With no forward assist, How do you seat the cartridge if, for any number of reasons, it fails to achieve battery?
That VLTOR looks like a good beefy piece of equipment, so I must be missing the obvious.
Robin
put your finger in the indented portion of the bolt carrier (where the gas vent holes are) and push it forward. if that doesn't work you either have an out of spec round or a chamber obstruction, in which case pull the charging handle and get the bad round out of there.
Not fun to do after you've fired it for a while.
That's why I'd go with a side charging upper on an Ares lower. The generally run more than $150 though.
Meke- Thanks for the info.
Unfortunately a standard LH upper is a no-go on the SCR since you can't use the corresponding LH BCG (SCR has a proprietary bolt carrier). On a RH BCG when the gun is in battery, the cam pin cams to the left, and on a LH BCG the pin cams to the right. The SCRs pin cams to the left (for RH use), with no ability to get one that works the other way without fabricating one from scratch.
DPMS actually made a LH upper that used the RH carrier and a special LH bolt head, which would work fine w/ the SCR, and that was my initial plan. Problem is that the gas vent holes in the BCG end up venting into the solid wall of the upper, and then back into the upper and lower. I figured venting the gas directly back into the action was not a recipe for success in the long run. Only other option would be to put setscrews in the RH vent holes, and drill new vent holes on the LH side but I don't envy the proposition of trying to drill and tap 8-32 or 10-32 holes into a hardened bolt carrier. I'm actually pretty bummed I won't be able to use the DMPS upper, that would be been absolutely perfect for what I want, I just don't want issues down the line due to all the crud the carrier will be dumping back into the guts of the gun. The only other viable option would be to convert the gun to piston, which gets rid of the gas venting issue, but I'm well past the point of diminishing returns then.
The LH upper linked is actually made w/ the DPMS LH upper I mentioned before, JSE must be assembling them in house.