X - Man":izt579gs said:A bit of misinformation about the early series Mini's barrels. The OD of the Mini barrel is virtually the same as a M-14 barrel. The M-14 never gets the same gripe. One of several causes of the barrel moving its poi is due to the Mini's over powered gas system and slide, putting a lot of stress onto the barrel. The early Mini's will settle down and shoot well when the gas system is re-worked to reduce the recoil.
Agreed, it takes skill and a bit of work to improve a Mini, and some people are not up to the task. But as a carbine it can be made to hold its own against other CARBINES.
If you take a stock Mini-14 Carbine and compare it to a stock M4 Carbine, the former simply does not hold up. If you say that with enough work, effort and money are poured into the Mini-14 it can be made the equal of the M4, you're simply whistling past the graveyard; that is no longer a Mini-14 it's a heavily customized carbine. If I put in the extra effort, money and work into an M4 as you did to bring the Mini-14 up to the level of the M4, that heavily customized M4 will be far better than the heavily customized Mini-14. I can do more to an M4 with greater ease and less money to make it outstanding than it will take you to make the Mini-14 adequate. In other words, it's a losing proposition and no amount of fast talk is going to change reality.
The M14 is NOT an accurate weapon as issued. If one wants to make it a match rifle, it requires a lot of work and attention, and to top it all off, you need to redo this every season if you are a serious competitor. Yes, the M14 has been reissued in recent years as a DMR rifle, but one of the big problems was finding people who knew how to make it accurate and who could then maintain them over time. If you pick up a match accurized M14/M1A by the handguards, it is no longer a match accurized rifle.
On the other hand the AR15 once you spend the minimum effort needed to make it a macth weapon, will remain so from then on, unless of course, you burn out the barrel or adjust it with a sledgehammer. But apart from that, it stays accurate, even if you drop it. Not so the M14/M1A.
You are nw here, else you would know that I have railed against the large pieces of metal moving off center on a Mini-14. I have also explained that obviously, a significant part of accurizing a Mini-14 would be dedicated to shaving down these pieces of metal and trying to tame the action. However, even with that, the barrel was/is crap, thin or thick is not the main issue here, as much as the quality of the barrel.
All this to say that your post simply underlines and even restates what I have been saying for a long time now, the Mini-14 is a bad design but it also confirm that with proper advertising you can get people to buy anything.