And just in time for hunting season, too! I’ve just put the finishing touches on my new favorite rifle of all time and I wanted to share my excitement with you all. Ever since I visited the Advanced Armament guys in 2011, I knew that I needed to get my hands on a suppressed 300 BLK SBR. They showed me the light, and turned me into a massive 300 BLK fanboy – you may have noticed. A rifle that’s more compact than an MP5SD, but just as quiet and more powerful? Sign me up! John Hollister himself even took me to the range to make that comparison . . .
First, full auto is tons of fun. Second, pink shirts are sexy. And third, that comparison sold me on the concept of the caliber.
Some calibers do better in longer barrels. The 5.56 NATO round, for example, is designed to burn all of its powder in 20″ of barrel. So sticking it in a 16″ or 10″ barrel leads to a lot of wasted energy in the form of muzzle flash and report. With the 300 BLK round, though, it’s the opposite problem. The round is designed to completely burn its powder in 9″ of barrel, which means my old 16″ 300 BLK barrel was unnecessarily long.
My only mistake in building this rifle was waiting so damned long to start the SBR paperwork. I procrastinated, figuring that the 16″ barrel with the silencer was good enough and I could get by without another tax stamp. But as time went on, I found myself still lusting for a shorter package. Maybe that didn’t come out the way I intended it. Anyway, a year after I submitted the form for my silencer, I submitted one for my SBR as well. And nearly two years after my trip to AAC, the rifle is finally complete.
As soon as I got the new upper, my first stop was the range. And it performed exactly as I remembered.
Percieved recoil is no more than with the 16″ version. It’s also just as quiet, meaning that I still don’t need hearing protection to go hunting and don’t have to worry about annoying the neighbors. And as for accuracy?
With subsonic rounds, I was making the steel gong sing at 250 yards. With supersonic rounds, 500 yards was a breeze.
For optics, I went with the Leupold Mark AR Mod 1 with the SPR reticle. I reviewed this scope a while back, and you can still see the same scope that I reviewed sitting on my competition AR-15 in the background. I liked it so much that I bought the scope from Leupold after the review. And then I bought another for the 300 BLK rifle, too. Hint: it’s a really nice scope, especially for the money.
As for internals, that’s a Franklin Armory lower receiver with an ALG defense QMS trigger. The lower was chosen because I liked the design, and the guys at FA were able to engrave my trust info into the gun before anodizing it. As for the trigger, the ALG defense QMS is a good single stage trigger that I had lying around. The upper receiver is the 9″ complete upper from AAC. And the silencer is the 762-SDN-6 from AAC.
I guess I should wrap up this article by passing on some advice that I learned the hard way. If I learned anything, it’s not to procrastinate on submitting your forms to the ATF. The longer you wait, the longer you wait. If your heart is calling for an SBR, just do it! Then one day, your dreams will come true.