I am somewhere down on the list for one, and to help me make the decision to plunk down around $3,000. and pull the trigger for one, I would really like to see what's under the hood, as in some pics of the rifle without it's handguard showing the barrel to upper interface and the gas block setup. Also is there anything else unique about the upper receiver other than being strengthened and beefed up in critical areas ?
Alright, been super busy QCing, building, testing and packaging but with the snow storm at hand I got moment to dive into the some of the points of interest regarding the LPR. Essentially this isn’t what I would call an “innovative” rifle but rather a “iterative” rifle as Alex says. Most things in rifle are not particularly unique, they’ve all been done before but either not well or not in concert or just never really refined.
So whats the big deal?
1.) The barrel - This is the heart of any rifle and if a manufacturer won’t tell you who’s turning their barrels or leaves the details murky, it’s a huge red flag to me.
So in full transparency our barrels are being produced by Proof. They are standard Proof stainless steel blanks (Wylde chamber 1/7 twist) turned to our profile and finished in black. 16” now and probably more options someday.
Why Proof? In 2024 there are quite a few high end barrels to choose from. Proof makes great single point cut barrels AND are tremendously easy to work with as a company. Single point cut barrels are simply must in our opinion as it almost completely mitigates POI migration under rapid fire.
Here’s an example of a 5x5 I shot the other day in about 60 seconds. There is clearly a little NPA slop but you’re not getting the stringing you’d typically see with Button cut rifles as they heat up, which is an important practicality in regards to SPR applications.
As mentioned our profile is unique and for several reasons. The profile is on the thick side but in all the right places, kinda a SPR/SOCOM hybrid…
(Here’s a prototype barrel with almost the same dimensions as the production)
Additionally our dual tapered gas block which indexes off of the barrel and which is held in position with a jam nut.
(An actual production set up)
Again we didn’t come up with this idea, we just made it better. The whole point of this is three fold. A) jamming set screws and pins into the barrel isn’t exactly guaranteed to screw things up but it doesn’t help accuracy and makes for leaky inefficient gas system. B) this system allows us to have a thicker gas block journal, which in combination with the intermediate gas length, has seemed to help reduce gas port erosion by a degree. C) lastly a locked and torqued gas block doesn’t go anywhere or become misaligned.
2.) The Barrel Nut - Our barrel nut does one thing, it holds the barrel in place. This was a major point of design intention as a traditional barrel nut design typically holds the barrel in the receiver as well as serving as mounting point for the handguard.
This traditional design is problematic as any shift in pressure to the handguard (bipod/tripod/barricade) will transmit to the barrel nut and the barrel causing vertical shift in the POI. 0.3-0.5 MRAD is common and we’ve seen it as bad as 1 MRAD of vertical shift on some rifles. Our “semi-monolithic” design separates the two aspects.
(Here’s a barrel nut being installed)
(Here’s an example of 5x2 with “P” being a group fired prone and “T” being a group fired of a tripod)
Lastly regarding the barrel nut I actually lied about it only doing one thing as it also incidentally seems to act as a heat sink of sorts, pulling a fair amount of heat out of the barrel (chamber/throat area) reducing heat wear significantly. We had a prototype barrel (stainless steel) conduct 20x SOCOM SURG cycles (4,800 rounds at near cyclic rates) with zero malfunction or stoppages and no perceivable loss in accuracy/precision when compared to the initial accuracy/precision test done prior to the SURG test.
I’ll snap a picture of it next time I’m in the shop, a few photos shows the results much more easily.