Long Range Shooting Rifle Options

I’ve got a friend with one. Shot it a bit, solid rifle! Shoots extremely well, easy barrel/caliber changes, and Seekins has good customer service (I’ve used it personally on a Havak)

 

They said their barrel dimensions are gonna be freely available to anyone who wants them. So you should be able to have a barrel built to their specs by anyone who is able and willing. Much as you can with AI. So provided the proper bolt heads and magazines are available you could have 6 ARC, 308, and 6.5 PRC setups for the same rifle. And of course changing a worn out barrel is a snap.

 

I don't know which mags you're using, but I think I've found a fix with the Magpul PMAGs. My hypothesis is spring tension is too high for rounds to come out of the magazine freely. Hence the failures to feed from a full mag. I disassembled a magazine and cut a loop of spring off of each end and bent the cut ends to kinda sorta match how it was before. Now it's feeding the HPBTs beautifully.



EDIT
I tried only cutting the spring in one spot first, but it wasn't quite there. I'd advise taking as little off as possible. Of course YMMV. Also, to anyone running the five round PMAGs, there's a tab on the bottom of the followers that's designed to be smipped off giving you an extra round if desired.

 

I really like the idea of interchangeable barrels and bolt heads. Even more so for a hunting rifle. Having one high quality rifle with 2 or 3 configurations that can cover you from varmints to the biggest game North America has would be great.

 

I have an FDE one in 6.5 Creed. I haven’t shot it much but I really like it. The bolt isn’t the smoothest but it is definitely getting smoother with use. I will probably get a .308 barrel for it at some point.
If you are in Socal you are welcome to come shoot it.

 

I tried this and it made it slightly better. I ended up cutting too many but I knew that’d possibly be the case. It was a test mag. I’m going to get another spring and cut the two off and try HPBT’s. The Ruger 5 round mag has a leaf spring that I smashed a little to reduce the spring and it seems to have helped. You can see how screwed up the tips are on mine

 

I clipped off the plastic tip on 3 of them and left two with the plastic tip. The first three home made HPBT fed fine and had issues with the plastic tips. I think I found my solution

 

The modded Ruger American 7mm PRC is impressing me, it really like the factory 175 ELD-x, the 160 CX not so much, not terrible but nothing like the 175 stuff. The barrel gets warm fast though affecting groups. Just been setting up at 100 yards, going to streach it to 300 next time out.

 

Probably just my old talking, but we didn't seem to have these problems with internal magazines. For a hunting rifle I think they're the bee's knees. I'll be trying a couple of slightly different ammos in the process of finding what the rifle likes best. Hopefully shortening those springs is a permanent solution. It's feeding great with both types I have on hand, even with 6 rounds loaded.

 

Unfortunately I'm not in SoCal. They have 6 GT as an option. I'll be interested to see where ammo availability goes with that one as PRS competition and long range shooting in general grows in popularity.

 

it’s just a Ruger American stock thing. There are some chassis’s you can get for this rifle and there is no issue but that would defeat the purpose of the cheap gun. They supposedly fixed the feeding issue on the gen 2 version of the gun but that one is like 599 or something

 

Mine came in the Magpul stock. I thought I was in for smooth sailing until I tried to load the HPBTs. Weird that we had the exact opposite problems. Mine isn't set up exactly like the regular stock though. There are two screws holding the trigger guard and bottom metal in and two more screws underneath them for the action and v blocks. I think the regular stock has two screws total? I'll be trying the 147 gr ELDM and 143 gr ELDX. Probably some of the Federal match ammo, possibly Berger too. Both make HPBT match ammo. Some of Federal's match ammo uses Berger bullets, I think they have versions with Sierra too.

 

yeah that is pretty funny/ interesting. The original stock is just two bolts.

well I’m happy enough to know something will feed and it’s not a complete dudd!

 

How's it grouping for you? I don't shoot well enough yet to know what my Ruger is truly capable of. I need to get a lot better at building a position, which is a little more challenging when you're prone in a farm field. The brake is a MFer to get off when I occasionally clean. The action is getting smoother with use and lubrication. Biggest complaint about that is it takes a fair amount of force to lift/cock the bolt. Lubricating the ramps and cocking piece hasn't really improved it. I've heard I should maintain the same cheek weld when trying to group as tightly as possible. Very difficult to do when it takes that much force to go out of battery. Maybe I need to actually remove the cocking piece and firing pin so I can apply lube directly to the working surfaces? I just went around everything as best as I could after only removing the bolt shroud.

 

I’ve only ran about 90 rounds through mine so far so it’s early. It’s solid sub-MOA, the best has been .508 MOA with the 175g ELD-X factory Hornady. Average velocity is only 2842 and the velocity deviation isn’t near as good as their factory 6mm Creedmoor. They must be test firing their stuff in a 28 in barrel because the box states 3000 fps.

I’m sure it will do much better with more consistent ammunition but it’s not a bench rest barrel profile which will hold it back.

I’ve got the Go- Wild version and the bolt a lot smoother than the 308 American version a friend has. Use should clean that up. I wouldn’t worry about maintaining your cheek weld between shots, just use good repeatable technique and breathe control.

I haven’t taken my brake off yet, I hope you’re cleaning from the breach and using a device to protect the chamber. After an initial quasi break-in cleaning I’ll normally go nearly 200-300 rounds between barrel cleanings.

 

Picked up an 8” barrel for my 8.6 The Fix rifle which is currently 16” barreled in .308. Yes, it’s been form 1 approved. Now, just waiting on the requisite silencer to go with it and I’ll be able to kill anything that walks the earth, within 300 meters.

On, and I got a coupon with it!



8.6 BLK is, basically, .300 BLK X 3. All that’s needed a barrel swap. It works in SR25 mags, no new bolt face or anything to go in the gun. What a cool cartridge.

 

ive never even heard of 8.6 BLK... do you shoot it subsonic? at 300 yds i assume not? is this something you have to reload for yourself?

 

375 Raptor!

8.6 has a twist rate (1 in 3?) that will require basically copper projectiles. After doing my research on the 8.6, I stumbled on the 375 Raptor. For me the 375 Raptor fit the bill for my purposes. I'm just waiting on my barrel.

@Resident Plarp - I'd love to hear real world feed back on the 8.6. Curious, whats the cheapest projectile that you found? Thats one of the first things that I check before considering a new caliber. I wanna shoot my shyt!

 

8.6 was developed by the same crew that did .300 BLK, and for basically the same reasons - JSOC needed a capability.

There are subs and supers available for it, but I’ll be shooting mostly the former. If I were anticipating using both, there’s a 12” barrel that’ll do both really well. I went 8” since I wanted a light rifle to carry wherever I go to kill everything I see. Less than 10 lbs in a rifle with a folding stock? Yeah, there’s nothing else on earth that fits the bill.

Ammo isn’t cheap, but considering there’s a rifle manufacturer making rifles for it off the rack, I’m sure it’ll become popular like .300 BLK.

The good thing is that I can swap barrels in two minutes without the need for special tools. So, before any hunt, I’ll swap to 8.6, confirm zero, and go kill.

It’ll be a while before I shoot it. The requisite silencer is in NFA purgatory. Ones it’s on hand and I shoot, oh yes, I’ll tell you allllll about it.

 

I'm going off of memory but 300 yards subsonic (please correct me if I'm wrong). With this "wildcat" round few manufactures are producing ammo. You'll have to roll/reload your own. The 8.6 cartridge is made from the parent 6.5 creedmoor case. The 375 Raptor is created by the 308 parent case.