Hey kiddies. Rose City Gun & Knife Show was in town a few weeks back. I was going to bring home either an M1911 or an M4. Since I'm less worried about getting an 8 shot pistol in the near future than I am a scary black rifle with a big magazine, I went with the M4. It is a The Riddle Of Steel (TROS) gun, made right here in Dundee, OR, and the price wasn't much more than what I wanted to pay (and way less than I expected to pay) and it had about 95% of the stuff I wanted. All the military features and controls with a RIS foreguard and free-floated barrel. (Yeah, the foreguard is just a UTG setup, but it is serviceable.) Flip-up front sight. No back sight. Apart from the foreguard, everything else is pretty much Magpul (pistol grip, mag, and stock). 1:9 twist on the rifling. For now I picked up a Magpul flip-up back sight until I can drop the bucks for optics. A sidebar question, how do you take the rubber rail guards off the rails? But the bigger question is, what do you like for optics? Yes, I know the answer is "It depends." But lets say I need decent over-all optics and don't foresee a lot of room clearing any time in the future. I'm tempted to be a gear queer and get an ACOG, but some of the guys I know who've used them are less than thrilled. What's good?
EOTech! THAT is the one I was trying to remember. Sweet mother of Elvis. Just had a look at prices. While the EOTechs are not inexpensive, the cheapest ACOG I found online is more than I paid for the rifle.
Aimpoint, more reliable than eotech. If you have an astigmatism you may have problems. Fantastic battery life. Eotech, got a deserved bum rap for a while. Their XPS/EXPS line has made amends. Different reticle than the aimpoint. Worse battery life. Trijicon Acog, awesome at anything over 25m away or further. Expensive as piss. Requires a mini red dot for close in work Trijicon red dot. Similar to aimpoints and costs a lot more. Strike force Viper. The only economy type of red dot to even bother considering. Even then it won't match the others for reliability. Any other red dot, don't waste your money. Ask Apostle / Ron Paul about his experience.
Small world! My son is home on leave (joined The Army recently) and want to buy an M-4 at first opportunity. He HATES the M-16 however - he can't stand their bulky excessive length!
Guys, guys, guys. You know Volpone never posts pictures of a gun unless he has his costume just perfect. Be patient!
I apologize for the photo quality. It was bad enough that my camera was a 12 year old 2.0MP Canon that could only manage about two photos before the battery died, but it didn't survive the upgrade to Win7. So I'm making do with a cell phone that I knew had a shitty camera when I got it but was prepared for that because, after all, for real pictures I'd use my camera. What could possibly go wrong? Anyway:
And yeah, the fore-end rail is just UTG, but the main reason for it is to allow the free-float barrel. Odds are that I won't hang anything off it. Unless I decide I want a tactical light. And a red-dot laser. Possibly an Airsoft M203 just to scare people. But since it is an Airsoft rail, that would be fitting.
I have a silly question for the room: I've noticed that a number of M4 clones are sold with a flat top in place of the carry handle but they retain the "stock" triangular iron sight up front. How would one use an optic with a setup like that? Would you be able to use a folding iron sight with an optic set up that way?
I've wondered that too. Mine doesn't have the triangular sight or the carry handle. I've got flip up iron sights.
Some people co-witness their iron sights with their optics, with the irons either lining up dead center of the optic, or lining up in the bottom third of the optic. That way, if your optics crap out, you can still use the irons "through" the optic without removing it. Additionally, you can zero your irons and then adjust the optics to match, or vise versa. It also makes it easy to check that they are both still zeroed later on. If you have a fixed front sight, I reckon you can use the "bottom third" method, and you could use one or the other without them interfering.
There are three ways to deal with this. Absolute Co-Witness, 1/3 Lower Co-Witness, Dremmel Absolute Co-Witness: You mount our optic. The red dot winds up nearly on stop of the front sight post. For some it's not a problem. They ignore the front sight post. For me, I can't get past that Lower 1/3rd Co-Witness: You mount your optic to the rifle, but with a mount meant to elevate the optic so that when looking through it, the top of the front sight post is in he lower 1/3rd portion of your field of view. Dremmel: (AKA The method). You take a dremmel with a cutting wheel attachment and slice off the front sight base, leaving the factory pinned gas block alone. No front sight post to bother you any more. If you are going this route, best to do it when you are swapping out the hand guard for a free float rail. I did this when putting my Troy TRX Extreme rail on to create this: Then I just threw a set of flip up, back up iron sights in place. I STRONGLY SUGGEST THAT YOU ONLY DO THIS IF YOU ARE INSTALLING A FREE FLOAT RAIL. Do not try this with, for instance, a set of magpul hand guards. I love them. But they are not stable enough to guarantee the accuracy of back up iron sights. As for the rear back up iron sights, there are a couple of options and any can be used with either folding front sights or the standard front sight base. One is to buy a flip up rear sight (i.e. troy, ARMS, Magpul, etc..) and put it on. Next you can take the carry handle and let your friend "Mr. Dremmel" and his buddy "Cutting Wheel Attachment" go to town. You shave off everything but the actual sight. Oh you can buy this already done.
Gah. I'm starting to bump into logistics problems. When I was young I only had a couple calibers of ammo to maintain (not counting the trusty old 30-30 lever gun). So I had pretty good stockpiles of ammo. Then I added a couple new pistol calibers that I don't have nearly enough ammo for. Now I've added .223/5.56 to the mix. And I want a .45. I can see why the Marines works hard to minimize the variety of arms fielded. Heck, that's why we still have Hueys and Cobras--they share a large number of parts and the mechanics can work across platforms on most of the stuff.
