Firing blanks with the M1A rifle

K

KBP75

New member
Our Honor Guard is looking for restrictors to go on the end of the M1A(M14) rifle so we can fire blanks when we do Military Honors for our Veterans. Without the barrel restrictors, the action will not cycle due to the reduced pressure from the blank round. The actions then have to be cycled by hand. I have been looking around and cannot find anyone that has these available. Does anyone have a contact that might have a solution to this problem? Thanks for your Help and God bless all our Veterans! Ken
 
Yes, the rifle is brought to port arms, then on the Ready command is cycled manually by bringing the left hand around under the rifle and pushing back the operating rod handle. Blank adapters can be used but usually are not because they spoil the appearance of the rifle.

There are many pictures and videos on the net, both ways.

Jim
 
M1A's are a lot of money for an Honour Guard.
"...Blank adapters can be used but..." They could go Hollywood and use an internal BFA. Wouldn't be cheap though.
 
We have been using M1's for 20+ years with blank adapters and never had an issue with them spoiling the appearance of the M1's. We are hoping to change over to the M1A's and install the blank adapters. I appreciate all the information I can get to help our members decide on this issue. We do over 50 Military Funerals each year and thank everyone that has helped me on this issue and request anyone else that has information on this issue to add to this thread. Sincerely, Ken
 
All in the world I did is enter M-14 Blank adapter in the search browser of my computer and several came up.
Here is one link

http://www.keepshooting.com/m14-blank-fire-attachment-kit.html

Appearance is subjective.There are reasons why the military wanted it to be obvious a blank adapter was in place.One is About having a muzzle pointed your direction in training.The other has to do with shooting ball ammo through a blank adapter!!Bore obstruction in place!!".So,its a visible,orange doohickey that says,"Hey"
In my experience,rifles have been manually cycled at salutes,even when blank adapters were available for training.If I had to guess,I would say that is protocol.
As I recall,blanks run on the dirty side.Turning the gas system off makes for a little easier cleanup.
Disclaimer,I'm not a Veteran.It matters to me that I not mislead anyone.
 
We didn't use our issued M-14 rifles for Honor Guard duty. That was part of the Drill Team duty and used the DT rifles(chromed 03 Springfields). That meant that I(Supply Officer) had to re-install the mag springs and followers and switch the "training/dry fire" firing pin tip to the standard tip in order to cycle and fire the blanks. After the Honor Guard duty, I reversed the change back to non-functional Drill Team condition(plus pouring cleaner through the bore and cleaning the chamber).
Firing blanks through the M-14(for training we used blank fire devices allowing normal cycling) automatically required bore cleaning for 3 consecutive days followed by daily inspection for 2-4 days.
 
Our Legion/VFW groups always do our honor guards with our M1A's, which have "permanently" installed blank firing muzzle adapters. They allow full functioning in their normal semi-auto mode. For anyone who doesn't know the rifle intimately, they never notice the difference. However, they make cleaning the barrels problematic if not impossible due to the small diameter of the restrictor tube at the muzzle. Does anyone know how to properly clean them? There flats milled onto the muzzle end of the restrictor tubes which suggest that a wrench might be used to unscrew them?
 
All I can say is that if I were doing it, I would build the restriction into a spare flash hider and simply remove the flash hider for cleaning. To prevent that flash hider from being used with live ammo, you could block the sight picture and/or make the restriction such that a bullet would blow it out without harming the barrel.

Jim
 
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