Hi guys, I recently picked up a Colt AR-15A4. It’s my first carry handle.
Using a bubble level the front sight seems level as is the handguard and rail on the upper. When carefully mounted, the top of the carry handle isn’t level – and that doesn’t seem like a big deal.
However, the rear sight has some play and is oriented toward 11 o’clock. Is there a way to straighten it? It took 9 clicks to the right to correct the windage at 25 meters and one more at 100 yards. That seems excessive. Snap sight picture is awkward with this setting too.
I would contact Colt about fixing this under warranty. This is not your job to make their stuff work correctly. And it’s not an AK where canted sights and wonky rear sight blocks are considered “in spec.”
The rear sight oriented towards 11 o clock is normal and believe it or not, is how they are designed. As to the rest of your questions, I couldnt say without seeing it. Get Colt involved would be your best option.
There is nothing wrong though I have always found that spec to be garbage and unacceptable for me. I’ve had 2 civilian guns do that. One had 1 clicks remaining and the other only 2. Should be better from any manufacturer, however, the windage is “in-spec” if you achieve successful target engagements. More times than not, to either correct a windage adjustment problem or, to satisfy OCDness, a simple facing / lapping / truing of the upper rcvr face will bring you to center or very near center. The other part of the rear sight that drives those unfamiliar with the carry handle (fixed / detachable) design is the intentionally-engineered, wiggleness, looseness, etc of the rear sight assembly. Some actually shim them but totally unnecessary.
Not seeing the issue here, everything appears normal.
You could always try a different carry handle and that’s what I’d do first to see if I could get the windage more centered. The way Colt installs FSBs leaves very little room for alignment error.
While it looks off, it should function correctly. It looks more or less like hundreds of other rifles I’ve seen, and should not affect the function. Just get the rifle zeroed and note how many clicks from the left you are.
Also, congrats on picking up a nice rifle. A 20" A4 style Colt is on my bucket list.
If your picture shows the rear sight as it’s sighted in then I say you are doing pretty good. I have had many A2 sights that didn’t sight in anywhere close to that centered but worked just fine. In the old days people would whack the front sight with a hammer or just keep trying A2 sights/A4 carry handles until something lined up.
It’s an AR invented for guys to carry into battle made by the lowest bidder, not a Swiss watch [emoji39]
I thought there was a spec for how close actual zero should be to mechanical zero, but I can’t remember it off the top my head and a quick google didn’t reveal it. I pulled out my parts built A4 and my carry handle sight is run about 3/4 of the way to the left to be zeroed. My rear sight assembly has the same slight cant, but it’s not an issue for me. I actually enjoy shooting carry handle irons a lot–I’m halfway searching for an A2 to be a dedicated iron sight gun, because I kind of want to build my A4 in to GWOT style set-up with an ACOG and an M5 quad rail, but I haven’t done it yet because I like shooting the carry handle so much.
If you’re not happy with the rifle I’d contact Colt. If you are new to shooting a carry handle, it might be worth letting someone with more experience on an M16 style gun check yours out and see what they think.
100% normal. Every Colt carry handle I’ve owned was cockeyed like that. Or oriented towards 11 o’clock, there’s spring pressure pushing it that way, and the play is normal. It’s one of those things where you go “huh, that’s weird…” then you go shoot the gun and never think about it again. At least I never thought about it again until this thread popped up.
Waaaaita minute, a couple years ago you were posting about running over a 6920 with a SUV and saying it worked fine.
I remember because I got sick of reading about it and put together a PSA 6920 clone to do the same thing. Problem is that it shot so good that I decided to keep it and not risk effing it up.
