After his success with the AR 10/15/16/18 series of rifles, designer Eugene Stoner went on to develop the Stoner 63 weapons system with the Cadillac Gage company. The Stoner 63 was in many ways a natural evolution of the AR15 rifle, with a strong emphasis on modularity.
The driving idea behind the Stoner was to use a single receiver for an entire family of weapons. The stocks, barrels, sights, feed assemblies, trigger assemblies and other main components were all modular and interchangeable. Some configuration changes were relatively simply, like changing between rifle and carbine – the carbine used a shorter barrel and folding buttstock. The more impressive design achievement was the ability to flip the receiver over to change from shoulder rifle to light machine gun configuration.
The rifle and carbine designs use a gas piston on top of the barrel and magazine fed from the bottom. The accommodate a belt feed, though, the belt needs to be fed from the top of the gun, which thus requires the gas piston to be on the bottom (you can see this on virtually every gas operated LMG, like the Bren and BAR families). The Stoner allow the rifle receiver to be rotated 180 degrees and mount the LMG components in this way.
Other features included a fixed vehicle mount design fired by solenoid, and tripod adapter to allow the gun to be used with the standard US machine gun tripods of the day.
The Stoner was used experimentally by special forces in Vietnam, though it was eventually declined for regular issue due to high maintenance requirements.During the procurement process, a number of modifications were requested by the military, which resulted in the development of the Stoner 63A – most significantly a change to right-hand feeding for the belt fed models, to eliminate the problem of ejected casings bouncing back into the feed port and causing malfunctions.
Video: https://youtu.be/vCNw9Z2Q3T0?si=
If you want to see some of the original manuals or advertising materials check out Ian’s official blog: https://www.forgottenweapons.com/stoner-63-system/
If it helps he also designed the gun under the name “M69W”.
Unfortunately that’s because it’s the same upsidedown and one version requires you put the receiver upside down. And not, you know, just because 69 is one of those funny numbers.
Jokes aside, it got further than most ideas do. But it definitely could have gone much further given the chance. It was about 50-60 years ahead of the trend of everything being modular.
Yeah that helps, I got that from Ians video already, binged it immediately.
I love cleaver engineering like this.
I’m glad to hear people actually watch the videos when I link them. I know that it’s not a short video especially this time [~40:00], but they’ll always contain much more information than I can summarize here.
I think the biggest thing it did was demonstrate the US military’s small arms gap in the lack of a 5.56mm beltfed gun at the time. I don’t have a source in front of me, but I believe that most of the Stoners that stuck around were kept in the beltfed configuration when used by people like SEALs. It’s pretty rare to see a Stoner 63 in any other configuration in pictures.
I wonder and speculate, without any documentation, if the existence of the Stoner 63 beltfed had any effect on the US eventually adopting the M249 to fill that same gap.
I agree with the comments about a lack of SAW. Check out this post I made on the other solution to that issue if you haven’t yet: https://lemmy.world/post/9034808
I heard it was ~11lbs for a beltfed in 5.56, which would explain why it would always be seen in that configuration. For reference the m249 is about twice that.
The Stoner 63A is very much on the same wavelength as the cutdown RPD for use in Vietnam.
While the M249 is arguably overbuilt in places and it is heavier than a Stoner, weight wise it’s only about 16-17 pounds empty, depending on the model (closer to the lower end for anything not the original configuration). Which is more but not by a ton. Don’t forget to check if charts are listing loaded or unloaded weights.
Yup that 249 weight was the loaded weight unlike the Stoner’s. My bad.
Here’s the weights for the 63’s variants. At least according to Wikipedia.
Yes for sure the Stoner is handier if only because it’s got the bones of a rifle in its layout. I’d love to hold one to see how the weight balances some day. Seeing all the Vietnam pictures of guys holding Stoners one handed makes me think they are more butt heavy than an M249.
I’ve held a m250 which is about two pounds more and longer (if you include the suppressor). And that was shockingly light, to the point I had to ask wouldn’t even want a rifle.
If the 63 had a similar balance to that those one handed poses wouldn’t be hard at all.