Getting a little off-topic, but.......There's a thread over at arf.com where a member (HendersonDefense) owns a range in Las Vegas (Battlefield Vegas) that has pretty much every firearm you can find in a movie or video game. He's got about 100 different models (and scores of duplicates) just in "Assault Rifles" and sub-machineguns. That's in addition to sniper rifles, shotguns, grenade launchers, pistols and a few other categories including tanks. He supplies all weapons and ammo on the range, and keeps logs of everything, including round counts, failures, maintenance, and anytime one of his armorers looks at a gun, etc. Some of these guns have literally hundreds of thousands of round through them.
With the AUG, his findings for parts that they have had to replace are... and keep in mind the excessive round count his guns have:
"They've broken at least one bolt, several firing pin spring, at least one extractor and a few firing pins.". They had one cam pin fail. He states that, "the gas block on the barrel will fail before the barrel itself does". "we've lost a firing pin here and there or a bolt but nothing like the AR platforms. They last double to triple life of a AR/M4 bolt. They are great gun if you like bullpups and they just continue to run with little maintenance."
His guns are not babied in any way. He states that the 20" barreled AR15s (many brands) are the most reliable AR15 rifles he has on range in terms of parts breaking and lack of stoppages...I guess due to less pounding the rifle gets due to the longer gas system. He then states that the AUG is more reliable than any of those ARs. This is coming from a guy who has access to hundreds of different models of rifles, and their reliability records.
For those interested, he also has threads on pistols, shotguns, AR15, AK47, HK, and optics. In the shotgun thread for example, he replaces the Mossberg 500's and Remington 870's about every
3 weeks due to them breaking. He has plenty of them on the line, and they are worn out enough in less than one month, that it's cheaper to replace them, than it is to have his armorer's repair them. His pick if he could have only one shotgun for the rest of his life...Benelli M4.
The thread is titled something like...High Round Count AR/M4, and his comments about the AUG are somewhere in the last few pages, starting around page 26, with most comments being made through page 29. There are other comments within the thread, but these pages seemed the most pertinent. Oh and by the way, he likes the AUG better than the Tavor.
