Many of you may remember the old US Army produced PS Magazine which featured comic book-style illustrations from Will Eisner among others. PS Magazine centers on maintenance and in 1969 the Army released “The M16A1 Rifle: Operation and Preventive Maintenance” which contained chapters such as “How to Strip Your Baby,” “What to Do in a Jam,” “Sweet 16,” and “All the Way with Négligé.” It was an Army full of conscripts and the style seemed like an excellent way to teach small arms maintenance concepts for the newly issued M16 to the troops. While the original version was soft cover like comics, this newly printed version is hardcover. I picked up a copy the other day at Barnes and Noble but it is also available through Amazon. This is a must have for every black rifle enthusiast.
Tags: Will Eisner
They still do produce it… we got them in monthly… they are ridiculous, but contained a lot of really good info. They arent just on the rifles anymore, nowadays they include stuff on our trucks, the rest of our equipment, ect.
Training with the RK 62 never required a booklet.
Training was all learning by doing, and the part that produced most learning was zeroing the weapon at the range.
Stripping, easy as pie; Jam, recycle action; maintenance, piece of cake.
The only real maintenance difficulty was getting the residue out of the locking recess so it’d pass inspection.
A weapon that requires more instruction in maintaining than aiming it may be well engineered, but not necessarily the best thing to hand to any private Taneli.
Still, the M16 has made massive strides in almost 50 years. Any long-standing gripes with the vanilla model can be fixed with switching the upper.
Too bad Kalashnikov didn’t go that way with the AK-47. AK-46 would’ve been interesting as a base design.
..and the part that required* most learning was zeroing the weapon at the range.
Really need to keep the multitasking down…