Home Forums Hunting & Shooting AR and Tactical Rifles List your ar15 accurizing tips

I don't think I ever said 10 shots. I may have. Who knows.

But 5 shots into an inch at 100 isn't that hard. Even my dreaded Douglas barrels would do that. Have seen more that a few model 1 sales type tubes do it too. But those are guns gone through to make sure things are asembled correctly. Granted some take more work than you would like IE finding the right bullet(often the twist isn't true and they also want flat base bullets or bullets lighter or heavier than you would think) but generally if it was trying to see if it was capable, they almost all would. I"ve seen one that would only do it with Sierra 40 grain blitz... which would have been of no use to me....

Using a top line barrel is a great start though. Helps when your friend is an old BR shooter turned HP and now retired and filled his garage with stuff... Even green mountain blanks shoot well.. and they are usually cheap enough. Shilen blanks are reasonable. And never flies on Krieger, Rock, Obermeyer, Etc... even Pac Nor was always any ok barrel for us.

Lots of brands I don't recall that brownells had on sale at times were good enough. Frankly an inch at 100 for 5 shots really isn't anything, and accuracy at 100 only really doesn't tell the tale to me. I like to seek 10 shot groups from an AR at 300 that are 2 inches or under. Hunting guns I want 3 shots into a small enough group at long enough distance that I have wobble and wind room by a bit if possible.

Headed to the boat.

Jeff

Good stuff Jeff. Thanks for your input

High power shooter in the club here and he does 5 shot groups with his rifle. Then he verifies that load with a 10 shot string. I guess it works for him he’s a high master.

That should work for just about anyone. That's generally how I roll..Sometimes you can see a problem load even after the first 3 shots.. I know some of us don't care for 3 shot groups much, but I've ran 3 shot groups and seen a definite pattern develop while working up loads. Since we are talking AR rifles, here's one I like to post every once in a while. It's from when I was developing a load for my Armalite AR10 308:





Even Stevie Wonder can see where the accuracy node is for that one.....

I don't even do that. If a load can score clean, I shoot it. If it doesn't, I move on. Last week at 3 & 600 combined, I shot over 98%.

Very nice!

Good shooting Tyrone!

Jeff, glad things are going well in AK for you.

A 60 day rainbow day is a good day no matter how you cut it...........

What's your beef with Douglas barrels? I don't have any, other than on bolt guns, but Compass Lake sells a lot of them with seemingly few complaints, & Frank white wouldn't put his name on junk.

MM

Good shooting!

Last yr my first year shooting competition in the AR tactical class. I fought my equipment for 2 months trying to make my setup work. I started off using magpul m4 stock (wrong choice) big time. But i tried to make it work. Then I tried and tried different loads. Finally put an A2 stock on it, Finally got a good load and finished last yr out pretty good. This yr I worked on a load using 75gr eld-m and I shot a 197-6x in our first fun match. My daughter wanted to shoot as well, so I built her a 224 Valkyrie with an 20 inch ARP barrel A2 stock a good trigger 10x SWFA and her first time shooting at 600yds she shot a 199-11X. The load I used has been used by a bunch of 224 Valkyrie shooters and they call it the red rocket it’s a 80gr ELD-M going 2900 fps. ARP chambered these barrels specifically for the 80gr ELD-M bullets. When building her AR I took from my mistakes and made sure she had a great setup. I did switch scope and put a 6x swfa to minimize parallax. Tuesday see if she can keep it up.

Your daughter is doing good buddy. Shooting with the kids is always fun. She sounds like a natural. My daughter shoots pretty good herself...
She likes my 6.5 CM AR10

I agree quite a bit with this list. I do #1 and #2, never used #3 but instead Sprinco Blue spring with an H1 buffer and an SLR adjustable gas block, prefer single stage match triggers, have bedded barrels with the green Loc-tite but tried #243 and so far it's worked, like WOA barrels, have a Super-chicken 3-9 HD on my .223 Wylde, a Leupold VX-3i 2.5-8X36 CDS on my 6.8 SPC II, and prefer either thermo-fitting a BCM or using a Vltor MUR-1 and bedding it.

The Leupold has worked great so far, this rifle will see time in the woods so I kept that in mind.

I have several rifles with a Midwestern Industries Gen3 handguard, and one additional step I take is to not let the handguard contact the upper. I don't know if it helps, but I feel better knowing if I load uo the handguard it won't transfer any pressure to the upper. I give it .010" to .015".

My biggest issue is finding the proper setting for the nut between the buttpad and the chair....

Ha ha. I think that is the weak link for most of us here. The nut behind the butt... I really noticed that when I was first learning to shoot the AR. It was a learning experience for me and still is. I find that finding the right parts to adapt the ar platform to the use really helps. One of the reason I listed the grip and buttstock and good trigger in my list. If anything, it helps with comfort and with comfort comes better/more consistent accuracy. At least for me it does. Good point on the handguard not touching the barrel too. Freefloating the hanguard has been known to help with consistency. Like I mentioned in a previous post, I noticed weird/wild groupings from my 6WOA after changing my handguard. I realized the screws that attach the Noveske NSR handguard to the barrel nut were touching the barrel. I figured that was a major issue and ground down the screws so they were not in contact with the barrel anymore, the groups instantly shrank and were right back to where they were when I was using the ugly as hell hogue handguard. Its little things like that, that one doesn't think about, but could be a major issue that should be brought up in a thread like this. It may help someone out if they are experiencing the same issues.

I have to admit that if I did load testing, as in get out with several different loads and compare each one, I'd find the good ones faster.

But....that would be less shooting and fewer trips to the range.

Ain't no sense in a man living like that. (grin)

This is an important & interesting point & while there's little doubt that a fixed A2, or maybe ever a PRS, or similar stock will help the shooter to shoot small groups, my AR's are not really built for that particular task & while I'm sure that fine groups would almost surely improve with the addition of such, I'm not going to do that.

So all my guns & anything that I post or have posted, are shot with some variety of a basic M4 stock, usually SOPMOD or similar version style.

MM

I like the SOPMOD. I did handle an A1 the other day and I still don't understand why they added 5/8" to it to come up with the A2.

I like the A2 stock as well, but they seem short to me. The only adjustable carbine type stock i dont mind is the magpul ACS.

While small groups are the goal, if you look across the board at service rifle shooters majority run A2 style stock. If I were to build a dedicated [bleep] goes south AR it would be in a M4 configuration w/16 inch barrel. What’s interesting is how the marine corp uses A4 and the Army going away from A2/A4 platform to the M4 platform. But I been in BCT’s the last 12 yrs I have only seen a couple A2 in those units that still hadn’t been turned in.

Yep, "small groups" are totally different things between bench, position, bipod and SHTF shooting.