HBASA

**HoggerNaut** · 13-01-2012, 14:23

A reply I got on M4carbine regarding the NEA-15

Man, I can literally tell you ANYTHING you want to know about that gun. I just finished writing a 10,000 word article comparing it to the TDP which I will be posting up soon on another site.

The basic info is as follows:

Good: The barrel is really nice. It's a polygonal barrel in CMV; they won't name the supplier but I suspect Green Mountain. It's a fairly heavy profile, .850 behind the gas block and .750 ahead. Despite this, the rifle itself is fairly light.

The BCG is solid...8620 and 158 Carpenter, good small bits... They batch test rather than individually test, so if that bothers you it's worth knowing.

Early trigger pulls were apparently brutal...they put in a trigger spring out of some full-auto machine and it ended up being something like a 15 pound pull. They got complaints and fixed it. The current pull is OK.

Bad:

Commercial receiver extension on the standard model, here at least

I'm not a big fan of the way they mount the rail (although the rail itself is kind of cool...I like the slabside thing they're doing with it). I think you would want to make sure both sides of the rail were evenly torqued to make sure there weren't alignment issues.

Unsure whether good or bad:

This thing is made out of billet 6061. The standard for receivers (as you probably know) is forged 7075. NEA's position is that 6061 makes better billet parts than 7075, and they designed with 6061 in mind. I don't know exactly what to say about that. My usual reaction would be to just walk away, but I know the guys behind this thing and they're fairly switched on guys. NEA is an offshoot of NorthEastern Aerospace, who make some pretty high-end plane bits. I believe they worked on the landing gear for the F18, for example. So how you feel about their gun depends a bit on how you feel about their ability to transfer their aerospace engineering abilities to building guns.

Similarly they are convinced their barrel treatment is uber-super. It's a form of meloniting which I believed they developed for use in aircraft landing gear. The barrels are warranteed for life for semi-auto applications so they seem to think that nobody's going to shoot one out...on the other hand so few people ever shoot out a 4140 DPMS barrel they may just figure that it won't cost them anything to replace one or two.

My basic take is that if your options were a 6920, a DDXV, and this, and you had the cash and so on...don't get this.

If your options are Stag, Armalite, and this...yeah, I would get this.

I can tell you that their warranty service is top notch. There were a couple of guns here in Canada that had undersized gas ports drilled in, but which were test fired with a suppressor on, so nobody noticed. The people who got those uppers were sent shipping labels and new uppers immediately rather than having to wait for their uppers to get checked or repaired. They just got new uppers couriered to them...I would call that pretty good.

Anyway I don't work for NEA but on account of my research fetish I have written extensively about this gun. It's the first Canadian production AR so it gets a lot of press up here.

If you have questions, just ask. I will be amazed if you can ask me a question I can't answer, unless it's "who is their supplier for X" because that is something I just could not pry out of them.

**curious george** · 13-01-2012, 14:35

Originally Posted by HoggerNaut

......but on account of my research fetish .....

*off topic:weirdo!*

Thanx for that info HN.

DS · 13-01-2012, 14:45

Originally Posted by Lian

read this on NEA's site:

- Q: Are your barrels chrome lined?
- A: No. We subject all of our barrels to our proprietary ARC ⁺processing, an advanced form of nitro-carburizing.

so.... is the ARC+ process actually better than being chrome-lined, or is it just fancy wording?
just curious about the process/details.

Nitride coating is not the same as hard chrome coating.

Nitride is tougher than hard chrome.

It is not bullshit - Patric Sweeney reported in on of his books that DSA says that their nitride coated barrels have a comparable life of 25k - 30k compared to a chrome lined barrel's 15k. Imo those figures are for barrel life that will still put out fairly accurate shots - it does not mean that the barrel cannot stabilize a bullet anymore. You will most probably get battle accuracy well beyond that and cqb accuracy even more well beyond that.

Pat Rogers has shot an BC EAG rifle with well over 40k rounds afaik - Google FILTHY 14 or read here http://www.ar15.com/forums/t_3_12/51...t_Rogers_.html

This rifle has done more than the round count when the article was written in SWAT mag.

I saw a post by Robert Silvers on the 300BLK Forum the other day where he said it is a well known fact by now that a barrel with nitride coated bore lasts about 60% longer than a chrome lined bore and a chrome lined bore last a lot longer than a non coated bore.

So if barrel still has decent service in it after 40k rounds it means with nitride coating it will still be decent at 64k rounds. Relate that to money and you will see that it will cost you around R320'000 to get to 64k rounds. Very few people out there can afford to shoot out the barrel of a NEA rifle.