The RAT WORX HTM “Hybrid Trigger Mod” is a drop-in replacement for AUG and MSAR trigger packs. At $230 (and with an ongoing waiting list) it is the most expensive AUG trigger “fix” I have seen, but it is also by far the best. If you shoot your AUG you should get this trigger pack.
RAT WORX made the clever design decision to build this upgrade around a standard AR-15 trigger group, which they suggest will allow users to tap the extensive market for AR-15 parts to further customize it. I just put it right in my MSAR and took it for testing.
Trigger weight measured a very consistent 6 pounds. Nominally that doesn’t sound any better than what I found with the Trigger Tamer. But practically there is no comparison: the HTM’s all-metal linkage from the trigger bar through to the sear and hammer eliminates sticking and stacking I couldn’t polish or lubricate out of any previous trigger systems. With this trigger I finally feel confident shooting my MSAR against standard AR-15s. With a 4x optic my test group was able to consistently ring a 200-yard steel silhouette shooting at rates up to 5 rounds per second.
Snobs are people who make judgments for non-intrinsic reasons. Like brands for example (Starbucks is great, Starbucks sucks), or market ideologies (corporate coffee is bad, coffee from tiny stores with a roaster in the back are good), or on the basis of various other untested assumptions. We try to be anti-snob at Coffee Review by tasting coffees blind and honestly reporting on our findings, even when the findings run counter to assumptions among some of our readers or preferences of long-time drinkers of certain kinds of coffee. We may not be right, of course, because last I checked there is no god certifying cupping results, but we’re honest and try to be transparent.
(Indeed, EmptorMaven tries to avoid luxury and “premium” products precisely because they generally command a price premium that exceeds any intrinsic or functional value.)
If we gave out medals the whole review would win a Commendation, accompanied by following citation: With his engaging and informative review of instant coffee, Kenneth Davids set a sterling example for product reviews everywhere. His writing is in keeping with the finest traditions of informing consumers, and reflects great credit upon himself, CoffeeReview.com, and the free markets.
Thanks to AAC 2012 may be the Year of the Subsonic Rifle. Over two years ago I lamented the dearth of heavy .22LR ammunition and rifles designed to shoot it. Today, with increasing awareness of the benefits of both suppressors and high ballistic-coefficient bullets, I’m hopeful this niche will be filled. Either way I’ve resolved this year to buy if possible, build if necessary, a .22LR rifle with a 16″ 1:9-twist barrel and threaded muzzle. [Update: Had to build it!] And I’ll be shooting Aguila 60gr ammo by the case if no other manufacturer steps in with a heavy subsonic .22LR round.
Expanding subsonic rifle bullets: Right now there are no commercial .30-caliber rifle bullets that expand at subsonic velocities. AAC/Remington have promised they will introduce one this year. I hope they’re not the only one. After .22LR .30-caliber cartridges are the next stop for subsonic rifles — whether .300 BLK, 7.62 Thumper, or .308 Winchester. The problem is that rifle bullets have traditionally been designed for terminal effect at rifle velocities: Much below Mach 1.5 and they don’t expand at all. At 1000 fps they can virtually have the rifling marks polished out and be reused!
Gun powder for consistent subsonic rifle loads: Trailboss is the current go-to powder for subsonics, but it doesn’t produce consistent muzzle velocities and, at less than 5 grains per cc, is too bulky for some cartridges. The only other option in this range of burn-rates is IMR SR 4759, but its density jumps to 10gr/cc and consequently doesn’t produce very consistent muzzle velocities at reduced loadings. There is nothing on the market to bridge the gap between the two. Give us a powder with a burn rate roughly in line with SR4759 but a density around 7gr/cc.
High-speed consumer video cameras: When Casio came out with the F1 in 2008 I was hopeful that it would not be long before consumers would be able to buy sensitive video cameras capable of recording 480p at thousands of frames per second. The technology is certainly there to produce such a product in scale for under $1000. However Casio discontinued its nascent consumer HSV product line in 2009 and nobody has pursued this since. The market is now free for the taking!
My first .22LR pistol was a Browning Buck Mark, which I amended with a threaded Tactical Solutions barrel so I could shoot with my Gemtech Outback suppressor. That works well, but I’ve since bought into the philosophy that one should “practice with what you’ll use,” and I’m not carrying my Buck Mark or taking it to any competitions. I’ve also mentioned the importance of practicing with semi-auto guns to acquire and maintain proficiency in dealing with their various failure modes. Since the semi-auto pistol I use and advocate more than any other is a Glock I decided to get a .22 conversion.
Reasons to get a .22LR conversion for your semi-auto pistol:
Cheap ammo allows for more practice ($.03-.05/round vs $.15-.30/round)
Low recoil helps inexperienced shooters acquire good shooting habits and experienced shooters to verify they haven’t developed bad trigger habits
Semi-auto malfunctions are still encountered — in fact, far more frequently than with the standard gun, which is actually a positive since it gives the user more practice correcting them
Suppressors don’t require booster devices because the .22 conversions are all blow-back actions
Advantage Arms has had a Glock .22 conversion kit on the market for years. But they never offered a threaded barrel, and for me the ability to shoot suppressed in my back yard was a big draw. This year Tactical Solutions came out with a conversion kit that is available with a threaded barrel, so that’s the one I bought. I paid $350 for the kit, but what they did not make clear (at least when I bought it) is that their slide does not come with sights. So add $40-90 for another set of sights!
This picture shows my original Glock 17 slide. The .22 conversion is just a replacement slide, shown underneath without and with my suppressor attached. Weight and balance of this conversion are kept pretty close to the original:
G17 slide is 17.2 ounces and its center of balance is 3 3/8″ from rear
TSG slide is 13.3 ounces and its center of balance is 3 3/4″ from rear
TSG with Outback suppressor weights 16.6 ounces with center of balance 5 1/8″ from rear
The other piece of the .22 conversion is a magazine. A fully loaded G17 mag weighs about 10 ounces. The TSG magazines can hold up to 15 rounds, but they weigh only 4 ounces loaded and protrude from the bottom of the grip by about half an inch. The magazines are one of the big shortcomings of this conversion kit, and not just due to their careless proportions: I bought an extra mag, and even after sending everything back to Tactical Solutions and shooting at least 1000 rounds through it the conversion will stovepipe virtually every round it tries to feed from a mag containing more than 10 rounds.
The other big drawback to this conversion, which it shares with seemingly every other .22 semi-auto on the market, is that full take-down for cleaning requires undoing screws. In this case, two tiny screws that are very difficult to reseat and very prone to galling. You can’t even fully remove the barrel without doing a complete take-down. And as with anything that eats .22 ammo, things get very dirty. But you can probably clean enough to keep it running just by scrubbing the feed ramp, bore, breech face, and extractor.
The final serious problem with this conversion, which is common to all other rimfire guns, is that dry firing can eventually break it: Rimfire rounds “fire” when the firing pin crushes the case rim (which contains the primer compound) against the chamber rim. Dry-firing causes the firing pin to directly strike the chamber rim, gradually denting the “anvil” needed to support a round’s rim during firing. In theory perhaps the firing pin could be made of a metal sufficiently soft relative to the chamber that it couldn’t dent it no matter how many times it hit. But in practice I was able to observe cratering beginning after just a handful of dry strikes. This is particularly problematic because the Glock is designed to be dry-fired before take-down. If you’re careful it is possible to dry-fire for disassembly while holding the slide slightly off the barrel so the firing-pin doesn’t hit it. But even if you are diligent in that you will probably inadvertently dry-fire many times during shooting because it doesn’t reliably lock the slide back on an empty magazine.
Bearing these issues in mind, I was reasonably satisfied overall with the conversion kit. As this photo shows the gun is capable of more accuracy than most people can wring from open sights on a standard-length pistol. Tactical Solutions recommends shooting either Federal AutoMatch or CCI Mini-Mag HV ammo (both of which shoot about 1050fps with a suppressor, which is only marginally subsonic but still quiet enough to not bother the neighbors) for maximum reliability. Granted, “reliability” for a .22 semi-auto is relative: Even without loading more than 10 rounds I count myself lucky if I make it through a magazine or two of AutoMatch without a failure to feed. But that’s part of the practice, and with .22s I can afford to practice a lot more.
My wife dropped her laptop, shattering the LCD. She assumed that was the end of her favorite computer and asked me to get a new one ASAP. But a broken screen doesn’t mean a broken computer.
I had her plug an external monitor into the machine’s VGA port to check it out. While backing up her files to our NAS she continued using the computer and everything else seemed to work. Now fairly confident that the damage was confined to the LCD panel I searched for a replacement.
For $75 LaptopScreen.com had an exact replacement for her model’s display at our house in two days. I managed to unscrew and peel open the cover, install the new panel, and close it up using a single small Phillips-head screwdriver in just ten minutes.
This is an XCR semi-automatic rifle in 7.62 Thumper. Shown is the “mini” upper with a 10″ barrel and AAC’s Cyclone suppressor. This is an awesome firearm that offers the power and accuracy of a rifle with the option of using subsonic loads that are not only hearing-safe but which “won’t wake the neighbors.”
In the following video I shoot a ten-round magazine of subsonic 220gr bullets. These leave the muzzle at 1000fps, which means they carry 500 foot-pounds of energy — comparable to a .357 magnum at point blank range, and greater than a .45 ACP pistol. And because they are very long, ballistically efficient rifle bullets they retain 80% of their energy out to 300 yards, which is roughly the outer limit of being able to accurately place a subsonic bullet.*
Like most, I began my quest for subsonic rifles shortly after buying my first rifle suppressor (a.k.a. silencer). After all, it was cool to be able to shoot without hearing protection, but supersonic bullets make a loud and unmistakable sonic crack of their own. The only way to further suppress a rifle’s noise is to shoot the bullet below the speed of sound.
What is 7.62 Thumper?
In principle it might seem easy to slow down a bullet: just put less powder behind it, right? However a number of undesirable things begin to happen as you do this with a given cartridge: First, as you continue to reduce the powder charge below roughly 80% you will begin to get increasingly inconsistent muzzle velocities, which dramatically reduces the gun’s accuracy. Drop the charge even further and you occasionally get a bullet stuck in the barrel, sometimes accompanied by a potentially catastrophic phenomenon often called “secondary explosive effect” which has destroyed many guns! Also, since a bullet’s energy equals mass times velocity squared you will be severely weakening your bullet’s power as you slow it down. To solve these problems you soon realize that what you want is to shoot a much heavier bullet. But as I explained in a previous post the only practical way to make a bullet heavier is to make it longer. And longer bullets combined with slower muzzle velocities require faster barrel rifling to get spin-stabilized enough to shoot straight. Before long you will realize that if you’re going to build a subsonic rifle capable of producing appreciably more energy than a .22LR it’s going to need at least a .30-caliber bore.
7.62 Thumper is one of a number of specifications for short rifle cartridges designed to shoot .30″ bullets at subsonic velocities. A host of proprietary and wildcat cartridges have existed for this purpose for decades, like the .300 Whisper and .300-221. However various drawbacks have prevented them from being widely adopted. The attraction of 7.62 Thumper is that it uses a standardized and widely-available case and chamber: 7.62x39mm Russian, which is the standard caliber for AK-47s. Peter Cronhelm posted a fair amount of research on subsonic shooting with the 7.62x39mm from bolt guns. My goal was to start with that and work up a gun and load that would shoot standard 7.62x39mm rounds but also reliably cycle subsonic rounds in a semi-automatic rifle.
The heaviest standard .30-caliber bullets are 240gr, which require a barrel rifled with a 1:8 twist to stabilize at subsonic velocities. Since no standard .30-caliber barrel has such a fast twist a new barrel is going to be part of any subsonic conversion. And this is why we make the distinction between 7.62 Thumper and 7.62x39mm: Russian bullets are .311″ diameter, whereas the only widely-available .30-caliber bullets heavier than 200gr are .308″. In theory you can shoot .311″ and .308″ bullets in either bore diameter, but I have tried that and the effects tend to be either bad accuracy in the case of undersized bullets or else shredded jackets and exploding bullets in the case of Wolf Military ammo in the high-twist .308″ bore. So a 7.62 Thumper gun is 7.62x39mm chamber but a .308″ bore with a 1:8 twist rate, and it’s best fired with .308″ bullets.
What about .300 AAC Blackout?
Halfway through my development of this rifle the Freedom Group announced its own solution to the same objective: the now SAAMI-standard .300 BLK caliber, which is designed specifically to work on the AR-15 platform. The ballistics are virtually identical to 7.62x39mm, and as with 7.62 Thumper a standard rifle only requires a new 1:8-twist .308″ barrel to shoot accurate subsonic loads. The advantages of .300 BLK are (1) It uses the small .223Rem bolt standard on AR-15 rifles instead of the large 7.62x39mm bolt standard on AK-47s, and (2) Remington will be producing factory subsonic ammunition, whereas you still have to load your own 7.62 Thumper ammo.
Why the XCR?
Getting a 7.62x39mm to shoot 220gr subsonic would be easy enough. But getting it to cycle a semi-auto action was unknown territory. I knew that I wanted a piston-driven semi-auto with an easily-modified gas system.
Given that I wanted to work with 7.62x39mm AR-15s with their small bolt were immediately ruled out. I also knew that I would potentially be yanking and changing a lot of barrels to get this to work. Fortunately, my favorite tactical rifle, the XCR, met the bill. The XCR’s barrel goes in and out with a single screw. The XCR also has one of the best piston gas systems for tuning: From the factory it comes with 5 hand-adjustable settings. And if those don’t work it’s easy to remove the regulator and gas block to enlarge holes to increase pressure.
The machinists at Robinson Armament, maker of the XCR, were also willing to build some custom barrels for this project at a reasonable price. I sent them a Shilen stainless steel barrel blank bored to .308″ with 1:8 twist cut rifling. RA cut it in half and put it on their machines to turn out the two drop-in short barrels shown here: 10″ for the shorter “mini” XCR upper, and 12″ for the standard-length upper.
Short barrels and subsonics go hand in hand. Longer barrels serve only to increase a bullet’s velocity. Of course you have to register a rifle as an SBR with the ATF before you can install a barrel shorter than 16″, but this entire project is only interesting if you are already in the practice of registering NFA items like the suppressor you’re going to put on the end of the barrel.
The Subsonic Load
With the rifle in hand my goal was to work up a load that would shoot right at 1000fps — about .9Mach under comfortable atmospheric conditions, and safely below the transonic barrier where bullets start to make their own flight noise. But I also wanted one that would do so with enough energy to cycle a semi-automatic rifle action, and this has not been easily done in the past! It is compounded by the fact that no smokeless powders commercially available are designed for short-barrelled rifles. The military has specified and bought batches of powder customized for SBR loads, but they don’t leave any for sale to the public. For now reloaders are stuck with suboptimal options in terms of bulk and burning speed. The new standby for subsonic loads, TrailBoss, is too bulky to work in any rifle cartridge capable of firing and cycling both high-velocity and subsonic ammo. After significant research and testing I have found that the two best powders for subsonic SBRs are IMR 4227 and IMR SR-4759. In the case of the 7.62 Thumper XCR SBR, 12 grains of 4227 or 11 grains of SR-4759 over 220gr-240gr bullets will shoot right about 1000fps and, with a suppressor, provide enough pressure to reliably cycle the action.
* Regarding Maximum Effective Range of Subsonic Bullets: The biggest constraint on subsonic bullet range is encapsulated in a concept called “Danger Space,” which can be defined as the maximum error in range to a target that will still result in a hit. It is a function of both target size and the bullet’s fall angle at the target’s range. At subsonic velocities the latter factor quickly becomes overwhelming: For an 8″ target at 300 yards danger space is 30 yards: I.e., if there are no other sources of ballistic error you can only tolerate a ranging error of +/-15 yards and still expect to hit the target. Any more and you will either overshoot or fall short.
Shooting targets of known range this is still feasible: I tested this gun against 8″ steel plates at exactly 300 yards. The shot requires 40MOA of elevation, and the bullet takes a full second just to reach the target, but we made a first shot hit and were consistently ringing the steel. However when you introduce the uncertainties in range and other ballistic effects one might encounter in “real-world” situations like hunting this would become a difficult shot.
X-ring rubber bullets have been around for more than a generation. Currently they are manufactured by the Meister Bullet & Ammunition Company. Boxes of 50 retail for around $12.
These should not be confused with “less lethal” or riot-control projectiles. Rather, these are reusable primer-powered training bullets. I tested both .38 and .44 caliber versions. Continue reading →
In 2007 Kel-Tec announced they would produce a clever new .308 Rifle, Forward-ejecting, Bullpup style (RFB). It immediately hit the wish lists of gun enthusiasts across the country. Mine is shown here with a 3-15x50mm Nitrex scope and AAC Cyclone suppressor.
This gun has a number of commendable features:
It weighs just over 8 pounds, yet fires the medium-size .308 cartridge
It has an 18″ barrel yet measures just 26″ overall (the shortest allowed for an unregistered rifle)
It uses standard FAL magazines, which are widely and cheaply available
It ejects spent cases forward, making it a truly ambidextrous bullpup
The RFB does have a few shortcomings that I will touch on in the course of this review, most critically in its gas system design.
The Biggest Challenge: Getting one
As of 2011 Q1 Kel-Tec has produced only 1500 of these rifles. The MSRP of $1880 hasn’t changed since it was first announced. Kel-Tec is irritatingly detached from the market for its products: The company increases neither production rates nor prices in response to ongoing high demand. Furthermore, the company only sells its firearms through an inscrutable network of distributors. To this day none of my dealers have been able to get their hands on an RFB. Meanwhile, people who do acquire them have always been able to scalp them on GunBroker.com for hundreds of extra dollars. Kel-Tec, obliviously, sells these to its distributors for under $1200.
I finally obtained one by learning through their fan forum that a batch was shipping to a particular distributor who was willing to make a direct sale to me (transferring, of course, through an FFL). My final cost was just $1350 which is considered closer to the “fair” street price than the MSRP.
The Bullpup Advantage
I have been a longtime fan of the bullpup firearm design, which places the action and magazine behind the trigger. The benefits are pretty clear in the following picture showing the RFB (18″ bbl) next to a comparable conventional semi-auto rifle (the FNAR, 20″ bbl) and a traditional bolt-action sniper rifle (the Savage 10FP, 26″ bbl).
The reduced length alone makes a bullpup much more practical for enclosed or close-quarters use. What you may not realize until you handle one is that the center of mass is moved so far to the rear that it is easy to shoulder and shoot, if necessary, with just one hand. Continue reading →
The AUG has a notoriously bad trigger. Not only is the trigger pull about 10 pounds, but it is also very “sticky.” Some people just shrug and say, “bullpups have bad triggers.” That’s not necessarily so. For example, Kel-Tec’s RFB has a crisp 6.5-pound trigger right out of the box. I will explain the origin of the AUG’s bad trigger as well as steps that can be taken to improve it.
The original AUG was an infantry rifle with a clever select-fire mechanism: Pull the trigger partly to the rear for a single shot. Squeeze it all the way to the rear and the gun fires a fully-automatic burst. For this feature to be reliable in the field the AUG was designed with a long and heavy trigger to avoid unintentional full-auto discharges. Perhaps compounding this design decision is the fact that militaries have not historically made “trigger feel” a high priority for infantry rifles; if anything a heavy trigger is considered a safety feature that reduces the possibility of unintentional discharges.
Steyr did not consider it worthwhile to create a smoother or lighter trigger for their semi-automatic-only trigger packs.
MSAR, which specifically built its rifle for the U.S. civilian market, doesn’t have a good excuse for copying the heavy AUG trigger spring.
With the iPad 2, as with the original iPad, Apple is continuing to charge an absurd $130 premium for models equipped to access 3G cellular networks. Even worse: You have to pick between Verizon and AT&T when you buy your iPad, since their wireless data networks are incompatible. It’s pretty sad to spend over $600 for a tablet computer that is then locked into a single data provider on an aging 3G standard.
Smart consumers are foregoing the 3G option on iPads and instead investing in portable internet access points, which can then serve not only their iPad but also other Wi-Fi enabled phones and computers in the vicinity. This preserves freedom to upgrade to faster 4G networks in the future and to switch service providers without having to buy another iPad.
For example, you can buy a MiFi mobile hotspot for the same price as the iPad 3G option and then get unlimited data access from Virgin Mobile, without a contract, for $50/month — for up to 5 Wi-Fi devices.
