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Više puta sam spominjao intervju sa Džimom Salivenom u kome specifično navodi kako su još 70ih u Royal Ordnance-u bukvalno zaboravili kako se pravi zatvarač i kako nisu znali pravilan postupak za spajanje uvodnika okvira i sanduka puške.
PS: Evo opet citat:
+ klikI went over to Royal Ordnance, Nottingham; just short-term stuff. Looked at the British SA-80 program. It was at the time they were shutting down RSAF and Enfield. They had already switched all the manufacturing to Nottingham. There wasn't all that much to my involvement. They asked me to go over there and take a look at it, I did and I told them my views on the gun, and they got angry and that was the end of it.
From what I saw, everything about it was wrong. For instance, they were using an M16 type bolt and not making it right. In manufacturing it, first you drill a hole for the firing pin. Once that hole is there, everything centers on that hole. You turn the outside, you cut the slots and everything else. They didn't do that. They cut all the outside first, then tried to drill the hole for the firing pin in the center. It wasn't "true." Then they found out you can't drill a hole that way, holes go off this way and that way and aren't centered. To solve that, what they did was mess with the firing pin tip. The firing pin has a nice, respectable diameter for most of its length until the front. Instead of a tapered firing pin so that it's good and strong, they just narrowed it down, and they had the thing about a half-inch long, and just a sixteenth inch in diameter.
Another thing was the magazine well. It's a sheet metal receiver, and the magazine well is sheet metal, but it has to be welded on. That's fine. But the sheet metal stamping for the magazine well, they stamp the slot, the little hole, the slot for the magazine latch, they stamped it in there, and then they weld it on. I mean, sure, you save an operation because you can stamp the hole instead of machining it, but no two latch positions on any guns are precisely the same. Their magazines on some of the guns were jammed up and the bolt couldn't move 'cause the magazines were stuck in there on some guns. On other guns it was too low, wasn't feeding properly. They didn't fix this stuff, it just went on and on like that.
They'd hold plus or minus one-thousandth, completely unrealistic tolerances, which nobody could make the parts to. The firing on that trip when I went over there was still done at the only range they had, which was still at RSAF Enfield. One of the things you do to test is you load up a mag, put it up in the rifle, you fire a shot and let the thing cycle and chamber the next round, and then instead of firing that next round, you hand extract it and look for scratches on it. When I did this test, it was just scratched all to hell. They weren't up on that. The back end of the lugs, you've got to carefully smooth off that corner. These were just raw. It was just cutting the cartridges. I don't know why they weren't getting split cases from that. Maybe they were.
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