These are tools and are thus improved out of necessity. This isn’t arts and crafts; companies don’t get creativity points. :suicide2:
I guess a lot of people here have a hard time understanding why people keep trying turning the AR into something it’s not. If you want a folding stock piston driven rifle then just get a SCARS, or something like it. What is the point of cobbling together a bunch parts just to make the AR not an AR.
I came across the Para TTR in a magazine a few months ago. They had a good review on it, just as every magazine has on every product in it. I wouldn’t buy one.
Para announced a few days ago that they no longer going to make it.
The para was the same design as the Z-M Weapons one. No clue who was making it for who.
I held the para a few years ago but didn’t get to fire it. The stock felt very cheap from what I remember. I didn’t like it. No clue how well the thing worked. The lack of an sbr upper was enough to not interest me. A 10.5 or 11.5 upper might have interested me although if you really want a short weapon you have some other options.
The review was actually for an SBR version. It was in Guns & Weapons for Law Enforcement if I remember correctly? I think it had a 10.5" barrel. It was less than a month ago that I saw the article while perusing the magazines at the local Walmart.
The stock does look cheap, it bothers me for some reason, too blocky maybe. I don’t think they had any pictures of the internals. I’ll definitely pass pass on it. As was mentioned, pick up a SCAR if you want a folding stock. Or maybe even an ACR…
Personally I could care less if someone wants to build a new AR out of horsehit. But, if they try to push that new idea as something it’s not then I have an issue.
Why does anyone think that Para is dropping that weapon from their production? It’s not because of great sales.
The bottom line is that the AR has received a bad wrap for many years partially because people give birth to ARbortions that should never have seen the light of day and then they tell everyone it is crap.
Or people continue to perpetuate old myths that should have died years ago. Trying to turn the AR into something it isn’t is silly. Especially when there are other products on the market.
A while back I asked Ken Elmore why he won’t sell his lower receivers on the market for people to build from. He stated pretty simply- “because I don’t want to some unskilled moron building an AR with the SAW name and logo that doesn’t run and then my company name gets a bad wrap”.
Having seen some of the stuff that I have I completely agree.
maybe this is a derail, maybe it isn’t… but what’s everyone’s favorite folder platform?
The only value I see in a side folder is in vehicles or in some other environment where space is limited. My AK74s fits nicely behind my truck seat and much nicer in my backpack. The AR, not so much, the extra 8" or so does make a difference in that respect, but is more accurate, and other than those two scenarios I like the AR platform better.
Having a side folder AR with universal mags and ammo would fill a niche quite nicely. So would having a side folding ak that took AR mags and ammo which seems much more do-able. If Arsenal did that I would be all over it.
+1. I think innovation got us to this point, but don’t take the spots off a leopard and tell me it’s a dog.
An ar was configured that way. When you try to"cobble" a rifle into somthing it’s not, good things are not going happen. Been there, screwed that up.
I am utterly puzzled by folks who argue that you shouldn’t attempt to innovate or adapt the AR. To the man that tries, even if he fails, I give a big kudos. It takes a lot of cash and time to build something like the Para side folder, it takes a lot of nerve to risk that much cash and time. Innovation, adaptation and risk-taking are powerful forces that advance the state of the art. To folks who have never done any of these things I suppose it is obvious you shouldn’t do these things. I am grateful to and admiring of risk-takers and innovators.
Sure I could try to design an engine that runs on cow farts too. Does the market want it? No. But you should applaud me because I’m creative? I don’t think so. The days are long gone when I get scratch and sniff stickers on my work just because I had a creative idea.
Is it needed is the question? Our family and business are very active in the entrepreneurial scene in our area; there are plenty of broke guys out there that think just because they’re creative, they’ll make money. If the market is saturated and there is no need for ‘re-inventing the wheel’, people aren’t going to buy your product just because you’re creative. Especially at that price point.
The point isn’t that we are resisting adaptation or innovation. We have to realize that there is only a certain amount of adaptation that can be done when you are using the same receiver that has been around for +/- half a century and still achieve results similar too, or better than, something that is designed ground-up for a piston, folding stock, bluetooth automatic garage door opener etc.
As for the Para, ZM, RRA and so on, I really don’t regard these as innovation. They use a receiver block similar to what ACE has produced for the AR and other rifles for some time now and hacked the BCG in half to cobble together a recoil system that will fit and hopefully work in adverse conditions. When they fail to sell and go by the wayside, like the Para, what are the owners going to do for parts?
I have been shooting for almost a half a century and I have witnessed a lot of controversies in that time. Optics on service rifles, the flat top AR, the M4, the AR10/M16/AR15 design itself were, in their youth, harshly and widely criticized. If, over the millennia, the innovators had listened to the naysayers we wouldn’t be shooting our Aimpoint sighted M4s, we’d be sitting around the campfire in a loincloth and a bone in our nose. I’ve observed that there are always an abundance of reasons for the risk-taker to not take risks and for the innovator to not innovate and never a shortage of people to point out these reasons.
a “Sign of the times”…sad but true…:agree:
as has been said in earlier reply’s there are many other good, reliable, accurate, available rifles to apply the folding stock to…the Ruger Mini 14/30 being one of them.
I’d like to say that i had a Mini-14 years ago and purchased a folding stock for it…i was NOT satisfied with it at all! i did not like the feel, operation and steadiness of it at all!
in fact, later down the line, i changed my M4 to a fixed A2 buttstock and like it MUCH better…JMO
If someone wants to innovate in firearm design they should - but they should develop a system from the ground up to support their innovations - not hack up a known good system into something it can’t reliably support for the sake of their ideas. Look at Magpul’s rifle and the SCAR… Those are two companies that know ARs and recognized there were limitations they couldn’t overcome to do what they felt needed to be done in the realm of innovation…
In fact, no one here has said “DON’T INNOVATE!” What they said was - this particular innovation is ill-conceived and doesn’t really work ON AN AR, nor it is 100% necessary - so they don’t see the need when someone else already built said “better mousetrap” in more modern rifles.
So, if I take a Ford Escort and chop off the rear part of the cabin and replace it with a wood truck bed, should I have people pat me on the back for such a wonderful innovation even though what I did was completely useless?
My new innovation cannot function as it was originally designed, and it cannot function well in its new redesigned configuration either.
The point here is that the Para/ZM/RRA/OA-93 weapons are NOT well designed, and the idiot that came up with the brilliant idea that an AR type rifle needs a folding stock shouldn’t be praised for chopping a bolt carrier in half, and welding a piston on where the carrier key should be…
If you want a useless hacked-up weapon, by all means, go for the Para/ZM “design”.
I’ll tell you one more thing about innovation. It’s impossible to know up front which innovations will work and which will fail. I have worked in electronics manufacturing for decades where rapid advance is a way of life. I have personally had too many ideas I thought were sure bets and seen them go sour and seen too many seemingly bad ideas succeed to join the ever present crowd hurling slings and arrows at the innovators.
All you guys hurtling the slings and arrows, Eugene Stoner had to endure the same sort of naysayers. John Moses Browning, Richard Gatling, Georg Luger, Paul Mauser, every one of them had the same insults hurled at their inventions. It’s something anyone and everyone who wants to depart from the status quo has to cope.
It’s the easiest thing in the world to sit on the sidelines and yell at the quarterback that he’s doing it wrong. He’s heard it all before.
I totally support departing from the the status quo, as you put it.
What I think is entirely stupid is to take a chop saw to a workable design of known performance, and calling that innovation.
You are free to think whatever you want, but this particular “design” is not a design, but rather, it is a poorly assembled collection of half-baked bubba-style modifications.
If you are going to market a weapon, at least redesign the bolt carrier, rather than chopping up the existing design…
Are we talking about the same gun? The Para TTR? The 2010 Shooting Illustrated Magazine’s Golden Bullseye Award for Rifle of the Year. That gun?