Great video / series, why did I only just now find it. One caviat, from what I understand, the change of the top mounted trigger style charging hanlde to the triangle on the rear, was already done under Armalite on one of the later hand full of prototypes.
That wouldn't surprise me. That being said, if they did put it on one of the handfulls of prototypes, they still went back to the triangle style on the 603. As I said in the video, the original AR15 under Armalite changed a bit and only a handful were produced, so it is sort of hard to point to one specific configuration. That may be a good video for the future though!
@@historyatitsfinest7112 Basically, that charging handle was an evolution. If I remeber well, Stone rnintially had the gas tube on the left side, with just a through hole into the carrier on the initial AR-10 prototypes, which was highly inefficient. Jim Sullivan then came up with the gas key and tube on the top. They kept the charging handle there, from the initial design. Then Sullivan shrunk the AR-10 down to the AR-15 and here comes the part that I don't understand. Then they found out, that the charging hande in that possittion becomes to hot during fireing and then had to fix that with the unergonomic charging handle at the rear. The part I don't understand is, why they didn't find that out with the AR-10 production runs and why that design then still made it in the first few AR-15 prototypes. That is what I remember from the Sullivan interviews on inRange TV / Forgotten Weapons and another one with some random guy. Also the Stoner tapes are highly recommendet, about weapon design in general.
@@historyatitsfinest7112 ech, yt keeps on deleting what I'm writing. I found the prototype guide on a well known site. So SN1 had teh top charging, SN 2 rear charging. That went back and forth during the prototype stage, so a lot of experimenting went on.
