Tag Archives: rifles

Part 1

Before I begin today’s report, I want you to know that I’ll be out of the office all this week. I’m traveling to Arkansas to film some episodes of the new American Airgunner. I’m asking the veteran readers to watch for new reader’s comments and to help them whenever you can. I know that you do this all the time anyway, but I wanted you to know that I won’t be able to answer questions as easily this week as I normally am. My wife, Edith, also closely monitors the blog. On to today’s report.

I’m writing this report as an airgunner who’s discovering something new — something that he’s wondered about a long time and finally decided to see whether the things he’s read were true or not. I’m writing it about a firearm because airguns are what I normally do. Firearms aren’t my regular beat, so anything I do with them is a stretch. I want to put myself on the same footing as someone who is new to airguns and doesn’t know what to believe.

The AR: What is it?
I could spend the rest of my life writing about the AR-15 and not exhaust the subject. It is without question one of the world’s most recognized and talked-about firearms. Love it or hate it — you cannot deny its success.

I was one who hated it. My experience began with the M16, which is the true full-auto assault rifle that civilians cannot obtain legally without going through many government hoops and paying dearly. The AR-15 is the civilian version of the rifle that lacks the full-auto capability. Full-auto operation is one of the main things that defines an assault rifle. So, an AR-15 is not an assault rifle — nor can it ever be, legally.

But it looks enough like the M16, except for the full-auto part, and it operates enough like an M16 that shooters have accepted it as a legal substitute. Some shooters aren’t even aware of the differences between the AR-15 and the M16 and use the model names, interchangeably.

My experience with the M16 began in the Army, and I documented it quite well in Part 1 of this report, so I won’t repeat myself. The bottom line is that the rifle isn’t as accurate as I want a rifle to be.

Over the years, I watched people with AR-15s, and all I saw was confirmation that it, too, was not a very accurate firearm. At least not by my standards. If I backed an AR owner into a corner, he would tell me about its high rate of fire, the interchangeability of parts and all the development that has gone into the rifle over its half-century life-cycle. Then, I would counter with the rifle’s 3-minute-of-angle accuracy and make a yucky face. And we would agree to disagree.

Yet, all the while I was watching from the sidelines, I saw occasional references to superb accuracy from certain rifles. When I tracked them down and eliminated all those that were based on 3-shot groups and 5-shot groups, I was left with a small but insistent core of reports that the AR really could shoot well. There were stories of half-inch 10-shot groups at 100 yards — stories that I wanted to believe, but simply could not. I’d shot too many M16s and AR-15s to believe that one could really be that accurate with 10 shots. Yet, like a child full of expectant hope, I never lost interest.

Then, I had an opportunity to make a trade of an AK rifle for an AR-15. That was the stimulus I needed to do the real research into the gun. About 20 years had passed since I last looked into the gun, and I discovered that things had changed dramatically. New propellants were discovered that made the rifle sing like never before. New bullets were developed that, combined with new rifling twist rates, made huge strides in the accuracy department.

The deal with the AR-15 fell through, but I had done the research and was now ready to make my move. So, when the right AR upper came along — one that promised the kind of accuracy I was looking for — I grabbed it.

You saw the potential for accuracy in the first report. Today, I’ll expand on that and tell you how I’ve learned to live with this rifle. The gentleman I got it from gave me a load that I tried immediately. I used both his recommended bullet plus another that I had on hand that was almost as heavy. My barrel has a 1:8″ twist rate, so it stabilizes heavier bullets. I don’t shoot the 55-grain bullets that many shooters use. I shoot a 77-grain boattailed spitzer and a 68-grain match hollowpoint that both stabilize in the rifle when a full load of powder is used.

On my second time out with the rifle, I shot three 10-shot groups at 100 yards. That may not sound like a lot of shooting, but I wait for the barrel to cool between shots, so it takes close to a full hour to complete.

I also load these cartridges to a longer overall length than the magazine will tolerate. This is something I learned from one of our readers, and the guy who sold me the upper confirmed it. Where most AR guys want the largest capacity magazine they can get, I’m loading each round singly and pushing the bolt release to close the bolt. I’m like a man who never takes his Ferrari out of first gear! AR owners would turn inside-out if they saw me shoot.

But I get results!

The first three 10-shot groups measure 0.913 inches, 0.827 inches and 0.562 inches. I’d say that was a success! I won’t bore you with the load details because every rifle is unique, but both the 77-grain and the 68-grain bullets were accurate.

Ten .223 bullets at 100 yards went into this 0.913-inch group.

Ten .223 bullets at 100 yards went into this 0.827-inch group.

Ten more .223 bullets at 100 yards went into this 0.562-inch group. This is what I’ve been looking for in an accurate rifle for the past 40 years!

I load the bullets longer than the magazine will tolerate because that way the bullet can be closer to the rifling in the bore when the cartridge fires. That improves accuracy. Looking at the three groups above, I think you would agree.

One problem with a semiautomatic rifle is that it throws the empty cartridge case far from the gun. With an AR-15, this can be adjusted somewhat by increasing or decreasing the amount of gas that flows to the bolt, and my rifle was properly set up to operate with the loads I was using. Still, the cartridges landed ahead of the firing line some 6 to 10 feet, and I had to wait for a cease-fire to go out and collect them for reloading. If the grass was tall, I might miss some.

So, I bought a brass catcher. Again, I did it my way. Most brass catchers attach to the rifle. The one I bought is separate. It’s large and catches anything the rifle cares to toss, as long as it’s in the right place on the shooting bench. Since buying it, I’ve shot the rifle about 70 times and it never missed one cartridge.

Another problem with semiautomatics is the cartridges must be resized their full length after every firing. This works the brass and shortens the life of the case. I’m using maximum loads from the standpoint that I can’t get any more powder into the case, but the pressures I’m loading are more than 10,000 psi below what a standard 5.56mm cartridge generates. I am at 42,000 psi, where 5.56mm rounds easily hit 52,000 psi.

I’m loading .223 Remington cartridges rather than 5.56mm military cartridges. The difference is that my commercial case is thinner and holds more powder, and the leade in the .223 barrel is shorter than the leade in a 5.56mm barrel. Because I work the brass by resizing and because I use maximum loads, I’ll be lucky to get 10 reloads from my cartridges — while I’ve gotten over 50 reloads from other cartridges in rifles that generate less pressure at firing and whose cartridges I don’t have to full-length resize.

I took the rifle out again last week and fired it with some new loads. The day I went, it was raining and I shot in pouring rain. A light mist doesn’t affect accuracy too much, but driving rain can play havok with accuracy at 100 yards. Perhaps that’s why the best group I managed to shoot that day measures a whopping 0.835 inches between centers. And, yes, that was sarcasm. I’m still very pleased with these results.

On the range during a driving rain. You can see my brass catcher. It never misses!

Best 10-shot group of this rainy day was a 0.835-inch group.

Am I pleased?
How could I not be pleased with these results? This is the level of accuracy I’ve been after for the past 40 years. Yes, something miraculous has happened. I’m shooting the best I’ve ever shot with an AR-15 — a rifle I thought was hopelessly inaccurate. I hope you realize that this does relate to airguns in a big way.

You may have a blind side to certain airguns like I did with the AR-15. You may hate spring guns or PCPs the way I hated black rifles. Maybe it isn’t ultimate accuracy that you want, but rather distance. Maybe you’d like to be able to hunt jackrabbits in the Texas panhandle, where a fleeting shot at 50 yards is the best you’re ever going to get. Or maybe you want accuracy, just like I did. Maybe you read about all these accurate precharged pneumatics, but just can’t believe what you’ve read; because when you see guys actually shoot them in front of you, they never do as well as they seem to claim on the internet.

Maybe you want the airguns that give one-shot kills. Maybe you’re tired of tracking game after you shoot it and wonder how all those airgun hunters are dropping as much game as they claim but you’re lucky to get one or two.

Whatever it is that you want, the way to get it is to do what I’ve done. Sift through all the reports looking for the kernels of truth. They’re there for you to find. And when the day comes that you have that pleasant experience where something goes exactly as you hoped it would, all your efforts will prove worthwhile.

By the way — writing a nice, flattering report about the AR-15 is penance for all my bad thoughts. I wonder now what I’m going to have to say about some airguns I also have thought ill of?

Someone new to the world of airguns encounters jargon, technical terms, confusion and mountains of urban legends. I know the feeling because, when I recently acquired an AR-15, I had the same experience.

I write this blog today about my experiences acquiring a firearm to help the new airgunner learn to make decisions about the airguns he doesn’t know and can’t actually handle before buying. Once you read the report, I think you’ll understand why I say it’s written for airgunners.

I never liked the AR
I was exposed to the U.S. Army’s M16 when it first came out in the 1960s, and the problems it had were so many that it didn’t make a good impression. For starters, I’m a rifleman, which means I care more about hitting the target than anything else. The M14 that was the standard issue at the time was doing that very well, but the new M16 proved incapable of hitting a man-sized silhouette at 300 yards. Since I wanted to qualify expert (having already done so with the pistol, the M14 and the .22 rimfire) with every weapon the Army gave me, I found this shortcoming to be a huge drawback.

I wasn’t aware of all the ballistic testing that had gone into the creation of the 5.56mm round before the M16 came out. I just knew from my first range experience that the rifle was inaccurate beyond about 250 yards. To a shooter who had already qualified expert with three other weapons, that was inexcusable.

Then there was the problem of cleaning the gun. The M16 required lots of cleaning and lubrication to continue to operate reliably. The M14 didn’t seem to need as much cleaning, though it did need to be lubricated, just the same. But the M14 was easy to field strip, clean and lubricate, while the M16 had some parts that were very difficult to clean in the field. Strike two.

I could go on, but you get the idea. I didn’t like the M16. And several years later, when I had about 100 of them in my company arms room in Germany in the middle 1970s, I grew to dislike them even more for all their petty maintenance and cleaning problems.

After I left the Army, I swore to never have anything more to do with the fully automatic M16 or its semiautomatic civilian equivalent, the AR-15. Occasionally, I’d see one at the range and watch the owner fumble with frequent jams, horrid accuracy and other problems that I remembered from my Army days. I thought the case was closed

Enter Crosman — the MAR177
Then, in 2012, Crosman brought out the MAR177, and I had to test it. But since the MAR is just an upper, it needs to be mated with a lower receiver to work — and that lower has to be an AR lower! You may remember in my review of the MAR177 that I actually built an AR lower receiver for the test.

Crosman’s MAR177 drove me to buy the firearm it copies, as I’ve done several times in the past.

When the test was over, the MAR177 went back to Crosman, leaving me with an AR lower. Crosman told me they had plans to bring out other MAR-type airguns, so I couldn’t get rid of the lower, yet. Until they did, I had nothing to use it with. Until I got a firearm upper of some sort, that lower was just an expensive bunch of useless gun parts. That’s when I began to think about possibly owning an AR-15 for the first time!

I didn’t know anything about ARs!
I had avoided the AR so completely that I now discovered I knew next to nothing about it. When I began to do research, including some done with readers right here on this blog, I found out that my information was old, outdated and generally no longer true. In short, I was like someone new to airgunning who didn’t know what he didn’t know and didn’t know where to turn.

Books
I tend to rely on books to get spun up on something new. And I know that Patrick Sweeney is an excellent gun writer based on his books about the Colt 1911. They were a wealth of information when I decided to go full-on with the 1911 after receiving a nice one as a gift several years ago. So, I reckoned he would be just as good with the AR 15.

When I want to learn about something new, I turn to books.

Boy — was I wrong! Sweeney writes about ARs using jargon and repetition. He salts his chapters with pithy anecdotes from gun classes he has taught or references to law enforcement operations — neither of which have any interest for me. As I said — I’m a rifleman — not a zombie fighter! Sweeney and I don’t see eye-to-eye when it comes to the black rifle.

However, in fairness to the author, he’s not writing for me. He’s writing to the majority of AR owners who think exactly as he does and want to know the latest and greatest tactical advantages the gun might offer. They number in the millions, where I’m just one.

And, among all the insider trivia, there were nuggets of useful information. Therefore, I read and decoded what was in those books until I had a good newbie-level of understanding.

The airgun comparison
And here’s where my plight will begin to relate to a budding airgunner. You may not know whether to get a spring-piston rifle with a steel mainspring or a gas spring, just as I didn’t know whether to get an AR with direct gas impingement or a piston-driven system.

I read and read and finally discovered several references to the fact that the direct gas impingement system would probably make the more accurate gun when all other things were equal. The reasons were explained in such a way that I could understand and internalize them. I also discovered that the makers of the piston-operated systems are working diligently to make their systems more accurate all the time — so the accuracy gap is closing with each passing day.

Returning to airguns, there are precious few airgun books for you to consult, but this blog is written for that purpose — to help explain the fundamentals of airgunning and to help you solve your individual problems.

So, you read and read, and one day you realize that all the gas spring guns I’ve tested are hard to cock. Maybe you don’t like that. And you’ve also read that many of the gas spring guns I’ve tested have only mediocre accuracy, while there are some with a coiled steel mainspring, like the RWS Diana 34, that are very accurate. From this, you’ve learned that you want a gun with a steel mainspring, just as I learned that I wanted an AR with direct gas impingement.

Looking at my plight again, I read about rifle barrel twist rates and discovered that the rifles with a faster twist are good for heavier bullets, and heavier bullets make for greater accuracy at longer distances. I like accuracy, and I like to shoot long distances. So, I knew that I wanted a barrel with a twist rate of 1:7 or 1:8 inches instead of the more common 1:10 and even 1:12-inch twist rate that many of the tacti-cool carbines seem to have. I also learned that Colt was at one time very concerned that buyers of their AR-15 would attempt to turn them into M16s, so they changed the pivot pin sizes for many of the parts on the lower receiver of their AR-15. Hence, there are a certain range of Colt AR-15 rifles that, while okay by themselves, will not accept common upgraded parts that all other AR-15s can use. Since parts interchangability is one of the AR’s strong suits, these Colts are seriously disadvantaged.

You read about airguns and discovered in this blog that, while there are a plethora of pellets from which to choose, only a few of them are the most consistently accurate. You learned which ones they are, and you know that you can either waste $30 buying the wrong bargain pellets that don’t work in most airguns, or you can spend half that much and get (far fewer) pellets that will drill a dime every time when fired in the gun you have decided to buy.

I read and discovered that using certain extruded gun powders will keep the AR-15 action clean for many hundreds of shots. And some of that kind of powder also develops very low breech pressures, so barrel wear is similarly reduced. The interior of today’s AR-15 is a far cry from the gummy wreck the M16 was in the late 1960s. And there are specialized tools that can clean those hard-to-reach parts in seconds, instead of the hours that it used to take us with toothbrushes.

AR-15 technology has changed over the years. Now, there are cleaner-burning gun powders and specialized tools to reach the places that are hard to clean.

After all your reading, you decided to buy an RWS Diana 34P. You know that you’ll have to learn to use the artillery hold, and you know that you want the rifle in .177 caliber to save the most money on ammo per shot — but you’ll be buying 10.3-grain JSB Exact domed pellets instead of the “bargain” pellets found at Wal-Mart. Yes, your pellets will cost you three times as much as the cheap ones, but your hit ratio will be even greater than that. So, this more expensive pellet is actually a savings.

I learned that a standard AR-15 is only good for about 3 minutes of angle (a 5-shot group of approximately three inches at 100 yards); but with the right barrel and bullet, the same rifle can be a sub-MOA rifle, too. I learned that instead of being confined to the rather short magazines that fit the rifle, I can load every round singly into the breech to give me the room to load much longer and more accurate ammo. If I buy the right upper receiver and barrel and load the right ammo for it, I can have an AR-15 that’s respectably accurate.

Where no man has gone
Like you, I’ve ventured into a world I didn’t understand. Like you, I found there are truths, lies and everything in between. But instead of rushing out and squandering my money on the first “bad boy” upper I found, I waited for the right one to come along. And it finally did! I found it two weeks ago on a Texas-based gun-swapping website.

The upper I found has a free-floated Saber Defense 24-inch stainless steel fluted bull barrel with a 1:8-inch twist. The extra long barrel means it’s an efficient powder-burner, which means it will take larger loads of slow-burning extruded powder and develop higher velocity for greater accuracy at long range. The extruded powder is both clean-burning and develops much lower chamber pressure than ball powders. Best of all, this rifle was built for 1000-yard competition shooting and has a .223 Remington chamber instead of a 5.56 or Wylde combination chamber. It was, literally, built for accuracy.

Not a gun most AR owners would want — my rifle has a free-floated, 24-inch bull barrel that’s chambered for .223 Remington instead of 5.56mm. I shouldn’t shoot military ammo in it; but with the right reloads, it’ll shoot rings around a stock AR. It’s exactly what I wanted. The scope is a Tasco Custom Shop 8-40X56mm that I used to compete in field target. read more