M25 Rear lug or not?
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Depends on what you have at present. A rear lug rifle is great if you are looking at a true precision rig that will be bedded and have the rest of the mods done. As well as feeding it a good diet of match ammo. It will do you no good if you can not do any one of the above.
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Probably should check with your armorer as well. Some won't bed a rear lugged rifle.
Wait one, do you really understand why a rear lug was developed? It was a fix for the fact that this rifle, be it an M14 or an M1A was NEVER designed to shoot anything over the current generation of Sierra 175 MKs.... and yet people HAD to try it. Stupid and it did a lot of damage to a lot of rifles, rear lugged or not.. waste of time since it's NOT needed if you stick within the realm of the design.
Trust me, the port pressures of the M14 design will not allow it to work right and with anything heavier then the 175's... the rifle will be tearing itself up. I know, I've had to fix them. I've had to ship receiver back to 2 different companies that self destructed playing this game. Also understand that during "The Day" of M118 white box and the match ammo we were shooting late 60's into the 80's never had a bullet heavier then 173 (the M118 bullet). I was using Lapua and Hornady's copy of the Lapua bullet, the one I call the "Stepped Boat tail".... I'll be going into depth on this one in "M14 Unclassified" when it sees print later in the year. Stay tuned, you'll learn a LOT about the best main battle rifle ever built. LEARN!!!! and enjoy it! I've get a fair amount of you folks shooting out to 600 and 1000. DISHOUT
Read me answer on this one... it identifies a whole lot on this one. Trust me folks... you'll learn one hell of a lot about the M14 and M1As if you start following my posts when I can get some time to log on... trust me, the book I'm writing is a BEAST!
Stupid fix for something that never should have been tried. The rifle was well designed as the M14... the rear lug was supposed to fix a problem that went against the design and it cost a lot of people a lot of headaches. It's a stupid fix for a problem that should never come into being.
Yes, you can bed them, but I won't. I won't touch them anymore. I've worked on M14s and M1As since 1975. When it comes out, my book will show you everything you'll want to know about tuning the rifles and bedding them, with "Pictures" of it!! Not illustrations. I've used everything from Devcon (USMC years ago) to ACRAGLAS to STEELBED and so on. I tend to stick to the last two since they're superb and I don't have to buy mega amounts of it.
Absolutely NOT. The rear lug was introduced to allow for the use of heavier bullets, since the M14 was never designed to use anything heavier then the 173 grain M118 white box bullet and currently the Sierra 175 grain MKs.
Problem is, even with the rear lug the rifle was NOT designed to use a heavier bullet since so many people loaded the bullet wrong for the port pressures... so not only does the gas assembly start to self destruct, the rifle beats itself to death. I've worked on several rear lugged rifles... what a piece of junk for a so called issue the rifle wasn't designed for.
More over, you can take ANY traditional single lugged receiver and if it's decent, I can get 1" all the way out with the old USGI chrome lined bore;
I've done it! You just have to understand the design of the rifle and work with it. I know, a very dear friend of mine was the lead engineer at TRW during the M14 production. He pushed me in the right directions and I do NOT use everything in the USMTU manual which Duffy and Miller quote.. Got my copy of of the USMTU manual in 1976. My Devine Tx. with the classic light NM barrel shot just fine all the way out to 1000 yards. I've still got those score books. Just wish I still had my Griffin and Howe mounts to shoot the "Any rifle any sights" stage of the PALMA. I shoot out 2 1/2 barrels on that rifle. Never had to rebed it (ACRAGLAS with extra flux).
I've beaten M40's on a specific Law Enforcement range during the days I was helping a friend get the SWAT team going. Give me a good rifle and I will get it accurate out to at least 600. Want to learn? book is coming mid year. It's why I'm not on here as much as I'd like to be, right now I'm working on the "refurbishing surplus stocks" chapter. Yep, it will have it all except the history... it's now boring since it's been published so often. Learn and improve, I did with the help of an old USMC Sniper... until I developed the skill set we were working for... I came back from the range black and blue a lot. He's old school USMC.
Watch for the book, it's coming.
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I've got one, I'd like to grind the lug off
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252 Posts
I went with the M-25 non-rear lug, awesome either way!
There seems to be a lot of misinformation reguarding rear lugs.
Rear lug receivers have been around for quite some time, long before most folks shot heavier bullets in their M14's. They became popular in the mid 1980's because they allowed match grade rifles to be removed from the stock and reinstalled without the need to fire 15 or 20 shots to get the rifle settled back down. The lug also improves bedding life and coupled with a torque screw, holds the action more consistantly in the bedding to give a slight improvement in accuracy. The torque screw is an important feature to have in a lugged receiver. It's too bad SAI doesn't offer this option.
Lugs are not for everyone. In most cases they are simply not needed, but for a master class competition shooter they definately supply a slight edge. Heavy barreled rifles in McMillan stocks make the best use of the lug. Lighter wood stocks may develop cracks behind the lug and that along with increased cost is one of the big reasons I don't recommend lugged receivers for the average shooter.
Rear lug receivers have been around for quite some time, long before most folks shot heavier bullets in their M14's. They became popular in the mid 1980's because they allowed match grade rifles to be removed from the stock and reinstalled without the need to fire 15 or 20 shots to get the rifle settled back down. The lug also improves bedding life and coupled with a torque screw, holds the action more consistantly in the bedding to give a slight improvement in accuracy. The torque screw is an important feature to have in a lugged receiver. It's too bad SAI doesn't offer this option.
Lugs are not for everyone. In most cases they are simply not needed, but for a master class competition shooter they definately supply a slight edge. Heavy barreled rifles in McMillan stocks make the best use of the lug. Lighter wood stocks may develop cracks behind the lug and that along with increased cost is one of the big reasons I don't recommend lugged receivers for the average shooter.
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As usual, Ted provided excellent information. i would like to add a little more.
The rear lug was "invented" or was first used by the Navy Armorer, Don "Mac" McCoy in the 60's when he was doing it on M1 Garands and that included some with torque screws and some without.
The first 5 rear lugs on Marine Corps rifles was after one of our Senior Gunsmiths STOLE the idea from Mac McCoy and we put 5 of them on rifles just before we left for the Nationals at Camp Perry in 1975. We had JUST gotten official authority to use heavy barrels on NM M14's from The National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice a week before the Nationals, even though the Army had been using heavy barrels that whole year and maybe part of the year before. We had been arguing that either they or the NRA HAD to offcially either make them legal or not, for the entire shooting season in 1975. They waffled on it until that time. Then the CO of the Marine Corps MTU told the NBPRP either they made an official decision or we would field "OUR Service Rifle" the Model 40A1, in competition. Well, THAT finally got them off their duffs and they officially allowed heavy barrel M14's. We got that word Wednesday morning when the following Monday we would leave to go to the Nationals.
We NEVER had the money the Army AMU had, so we could only afford 10 heavy barrels for our number one Team Match Team. We began with NOS rifles and worked 12 to 14 hour days through Sunday and actually got them all tested and approved over the test rack by late Sunday afternoon/early evening. It was decided to weld lugs on five of those rifles as an experiment. We weren't sure if the lugs would cause other problems, so they wanted fixe without lugs in case of problems. If there were problems, the five rifles without lugs would be issued to our five best shooters for Individual matches. Of course, the shooters had to actually zero those rifles during practice at the Nationals. However, I have always said I'm glad NO ONE but we few Team Armorers ever saw those first five lugs as they were really CRUDE and not nearly as nice as Mac McCoy made them. We got exceptionally picky about rear lugs in the future and the sides and back had to be almost dead flat and checked with a precision ground block of steel.
I join Ted in NOT recommending a rear lug for a receiver that is going into a G.I. wood stock, because they cracked the stocks so often from the rear left corner of the lug. We rounded the corners as much as we could and it was still pretty common they cracked G.I. wood stocks in maybe 20 - 30 percent of the stocks. Of course in the super fat Walnut Stocks we used, it wasn't a problem. I have used them in a lot of laminate stocks and have yet to see one crack those stocks as long as the lug was shaped correctly.
A rear lug does not increase accuracy. It does increase the number of rounds you can fire before the receiver has to be skim glassed and that is the main virtue of the rear lug.
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