Hmmm, I was lead to believe by the account I read, by someone who used one in Vietnam at least a little, and had tried out many other guns of other designs, was that the M60 was uniquely lacking in not having a handle off the barrel. He was focusing on the "get the barrel off" without a mitten problem ... ah, and depending on where he and his friends were in Vietnam setting a fire was less of a danger. But I do see your point.

OK, I've looked up the source (http://www.amazon.com/Testing-The-War-Weapons-Machine/dp/087...); this was a problem with early ones. "A friend of mine burned his hands to the bone pulling out the barrel of an M60 with his bare hands when the North Vietnamese infantry attempted to overrun his position in South Vietnam. He did not feel it at the time, but after the battle was over, he discovered the condition of his hands." They did add a handle later, and it sounds like by the time you tried one (and probably when I would have, if eyesight hadn't kept me out of the military).

Other points: Early ones had fixed front sights on the barrel.... Then he gets into reliability, and notes machine guns fire a lot more rounds than pistols and rifles. Some crazy guy put 10,000 rounds through a MG3 in 7.5 minutes, and 500,000 (!) through a FN MAG in one sitting. Obviously the soft sear is an issue there. He also says "a number of parts" can be put in backwards. Then he gets into ergonomics, the weight of the tripod (more than the less complicated one for the MG3, which also isn't made out of lightweight metal), the original bipod being barrel mounted (!!!) ... yep, your summation of it being a dog sounds spot on.

I served as an Assistant Gunner for awhile and we learned to LOVE our M60's. It always seemed that the skinniest guys were AG's, loaded down with ammo, extra barrel, tripod, and T & E mechanism, while also having to carry an M16, and its ammo.

In all of my time in service, the only time I ever burnt my hand on a hot barrel was during OSUT, when a dickhead Drill Corporal had us all stand at attention after we'd formed up after being cleared from the firing line. It taught me a valuable lesson about how hot a weapon could get.

I have also seen an M60 barrel warp & bend after firing 1500 rounds non-stop.

As for putting the gun together incorrectly, I can see doing so in the heat of battle, or the fog (20+ hours a day on your feet, except while in the "front-lean-&-rest") of Ranger School, but have never seen such occur in normal training.

All in all, the M60 is still a venerable gun, and when proper tactics are employed (inter-locking fire) it is a more than capable weapon.

So much that, in one of my assignments, our platoon had 3 gun crews instead of the usual 2, because our PL had served multiple tours in Vietnam, and he knew the effectiveness of these guns - especially with 3 crews while doing a bounding overwatch.

"Fire a burst of six to nine."

Sure a properly maintained M60 may be reliable. The M60 just does not compare to the 240 in any way. The 240 is so reliable you can hold a belt of ammo, pull the trigger and watch the gun pull its-self toward the belt of ammo!

The point is I should be able to pick up any weapon, take it apart and put it back together without knowing much about it. I, of course, was well trained. There's no telling how much training the next person has and we should expect that they will have little to none. I also spent time in a platoon with three gun teams.

It sounds like you used it after the initial critical modifications were made, e.g. did your barrels have handles? If so, and if you managed to avoid the assembly problem---which you have to admit could be rather lethal in combat---and replaced the sear before firing 20,000 rounds, it sounds like it wasn't awful.

Unless compared to its competition. In many ways its infamy is that while everyone else got it right (the Germans in 1942!) or at least a lot better, we didn't.... And I'd like to see what you say about the even longer list of problems in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M60_machine_gun#Design_flaws ; I not that it doesn't mention the barrel handle and bipod fixes, or the assembly problem.

Our barrels had no handles, they had bipods. The M60 wasn't too bad of a light machine gun, and, yes there are better alternatives, but we made do with what we were given, and once you became familiarized with the gun, it was actually a solid weapon.

The worst part was filling out range cards. (lol)

Wasn't that a small price to pay for being paid by the government to shoot off all that ammo ^_^?

(I certainly appreciated the government supplied ~3,000 rounds/year of .22LR I shot on my JROTC rifle team.)

The most fun was firing at balsa wood target RC planes for anti-aircraft target practice. We'd lie on our backs and fire the M60 at flying targets. This was at Pohakuloa Training Area, in Hawaii.