The House Donks and a handful of traitor RINO's just passed that horrible AWB bill and Mass is already a hard place to find key components for Legos guns, so last weekend I sought out my next AR-308 lower. Didn't take long to get responses to my WTB ad. My favorite FFL at the Freedom Mill happened to have a complete Aero M5 lower with the PRS stock, so Mrs. Mountain and I made the road trip.
Project in 'quotes' because I'm totally cheating and being lazy on this one. As mentioned I started with the locally sourced complete lower. Ordered the upper+barrel from California of all places. Rest of the parts I ordered from a couple online vendors or grabbed from my parts pile. Everything delivered by end of week even with the cheap shipping, so I slapped it all together last night. Very simple build:
- Though the lower and upper were ordered separately and that lower was older stock (pre you-know-who?
), they match perfectly for color and fit.
- Barrel is a Ballistic Advantage Premium Series heavy taper fluted. Even with the flutes it's damn heavy, but that's what you need if you want a precision shooter. BA is owned by Aero, though I was acquainted with BA's owner before he joined forces with Aero.
- Hand guard and nitrided BCG also Aero.
- Stock and grip are Magpul, came with the lower.
- Trigger was OK but single stage, so I swapped in a RRA National Match 2-stage trigger. It's good but not my favorite. Pull is ~5.5 lbs with the springs in it now.
- Brake is a VG6 Epsilon. I'm a fan of their stuff and they come with a convenient little hole on the bottom for us pin and weld fags.
- Borrowed the scope from my 6.5 ManBun AR - Leupold Mk3i LRP with max power of 14X. It's bottomed at my zero stop for the 6.5, so that's why the groups are high and left.
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I gave the barrel a good douching before calling it a night then went to the range this morning. 100 yard 5-shot groups off the bench. First group was from my grab bag of misc leftover reloads. Basically a few 'fouling shots' for the barrel, so why waste the primo stuff. Next 5 shots are my basic 168 SMK & Varget loads. That's a .86 MOA group. The 4 shots in the clover leaf are .29 MOA.
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The one shot above the cluster is probably my bad. That's it for now- those are the very first and next 5 shots out of this rifle. I don't like to take a lot of shots through a new barrel without giving it a good cleaning and a few passes of JB bore paste to slick up the surface after the initial shots.
I would have been happy with 1.5 MOA and hoped for 1 MOA. Looks like this is only a great trigger and maybe more powerful glass away from hitting .5 to .75 MOA all day long. I'm sure I can keep it sub-MOA as is. Not a lot of magic in getting this done- just use the right parts, especially the barrel and BCG. FWIW, I think the BA 'Premium Series' AR barrels are grossly underrated and can hang with Douglas, Krieger, Bartlein, etc. at about half the price. It's an AR, so you can spend all the money you want on a barrel but you'll only go so far in precision.