.280 Enfield...Ahead of its time

[JASmith]

The AR10 is much easier to manufacture than a Garand, M14, or other steel receiver rifles, since the machining is done on aircraft-grade aluminum receivers, cutting tool time and increasing tool head life, then hardening through anodizing after they have been machined.

I will admit that I was about 10 years old when the M14 was going through final design and competition. But our family interest in firearms and my father being in the steel fabrication business brings couple of impressions strongly to mind: First, "only cheap and unreliable firearms used aluminum." and second, aluminum had not yet become popular outside the aircraft industry. Indeed, aluminum was only coming into popularity as a roofing material during that period.

At that time, accepting a firearm that employed an aluminum receiver would have been a serious break from tradition, representing a serious gamble on reliability and safety. Add to that we know that very few institutions evolve more slowly than the military firearms community, one can readily understand the reluctance to go with the new-fangled weapon. (Recall that the adoption of the M16 was viewed as a revolutionary step imposed from the outside.)

To be sure, other parts of the military R&D establishment were rather dynamic in trying new things. Even there, however, there were significant pockets of technological inertia in many areas, including some that I spent a significant part of my career working in.

Bottom line is that reluctance to adopt the AR10 in the mid-1950s would have been seen as a reasonable move by most of the folks that had even a rudimentary understanding of the business.