Marvin Pitts Lightened Bolt Carrier

[DDustin]

If anyone’s read any of my posts regarding my thoughts on the ACR you’re aware that, while Bushmaster sucks, I believe the ACR is the only rifle that truly replaces the AR platform. Personally since buying the ACR, I can’t stand using my AR anymore. As I’ve gotten deeper and deeper into 3 gun and other competitions I find the ACR excels there as well. In order to increase support I would like it to be more widely used. I demo my rifle whenever possible, sometimes to some decently famous people, but I always seem to get the same thing; everyone loves the feel but it can’t be modded in the way the AR can for competition. Most believe it’ll never be able to take off because of the lack of support. It’s hard to blame them since FN comes to every match with a custom truck and trailer and custom SCARS while Remington usually only has the one ACR and personal vehicles. So I’ve been trying to contact companies about addressing the parts most often brought up.

One of the biggies brought up to me a lot is the fact that you can buy lightened bolt carries for ARs. So I brought it up on here in my barrel tread after seeing some Remington guys with the bolt lightened. It seemed to get a lot of positive reactions so I brought it up to Marvin Pitts. He seemed really interested in the idea as well as a lot more knowledgeable on the subject than me lol. So I sent him my bolt carrier assembly and all of the photos I took of the Remington bolt. I got it back just in time to test at the last major matches of the season including the 3 Gun Nation match at Rockcastle.

My current setup for the test is a 14”(ish) recontoured and fluted barrel with a pinned Surefire brake and the gas port opened to .625, done by Marvin Pitts. I’m using the Geissele Super Three Gun trigger and a Vortex Razor HDII 1-6x scope. The bolt carrier was cut down decently lighter and the recoil spring was kept the same.

I just got back from my last match of the season and so far so good. I've fired 690 rounds so far with 50 suppressed, in 3 matches and 2 training sessions. Some of the tests and matches were under pretty extreme conditions, one match had pretty severe rain, mud, and wind that eventually even turned into hail and a tornado near the match, another was icy, muddy and below freezing (around 20 degrees) that stopped up quite a few competitors’ guns and, for a bit, my shotgun. Also almost all rounds were fired fairly rapidly with the exception of some long range shots. I used 3 different types of ammo, one type was low velocity, like I said 50 rounds were suppressed and it functions very well with every type of ammo suppressed or unsuppressed.

I noticed a very large reduction in recoil. Even at 100yrds I managed to stay on target with decently high rate of fire. During practice I shot a 100 yard steel 8" swinger target at a rate of 1-2 rounds per second, all rounds stayed on target and hit. I actually feel like I could have gone faster because the dot never really left the target at all, it just kind of wiggled a tiny bit.

The only malfunctions I experienced were some stovepipes I traced to a bad ejector spring, and a partial/incomplete bolt lock where the bolt locked back on the magazine instead of the mag stop release once the mag was empty. It happened only once during the last match, slow firing at long range targets when it was 18 degrees with 15 mph winds. I'm not sure if this was a gas issue, due to the cold, or just a random thing.

I included a breakdown of the round counts as well as some pictures. I noted the conditions of the tests in the PDF attachment.



Bolt.
After 690 rounds, no signs of fatigue or odd wear and tear on either the rifle or the carrier group.
What it looks like in the rifle
Only malfunction. Not sure what caused it, but it was only once.

[ACR500]

That is awesome. I'm honestly surprised the spring or gas port didn't have to be adjusted.

This is another example of Marvin helping to advance this platform.

[SDDuc996]

Nicely done bro. Ballsy move that I hope pays off!

[DDustin]

Some videos of the tests, if I can actually get them all to post.

Night time test

[Warpdrv]

PEW PEW PEW

No PEW

Love it......

Awesome work, I hope this pans out in a positive way, - that is really going out on a ledge. I assume you weighed the before and after ?!?!

Did you make an attempt to get a new brass deflector ?!!? That might also be something to keep your rifle from stove piping down the road, made all the difference with my ACR....

[68fbjjz109]

Well now I know who's gun we where talking about yesterday. Looks good. It's a pretty substantial amount of weight. I can't remember if he said it cut close 4oz on that or something else when we discussed weight savings.

[DDustin]

For some reason I'm having a hell of a time posting. I've tried like 30 times on 3 browsers to post a comment and another video and it keeps telling me I need more than 10 characters to post. It's driving me nuts.

[DDustin]

Of course that one worked. I also noticed it removed all of my paragraphs.

lets try this again...

Here's the 3 Gun Nation Classifier from the 3GN international match at Rockcastle.

[Warpdrv]

For some reason I'm having a hell of a time posting. I've tried like 30 times on 3 browsers to post a comment and another video and it keeps telling me I need more than 10 characters to post. It's driving me nuts.

Those are forum built in security rules..... there is a minimum character limit so there is less bot spam......

[DDustin]

Finally think I fixed everything.

I did swap out the brass deflector along with an upgraded ejector and extractor spring set. The old ejector spring was actually stuck compressed when I pulled it out. The Remington guy had told me it was one of the issues they had when developing the Army rifle competition submission. I haven't been able to test the fix due to lack of time and just really crappy weather but judging from what I saw with the old parts, that's the problem.