I'll take a minute to throw in some professional advice and I'll do my best not to make it completely a PVA Horn Tooting soap box. I will admit up front that there will be some tooting of my own horn as I have worked hard to bring our company capabilities and processes into a game where there are few true competitors.
The barrel nut prefits we have on sale are the same spec Rock blanks that we sold for years as the "button" version. They're excellent shooters, sometimes they're a little ugly inside but they shoot awesome. At the end of the day matches are won by what the target says not what the borescope says. Until we launched the Ospreys as our flagship offering, the Rock buttons were what I used personally for several years and I won a lot of local and regional stuff with them.
Should you want a shouldered install I would recommend our Ospreys. They're excellent barrels and in blind comparison they are up in the same sentence as the premium cut rifled barrels with some added benefits of life longevity and consistency in velocity across several different barrels.
Proof makes great barrels. We do some things differently than they do in the cores as well as the wrap. However I will not, even as a competitor who would like to win your business, bad mouth them for the differences in their process vs. ours. They make a broad range of things with standard chambers and what they make they make well. I offer more flexibility/customization to the end user because we have the flexibility within the process to do so. We have a program with EB right now that you can order a proof blank from their website and get it chambered by us. EB takes the order and payment for everything, they ship to us, we cut the barrel as ordered and ship direct to the customer. If Proof wasn't making good blanks I wouldn't be doing that program.
Criterion makes good stuff at the price point they sell. I've seen them to be somewhat softer steel and the blanks seem to come up shorter on barrel life. They do shoot and you can get a few things from them that I don't make. Likewise, I make a lot of stuff that they don't. Comparatively, PVA went head to head on a contract bid with Criterion for an OEM and we won on quality and lead time. They beat us on price point by about 10%. They're very competitive on cost to both OEM's and end users.
Ultimately, PVA is still very much custom oriented with the capacity to handle contracts for places doing 25-100 barrels a month. This puts us in a bit of a unique position within the precision rifle market. We're not Proof or Criterion doing 1000+ a month but we're also more capable than the bespoke custom shop that can do 2-3 barrels a day and only handles custom work. Our work is 100% dialed into the spindle on both ends of the barrel, we do not use the "skim pass and collet" method. This has cost us some production contracts that were more price sensitive than quality sensitive but as I explained to the OEM bid, it's a quality metric that I'm not willing to sacrifice. We offer shouldered configurations that others don't and we are typically the pioneering entry to market for new actions: IE we had the first CDG prefits out there as well as the first to offer both the barrel nut and shouldered prefits for the Tikka T3 and Sako actions.
When I opened PVA in 2013 I offered shouldered prefits for Bighorn TL and TL2 actions as the first order of business. The prefit idea was non-existent then, now it has become ubiquitous. If a new action comes out that doesn't handle prefits people don't buy it. I would like to think that idea was driven in large part by our efforts.
Barrel nut barrels offer some flexibility that don't come with shouldered prefits. One option you have from us is you can send your action and we will custom fit the first barrel, then provide a laser engraved tag for that specific action with the dimensions required to make replacements for you. We never need to see the action again unless you do something like swap the bolt or recoil lug or in other ways change the headspace. It's a standard part of our process with the installation of a custom fit barrel for an action like a Rem 700 or a Defiance Deviant; IE actions that don't have shouldered prefit capability.
PVA Benefits
1) There's no "we don't have that contour" here, everything is contoured to order. If it's not on the website let's figure out how to get what you want.
2) Every single chamber, no matter what, is dialed into the spindle. Doesn't matter what prefit or custom install we're doing they all get the same chambering treatment.
3) We are 100% CNC driven process and the consistency of size and shape on the chambers is exceptional.
4) I'm here answering questions and our reputation for cutting hammers is well known.
Another PVA fan here. As stated above they are very accurate. The barrel nut sale right now is also a deal for that quality of barrel.
