The Superlite arrived, so I ordered a bunch of components and jumped in.
We'll begin this build with a glamor shot of just the Volquartsen Superlite. She's a beauty as is.... This shot will make for a great before and after side-by-side.
The hardest part of this build is going to be designing the forward charging components that fit inside the La Chassis' MLOK foregrip, works, and is durable enough to take lots of use. This requires fitting lots of small pieces together and making sure that any given part of the forward charging system takes too much pressure from use.
Below you can see the main components that will make up the forward charing system and linkage back to the Volquartsen bolt. Moving from front to back (generally):
A small linear bearing and carriage that will be mounted under the barrel and thumbscrew for charging handle
An eye bolt and barrel nut that will connect the charging handle to the copper tube filled with ball bearings
3/8" Copper refrigeration tubing (coiled around the outside in the picture) and polycarbonate clear ball bearings
6-32 Bolt and wing nut to press against the charging handle on the bolt
3/16" Brass tube to house and guide the Streamlight TLR pressure switch cable
Streamlight TLR R1 mounted about where she'll sit when the build is complete
I started working on a couple different options for the forward charging setup. The one below, with the thumbscrew charging handles sticking out through the MLOK space in the foregrip would be great, except for the fact that the bolt's travel distance is greater than the length of the MLOK port.....
My next great idea was to fabricate some small steel plates that will mount to the bearing carriage and extend about the MLOK foregrip. You can see these side-by-side as well as set inside the La Chassis foregrip in the next two images. I think these will work, but the needle I have to thread is to space them far enough apart to not hit the barrel, but no so far a part that they rub against the inside wall of the foregrip.
The assembly above sits well within the foregrip and positions the steel charging handle "risers" wide enough a part to not interfere with the barrel.
To secure whole assembly to the foregrip, I made up the little mounts you see below. They are composed of 3x 6-32 nuts laid in a row and 1x 10-24 barrel nut cut in half and then JB-Welded perpendicular to the 6-32 nuts. I added a small piece of stainless steel sheet metal on top for extra rigidity.
This will be placed in between the bearing slides (which will mount to these posts via the 6-32 nuts) and attached the the foregrip via the 10-24 barrel nut and some MLOK T-Nuts.
I was feeling pretty good about these little post mounts until I was doing the final drills and cuts to size and destroyed one of them. Clearly they aren't strong enough to be the core mounting feature for the charging mechanism, so I'm on to the next option.
My next version is going to be a 1/2" block of aluminum that I'll drill and tap to have this same 6-32 sideways, 10-24 vertical setup but me much stronger milled from a single block of metal. They'll also look much better. You all know I love my JB Weld, but it's doesn't make the prettiest components.
Nice!
That is a ton of room to play with on the inside of the fore end. I'm excited to see how the tubing goes with the bearings as you noted the clearance is tight but it will be good to try.
Using the mlok slots would have been perfect. You could have the charging handle hinge kind of like a G3/g36/HK handle. That may give you enough extra travel to complete the action movement if the connecting rod is mounted a bit further out from the chassis. That feels like a right-side-only solution though