I had one for a couple years. I bought it for $350 at a local gunshop on consignment from a guy who was buying a SOCOM M1-A and it was LNIB. I figured it was worth the money and it was cheap enough to play with. I had owned the original version, a Sterling. That one was all steel.
At the price I bought mine, it was well worth it. I liked it, it was fun, and I thought it better than a Mini-14, which would have ran me more. It was no AR-15 though.
The gun was light. The pencil barrel (non-chrome lined) and the plastic lower, etc. made for a very light gun. I added an ACE folding stock to it, which greatly improved the balance, handling, and utility of the rifle. It made a huge difference. If I owned another, I would immeadiately replace the stock again. Even if I used a fixed ACE without the folder. The OEM stock wasn’t terrible, but there was a better option once the ban died.
The gas block was held by two hex-head bolts. You were supposed to loosen them and rotate the gas block around to zero the rifle. Yes, there was windage adjustments on the rear sight, but you used the gas block to zero it. The process was time consuming and because there was no index markings (mark it yourself before you move it;) ) there was no way to know exactly how much you moved the gas block, nor any way to repeat movements. So by not marking it, the zero process was entirely too tedious.
Elevation was zeroed using a screw in front sight post, ala AR-15, like the original. Mine was too short. It seems it was a common problem. by the time it was zeroed, the post was barely held in the front sight base. The AR-15 post is the same, only longer, so I trimmed one down just slightly so it was still longer than the original post and that worked out well.
The handguards were thin. They got hot. Armalite kept saying that if they got hot you were shooting too fast. They continued to repeat that mantra to anyone who complained about it over on ARFCOM. I took some roof flashing and made some liners and it worked great. The HGs are copies of the original, just made of different plastic. Because of that, the fitments for the liners are already there. Simple.
The sights were simple, being an AR-15 rear sight basically. Not much to say there. The scope mount was a copy of the original, and good enough for 1965. Not exactly robust, but QD. It was tack welded on the upper. Mine worked fine. Like I said, not very robust, but good enough for what it was.
The AR-180 operating system is a gas pistion arrangment similar to the FN/FAL. It has been copied alot. It shot clean. It was easy to take care of. The gas cylinder on mine came loose and caused all sorts of jamming problems. Hmm, so much for pistons being better by default. I retourqed it with locktite and never had another problem. Apparently I was not alone with the problem, but again a simple fix.
The bolt runs on two rails, each with a return spring. Kinda like an M3 Greasegun. I never had any problems with either the new or old one. It kept the carrier from contacting the upper, so you could probably get a large amount of crap in there before you had problems. There was a track for the bolt cam to run in so it would stay in the correct position. The bolt itself was spring loaded so that it automatically popped into the forward (unlocked) postition when it was out of battery. The bolt was removeable in the original, similar to an AR-15, but in the “B” for some reason they used a roll pin to hold everything in the carrier. I know not why. You simply could not get to the insides of the bolt/carrier without driving out a rollpin. I suppose it was that since there was no direct gas, there was little need of cleaning, but no one thought of rain, etc? I dunno, but I didn’t like that one.
The firing pin was spring loaded. After a few hundred rounds, the bolt carrier peened over the firing pin hole and you couldn’t get it out. It didn’t seem to progress after that, possibly it had work hardened. Again, I didn’t have anything like that happen with the Sterling, but again it was an easy fix. I took the pin out, and chamfered the edges of the hole. The problem never returned, but I wondered just how soft the carrier was after that.
The lower was plastic. It uses a pivot pin that was C-clipped in place. The original used a pin you could remove (and loose). I don’t know which was better. The front pivot pin seems the root of all evil with this rifle. There were several people who broke the plastic lower at the pin holes. If you opened the rifle and let it swing down and smack the lower, the leverage of the upper put tremendous stress on the pivot and “snap!”. There was a warning about it in the manual. I was pretty careful with it, and even then it hit accidentaly once or twice, but never had any problems. You did have to be careful though. More careful than I cared to admit really. Every time you opened it, you felt that it might be the last time your rifle would ever work. It was a definate weak point on the plastic “B”.
The internals were straight AR-15. Because of the way they made the gun, the selector detent blew. Simple as that. It was like the safety on an old Browning Hi-Power it that it had no feel. No positive click on or off. not much to recommend there. Mine never moved once I switched it to a postion, but you wouldn’t know if it ever did. Nope, didn’t like that one bit.
The buttstock was removeable. As I said, I used an ACE stock on mine. That’s not for the faint of heart, as you have to take a hacksaw to the little stub sticking into the stock from the lower. Hey, at $350 I could afford to, and looking back on it I’d do it no matter what. The conversion is actually very easy and worth every cent. The original stock itself had a clening kit compartment, but it was too short for GI M16 rods to fit.
The rifle was accurate, reliable, and clean to shoot. Various problems cropped up, and were fairly easy fixes. Armalite did actually a VERY good job at customer service, and frankly I liked them. I don’t think the rifle had much priority in the bigger scheme of things, but that’s a no-brainer anyway. Their AR-10/AR-15 line is the bread winner, and there’s not too many good reasons I can think of to sink huge sums of capital into a gun just to compete with yourself. They intended the AR-180B to be a Mini-14 competitor, to capture the cheap market, so spending alot of money to develop things for it isn’t exactly the best strategy. Some folks came out with various scope mounts, and MI made/makes a rail handguard. So you can mount things to it easy enough. It’s easy for people to say, “It should have this, or that” when they aren’t paying to have it done and only need to pay the small sum at the consumer end.
Overall, I liked the gun, but I didn’t consider it “serious”. At $350 it was well worth it, but much over the $500 mark and you have the AR-15 builds to consider. I had always been a fan of the gun since owning a Sterling back in the day, and it always seemed to need some refining as well. I’d buy another for a blaster if it were as cheap. I would not pay current retail prices for one.
Sorry for this being so long, but there ya go.
Ross