Thursday, September 2, 2010

M&P15-22 MkII

They rebuilt him, they had the technology...

As mentioned, I got my gun back the other day (in case you missed, it blew up.)  I've been pretty busy (work and school started again today, so full credit load plus 20+ hours of work a week!)  Today I got the chance to pull it apart and see what they did to it.

After putting all my accessories back on-















Externally; not really much to see, but if you look close you can see a little nub that keeps the Extractor Spring Retainer from rotating.  Supposedly (at least from what a couple hours of scrounging the interwebs has found me,) this helps reduce the chances of an OOB det with sensitive ammo.  There's also an Extractor again.









As soon as you field strip it, you notice that the main recoil spring is the new style aptly named "blue" spring:














I can't feel any noticeable difference in the strength of the spring, but I guess they're supposedly a pound or two heavier to make sure the bolt gets home to prevent an OOB det.

There's also a new "blue" hammer spring:













Same thing, supposedly lighter to ease in cocking and reduce the likely hood of the rifle doubling.  It also reduces the trigger pull weight and smooths it out a little, which is nothing to complain about!

The sneaky one was the mag though.  I thought it was the same one I sent in with the gun, since my markings were still on the baseplate.  However I realized the one I had put on the body was gone and there was the telltale "25 ROUND" under the "22 LR" mark.













Seems they swapped out at least the body, and possibly the spring (follower and baseplate are from my old one though.)  I gather the newer style may have some improvements to smooth feeding, but they may just have the markings to denote they're not 10 rounders.

If anybody has more concrete evidence of why the changes are what they are, that would be fantastic.

Hopefully I'll get out to the range tomorrow or Saturday and see if it doesn't blow up or go full auto or something on me.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi, while reading your post I noticed you have a single point sling attachment on your M&P 15-22 buffer tube. Would you mind sharing what brand etc...

Fred said...

No problem! The one pictured is a Midwest Industries MCTAR-13 ( http://www.midwestindustriesinc.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=category.display&category_ID=97 ) mounted backwards to get the loops a little closer to the receiver.

However, when I get home I'll likely be swapping it out for the MAD Hook UP ( http://www.missionadapteddesign.com/products/mad-hook-up ) I'm currently using on my issue M4, in conjuction with a Magpul RSA and a Savvy Sniper sling.