It's fun to play dress up

I keep looking at the original Vietnam era Colt M16A1 parts kits, but they're always really beat and a lot of money for what you get.  I mean, you can get a whole, complete, new AR-15 for what an M16 parts kit costs.  Even cheaper than that though is my EBR, a Mossberg 715T.  The 715T is already just a 22lr dressed up in an AR-15 shaped plastic shell, and I decided to dress it up even more.

The 715T being just a 22 in a plastic shell that it is, standard AR/M16/M4 pattern parts won't fit.  In keeping with my general theme of "lets see how cheap we can do this," I decided to use airsoft parts with 3D printed adapters.  Some airsoft parts are surprisingly high quality, those guys get as into their hobby as we get into ours.  For my dress up kit I'm using an ICS stock, but just about any airsoft M16A1 style stock should work as long as it's the style with a the long screw attaching it. For the front end I'm using a JG/Golden Eagle M16A1 handguard. The whole conversion only cost me about $40 for the parts.

Here are all the printed parts that are needed:

And here's where they go on the rifle:

The handguard adapter holes are sized to be tapped for 8-32 socket head screws. The stock adapter hole is sized to use a 10-24 screw. I didn't have the long original screw for the stock so I made one with some 10-24 all-thread and welded a screw to the end to hold the stock on. It ended up being around 10" long, basically all the way from the butt plate to the 3D printed adapter.  The front handguard cap gets screwed to the front sight post with an 8-32 screw, and the front of the handguard needs to be trimmed slightly for screw clearance like so:

The front sight post and handguard cap should be a tight slip fit over the barrel, and the original 715T sling swivel will still work. I use an optic anyway, so the front sight is just decoration for me and a little bit of movement is ok, but it you use iron sights the front sight post has two holes in the bottom for 4-40 set screws if you really want to lock it down.  Some versions of the 715T have a threaded barrel so an actual flash hider can be bought cheap and threaded on, but mine is unthreaded.  My flash hider is printed solid and is meant to be a tight press fit onto the barrel.  It took a lot of force to to get mine pressed on, and it should be more than enough for a 22lr.  It's also pretty much just for decoration anyway.  The handguards need to be glued to the two handguard adapters too.  I used hot glue, but superglue would work just fine too.

When everything is printed in black and assembled, here's what we end up with:

If you happen to have one of these rifles and want to dress it up, my printable files can be found here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3610994

Right on point

This is just a small update to the EBR(If you haven't been following along, it's an "AR styled" Mossberg 715T 22LR, really just a 702 Plinkster is a plastic shell).  The factory open sights on the 715T are OK, but not great.  I decided early on to add some optics.  I didn't want a scope, but I wanted something.  I decided to go with a "red dot" or "holographic" sight.  Since it's a cheap gun, I went with a cheap sight, an AIM sight I got on Amazon for around $35.  The rail it's sitting on came with the gun, and is hollow so you can still see the iron sights under the holo sight.

If you've never looked through a holographic sight, they're pretty neat.  It's kind of like having a laser sight, except that it doesn't project a dot on the target.  The big hoop has a piece of glass in it, and a reticle is projected onto the glass.  It can only be seen if you're looking straight through the sight from the back.

You can look through it with both eyes open and have nearly completely unobstructed vision.  It's supposed to help with fast target acquisition.  I've actually has it since shortly after I got the gun, I just forgot to post about it.  Even the pics are old.  It's worked very well for me in the past few years(especially for $35).

Mossberg 715T Spontaneous Bolt Lock

Another very common problem with the Mossberg 715T is spontaneous bolt lock.  The Mossberg 715T, like it's 702 Plinkster brother, has a feature to lock the bolt in the open position for cleaning, reloading, etc.  It works by pushing the charging handle into the receiver, where a hook catches a tab.  It's handy for cleaning, and for rifle ranges that have "Bolt open when not in use" rules.  What happens on the 715 is that seemingly at random while you're shooting, the bolt lock will engage and the gun won't cycle.

I determined that the charging handle is the problem.  The bolt lock tab is part of the charging handle.  The stock charging handle is a fairly sloppy fit in the bolt, so it's got a lot of wiggle room.  What happens is that when the bolt recoils, the charging handle actually hits the plastic shell.  When it hits, the charging handle tilts ever so slightly, but just enough that the bolt lock can catch.  You can see the problem here:

And here's where it makes contact:

To correct this, I could have trimmed back the shell, or ground back the charging handle.  I didn't really want to do either, so I just made a new one.  Here you can see the change I made.  The original piece is on top, my new one on bottom.  The original handle is offset to the rear.  My new one is offset to the front.  While I was at it, I machined it with much tighter tolerances so it doesn't wobble as much.

Here's how it fits in the bolt:
Original

New:

 Now with the bolt all the way back the charging handle is no where near the shell.  Though I haven't put a whole lot of rounds through it, I haven't had a single spontaneous bolt lock since I made the change.

Way off the mark

A very common problem with the Mossberg 715s is that they can't be sighted in.  Very often, the sights don't have enough adjustment room.  Most commonly, they shoot low and left, though mine shot low and right.  The problem is that the receiver isn't located properly in the plastic shell.  The sights are located on the plastic shell, and not attached to the gun it's self.  To fix this, the action must be relocated inside the shell.  I started with milling the receiver where the mounting screws go through.  I milled off .050" from the back of the receiver.  Then I shimmed up the front of the receiver about the same amount with some washers.  For reference, .050" is about 16 sheets of notebook paper thick.  The left/right alignment is adjusted by biasing the receiver in the shell as the bolts are tightened.  The red arrow shows where I removed material, the blue arrow shows where I added shims to get the barrel to point up further.

The second problem is that there is some play in the receiver mounts.  Any time you took the action out of the case, you couldn't be sure it would go back into the exact same spot.  That means you'd have to resight it every time you took it apart to clean.  There is also enough play that it could move around under recoil.  The solution here is the same as on the Mosin, we're going to bed the action with JB Weld.  In order to not have the JB Weld run everywhere, I made a dam with modeling clay.  I also scuffed up the plastic to give the JB Weld something to grab on to.

Then I mixed up the JB Weld, smeared it in, and bolted the receiver back into the shell.  The receiver had a heavy coat of silicone and car wax on it to keep it from sticking to the JB Weld too.

With the clay cleaned out and the receiver removed, you can see how the JB Weld perfectly conforms to the receiver.  It's much more obvious how well it works on this than the Mosin.  Now the receiver will mount in exactly the same place each time it's removed, and it won't move around as the gun is being fired.

With the receiver adjusted and bedded in the shell, the sights could now be aligned, and the gun can be taken apart without messing up the aim.

The Ebil Black Rifle

This is the gun that (re)started it all, the Ebil Black Rifle.  Show it to anyone who's remotely anti-gun, and they'll scream "Assault Rifle!  Ban it!  Nobody needs a gun like that!"  Overlooking the fact that to be classified as an assault rifle, a gun must have full auto capabilities which NO commercially available guns have(even the evil black ones the media loves to hate), it's about ans far from an "assault rifle" as you can get.  In reality, though it looks like an AR-15, it's a Mossberg 715T, which is just their 702 Plinkster .22 in an evil black plastic shell.  Being just a .22, it's about as far from evil as you can get with a real gun(hence the cutesy "Ebil" moniker).

I'd been looking for something like this for awhile.  I saw this one on a Black Friday sale, and decided it was time to take the plunge.  Current .22 shortage not withstanding, .22s are fun to plink with, and this particular one is neat looking.  They make a couple different styles, this is the A2 carry handle style(for obvious reasons).  The one thing that really bugged me about it is the forearm.  It's just way too long and makes the gun look front heavy.  The front rails were kind of sharp too, and didn't feel nice in the hand.  First things first, I bought some standard length rail covers.  Using the covers as a guide, I whacked some of of the middle of the hand guard, it ended up being around 4".

After epoxying everything back together, I trimmed, redrilled, and reinstalled the removable side rails, then put everything back together.  Just that change really helped the proportions of the rifle, and makes it look a bit less ungainly.