Rico Morgan’s M14… and Mine

It began life as a lowly Chinesemade Poly Tech M14S rifle. It had no claims to fame except perhaps that it was my first centerfire autoloading rifle. I’d recently moved in with Mom, having come back to southern Michigan from my 14-year Alaskan sojourn. The time was the early 1990s. On the way to Mom’s house I passed through John Linebaugh’s Wyoming country where I retrieved my sixguns, mailed to John’s FFL from Alaska.

I stopped at Ross Seyfried’s ranch in Roggen, Colorado, for a few days, then drove my Land Cruiser—pulling my tiny travel trailer—to the old family homestead in southern Michigan. At odds with what to do with myself, and not being able to clearly explain to Mom exactly why I was there—not consciously knowing she’d be dead in a year—I looked for work. I found it at two local golf courses, one of which gave me my wonderful dog Birdie.

I also had a few remaining gunnie contacts from my previous work and took to writing for some of them. The vent hand guard was my preference after trying a wood one. I even tried the stock from his Springfield M1A for a time but prefer the GI stock. The trigger pull is simply fabulous, the fine work of Clint Mc Kee at Fulton Armory.

Additions include genuine walnut M14 stock, Winchester barrel, forged receiver, mostly all-GI parts throughout including the sling, Burris 2-8X scope in S&K mount, and custom flash hider. This is a sub-MOA rifle with match ammunition. Mom lived on ten acres of Michigan woods but neighbors were close. My first project after building a dog house—which Birdie never, ever, entered—was to make a sound-deadening box so I could do some shooting without unduly alarming the neighbors.

This was an open wood tunnel about four feet long and three feet square lined with fiberglass insulation supported internally with an 18inch-diameter tube of chicken wire. In use, I’d put the gun’s muzzle deep into the box to shoot. Mom said the sound was not at all bad, even when she was outside and not far away from it. But I digress… I had very little money to spare, with only meager earnings from the golf courses. My gun writing had not yet paid anything.

I’d been away from gun writing for over a decade in Alaska, during which time I was a professional photographer in Anchorage. I don’t recall ever firing a gun in that time. Now I had a dog to care for and feed. Eventually I had a bit of success with my gun articles, so I was finally back at my chosen profession, with a few dollars coming in. One fine day I realized I had enough spare jack to consider buying a battle rifle. I’d never owned a modern semiautomatic mil-spec rifle of any sort.

I never liked the common AR-15 black rifles with their dinky 223 Remington/5.56 NATO cartridge. I wanted none of that. I wanted a 308 Winchester/7.62 NATO battle rifle or nothing. The Springfield M1A was way too costly for a man of my limited means. After a lot of looking I foundanew Chinese Poly Tech M14S at a local gun shop for $510 and bought it. The M1A cost about

twice that at the time. I shot the Poly Tech a bit and enjoyed it quite a lot. I’d owned it three days before I went to work on the stock. My notes tell me I smoothed the square shoulders of the stock and tried to get the "motor oil" out of the wood with kerosene. I then put linseed oil thinned with turpentine into the wood, which made it look better, but it was no stronger. Accuracy out of the box with the original chrome-lined barrel was lousy, on the order of eight inches at 100 yards.

I had to move the rear sight fully to the left to center the group. I went to work shimming the stock here and there, improving accuracy to around five Replacement of parts such as the bolt-hold-open with original U. S.-made GI parts assures longevity and improves overall safety. Originally I had a Brookfield mount on the rifle with 10X Leupold sniper scope. It was too much scope for my uses for this rifle. inches at 100. Turned out the fault was not with the barrel but with the dodgy bedding.

I discovered the main recoil lug was bearing only on the right side. By filing the lug and using machinist’s bluing to guide my work I got it to touch evenly on both sides. That gave me about three-inch groups. I added some temporary shims inside the stock to see what effect they’d have. Things improved somewhat but were never stellar. The best the original barrel did was on the order of 2.5" at 100 yards, which is not bad but not what I wanted.

Six weeks after I bought the rifle I began replacing Chinese parts with USGI stuff. These included Some promises have to wait awhile. GI magazine and sling. The stock has an oil finish. They’re not this slick as issued. the hammer, recoil-spring guide rod which stops the op-rod from coming off the bolt, and the rear sight, which got a National Match replacement. I replaced some of my temporary shims, only to find the accuracy went to pot. Along the way I evaluated the wood inside and out.

Here are some of my notes: "…wood is terrible quality. Soft, sapwood, coarse-grained. Lousy at best." The forend splintered when I removed the rivets holding on the front swivel. I needed something better. About that time one of the sales people where I bought the rifle informed me the barrel threads were identical with USGI rifle barrels and one customer had replaced his chrome-lined barrel with a good US barrel. That set me to thinking furiously.

One of the last modifications I made to the original parts before I moved to Illinois was to drill 49 holes with a #20 drill into the original Chinese flash hider. The unit was a mockup of the real thing, with depressions in its side rather than being pierced. My holes made it functional. I tested it at night and found it to be amazingly effective. There was no visible flash with a variety of ammo.

For various reasons never fully understood, groups degraded the more I tested the rifle. They settled in at about six inches at 100 yards. I tried upward pressure on the gas tube at the forward end of the stock. Groups went to 10-12 inches at 100. Mistake! Around this time—early 1994— my mother passed away. I was unable to do much with the M14S until I got resettled in the Chicago area. My new job was as one of two Senior Editors at DBI Books, which gave me a decent income.

Once I got settled in my new job I went back to work on the M14S. I replaced the soft Chinese stock with a genuine GI walnut one ($40 in 1994) and, with no other changes, groups became one-third the size they had been with the original stock. It looked a whole lot better, too. Later that year I finally did what I’d planned to do for many months. I sent the rifle off to Fulton Armory and got the splendid work of Clint Mc Kee applied to it.

I got the rifle back in late October with the following additions: Winchester GI barrel; The iron sights are actually usable without removing the scope. All the frontand rear-sight parts are GI replacements. This works better than the GI part. TRW bolt, connector lock and pin; GI hammer; National Match op-rod spring guide and spring; GI elevation knob and base; GI ejector and extractor springs; NM front sight and screw; NM gas system; GI spindle valve pin and spring, gas lock, piston; NM trigger modification.

Clint also installed one or two other bits and pieces in the rifle, the whole assembled with extreme care, proper headspacing, all the things it needed to be a viable and trustworthy rifle. Along with the new parts came the professional touch of a master gunsmith who, like me, considered the forged action to be the best part of the Poly- Tech rifles. There were rumors that these were actual USGI actions, but at the time no one could be absolutely sure. I still don’t know and frankly, don’t care.

Clint was happy to use the original action and not much else from the rifle. I eventually changed a few of the remaining Chinese parts for GI originals, including most of the magazines. Then I popped for the best scope mount in the world for it, a genuine Brookfield. The mount alone cost $235 in late 1994. I’d guess you can about double that today. The Brookfield attaches to the receiver with a large bolt and the serious torque of a wrench, no dinky little screws.

Today there are several similar mounts for the M1A and M14S that utilize the dovetail and bolt to the action and also costa lot less. To crown the mount I stuck a Leupold Mark 4 M3-10X scope into it, one of the finest sniper scopes in the world. The most recent price I saw on that scope, which is now discontinued, was $2,000. With that setup I was quite happy. The rifle now shot extremely well. I recorded a fourshot, 100-yard group with Federal Gold Medal Match ammo at 3/4 inch.

So, was this a great way to get an exceptional rifle? Would I not have been better off starting with an M1A Springfield rifle? I wondered hard about that. By the time I got the rifle back from Fulton Armory I was in a financial position to be able to look into other 308 semiauto options and that’s what I did. In order to get firsthand answers about other 7.62 NATO rifle options I acquired a Springfield M1A. One day I tried it in very cold weather.

There was apparently some grease in the trigger area and I had a double, which resulted in a jammed rifle. The ammo was WCC 87 Winchester ball. The second fired case was stuck in the chamber and the hammer was down on it. There may have been a chip of brass in the chamber that caused the stuck case. In the cold at a commercial range I was unable to properly analyze the trouble. This did not give me confidence in that rifle, even though the M1A was capable of sub-minute groups with match ammo.

Next I acquired not one but two FAL rifles, an older L1A1 and a brand-new Argentine version, both from my friend Dave Selvaggio, headman of DS Arms. I did a trigger job on the latter, which improved it immensely, and eventually sold that one to Chuck Taylor. I liked the FALs. Accuracy and reliability were at least acceptable. Then came a brace of HK-91 rifles, one a Springfield SAR-8 and the other a genuine HK-91. To the latter I attached a collapsible stock and that was one heluva fine rifle.

My friend Jeff Cooper also liked that setup. One day at SHOT Show, Jeff and I were talking about the HK-91s and when he asked which It does not noticeably distort the scope image. version I had, it turned out we both had the collapsible stock. To clarify it, Jeff made a downward wave of his right hand and extended his hand to the right, which is how that HK stock extended. We understood each other perfectly. So I ended up comparing my custom M14S/GI conversion with five other rifles in the same caliber.

The FALs had their charm and their problems (very long rifles with a short sight radius, easy to open for cleaning, somewhat fussy for ammo in my experience). The costly and precision-made, rollerlocked HKs had their good points, one of the best being the collapsible stock. One thing about them is that if you’re a reloader you’ll never find your brass. The rifle flings it into orbit.

This is a pain if you’re testing, as I was, with top-notch Federal Gold Medal Match ammo, The two-stage trigger pull is 3.5 pounds take-up and just one more pound to a perfect let off, with a dead stop after. This is one of the finest triggers, rifle or handgun, I have experienced in over sixty years of testing guns. which has some of the finest brass in the world. I don’t believe I ever recovered a single empty from the HKs.

Despite the added weight of the HK-91 over the M14S it had a harsher felt recoil due to its locking system. Both my HK-91s were completely reliable at all times and accuracy was excellent. The stock of the M1A was fat and heavy, weighing a full pound more than the GI M14 stock on my custom rifle. I swapped the stocks for a time to see if I liked it. The M1A Springfield stock looked great, but I eventually sold the M1A to a fellow and gave him the proper fat, heavy stock with the rifle.

I stuck the genuine M14 walnut one back on the M14S and there it remains. The standard mil-spec flash hider on the M1A was not as effective as the one I made out of the phony one that came with the M14S. So my custom drilled unit is on it today. I found the ten-power scope to be way too much for average use. It was superb for sniping but not for all-around utility.

I removed the 10X Leupold scope and the Brookfield mount, bought an S&K detachable mount and stuck a Burris 2-8 scope with post reticle into the mount, and that’s how it is set up today. The Burris is on the heavy side and the S&K mount must be firmly attached to stay properly tight. Finger pressure alone won’t secure it. The rifle shoots groups of just over an inch reliably at 100 yards with just about any ammo. Match stuff is sub-MOA.

The National-Match conversion trigger that Fulton/Mc Kee set up on it bears special mention. Its total

I tried glass bedding here and there, shims, careful fitting, but nothing gave decent accuracy. Simply swapping to a GI stock cut group size noticeably. The wood splintered badly when I removed the tiny rivets to replace them with these stout screws. pull weight is 4.5 pounds, take-up is 3.5, and the final break is just one pound, absolutely clean, coming to a dead stop on the break. This is the finest two-stage trigger I’ve ever experienced in over sixty years of testing guns.

All in all, the rifle is a complete winner. I got rid of all the other five 308 battle rifles and kept the M14S, having compared it to some of the finest of the world’s military-style rifles in a serious caliber. During The recoil lug of the action bore against one side but not the other.

Careful fitting with bluing and filing helped the accuracy of the original setup considerably, but it never approached the sub-MOA of the rifle as it’s set up today. my eighteen years of testing guns exclusively for Gun Tests magazine I had the opportunity to once again compare my M14S with several other rifle types in the same caliber. These were largely "black rifles" with appearances and construction similar to the M16.

One or two of them got my attention, but the best ones were extremely costly and did not have the coldweather comfort of the wood stock on my M14S. Today the Poly Tech M14S is scarce. I saw one for sale recently for $1,000. These can be modified as my rifle was by masters such as at Fulton Armory, however, the cost might not justify the result, unless you absolutely must have a forged receiver.

Fulton Armory, Springfield Armory, and possibly others sell complete rifles for about as much as the conversion would cost you. The only thing that you get with the customized conversion that’s at all special is the forged receiver. As for GI parts, lots of them abound for the M14S, but it’s not easy nor cheap to get Winchester barrels any more. There are many other barrel options with prices from $250 to over $600. Is it necessary to replace the barrel? Suit yourself, but I’d say yes.

I doubt there’s any way the original chrome-lined Chinese barrel would ever have shot subone-inch groups, as my Winchester barrel does. The Chinese barrel slugged 0.3085" at it tightest, with sticky spots at muzzle and breech. I’ve no idea the dimensions of the Winchester barrel. In short, after comparing six rifles in three types in the same caliber, I decided that my supercustom M14/GI conversion would stay here forever. What’s it worth? Ten years ago I turned down $2,000 for it.

Today it’s not for sale at any price. However, I did loan it to Rico Morgan for use against a deadly foe one cold night, the story told in Border Caper, my first novel, available at Amazon. AG