By help I don't mean an endless tirade of "you shouldn't have bought a repro" or "OMG, a Kahr/AO, what are you stupid?" taunts. Lol

I love the M1 Carbine but I am certainly not an expert. I bought one (Kahr/AO repro) a couple years ago. It is out of warranty, I have an RMA from Kahr but no assurances.

It runs great on ONE mag. Every other mag I own which is a mish mash of good quality to ProMag it bobbles. I didn't recognize the issue at first because I only had the one factory mag for awhile and I only shoot it with my son so the issue was masked until recently when I started using other mags.

I have a Quality Hardware'44 M1 as well. The mags work fine in it. I usually suspect mags but in this case I suspect the gun.

The magwell seems out of spec. Offending mags are sloppy in every direction with bolt open. I mean very sloppy. Side to side, front to back, and probably most importantly up and down. These mags fit tight with significantly less slop in the GI rifle.

Here are my options. Send it to Kahr paying shipping on my own and then paying for them to most likely replace my trigger housing with a new one of their procurement. Risky perhaps. OR Fulton Armory sells a trigger housing that by all accounts is very GI like in manufacture and I try to fix the problem myself.

I have convinced myself, rightly or not, that the sloppy magwell could be fixed by a magwell/trigger housing of the proper spec.

What think ye hivemind?

Forgot to describe the problem. The bolt overrides the rounds in the mag and FTF results. Sometimes it will even do it on the first round. Pull back bolt and let fly and it completely misses the top round. Sloppy magwell right?

Have you tried just replacing the mag catch? If the mag catch is out of spec, it could cause sloppy mag fit. You can get those for a couple bucks, so I'd start with that first.

Otherwise, you're probably correct. You could try the Fulton trigger housing, or you can see if you can find a USGI trigger housing for even less.

Provided, of course, that USGI-spec housings and mag catches will work with the AO carbine. That's the problem with commercial carbines... Often any number of parts are not USGI spec, and require those proprietary parts in order to fit properly.

Ok, I can try that. I have replaced multiple small parts, sights, mag catch, safety barrel band. They fit fine but starting small seems like a good idea.

I have an extra SA USGI housing you can have.

It will work, if the housing from your other M1 works when attached to the commercial one.

If it does, just email me your address.

Thanks Arc. I will try it, appreciate that.

Pete

I know the Kahr/AO replicas get a lot of bad press and obviously some of it is deserved but I switched out my GI trigger housing and it fit just fine and functioned normally. At this point I have changed out enough parts to say that I think GI parts fit great. Of course the one part I haven't tried yet is the piston but I don't plan on that, lol.

The old GI housing did tighten the magwell up. I will report back on whether it actually can fix the feed problems.

Thank you gentlemen for all the help and suggestions.

Pete

Sounds like you are ahead of me, but I would swap the trigger group from the GI gun that runs into it- of that fixes your problem a new trigger housing and mag catch should get things rolling again with minimal effort( probably cheaper than sending it back)

I swapped them to ensure that a new trigger housing of GI nature would work. Internet info says parts compatibility is sketchy, so far I have not found that to be true.

I am not going to monkey around with my GI Quality Hardware carbine. It is in good shape and I will either get this repro running using collected parts or I won't. The original carbine is more valuable to me as an original.

quote:

Originally posted by pedropcola:
Internet info says parts compatibility is sketchy, so far I have not found that to be true.

The newer commercial carbines seem to be better as far as USGI compatibility. Many of the older commercial carbines from the 60s/70s/80s are notorious for poor USGI compatibility.

(Some are drastically different internally, rather than just being off-spec.)

I have read some horror stories. Honestly, this repro is nice. The parts I changed out were mainly just to improve the carbine for my use. I hate the push button safety so I swapped in a flip type, I prefer the type 2 barrel band which was a major pain in the ass to swap. I had to buy the jig to take on/off the front and rear sights to install that one. Since I had the jig I swapped in the ramp style rear sight assembly.

The mag issue is the only problem, admittedly a kind of big problem. I am really hopeful a tighter magwell will solve this though.