I paid $1,475 + $25 for shipping, need to take it out & shoot itI'm guessing that period of Armscorp has all USGI parts, nice find. If you look up the serial numbers on the SAI's it will tell you what to expect to find as far as USGI parts...
I've heard of the soft bolts, but haven't found any poly tech owners that have had problems with their bolts. I have two spare ploy tech boltsPolytech's aren't supposed to be too bad either. They have a forged receiver, which I believe is made on the tooling we sold to China and most of the parts are USGI. There are stories of soft bolts, but just replace it with a USGI can forget about it.
The more recent SAI guns are more suspect to being out of mil-spec than the preban guns. It may be in spec as far as SAI is concerned, but is not in spec per the M14 blueprints. Due to that SAI won't do anything about it. They are great guns, but have some idiosyncrasies to them.
The M14FiringLine is a great place to get information on the M1A/M14 platform.
My M1A left the factory on 8/23/12 and all the measurements posted on Sparrrowhawk's and Sadlak's pages are correct. I used metrology tools to measure.
Those shorty are niceI have a SA Socom II and love it. No issues so far.
I'm looking at SPRINGFIELD ARMORY M1A, but must do my homework before I buy