Managed to buy one from a board member, took it to Wyoming for the holidays and put about 100 rounds through it. Learned a few things, but have a few questions.

1. My prescription for my glasses is intentionally just a bit weak to reduce fatigue when working on the computer. Bad for shooting...I haven't shot in years. Couldn't understand why I couldn't shoot a decent group at a 25m M16 zeroing target, then let my brother in law shoot it and it shot just fine for him :-). I'm guessing I need a shooting prescription if I'm going to be serious about it. This was never a problem on M16s (or scoped hunting rifles) in my younger days.

2. Lots of magazine malfunctions. I believe the magazine isn't an original SA, so it's a simple fix...get good ones.

3. Toward the end I got quite a few failures to extract. Either it was simply dirty (but I didn't think M1As were so sensitive to that?), or the Walmart .308 hunting ammo I was shooting in it was causing problems. Is this a common issue? When I loaded a round into the chamber by hand it always fully seated...it seemed that maybe the bolt was barely being blown open far enough to load the new round, but then didn't close with enough speed to guarantee the extracter would get around the lip on the brass.