um there are some companies that will bed the gas blocks in place or press them on. I believe LMT presses their gas blocks on. Um and LaRue has like an estuchan uh that is in front of the gas tube that presses the gas tube in to create a better seal. I don't think put it on other guns, but it's it's something that you need a tool to deal with if you've ever taken one apart. Um so some people have tried it, but the better fit there is going to give you more consistent operation from a clean gun to a foul gun. But now you're stuck in the world of, you know, if you're selling firearms that they have components that are maybe not compatible with other firearms, like like LMT, um, now you're kind of you're just using one of the two as a manufacturer. Yep. But I see what you're saying, though. And I've always heard that the the AR is meant to be over-gassed. Like it's that that's okay, that's fine. What kind of mechanical failures start to show up if it is truly overgassed? Um, you're gonna break uh the bolt and bolt interfacing components faster. Uh so basically you're gonna shear lugs off, you're gonna break the bolt at the cam pinhole. Um, your firing pin and retaining pin will take more damage, your buffer spring will have a shorter service life. Sometimes even the pad on your buffer can take enough damage to justify replacement. So um visualize the little rubber pad, right? It starts like losing some material. Uh-huh. So now your bolt carrier travels a little further back into the buffer tube. And at the top of your bolt carrier, carry key's hanging out. There's supposed to be a gap between the back of that carrier key and your lower receiver. That gap goes away on an under gas of an o on an overgas gun because the rubber collapses, and now your carakey strikes the lower. It doesn't break your lower most times, but it will loosen the screws or break your carry key screws. Interesting. What are signs that the gas system is causing reliability problems? Um generally. You're going to get a uh they're very similar malfunctions, but it's the bolt over base or bolt over brass. It's where the round is sort of like up the feed ramps, but still underneath of the bolt. Okay. So that can happen from under gas because the bolt doesn't come back far enough to get behind the round in the top of the magazine to push it forward. And then the bolt carrier starts coming home. And people are like, well, if the bolt didn't grab the back of the round, how does it come partially out of the magazine? The face of the carrier itself pushes the round out. Ah, okay. Has just enough friction to start feeding it out. Okay. Yep. And the same thing on an overgas gun. An overgas gun will outrun the magazine. The round cannot present fast enough for the bolt lug to grab it, but then it pops up after the bolt lug passes it, and the face of the carrier itself will push it halfway out. And the symptom of that is the same malfunction, but a really big dent in the side of the cartridge for when the bolt ramps into it. Okay. But those are those are generally the issues. And uh that could be also a bad mag, too. I mean, if your spring is weak, it can't keep up. Um, you can do that. And then people will start messing with buffers. If you add mass to the system, it will slow the cycling speed down, going from the rear to the front. You can add a heavier buffer spring to the gun to slow it down to the rear, but on its return path, a heavier buffer spring makes the bolt carrier come home quicker. So you can actually make it worse and outrun the mag even more by putting a stiffer buffer spring in there. And adding that mass, does that add more wear? Because there's there's more mass slamming home then as well when it comes shut? Yep. It's it's slamming more on the campin as it locks up. And when there's more mass, the the gas system, specifically the gas rings, have to contain that over pressure of gas. It shouldn't have that much pressure to hold it closed long enough before the unlocking happens. So the gas rings wear faster. So overmassing the the gun to slow it down will make it work, but the gun's suffering some. Interesting. So let's uh look at some of your classes that you do. Someone hands you a rifle, you can obviously see that it's been ran hard. What's the one of the first things that you start looking at when we're like, hey, this isn't working anymore? It's like having a does it depend on what malfunction it is, if it's like a failure to feed or failure to eject, where you start looking? Or are there certain areas that if you know this gun has been ran just the crap off of it? What do you look at first? I will look at the carrier key, how it's installed, the type of screws that are in it, whether or not they're they're staked in place, if they're loose. In my videos, I do um what I call a breakaway test. It gets some people spun up because it's not super accurate, but it's better than just guessing. So I'm looking for broken screws, uh under stake screws and under torque screws. If they're loose, it's not gonna cycle properly. Um I'm looking for impacts on the front of the bolt lugs. And that's a symptom of what we talked about with the campin and where in the upper, if the bolt is trying to turn prematurely, the bolt lugs are gonna crash into the openings of the barrel extension. So if I see impact marks on the face of the barrel extension or on the face of the bolt lugs, I know the bolt is crashing. That tells me I have a worn campin or the upper receiver's got a groove worn in it where the campin was, the bolts possibly worn are going to break. Um and it's also possible, depending on the tools that you use to hold the barrel in the upper when you twerk it, you can actually, even though there's an index pin, cause the barrel to slightly misalign in relation to the upper, which can also cause the bolt to crash some. So all those things can add up to the gun working when it's new, but as things start to get beat up, it can cause the bolt lugs to break, it can cause the barrel extension to pee up, and that can cause feed issues because when the barrel extension takes damage, the ramps are there. So it might cause a burr to get lifted, and now I can't feed from the magazine. Interesting. Um I'll look at the mags they're using. Um, I'll look at the springs, of course, which we talked about. I'll do a headspace check, I'll check fire and pin protrusion, which believe it or not, is off a lot more than people realize because they don't check. In every class that we have, we have we limit our classes to six students. We almost never have a class where at least one student has a fire and pin protrusion issue. Either it's too short, which can cause failures to fire, or too long, which can pierce the primer. Hmm. Yeah, that's one thing I I notice about your classes online is that you purposely keep them small so you can really dive into these in a in more in-depth than you could with a larger class. Is there any other positives for keeping a class small like that? I just like to give people uh uh more more of a it's not a one-on-one, of course, but more of the experience where they get more time with me. And this is not to throw shade at the way other schools and classes go. I mean, there are some classes that you can go to, you have 30 people in it. Um, and you can still learn a lot in that, but you don't have as much time with the instructor. So I like to make sure that I make time because everybody brings something different. Some people are afraid that I'm gonna make fun of them if they bring a cheaper parts kit and they buy really nice stuff. And then some people, well, I brought the cheap stuff because I want to learn because I'm probably gonna have issues. And believe it or not, it's usually the opposite. It's the guys that bring the real expensive stuff, and the parts just don't mesh properly. It's not that they're bad, it's just they don't understand the selection of components they got. And we need to make changes or replace stuff in order to make the gun work. And then the cheap stuff, as long as you put it together right, use good springs, good magazine, proper torque for stuff, um, those cheaper guns can run well if you know what to replace. What lessons do you consistently find students uh taking away after seeing and and gathering a more understanding of how that system all works together? Um the best thing is uh the troubleshooting aspect. Once they understand the the nuances of the gas system and how elegant it is, it helps them understand the gun to a level where the the problems that they have become less of a mystery. Um we talk about some really odd things, not because I'm trying to make up class time, but because I've seen these things and I call them ghosts in the machine. You got a gun that runs fine through three 30 round mags, and then on your fourth one, just one time, it does this thing. And sometimes just checking for um whether or not your bolt carrier glides cleanly before you even put any parts in it. So let's just imagine you put your upper on your lower with your takedown pins and you screw your buffer tube on and lock it down. Put your barrel in and just hand tighten the barrel nut. There are guns out there that if you try to rock that upper back and forth with a strip bolt carrier in it, the bolt carrier will bind because there's a tight spot in the upper receiver. Or the buffer tube has a tight spot. Or when somebody staked the buffer tube, it moved metal in and impeded the flight path of the bolt carrier. Simple stuff like that. And it isn't a problem until the gun gets dirty. Right? And then that little bit of bind turns into a big speed bump. What other stories do you have where the real problem turned out to be something completely unexpected than what the student thought it was, or they're chasing it down the wrong way? Um, sometimes it's it the the biggest issue is is the gassing issue. An over-gassed gun can fail to cycle when the casing, specifically brass, fires, it expands and it will grab the chamber walls. And if the chamber is too rough or the gun doesn't have enough buffer weight and spring to slow down that unlocking, the gun won't cycle because that pressure prevented the bolt carrier from moving because it was trying to move too quick initially, and it basically worked as a brake. And people start hogging out gas ports because they're thinking, well, the bolt didn't move, it doesn't have gas. And it's actually the opposing problem. They needed to either step up the mass or choke the gas down somehow. And then the gun started working. Sometimes it has to do with the magazine we talked about. People had no idea that their uh brand of magazine wasn't even making contact with the bolt hold open. And they thought they had a gassing problem. And the finger on the bolt catch wasn't even touching the magazines they selected. We switched mags, gun locked open every time. That's it, it kills me how often a magazine is the the reason that a gun's malfunctioning, and just a simple like it just doesn't work with this brand magazines or this style of magazine. You switch to a new one, no problem. Never have an issue again. Yeah, very common because we have a lot of options. The US military has a handful of magazines they've used over the you know the past 60 plus years. Um on the commercial side, you know, the stuff that we have the options to select, there's there's probably a hundred different brands, if you really get down to it, ones that are currently made and ones of the past. So that opens up the opportunity for something to go to go wrong. And if you don't know how to identify what wrong is, you really start chasing your tail. Right. So we spend a lot of the time talking about not is this brand of magazine good and this brand of magazine bad? Is that you need to check these things to make sure that these two parts will get along together. Well, when you're talking about magazines, do you um do you also look at like do your standards for the magazine dimensions and all that stuff, is it gonna change depending on the material? Yes. Like say if you got a polymer magazine, are you gonna want it to be maybe slightly larger or wider because it's gonna crush? Or do you want, you know, something like that? Yeah, absolutely. Um if you if you look at like the way the magwell's cut, it's basically a square and uh a polymer or plastic magazine, if it sits in the sun, it's gonna expand and it might not fit in that same magwell anymore. Or maybe it's sitting loaded, it sort of swells a little bit. Right. And I'm not talking about just loading it and you know, immediately testing. I'm talking about it being loaded, and like if you keep it in like the trunk of your vehicle and it's in the summer, it's gonna swell some. You can take out caliper or micrometer and measure it when it's freshly loaded, and then measure it after it's been sitting. It's larger in diameter. Is that enough to cause a problem? Potentially, and that's why we we test for things. We want to have a little bit of clearance between those two parts to account for maybe a little bit of dirt, a little bit of mud, um, you know. And if your hand's bloody and you're injured, you don't want to have to use, you know, a vice to rip your magazine out to do a remote. Um, but it's not it's not trying to point fingers to say good and bad. Sometimes it's it's literally the lower receiver that's the problem. It's where they cut the magwell in relation to where they put the magazine catch or sorry, the bolt hold open. And the bolt hold open is just too far away from the magazine well for a particular brand where the follower sits to make contact. Yeah, sure. Yeah, some followers are more forward towards the muzzle where they're sitting the magazine. And if your your bolt catch just happens to be slightly back and it just misses it completely. I've seen that happen. Yep. And some people put aftermarket bolt catches on, right? Maybe that finger is a little shorter. You just didn't measure the old one. And now it's causing problems. Uh another thing that I see, and I teach on this, I've gotten a lot of pushback from uh social media on this, but lower receivers with ambidextrius bolt hold open devices, not the safety, not the magazine release, but the bolt hold open device. Depending on how it's made, you're generally adding more mass in order to actuate that device. And when it requires you to have more mass to trip it, it happens slower. So try to visualize the bolt carrier coming back and basically outrunning it simply because it has ambient controls, because the follower doesn't have enough punch to drive it upwards at the same rate. And you start having a gun that's not unreliable across the board, but certain magazines it doesn't get along with. So if your magpull mags run your LNT Mars AMB lower just fine, when you switch out to another brand of magazine, it might not work because maybe that particular spring in that magazine isn't as strong as the one maybe Magpul use, and they start chasing problems with the weapon. It's not the weapon, it's just the nuance of having AMBI controls, and it makes them more temperamental on what magazines they like. Man, this uh this is such a small detail that would be so easily overlooked. Like the fact that so just because you have a secondary lever to actuate the bolt catch, you're adding mass to the bolt catch going up, and so your spring tension on your magazine, if it's any different, is gonna impact that. Exactly. This is crazy. I did not realize that ARs were that complex, but I mean, it makes sense. Like I can totally see that happening. Yeah. Yeah, little tidbit real before we move on, real quick, if it's okay, little tidbit from an LMT class that I took is a fantastic armor's class, and I brought this up to the instructor, and he is on the engineering side of LMT. And uh the LMT Mars lower, that's why I used it in my example. It has a paddle on the right side where the ejection port is and on the left where it typically is. And I said, I noticed that you guys use an aluminum paddle on the right side and a typical paddle on the left. Why is it made of aluminum? And they said, Well, our first generations had steel, and we noticed that they had a whole lot of problems locking open. So we had to lighten the mass to make the guns run well. Wow. So it's just some good confirmation, not to say, ha ha, I was right, but I felt a little less crazy because sometimes the stuff that I find, I feel like I'm losing my mind a little bit. No, no, props to you. And there's that's good marks for LMT too, for doing the testing and finding the problem. Yep. That's fantastic. Before they even released it, they fixed it. Yeah. That's good because LMT is selling those things to, you know, militaries and things like that. And last thing those guys need is more problems. Right. Have you seen a malfunction in the last year that you weren't like, I know exactly what that is in 30 seconds? Absolutely, yes. Absolutely, yes. And this this is one of the things that I really enjoy about having some exposure to what I do because manufacturers, like, they'll have their recipe down. Like we use this brand of you know, barrel with this size casport, we use this bolt carrier group with these dimensions, we use this buffer and spring, and they'll start having problems when they test guns. And when they run out of excuses on what's going on, they'll reach out to me and say, Hey, um, can we send you a couple examples of this? And then I get to see the odd stuff that generally companies keep close to the chest. And I won't give out the secret of who the company wants that have problems, but I use it as another educational point. I'm like, look, this is something that's going on that not just company A is dealing with. There's several companies that are having this problem and it's new, and you should look out for it. But yeah, that's I love it because it's like, oh yeah, new challenge. I'm always I'm always enjoying the challenge because it keeps me sharp. What is usually the first AR component that you would upgrade for durability? For durability, um it's usually the springs. Um, I also look at the buffer too. The more budget priced guns tend to have a non-heavy buffer. And the AR does need a certain amount of reciprocating mass to maintain reliability when it gets uh really cold, really hot, or really dirty. And um the problem with a heavier buffer is it make it it's heavier because it uses tungsten, and tungsten is expensive and it's becoming more expensive. Yeah. So much so that some people in the industry are panicking over it because the price of a heavy buffer is now $100, like an H3. Maybe it'll be more by the time you guys air this episode, but it it's getting expensive. Yeah, I'll see. So uh people don't want to spend another hundred hours on a brand new gun to they get the edge of function of where it's supposed to be, because that controls the speed of your bolt carrier. Um, but generally it's the springs, uh, those critical springs, extractor, ejector, buffer spring. But you got to be careful about how you put those parts in. If you don't have experience, the ejector on the AR-15 can be intimidating because people, if they don't support the part right, and Brown Els makes a great tool to hold that bolt to do it. Um, they break punches, uh, they they break it off in the bolt, and then they can't get the broken off punch out of the bolt. So now they're like, well, darn, now I gotta buy a whole new bolt because I can't get this out. The simple swap can turn into a big headache. Um, but I like to change those three things if I don't know the provenance of those springs. Uh buffer, and I will normally take a close look at the carriage based on what I said. The uh the type of screws, the type of staking, make sure that it's tight, because all those are very important. What is a component like your first go-to component that you're going to double up on to carry as a spare? As a spare, uh bowl replacement parts mainly. Um several sets of gas rings, um a couple of firing pin retaining pins, maybe a spare firing pin, spare cam pin. And a hammer pin doesn't hurt because your hammer and trigger pins can break or the groove is cut in them. Okay. Um doesn't hurt to have some people will carry a completely spare bolt with a firing pin and a cam pin in it. It's not really a bad idea, but this comes down to choosing quality parts that are more trustworthy. Because no matter how much you inspect and gauge stuff, if you can't trust the provenance of the part, I mean, is it really made of what's laser engraved on it? So that's something that I'll also teach too. Like I can teach everybody how to inspect their gun, but if you can't trust who made it, is it really made of what you think it is? So um, but th those are the things that I'll I'll tell people to carry spares of. And of course, that spare bolt's gonna have an extractor. You usually will not break an extractor if it's not cast or metal injected molded, or it doesn't have some weird coding one that changes the heat treat of it. Are you a fan of mim parts or do you try to steer people away from using mim? No, I think it's fine for a lot of the gun. I mean, there's cast parts that are listed on the technical data package. I believe offhand, I'd have to look at my notes. I pay more close attention to the uh the dimensions than what parts are made of, but I think the bolt catch is one of them. It's okay to have cast and mim stuff, but it really depends on how the gun's set up. I mean, if you got this massively overgassed AR with a 10-ounce buffer to slow it down, your cast bolt catch isn't gonna hold up very long. Right. Something's gonna give it's gonna break. So uh it's the sum of parts. But you really don't have to break the bank. I tell people they can uh they can shop for sales on on places like Brownell's, and they can put together uh a gun without breaking the bank if they're patient and uh they put it together right. And that's what I'm big on in my classes is using decent tools. They don't necessarily break the bank, but using decent tools that are appropriate, fixtures that create consistent assembly and proper torque values, you'll get a better experience out of your build. And that's just not just ARs. People are always breaking the optics mounting screws on their red dots on their handguns because they don't torque them down properly. They're either loose or too tight and they break. So, one last hard question here for you. If I asked you to define what a hard use AR is and you had to just give me one sentence, what would that sentence be? Really putting them on a spot there, Tim. That's what I do. I gotta do it at least once in the podcast. Uh assembled with love, putting it together with love and caution. You can have you can have a cheap gun if you put it together right, you're gonna have a good experience. All right. All right. That's great. I'm gonna I'm gonna take that one step further, if you don't mind. Sure. So, first of all, for the audience, I hope you guys have learned as much as I have. This has been a master class in the operating system of AR-15. This is incredible. Chad, I'm gonna have to come out there and take this class, man. This is this has been amazing. So we're talking about the operating system, where where is gonna be, where it's okay, you know, um, everything down to like the orientation of the camp and everything like that. How would you describe the perfect AR-15? Like, what about it is just like just give us the give us the high points. Like, what are the qualities of each of these components that is gonna come together and be the perfect AR-15? Um another hard one. I I as I've gotten more experienced and gotten older, I like I like simple better. So most of the modern ARs, you have all these gadgets on them. And I'm not saying I don't have guns with those gadgets, but I appreciate the elegance of like the original gun. Like old school Vietnam, 20-inch barrel, rifle gas, triangle hand guards, fix stock. That's that's the one that I I lean towards. Like this is the one that I enjoy shooting the most. Don't have a can on it, doesn't have a red dot on it. It's just it's just an elegant gun. That's that's what I lean towards. And simplicity is great when you're first shooting a new gun because if you build one out of various parts and you have problems, where's the source of the problem? If you have a basic, let's just say GI mil spec gun, and you change a part on it and you start having problems, well, now you know where your problem is. It's you and you put the wrong thing on there, right? Right. But I I I I love the old school ones. They they're is that a little bit because like you you're a little bit of a purist, you love the AR fifteen, and then is it also because Because when you get down to like how it was originally designed, the genius behind it was all of the all the details you just listed, like 20 inch barrel, rifle length, uh buffer tube, and all this stuff, that was all thought of at the the dawn of this build. Absolutely. Or this design. Absolutely. And that's why it's so perfect. It is. And as we've gotten, if we shorten the barrels, we shorten the gas system. When the gas system is shorter, it unlocks faster, cycles more violently, and we have to accommodate for that. And the original gun was just this this sweet art to shoot. I just love it. And I collect the older ones, I have them all wall in my shop. It's not to show off, it's just to it's my appreciation of where they came from and the small changes over time. If you understand, and I don't waste time in my classes with history because there's tons of fantastic books and videos you can watch, but just watching the the evolution, if you want to call it, of the gun, it's just uh I I love it, but I still find my way back to uh my favorite guns or the classics. Nice. Well, there you have it, everybody. If you want the perfect AR-15, if you want the perfect system, just get the regular old 20-inch barrel A1 M16. There you go. Yep. Very few problems. Chad, where do folks go to find more about you or the uh school of America of the American Rifle? Um, it really depends on your taste. Uh the the people that come to my class, they come from all walks of life. Some people are, you know, in a job that it'll help them to learn this stuff, and some people are just uh nerds about it. And they just want to know more about their gun, and that's a great thing. Um, but uh if you're if you want to take a class, you can go to my website, schoolamericanrifle.com, and then there's a calendar that lists classes when they're available. You can just follow the the booking process. Um, we don't have it available right now, but we're working on an online school for people that don't have the capability to travel. It won't be as hands-on, of course, because it's remote, but right we uh we love education and teaching people, so it would be another option. And then we have various social media. We have a business Facebook page, our YouTube channel is where we share um wonderful nuggets of information. I would say about half of my class that I teach in person, you can get on YouTube for absolutely free, except for your time. Nice. You just gotta spend some time and and watch some content. And uh most of it's long form, so it's not easy for some people to digest if they have a short attention span. I give away a lot of stuff for free on on YouTube. My Instagram page is more of me uh doing a little bit of trolling. So if you get offended easily, Instagram's probably not for you for School of the American Rifle. And my Facebook page, we have uh our regular business stuff that we announce, and then we have a private Facebook group called Sotar Armors Enhancement Group. Um, and then we have our own private, we control it. It's called Sotar Society, S-O-T-A-R Society. There's an annual fee of $20 for that, and that's just to cover like the overhead of you know servers and software and and all that stuff. Um, we have about 800 people in that smaller community, and uh it's lovely because uh out of the 800 people in five years, only five people have had to be removed due to behavior issues. Nice. And everybody treats each other like a friend. There's no making fun of people's choices, there's no that's a stupid question, which is unfortunate about most of social media. Right. That's awesome. I love that. So lots of options, lots of options. I'm not in it to try to sell everybody every bit of information, but I I do give my best to my students. And one thing that I do offer my students that do take a class is once you've attended as a student, you can come back to sit in and observe. You can't be an active student, but you can sit in and observe, take notes, ask questions at any future date at no cost whatsoever. Just to kind of get a rub refresher on some of the concepts again? Yep, because it's a fire hose of information. And um, I'm constantly trying to evolve to add the most important stuff to the classes. So the class that, you know, John Smith takes this year might be drastically different in three years depending on what I've added and taken away. And the stuff that I take away is the stuff that I give away free online. So there's no point reiterating what I've already discussed online a hundred times. So I'll save it for the class. But uh, I'm always trying to sharpen my edge. I'm a perpetual student. I take classes from everyone that I can that I can afford and take time off to do. And I try to teach that as well as give credit from where I learned it from. Awesome. Well, Chad, thanks for bringing your experience and perspective to the Ram room today. Really got a lot out of this uh interview with you. I appreciate both you guys. Thank you, Tim and Jude. Yeah, thank you, Chad. This has been awesome. Well, if you enjoyed today's episode, share built to last with someone who cares about performance over trend and discipline over decoration. As always, ready aim, fire your comments or questions to built to last at brownells.com and rate and comment wherever you stream this podcast from. Remember, if it's worth building, ensure it's built to last.