Brass dents revisited

[LRRPF52]

No problem Klem, I always enjoy yours and others perspectives.
The picture of the shiny bolt tail is a perfect example of what I was talking about..Olympic Arms used a straight cut, undersized gas tube, over sized gas ports and a haywire approach to their rifles too..The real dogma is the need to keep the bolt and carrier carbon free, which I think came from the early days of Vietnam when the ball powder of the time had a high content of calcium carbonate, which was suspected to clog up gas tubes and carriers. Then the white glove maintenance appeared...Just like long gas tube pipe cleaners, carbon scraping tools are completely unnecessary and can actually be detrimental..
Like you said, each to their own..

This is quite a derail from the OP’s thread, but...

White glove mandates come from periodic armorer-level inspections. The armorer gauges won’t get any useful readings if the critical dimensions on parts are caked in carbon.

Nobody ever explained that to us, so we just thought they were wasting our time with senseless menial tasks to keep the blotter report down (soldiers with spare time = incidents).

The gas system works better when it’s fouled to an extent, but AR-15s can become sluggish when run with high volume Wolf, suppressed.

The design was engineered around running on tiny stick propellant, which left minimal residue. Ball propellant of course leaves a lot more carbon fouling from the graphite bath that the kernels are given for stability and anti-stick properties.

Original bolts were hard-chromed, which was removed from the TDP after an early joint USAF/US Army fleet study of fatigue cracking mostly around the cam pin holes. They found that hard chroming caused hydrogen embrittlement of the bolt surface with higher incidence of failure nodes, so the phosphated bolt became standard after that.