StrangerDanger

I avoid ghost loading myself. I’ve encountered too many issues to trust it to function when it matters.

Definitely does sound like a weird one. See if the shell release lever is moving properly. Then give the trigger pack a good cleaning too.

The Velcro systems is actually the best option. The large bulky receiver mounted options do nothing but add weight and girth. They don’t crush flat when empty like the Velcro models. When setting up the Velcro card system, you can have multiple cards that you can swap on and off there receiver to do even faster loads. The spare cards are fixed to a plate carrier or chest risk. These setups are generally cheaper too. For competition, most competitors have belt mounted speed pouches that let them grab 3-4shells at a time into their loading hand. They then speed feed them in without having to cherry pick a round at a time, move it to the gate. Load it. Move their hand back to the carrier. Cherry pick it. Move it back to the gate. Load it and repeat. Once their hand is at the loading port, they can stuff 3-4 shells in without any arm movement. Keeping the weight of the shells off the firearm has its benefits too. The Velcro carriers release the shells better than the hard mount systems I’ve use from Mesa Tactical and SideArmor. For bump in the night situations where you don’t have time to put on all this equipment, a bandolier is easy to stow with the shotgun and will have plenty of ammo for most situations.

Any other modifications done to it? I’d disassemble the magazine and clean the tube well. Do not put lubricant inside the tube or on the follower. Lube collects fowling when firing and can hamper the magazine from functioning. The last shell in the tube has the least amount of spring tension on it. If that doesn’t correct the issue, I’d look into getting a replacement magazine spring.

It’s been a few months since I’ve upgraded my M4’s. I ran across these titanium chokes that are lighter than the oem steel ones. They also offer some porting to reduce perceived recoil. Probably looking at a 10% reduction at best, but that’s better than nothing! I’ll take any weight reduction I can get out at the end of the barrel. You cannot shoot steel shot thru these chokes, but that doesn’t affect me at all. I went with an Improved Cylinder restriction for both M4’s. I’ve been having a couple 14” and M1014 flag edition M4 barrels threads by Briley lately. They have all the tooling to do the Benelli Mobil thread pattern. The work has been done fast and the quality of work has been solid.

Those lasers are amazing. They’re not cheap either. They’re about 17 grand. The one I got my daughter was about 6 grand. It can mark aluminum, but it really isn’t man enough to do engraving like that.

Looks great! Glad they positioned the orientation correctly too.

Yeah, I think it's the phosphate finish that looks gray.

I think the Carriercomp spring would be fine if it hasn’t been trimmed at all. Many users end up cutting several coils off to make 7 rounds fit and it functions fine. So room for one extra shell should be no problem.

Definitely not my project, I'm just as interested as anyone else. I believe the guy running the design is out of the country at the moment, so things are on hold. I hope he takes it to production for customers, I just don't know where the costs will be.

You'd probably have to butcher your neutered extension. Then you'd need some way to fit the stub of the receiver extension to your polymer extension. Trouble is if you do an overmold, it couldn't be anywhere near the stock adjustment notches since you're building to fit an existing stock with set dimensions. You would also run into issues with the pistol grip since it slides over the receiver extension. If you have a large transition joint, it wouldn't pass over. The fit is rather tight since the pistol grip uses the same nut that holds the factory receiver extension against the receiver. To answer your other question, no it would not count towards 922 compliance. The receiver extension isn't considered one of the evil parts.

Agreed, and I can barely change my own oil!

I'd wager it would not work since the tube wall thickness is quite thin. So the areas where you have threading that interface with the receiver would be subject to a lot of stress. Plus machining the threading on the plastic would be difficult to near impossible I think. You'd have issues installing the flexible ring in an inner grove that wouldn't just beat the plastic to the breaking point. Every time the action cycles, the plunger hard stops on this ring. Even if you could address all of those issues, I feel the polymer would not be resilient enough to prevent the stock from compressing the polymer and unlocking during recoil or high impact stress.

Parts finally arrived yesterday. Spent a few hours doing reassembly. Quite a bit of fitting is required to get one of these together after everything has been plated and poor fitting aftermarket components. Such as the FFT handguards must be filed down to get the barrel ring to seat correctly. The FFT hammer had to be ground a bit to make the hammer not hang up on the disconnector. The gas pistons have to be fit. What I do with the pistons is I put the pistons in my drill chuck, then hold a section of 400 grit sandpaper. I then finish it up with some 1000 grit paper. You keep test fitting the piston to the barrel to see when enough material has been removed.

If you have gunbroker, I’d try it there.

Got another one of these builds finally coming back from Wright Armory. Some bad, they seriously increased their pricing without any forewarning. This current M4 racked up 2200 dollars in costs with them for the plating. It used to be around 1150. They really stick it to you on the chemical stripping fees. I’m going to speak to the owner about the drastic increase to see what the deal is. It’s hard to give customers quotes when the pricing varies so much. This H2O will have a Trijicon SRO in place along with a set of actual Trijicon iron sights done up by ToolTech. The sight housing was done in NP3 already. Aftermarket will be a full build with a Carriercomp magazine tube, FFT fire control, elevator, spring kit, DMW oversized safety, TTI stainless bolt release, A&S Engineering frame, GG&G oversized bolt release, IWC light and sling mounts, Surefire M600DF weapon light, Scalarworks Sync top rail, stippled FFT forearm, Limbsaver 10403, BlueForceGear sling.

The factory stakes those two screws which tends to cause the tip to break off when unscrewing them. Sometimes they’re salvageable. My guess is they have a arbor press of sorts with a fixture that holds the receiver. It then reforms the screws to act as method of keeping the screws from backing out on their own. When I have reinstalled the iron sights with new screws, they can removed without damage. You’ll want to use some kind of thread locker like blue Loctite. If you’re going to leave the rear off, put the screws back into the housing along with the lock washers to keep from losing them.

They don’t hurt anything. You could fill them with black RTV pretty easily.

Looks much better!

Do you think it would be possible to clean it up on the lathe? I'd run it on the lathe if interested. Or if you want to send another Z68.

Sure. Here pis a picture of the M4 with the iron sights removed.

Given that the FFT trigger pack spring kit is factory weight, I don't think it will have any effect.

Clean build, came out great! What did you machine the tailcap with? It looks a little rough? You can also delete the iron sights to cut weight and declutter your optic's field of view. Modlite has a replacement lamp head that is significantly brighter than the Surefire M600DF. The PLHv2 would fit the shotgun the best. It will drop right in on that Modlite body.

Briley is the better product. They can fit their trigger kit to the polymer trigger frame without issues. The FFT kit almost always requires sear fitting. Many end users aren’t comfortable doing this. They’re both in the same ballpark price wise. The only bad about Briley is you’ll have to send your trigger pack to them for the work. There is also the potential that the kit will not work in a different trigger frame after being fit. Such as if you moved to an A&S Engineering frame after the Briley kit was tuned to work with a polymer frame.