#JimSullivan

UPDATE: Jim says he was mis-represented by HBO. He responds here.

The Stoner legacy goes beyond just the AR-15. Several firearms designed either by Stoner or based off his work continue to impress modern shooters at the range and in use. One very notable such weapon is the Stoner 63 LMG, the weapon Larry Vickers has taken to the range for the first time in the video embedded below:

Following up on their previous interview segments with AR-15 designer Jim Sullivan, Forgotten Weapons and InRange have posted a video on Full30 of Sullivan describing his view of what went wrong with the AR-15 in Vietnam. Sullivan’s view essentially boils down to “they changed the type of powder that was used, which raised the port pressure, causing the gun to run faster and which led to malfunctions”. This is essentially true, but to help add more depth and clarity to the matter, I asked Daniel Watters, author of  The Gun Zone’s 5.56mm Timeline, to give a summary in his words of the AR-15’s propellant woes. Watters has already written about the matter, but elaborated further in our conversation, so that I could share it with our readers:

InRange has an excellent interview (and range video!) with Jim Sullivan, a designer of the AR-15, Ultimax 100, Mini-14, and other firearms. In it, they get to fire Sullivan’s improved M4, which is more tolerant of sustained fire and employs the “constant recoil” principle used in Sullivan’s Ultimax 100 machine gun. I’ve fired the latter weapon, and I can say without a doubt that Sullivan means what he says when talking about its performance and soft-shooting characteristics. To help illustrate this, here’s a video of my friend Arthur firing the Ultimax 100 taken by a high speed camera at about 1,000 frames per second (due to the lighting conditions that evening, the quality is not as high as I would like, but the effect of the constant recoil mechanism is very evident):