Colt staking photos?

[Lost River]

AR 15 vice blocks for the castle nut.

For the carrier key you can use pieces of leather or cardboard to protect the carrier from the jaws of the vice.


If you do not have a vice there are bench blocks that look like this for a table top. You can stick the carrier on the block. If you can, a C clamp helps to secure the block to the table.

[OlongJohnson]

So, just short of eight months later, I finally got around to grinding a square punch and making some stakes.

Note: I believe the images look purple due to lighting in my garage. With film, fluorescent turned everything green, so you'd use a purple filter to bring it back to white. I don't know how my camera is sensing fluorescents for color correction, but I have a mix, with tubes in most of it and incandescents over the bench. I suspect the camera detected the fluorescent in the environment and corrected for it, but the whiter lights dominating in these shots made it come out a little purple. The parts are actually nice and black.

Installing a Colt receiver extension and Magpul ASAP-QD end plate. Gonna be a little difficult to stake that.



Fortunately, when I was crawling around the Specialized Armament web site, I saw where they have an option to grind down the perimeter of a Magpul end plate before staking it. I have a big disc sander, so that's what I did. Paid a little attention to the surface condition and then cold blued it.

I made several test stakes in the edge of a piece of hot rolled scrap steel, which came out great. The Magpul part felt harder than that garbage steel, though, and acted a little different. I don't really like how the punch got spit out toward the edge. But I think it'll hold. I've tuned up the shape of the punch a little and expect improvement on the next one.

The notches were 0.092-0.094 on the nuts I measured. I scaled a photo I found of a Geissele stake and made the punch 0.074 wide.



Also, who knew there's such a thing as a fake castle nut? The one on the right is a DPMS I picked up several of on a Midway clearance sale awhile back. The fake staking notch doesn't provide much of a cavity for the staked material to move into. The one on the left is the CDNN "mil spec" part.



Other fun stuff...

Amazon will sell you a precision-ground tool steel pin 0.154-in diameter that works great as a slave pin for installing triggers. It's $2.15 right now.

I made a holding fixture for the receiver extension, because there's always some slop between the keyway and the tab in the receiver extension, and I couldn't figure out how else to keep the RE aligned while torquing the nut. I've also had the RE turn and swage the tab into the threads, which pretty much sucks arse. The fixture is dialed in now. The difference in angle between the top of the receiver and the bottom of the rail on the RE is 0.00 degrees, according to my digital level.

I noticed when handling my pistol that the square chunkuses on the forward corners of the BCM GFG Mod 2 were digging into my social digit when one-handing it. So I blended them out. Did it on this carbine as well. A little change made a big difference.



Yeah, I'm a little OCD, but I can't figure out how to get anyone else to do this stuff.

[DDTSGM]

Stake, smake: