Any complaints about mine are really irrelevant to the use of the rifle as a battle rifle. The rifle is meant to be zeroed once with one type of ammunition. Rezeroing is a bother . the windage adjustment knob has about a half turn of slack and you have to have a screw driver to loosen the screw. Since the elevation turret has fixed elevation adjustments for yardage, you have to play with a screwdriver to get an elevation zero when changing ammunition or bullet weights.
For a rifle to be handed out to untrained cannon fodder in a war, this is not an issue: cheap, fast, manufacture, reliability and ease of maintenance are far more important considerations.
What happens in major wars is that the military does not have time to train recruits to any level of marksmanship. At best the recruits understand how to load, fire their weapons. There are a number of accounts of Dough Boys (WW1) and Dog Faces (WW2) who arrived in combat not knowing how to load their weapons. We still have a living WW2 veteran in the gun club, he had a total of 20 rounds of familiarization with M1 carbines before being second wave on the Iwo Jima invasion. He had two ten round periods of familiarization at a 200 yard range with a carbine before being loaded on an invasion ship. He got each of those carbines zeroed in the ten rounds he was to fire through them, but the carbines were taken away. One he had to aim at the bottom of the target to hit the middle, it was shooting at least three feet high! He was issued an unzeroed, unfired carbine on the way to Iwo Jima. He had to zero the thing in combat. He said his first shots, he aimed at the right most of three Japanese, and hit the left most! He had to beat the sight base over with a knife butt.
My Uncle, 101 Airborne, he had a total of eight rounds of familiarization with his M1919 before being dropped behind enemy lines at Normandy. He and his loader were so ignorant of the function of the thing they did not know it did not have a safety. They loaded a belt into the machine gun, were setting it up in combat, and bumped the trigger mechanism on the ground. The M1919 discharged, shooting off a finger of the loader who had his hand over the muzzle!
Another complaint has been the short buttstock and the scope mounts that place the scope directly into your head. Maybe about 2” into your head, I took my scope mount off after realizing that it placed any scope I had too far back.
The rifle is hard on ammunition, but reloading is not a consideration for an issue service rifle. I installed a buffer which kept ejected ammunition within 15 yards. Without a buffer cases are ejected 25 yards or so.
This is a well thought out battle rifle, it is still in production and service, after the FAL and M14 have been out of production for decades.
In 2008 I had Bill Springfield do a trigger job on my PTR 91. He did an excellent trigger job, match quality for a service rifle.
>
[email protected] wrote:
>
> I can set you up with a pull that has virtually no creep in the 4.75 area. I
> also remove all the take up slack. Price runs $54 and return postage is
> included. Only the trigger pack is needed, personal check is fine. My address
> is:
>
> Bill Springfield
> 4135 Cricket Ct.
> Colorado Springs, Co 80918
