Anyone played with one of these yet.
Ive got one landing at the end of the month and would like to know what the people more in the know think of them.
http://northeasternarms.com/
Just curious… What made you decide to go with them? Also, I see youre from South Africa… What other brands do you have access to over there? Nice to see we have AR shooters all the way out where you are.
Got the chance to shoot one and from a build and quality perspective it impressed.
And we aint spoilt for choice here. Firstly a normal citizen cant own an SLR (lots of hoops to jump through) and new its this or a Norinco.
With some patience maybe a DSArms. With the NEA we have an agent in SA aswel as the fact that the barrel has a lifetime warrenty
That’s interesting. Good to know. What does SLR stand for?
What other parts and accesories do you have access to over there?
SLR= self loading rifle.
The nice thing about accessories is that Brownells ships to SA so she’ll be dressed in magpul gear.
Parts aint that easy,but can be had.
The biggest drawback here is once customs ect has been cleared a rifle that costs $1000 in the states costs us closer to$3000.
That’s good to know. Atleast you have some access to online merchants, or one. In any case, I think you did good, especially given your options. Looking forward to updates from your end.
I believe since these are Canadian and have non-sporting features these can not be imported to the US.
They look like they have pieced together a nice carbine.
You should report back with how it holds up, and shoots.
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.
Thanks bud, really appreciate the time you took to right the response.
Weve got two of their demo rifles doing the rounds here in SA and the feedback from all is great. The local distributor "Honey Badger Armaments have put the 14,5 and 10,5 through its paces with the help of some of our IPSC and IDPA friends.
Ive got a few picks of the receiver ect that I’ll post that shows just what a soft shooting rifle this is aswell as the lack of wear and tear after a couple of rounds. Armalite is probably its closest rival here and my sentiment also is that the NEA would be the better bet.
Also the lack of muzzle flip is amazing.
As quoted from another shooter here
“with propar technique and grip the little red dot barely bumps between shots on target”
If you get one, definitely pound the tar out of it and let us know how it goes.
I had the chance to shoot an NEA rifle a few months back. It was quite accurate, and I really liked the hand-guard. It ran fine. The trigger on the one I tried was better than my rifle.
Yeah, that’s interesting about the triggers. I don’t know what springs they were using and how they ended up with test guns that had smooth triggers and production guns with incredibly brutal ones…I guess their tester guns had thousands and thousands of rounds through them and the triggers just got decent after enough use.
Current triggers are gritty, but would probably be fine after a clean and lube, and a few hundred rounds.