Saturday, June 18, 2011

Praxis: Oleg Volk on Anderson Manufacturing's RF-85 finish & its application to the base-of-fire support role in an AR.



Tip of the boonie hat to Randy.

Anderson says:

In addition to the rigid quality controls of manufacturing, the feature that sets the Anderson AM15 Rifles apart from the masses is the proprietary RF85 treatment allowing Anderson weapon systems to operate efficiently without “Wet” lubricant. In a coefficient friction test performed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the reduction of friction on all steel surfaces was reduced by 85% — without traditional “wet” lubricant, hence the name RF85. An RF-85 treated weapon cycles faster and more reliably, operates at cool er temperatures, experiences significantly less wear and, without traditional “WET” lubricant, doesn’t experience failures due to excess dirt and carbon fouling in the action.

In the video (at the link), which was made at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, the untreated rifle took 23% longer to cycle than the RF85 treated rifle during testing. Oil attracts dirt, sand, grit and other harmful particles. By using the RF85 treatment not only will the gun operate almost a quarter precent faster but will also last longer due to less drag and wear. And accumulation of harmful elements is greatly reduced.


There was a bit of a dust-up on ARFcom last year when somebody at Anderson tried to pimp the product without revealing up front who they were.

My interest in posting this here is not so much to advertise for Anderson but to get folks thinking about a base-of-fire semi-auto weapon, whether it be AR, drum fed Kalashnikov, Simonov or whatever.

8 comments:

Dakota said...

Painful to watch that video ....I would never rest my AR and shoot it using the magazine for a rest. This can cause a host of problems down the road, not the least of which could be magazine retention failure.

I use very little lubricant on my SP1 variant and have no problems with reliability. The key is to lube in the right places.

Michael Gilson said...

Interesting, but I have to wonder if it has any meaningful superiority over hard chroming the inside of the bolt carrier group, which can be done by almost any gunsmith who does metal refinishing? Also, all that talk at the beginning about running wet, I though moly S based dry lubes were the lube of choice for AR platforms?

pdxr13 said...

I have no love for the AR-15 platform for militia/self-defense, but know enough to not rapidly fire 150 rounds through it as if it were a SAW. There was some mention of a "heavy barrel", which is effective at adding weight, negating one of the finest features of an AR-15 rifle (half-weight of .30 rifle) while not making it a .30 rifle.

Magazine is not a handle, nor a tripod, although it can make merging with the ground and firing accurately from a very-low position difficult.

Bleached 4" diameter fallen limbs are not cover from incoming rifle fire. Where is that entrenching tool?

OTOH, an SKS with a drum might well be used in this application with no trouble except slow reloading of the drum.

I don't own any drums due to the relatively high cost vs. a pile of stick magazines of the same capacity. SKS, in particular, is very thrifty (price and weight) by using strippers directly into the weapon. The user of an SKS can be trained to top-off individual rounds during sporadic firing or rapidly reload from the stripper with only a brief pause in firing. The "all eggs in one basket" problem of a dented/jammed drum is unappealing more than time saved not reloading 6 times is appealing. The cost of an SKS drum is about half the cost of the weapon, which by my calculation ought to be spent on more ammunition, more training time, or that fraction of another SKS for another man.

Someone smarter than me said "drums are dumb".

Cheers.

oldsmobile98 said...

Allied Armament and the Beta Company have come out with drums for battle rifles (M14, FAL, G3, SR-25 type).

Anonymous said...

You might want to check the weights of a typical AR-15 vs. a typical .30 caliber semiauto.

For example, a stock Springfield Armory M1A has an unloaded weight of 9 pounds, while a DPMS AP4 16" carbine (their most popular model) is 7.15 pounds.

A difference, to be sure, but not "twice" as much.

I, myself, own a 17 pound match conditioned M1A, as well as an 8 pound Fulton Armory M14S - the lighter one can be a bit harsh on recoil, while the heavier one is a drag to carry...

Oleg Volk said...

I wouldn't use magazine for support...but most people better qualified than I am do. And deep mag well allows them to get away with it.
I am not generally fond of drums...but this one works better than most. For one, it's fairly light, for another it is very durable, much more than a 30rd GI magazine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjIZOOdd3QY
While entrenching makes sense, time for doing that isn't always available.

Anonymous said...

I went to the rf85 website and ended up reading a letter from Anderson manufacturing to Oakridge National Laboratory. Basically, it said that a rf85 treated gun will begin to malfunction at about 200rnds with tulammo. That sucks.

http://www.atdmachineshop.com/Letter-steffner%20II.pdf

Anonymous said...

Semi-auto support weapon? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9crLNpS5S0&feature=related