I know this will be a little long winded, but the details might be important on this one.
So I’ve gone down this rabbit hole before, without specifically knowing it. At the time primarily focused on the negative effects of an extremely overpassed system. At the time I was seeing abnormally large groups after adding a suppressor, which was resolved by reducing the gas via a BRT gas tube. It worked quite well, and resulted in the rifle going back to shooting as well as it did prior to adding the can. That said, I would still get random fliers (true fliers, on a 30 shot group, 28rds into 1.2”, the 2 would fly wide and increase the es to 2”) which I chalked up to me just sucking, or getting sloppy.
Fast forward, I built a new upper specifically to help reduce receiver flex/positional poi shift (which was done reasonably successfully with an Aero Enhanced upper and rail). This meant a whole new upper, and allowed to be built with an adjustable gas block this time. Long story short, new upper shoots great, gas is tuned perfectly, still getting random fliers as discussed above, so same conclusion, I must still be doing something weird to cause the fliers.
Then a buddy of mine who works in a local gunshop hits me up and is telling me about this new BCG they have from VKTR (turns out it’s exactly the same as the Leitner Wise bgc) and that I should try it out. After looking into it, their claim to fame is an altered/delayed cam path, that is supposed to unlock the bolt/extract the case 10-15% later than a standard BCG, thus keeping full pressure in the barrel longer, and extracting at lower pressures, which should reduce gas to the face running suppressed. It’s also hard chromed, and a couple other minor advantages, so I figured sure, why not. Worst case it does nothing, and I could use another BCG anyway.
Turns out, it definitely does something. The rifle went from locking back on empty to not locking back. And most interestingly to me, the fliers seem to have disappeared. It was just one group, but it’s August in AZ, so laying on the ground to shoot a group is not comfortable this time of year, and it was a 20rd group in about 2 minutes, so the rifle got quite hot. All that to say, if there were ever conditions that would justify having some fliers it was that.
Obviously I need to do some more testing, but has anyone observed anything similar? Maybe not with the Leitner Wise/VKTR cam path, but I know LMT and Surefire do something similar with a delayed cam path. Does it even make sense that delayed unlocking would have that much of an effect?
