The Buffer - Theory and when to Use What Buffer

welcome inspiring solutions today I'm going to be talking about a very misunderstood topic which are buffers now it's been my experience working with OEM as there's many OEMs and engineers who don't understand what the purpose of buffers are when you use specific ones and under what conditions that you use them many people out there like to mess around with buffers they'll basically you know flip around you know mix rum mixes and matches of them and oh my rifle now has the less recoil look what I discovered well unfortunately uh so we're gonna burst the bubbles here that many people like to mess around with buffers and you know they discover that yeah they can get less recoil and all this these are wonderful things and they posted on the internet and you know and people out there can follow well unfortunately that's very dangerous for many of you guys who are law enforcement military use these rifles for personal protection or for combat use it's very critical that you understand what buffers belong in these rifles and why because the rifle that works you know reliably during the summertime all of a sudden may not function at all in the wintertime so we're going to go over the actual milspec or Colt designed buffers now for again for anybody who out there who likes to mess around buffers and says look what I found I have a very thick folder of testing that Colt did over the years buffer variations talking about buffer weights versus climatic conditions versus barrels so I can pretty much tell you that anything that you've messed around with Colt is done before the buffer so we're going to talk about here are the actual production ones that go in military weapons now there's many manufacturers out there who offer all different kinds of buffers so that are supposedly improvements and whatnot we're going to go over the ones that would actually come in your rifle from Colt or for FN or from a milspec manufacturer who's designed their rifles to function in all climatic conditions the first ones we're gonna sort off but they're gonna be the rifle buffers and we're going to talk in depth about the different generations okay starting from the beginning the first rifles were referred to as the Edgewater spring guide this was the original buffer that came out on the original model oh one rifles now I'll keep in mind the original rifles were designed to run a hammer a propeller which was going to give you a rate of fire around 600 700 rounds a minute if we're that rate of fire it did quite well however when the military introduced a ball powder into the end of the mix you increased your rate of fire from around 700 rounds a minute up to nearly a thousand rounds a minute well with that decrease in speed did was they cause what's referred to as bolt carrier bounce but both carrier bounces is when the actual bolt carrier group closes during firing the bolt will actually close lock and then do to the bolt carrier striking the mass of the barrel and barrel extension you'll have an elastic bounce about it that carrier will start to bounce rearward taking it out just slightly out of battery so when the hammer comes to strike it the firing pin cannot reach fully the firing pin cause you get tube to misfire so basically you have to eject the round out a little better one then pull the trigger again so this would cause it's major failures during a fully automatic fire so you would have you would have a light strike do the bolt carrier bounce so after the 1968 congressional hearings the standard buffer came out well the difference is is this is an actual buffer if you listen you can actually hear there are five weights in there are five steel weights that is a steel weight and each one of those wet weights has a rubber disc in between so what this does is is the bolt carrier moves rearward and goes forward as soon as the bullet carrier would actually hit the receiver extension it would absorb that shock and prevent the bulk air from bouncing a rearward and unlocking and it would keep the bolt closed and would allow for reliable function with the higher rate of fire now pretty much all the rifles obviously have used this from probably round 1968 to this day whenever you're using a full-length gas system 20 inch barrel for the most part you know the receiver sanctions are identical between the a1 and the 82 Eve you know the a2 is additional five eighths of an inch longer the buffer actually remains the same length you actually just have a spacer that goes between the rear of the receiver extension and the stock but these have been the rhotacism they're reliable one that's been going on for quite some time and is pretty much standard throughout the world this one here sort of was an embarrassment on Colts part Colt decided they were going to do in the late 90s a cost-cutting measure and they basically knew that I was something out of manic rifle the weights have no difference well the full length rifle quite frankly it doesn't because you if you have the bulk carrier balance it doesn't make a difference because your finger would never be able to outrun the actual you know the actual action of the rifle so they realize this so they basically made a buffer that would give enough weight to hold the bolt closed long enough and the steel waist were not necessary for you since in some item Bank now if you're trying to put this in a fully automatic rifle it would not function you would have the light strikes and it just wouldn't function well cold cold got a lot of flack from from their customers they're spending a lot of money for these rifles and all of a sudden they're getting stuff is die even milspec so this was a very short-lived cost-cutting measure it did not take long enough for that to be replaced if I may go back to the original standard buffer which is what they use today the next one we're going to talk about is the actual hydraulic buffer many of you have seen the anodyne 's and several other of the hydraulic buffers well many of them if not well quite frankly they don't work they tend to lose the seals tend to go and they don't function that's why they're not very popular all for military use however during the development of the Colt LMG or light machine gun which is actually done by die mecha at the time it was undone by Colt it was an open ball machine gun design designed by calls hang tight ro the initial design was done by Hank Tatro at Colt but due to many issues that were going on at Colt at the time including the the strike which basically shut them down cold head bow ability to do any engineering work so this was sent over to D'Amico and they realized that with the open boat machine gun that if they slow down the rate of fire that would make the thing is surgically accurate and fully out of MEC which this was the result this does not use the standard spring this has a different spring which is much shorter and it's it's designed to work from the open bolt and this brought the rate of fire down with ball propellant will university it was standard m855 ball mater ball ammunition and bob pollin it brought it down to Pryor around 700 even rounds a minute and it just purred like a kitten accuracy was incredible however like all of the hydraulic buffers there was issues with the seals of the seals breaking damico did actually offer a rebuild kit to rebuild these buffers as well and this has been probably the the most successful hydraulic buffer used by the military the US military dimecaco or cold canada has sold theses several of their of their customers i believe that you see Netherlands Denmark Norway there were several countries who have actually bought versions of the open bolt machine gun LMG also they bought the LMG in a closed bolt as well but would still use the hydraulic buffer my experience that hydraulic buffers has not been good this one here is different this was actually in military grade one where a lot of time and money was put into it to make the best hydraulic buffer that was it could be made this is sort of a unicorn let's say these are manufactured in Canada the only product meant with the Colt LNG's and spare parts this would not be something that you would find very regular very rarely it just was never imported it was pretty much only used in that one model with the Colt LMG and that was it this is sort of a good example of the the standard buffers now people have discovered that if they add some additional weight to these they can get a little lighter recoil however there are consequences to that the rifle is really a system you have you know you have a buffer you have a buffer spring you have a bolt carrier you have a gas port you have a nation that has chamber pressures and port pressures now a military rifle has to function in all different kinds of environments if you decide you're going to change something in there you can pretty much guarantee one of those is gonna be thrown off balance and you're gonna have issues and one of the major issues that comes up is uh you know people say hey this just works beautiful and I have later recoil well sudden here comes the gun a cold Nelson now it's not working you may or may not understand or know that ammunition functions differently it's chemical reaction is different between hot weather and cold weather during your cold weather you create a much lower port pressure than you do with the standard regular normal temporary conditions and when you add that with the additional weight of a buffer you can actually cause the rifle to short stroke or to not have enough pore pressure to dry the bolt all the way to the rear or to reload this is why it's critical for people who are using these guns for le military purposes that even though there's a lot of neat stuff out there you stick with what comes to the factory it's not for a reason the gun centers there coming in a cult coming out of LMT coming out of FN these guns were designed as military weapons to function in all environmental conditions and if you change anything in that system they're giving very severe consequences well this is sort of the reason why I would recommend anybody who is using these rifles to stick with the milspec type buffers - these ones we're going to talk about here because there's a reason to the method that's ana madness of why these specific buffers for use as opposed to many of the quote improved buffers that you're going to see throughout the industry now for the most part if you're a you know your just target shooter you know using these things for recreational purposes you know have at it do whatever you want just make sure whatever you're doing is still safe but you guys who are professionals we're working at me in this field you need to be really careful of what what you put in these guns the next ones we're gonna take a look in it's going to be the actual carbine buffers themselves things get a little bit more complex here now we're gonna start with the carbine buffers the original buffer that was used in the original xm177 is excellent 177 e2s was a shorter buffer which had three steel weights and there's actually a cut-off you're kind of later we can actually see what's happening in there we have the actual rear bumper which actually strikes the rear of the receiver extension you can see the actual steel weight and the rubber disc what can you actually can see three steel weights with two rubber discs and what happens is you can see how these move back and forth so is the bolt carrier bolts moving to the rear it's pushing rearward on the actual bumpers they all shift to the rear then as it goes forward it actually halts the bounce of the bolt carrier this worked quite well up until the development of the m4 carbine now the m4 carbine it wasn't so much is that the issue came around its rate of fire it came with the actual presentation of the m855 round into the into the chamber holding the bolt back long enough for the cartridges to be able to pick up when coal developed the the m4 there was a couple things they did to prevent the issue of the problem with the ground presenting itself in time the first was the the creation of the m4 feed ramps which was the extension of the Fein ramps they would go into the laura mercier her to the upper receiver which you could see the difference on the barrel extension itself as well as the receiver so that basically cleared it some of the m855 around could present itself the second was the creation of the h2 buffer now if you look at this buffer you'll see that there's a couple different colors in here you have a shiny weight then you have the actual steel the shiny one is actually tungsten tungsten one tungsten weight is about the same weight as to steel buffer to buffer weights so what that additional weight does is it gives a little more resistance let me get a bolt carrier moves rearward to slow us down just enough and also when it closes a high rate of fire it's additional weight to what to halt the ball from moving back now however the reason for this was again was to allow for the positioning on the m855 ball round now first far as the issue with the m855 ammunition only one of these was necessary either the H buffer or the extended feed Rams however colt kept both the recent colt kept both of these changes on the m4 rather than just take the one it was necessary for the functioning they needed to prove to the military that the m4 was not part of the 1968 licensing agreement unless the agreement basically made it so everything that was done as a derivative of the m16 was already owned by the US government and therefore Colt could not make any money out so they wanted to show that the m4 carbine had several things that were changed on it that were due to their expenses and they owned it rather than the army so this was a two additional items that were done on the m4 that were different from the standard m16 you know rifle system which was and you know eventually is what led to the m4 being its own weapons platform it's on some family of weapons as opposed to the m16 as we spoke a little bit earlier we have two different types of buffer weights we have the steel and we have tungsten tungsten is significantly more expensive however it has much more mass to it basically you have one tungsten the weight is equivalent to two steel weights so that enables you to see a much heavier buffer with a carbine length buffer you only have enough room for three or three weights in there that's about it so the tungsten enables you to increase the the mass of the the buffer when needed the next buffer we're gonna talk about is the h2 buffer what h2 means is you have two tungsten weights and one steel this was developed during need and for a one program for so camera which slowed cam develop the m4a1 it had a much heavier barrel so basically what's happening with the H buffer was as the buffer was moving rearward and as the bolt would close there wasn't enough weight there to actually stop the bolt carrier bounce so if you were to try to fire a heavy barrel the 14 1/2 inch heavy barrel on fully automatic you would encounter all those light strikes so buy any additional tungsten weight and weight to halt the actual carrier bounce itself within the buffer so that was developed specifically for the heavier barrel what happens is once you the heavier mass you have up front the more of a bounce you're going to get off of the bolt carrier when it strikes there but the barrel extension so again the heavier in the barrel the more elasticity that you get and the more about so you're going to get back so when you change your barrel that's much the length but the actual weight itself heavier you go the more weight you're going to need to provide the bulk carrier vows again this is specifically with firing a fully automatic fire if you would have that same barrel and you're referring to something automatic only you could use a standard buffer you can use a you know an H buffer but if we're fully automatic that's why you would need this also you'll see the h2 buffers being used on the external piston type carbines the reason being is you have a much more violent opening stroke on the external piston or the short stroke tap that long stroke Pistons so this does is it gives it a little bit more resistance than beginning before the opens up you can also see this for instance if you look at the inside of the receiver of an external piston gun you'll see where the cam pin itself cuts into the upper receiver that's a perfect example of your having a much more violent opening stroke and also you tend to have a higher rate of fire with with the external pistons as well as you know to make them function reliably geremy have a higher rate of fire so the h2 buffer is used specifically on heavy barrel and generally external piston guns I can definitely give you a story regarding this man worked at Colt we had an issue with the police department who had English 10 or 12 rifles that were not operational and fully automatic they wouldn't function but in semi-automatic they were and they had told us that these were you know or commandos well you know we Jenica I couldn't figure out over the phone what was going on with it it was just one of our commandos so I had said in two of the rifles well we got the rifles back they were cold upper lower receivers however the barrel itself was a heavy barrel Bushmaster so the problem was they were using a standard H buffer in that rifle so when even flutter if I'm fully out of bank you'd have so much elasticity of the book here bounced back so much it would cause the light strike issue so I'll we did was just knocked it out with a with an h2 and sure enough it worked fine after that generally we would have replaced the barrel isn't a banking treasure for the barrel because they all shoulda got it from our configuration but to being a nice guy that I am you know we told them you need to just replace these buffers and the rifle should work fine which they did the next thing we're going to look at is called the h3 the h3 buffer was designed specifically for one rifle the Colt infantry automatic rifle the I err was actually a 16 inch heavy barrel there was a significantly of your barrel didn't it slow calm barrel it was used on a 14mm for a once so it was experienced with a massive amount of light strikes due to that that heavy barrel so cold it was forced to go with the h3 which was three Thompson White's as the heaviest buffer the colt has ever offered and again this was specifically designed for the IAR and this also goes back to environmental conditions the buffers that you see here were designed for specific weapons so the biggest thing I really want to get for D you will get through you guys I want you to understand that buffers were designed for certain conditions and again those certain conditions are functioning reliably regardless of whether you're in the Arctic or in the desert in temperate or whatever the weather conditions may be because believe it or not the actual chemical reaction which consists when the program the powder burns under certain external conditions has a has a bearing on the way the wife a little function cold weather makes a difference it makes a difference I'm the gas pressure first far as a functioning reliability reliability I was like giving you guys some kind of examples when I first built by my mark 1291 I had assumed because it was just a heavy barrel then I would go with h2 on it well there's another condition existed with the with the mark 18 barrel had taken consideration was it was not 16 inches it was 18 inches and also the fact that he used a rifle gas system person is a carbine so the day that I went to fire I had the the h2 in it and it was probably around 13 degrees negative 30 every time I would fire have we had short stroking and you know was it was without without without love it without a hiccup every single one was a short was a short stroke fortunately that day I had a POF Puritan out there which had a standard three weight carbine buffer so I swapped out the h2 for that and sure enough the rifle worked perfect since then I've had that same rifle in the Texas heat you know over a hundred degrees and it functions perfect the mark 12 required a lighter buffer to function in all weather conditions and again that was a combination of 18-inch barrel rifle blank gas system as opposed to a 14 1/2 inch barrel with a carbine system or 16 inches with a carbine system the again you have the team pressure you have the port pressure on the barrel and from the pore pressure you have how long the bullet plugs it until it leaves the end of the muzzle all that works is a system so again I'm gonna say again to any guys who are professionals who are using your guns and law enforcement military conditions leave them alone you want to change out your pistol grip or your hand guards that's one thing but when it comes to actually impacting the mechanics of the rifle leave your gun as it was issued they were designed to work under all conditions you start messing around with those things you're start messing around with either your life or whoever's be carrying that rifle last buffer I want to show you is a pretty interesting one this was only type this was never actually put into production coltd designed it to work with their xm177 of course the earlier carbines to try to lower the rate of fire and you know it did do that however there was a reliability issue with it again you have hydraulic seals in there that would actually come undone they would actually dry up or they would they would break and it would cause the part to fail so coal just never went anywhere with it but it was it was definitely unique an efficient effect you had a flat bumper on the back as opposed to the you know because of the current ones but this was rather interesting the next buffers we're going to talk about it once for the 9-millimeter carbines and submachine guns now this is a rather interesting topic here due to the fact that you see a lot of people who when they mess around building these 9 millimeters they're swapping around buffers like crazy now if you really understand what the consequences of a lot of it are the five point five ounce buffer is one of the one of the heaviest ones that is offered it's manufactured out of steel this additional weight is necessary due to the fact that the nine millimeter is actually a blowback rather than a gas-operated so it's the actual weight of the buffer the spring and the bulk air that keeps the bolt closed long enough for pressure to drop so it can safely extract and inject the nine millimeter cartridge case so the first one we're going to talk about here is the actual two-piece selective fire buffer basically have two pieces you can see how it's pinned in place you have a piece of rubber that's inside there and what this one here does is it allows on fully automatic fire to absorb the shock is necessary to prevent light strikes so this one here would specifically be used for selective fire of course it could be fired and in any of the cinematic only variations but if you were to have a fully automatic you would you would need to have this particular model right here the next one is you can see is the exact same weight however it's a solid buffer it's one piece called it sold these for many many years in there nine-millimeter semi-automatic only carbines this did come to an end just because there's no point in cold having two different part numbers for the same thing however this one here if you were to fire this one in a selected fire knightly r sm g you would have the issues with the light strikes so you know when in doubt if you think you're gonna be using anything it's fully automatic you always wanna make sure you go to the to the two-piece now some changes were made in 2009 Colt never finalized the design of the 9mm your submachine gun they never want anything it was gonna compete with their at before and they didn't really sell a lot of the nine-millimeter SMGs they only made him once a year so they never really finalized them in 2009 while I was there we were in Jamaica or we had a major failure with one was the bolt came back so far the fire cartridge case went into the trigger compartment and got lodged in between the compartment and the bolt itself and the reason it was able to do that was because if you look at the overall length of a nine millimeter bolt versus a standard bolt you have actually a pride another half an hour half inch to an inch that sticks out from the face of the carrier for the bolt well and locks up a nice last shot that stops right near the bolt catch well with a nine millimeter you have that open and you know half inch or inch or so space and what that does is it only is a give additional time for the bolt to accelerate before it impacts the bolt catch but it also leaves that trigger compartment open so we and we had had both we had the issue with the cartridge getting stuck as well as we had you know some issues with some of the light strikes well we got back to Colt we finally were able to get them to do some research into it they did some high-speed video when they figure out what we told them was going on and the solution was mainly a spacer was 1/2 inch longer so space sure that went in the rear of the buffer spring so when the bolt came back on the 9-millimeter it would stop at the exact same location as the standard five five six that was that kept the trigger compartment covered at all times and it also the bolt stopped right before the bolt catch which eliminated the time of acceleration from from the time it was to the rear of the worst most position to its closing on the other bolt catch and this was made a major difference in breaking ball catches this was this was really big for that now there have been companies that have actually made longer buffers which is definitely a good idea but you need to make sure that you're still in the 5.5 ounce weight I have seen people with carbines who have put regular you know three steel carbine buffers and the nine million carbines and this was dangerous they liked it because of the increase the rate of fire the other problem that it had with it was when it fired the bolt would actually start to move rearward in the rear of the nine millimeter cartridge case would be unsupported and you would see like a bubbling or or like a swelling right right in front of the the rim of the night under cartridge case this is rather dangerous that is that's why the you have to understand how everything works together to make a reliable firearm so you need to stay with the proper weight buffers to have the gunner function reliably I would always recommend that if you have you know one of these standard 9-millimeter buffers think about a bucket or a buck and a half in quarters stick it in the back of your receiver extension what that will do is it will give you that extra half-inch there so you're a shorten up that gap between the I'm only your bolts and the the bolt catch and that will eliminate your issue with having you know deal with first of all the acceleration issue would cause the bolt catch to break and also make sure that your trigger compartment was covered at all times that's one very easy and very harmless improvement that you can make to that to that car being the last ones we're gonna show you here are actually when the Sullivan band came the coconut longer sell the telescopic stock verses of the nine millimeter carving so they had to go with a full rank stocks so a buffer was modified to get it up to the weight that it needed to be so basically what you have here is a standard buffer which inside you have seven steel weights and you have the rubber bumpers in there and what that did was that made this this this what this buffer itself suitable for use in a full-length stock receiver extension you can pretty much tell these because when you shake them you don't hear anything because they're pretty much compacted in there and second of all cult usually would just hit some Sinnott with some spray paint black identify it as a nine millimeter carbine buffer so again if you were to have a folding stock and a nine moment you need to make sure that you had the proper buffer I don't believe I've ever seen anybody make this this buffer here outside of cult so saying that they're not out there but for safety reasons I would make sure that if you do have that that you had the proper buffer now Cole has done some other ones as well for instance for the 222 Remington that they made for Italy there are some countries they couldn't have US military weapons or military calibers so said I've gone with the two to three they had to go to the two to two what they did was they took the standard carbine buffer and they took all the weights out of it and just been just put in any put one on each side so one on the one side of the spring one on the other side of the buffer spring and that lighten it up so it would function properly with the lighter impulse another two 22 let's give you a topic atop you hear of how you identify what the buffers are the unmarked is the standard carving buffer with three steel weights the H means to steal one tungsten h2 means one steel to tungsten an h3 is three tungsten I'm gonna do a quick recap on why you when you use what 470 item attic only direct impingement rifle your you go with the standard carbine or the H in each I tend a favor just do the fact that there are a lot of rifles that don't have the extended m4 feed ramps and with some of the projectile tips it's just a better just a better reliability enhancement to keep with the H the h2 is for use only with heavy barrels and with ones that are external piston short stroke or long stroke now again you're not going to see a lot of the differences with a nine piston rifle just doing the fact that it's their semi-automatic only however if your friend select to fire you will see a difference between a heavy barrel and a standard barrel the bulk carrier balance will cause failures to fire if you have a piston gun external piston I highly recommend it just to try to save some wear and tear on the on the inside of the upper receiver and the h3 is a very limited use buffer it is only in the most extreme circumstances of having a heavy barrel for instance again cold heavy IR a 16-inch massively heavy barrel that's what it would that's what it was used for now with its weight you probably could get away with using it for a nine-millimeter however I would not recommend it and it's not what was designed for it was designed for a very specific purpose all of these buffers are available at Brownells and all these different configurations many people who build these rifles you know look at the person say oh they look the same so they probably are the same and that's uh the farthest from the truth everything that you see you know here every buffer here is different it was designed for a different purpose again for you guys who were experimenting you're messing around on the range and everything you know what do whatever you want you know it's it's not as critical there you can experiment but for you guys who are in military law enforcement or who are using these guns for self-defense stick with what comes with a gun there's a reason for it and if you're building the guns like I said if you're using a 16 a strict impingement barrel a standard or an H before the H if you're doing selective fire that's when a lot of the H and the h2 and h3 come into play you guys who are building 9-millimeters granite a layer buffer will give you a higher rate of fire and I know some of you guys look like that however it is not safe your your bolt is actually opening prior to the pressures that are that are dropping you need to stay with the 5.5 ounce steel buffers and I would recommend yeah I know Brownells also sells the spacer that colt produces to put in the back at the back of the recoil spring again that is an awesome improvement it takes care of the you know many of the issues that come along with ball catches Breaking and cartridge cases going into the trigger compartment it also helped a little bit with the wear on the knee hammer pins themselves nine millimeter hammer pins is one of the most frequently broken part it's just very important that you understand what your circumstances are what environments that you're going to be in here in Southeast Texas I have to worry about cold weather too much however New York when is living there yeah we had we went from you know hundreds down to the negatives and and I had a perfect place where I could actually see the differences of how I plan will function the same rifle the same system with the same ammo under two very different climatic conditions but I can always say if I had the proper bumper buffers in there that came with them I had never had a hitch of any weapon systems I ever use going from one condition to the other if you have any questions or anything please listed in the comments down there I'll try anything back to you I hope you enjoyed this video and if you did please click like and please subscribe thank you

Channel: SmallArmsSolutions

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Id: DYf-MLMODhA

Length: 35min 11sec (2111 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 07 2018