SMALL FRAME 308 AR (INTERMEDIATE FRAME 308 AR)

Maybe They Had It Right The First Time

I don’t often like to dwell on past firearm history on this site but I’m going to make a rare exception here. In 1959 Colt bought the design of the AR-10 and AR-15 from Armalite. Colt designed but never produced the AR-10A which is smaller than today’s Armalite AR-10A and other manufacturers 308 AR’s. The original AR-15 was based on a scaled down AR-10. The Colt AR-10A was a scaled up version of the AR-10 that was not as large as today’s modern Armalite AR-10A, AR-10B, DPMS based 308AR or KAC SR-25. 

The Colt AR-10A was sized closer to todays AR-15 than the full sized AR-10’s/308 AR’s or what is now. Today we refer to this born again class of 308 AR as “Small Frame 308” or “Intermediate Frame 308” . Examples of this would be the DPMS G2, Colt 901, POF Revolution, Zev Tech Small Frame and Adams Arms Small Frame. It remains to be seen if this is the 308 AR/AR-10 of the future but being lighter and less expensive to manufacture are very compelling reasons.  

Read the AR-10 History