• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2127 0

broken free from the traditional stiff constraints of wood, stone, and steel, designers molded, bent, and formed plastics and alloys into increasingly abstract shapes. The Monsanto House of the Future—a plus-sign–shaped modernist structure on show at Disneyland between 1957 and 1967—was constructed almost entirely out of plastics, and its makers boasted that hardly any non-manmade materials were used.8 Along the same lines, the AR-10’s forestock and furniture, for instance, were made of fiberglass, and its two-part, hinged receiver of rustproof, lightweight aircraft-grade aluminum. Because aluminum was not as strong as steel, the rifle lacked the T44/M14’s ruggedness, but it was sturdily built nonetheless, and it popularized the use of metal stamping in American rifle manufacturing. By isolating themselves from the historic Springfield-contractor nexus in Connecticut and the eastern seaboard, Stoner and his small team of engineers in California were able to pioneer innovative workarounds to preexisting obstacles, like the seeming inability to reduce weight drastically.

Externally, if the AK-47 reminded people of the dreary past, the AR-10 looked futuristically cool, and today it remains, like any design classic, instantly recognizable—partly owing to its sleek lines and distinctive carrying handle that cleverly integrated the gun’s rear sights (adjustable, in homage to America’s marksman tradition, for windage), a detail clearly borrowed from the late British EM-2 rifle. And all this in a seven-pound automatic rifle firing the regulation .30-caliber NATO round with a twenty-shot magazine.

Its sole downside, so far as anyone could see, was that its light weight made muzzle climb inevitable when firing on automatic. Even so, Stoner succeeded in taming the rifle’s potential uncontrollability by using a straight-line stock—a modification previously seen in Earle Harvey’s T25—thus shifting the burden of recoil directly to the shooter’s shoulder and allowing greater accuracy by reducing flinching.9 Stoner was no aesthetician, but he achieved a lasting place in the pantheon of great gun men by combining the best bits and pieces of past rifles into a single machine.

At Springfield, the AR-10 met a hostile reception. Not only was the rifle a latecomer to the T44-FN trials, but Time and other news outlets, using information leaked by Fairchild, had been running articles critical of the armory process. (“The U.S. Army last week was still marching earnestly forward in search of a weapon it has been unable to perfect through ten years of research and testing: a new infantry rifle.”)10 By puffing this new “aluminum rifle” that had been developed “at no cost to the taxpayer” and that “gave promise of being superior” to the T44 and the FN, these helpful journalists unwittingly shot Fairchild in the foot.

The embarrassing articles infuriated the testers. When Sullivan brought two samples of his rifles to Springfield, an official told him they couldn’t include them unless the government “owned” them. “I’ll give them to you,” Sullivan offered, naïvely. He was refused; the guns had to be purchased, and Sullivan had previously quoted a price of $500 for each. The army could not spare $1,000, he was told. Desperate to enter his rifles into the competition, Sullivan ate the loss and sold his two AR-10s for the princely sum of one dollar. (The uncashed check, framed, still hung on his office wall more than a decade later.)11 Even with the AR-10s now in the running, another arsenal representative bluntly told Sullivan, “We’ll send you home in one day with your parts in a basket.” Sullivan also claimed that when one of the staff members reported of the AR-10 that “this is the best lightweight automatic rifle ever tested in the Springfield Armory,” his boss erased it.12

The AR-10 tested well in every heat bar one, upon which it was sent home, though not in a basket: the six-thousand-round endurance test. The steel lining in the barrel was too thin, and the barrel became over-heated and deformed. A week later Stoner had fixed the problem, but