Shooting sub-MOA with a 223 Remington AR15

To begin with I think most, if not all, AR15s should be able shoot 1 MOA groups. Unfortunately they don’t, and sometimes even the best rifle just won’t marry whatever ammunition your using. But here’s proof that this competition rifle is up for it.

A lot of the top competitors in Practical Rifle reload their own ammunition. To get the best performance and the lowest time on a stage a lot of them use low-weight, low-recoil around 50-52 grain bullets. You have to take care so that you keep within the Power Factor (150 in IPSC), as the bullet is low mass compared to the normal so you need a lot of velocity to get up to the requirement.And make sure it stays there, even if the temperature drops.

Below: The bullets – Hornady Match .224″ 52 gr BTHP, features AMP Jackets. 500 pcs.

The reloads I used shot really accurate, but also with a very smooth and low recoil so you can shoot your next shot faster than most (all?) factory reloads. In competition every tenth of a second counts, and when you can really fire away at 200-300 meters it really makes a difference.

Specifications of the rifle:

Barrel: Rainier Arms Ultramatch 20″ 223 Wylde 1:8

Upper/Lower: Rhino Arms

Handguard: Mega Arms wedge lock

Elftmann 3 Gun Trigger, which are great by the way.

Compensator: Salen Open Titanium. As it’s 3D printed in Titanium and Made in Norway, we might take a closer look at it in a future article.

JP enhanced Carrier, Master of Arms titanium Buffer, JP Silent captur.

Magpul PRS stock, Magpul K2+ pistol grip

Mount: Spuhrfrom Sweden

Optics: Zeiss V8 1.1-8x

Custom Ceracote.

This is what they look like once they have been reloaded. The “Hollow” looks huge.

The rifled was zeroed so I shot one grouping to test and the result can be seen in the top picture.

The distance is 300 meters and I was a little bit high, otherwise all five shots would have been withing the inner ten for a full score. Now I lost 2 points (48/50), but the grouping is what we looked for this time rather than the score.

The reticle of the Zeiss V8, at 8 power, felt a bit large but apparently it worked fine anyway.

For windy conditions a lot of top shooters use the 73 grain Berger bullets instead.