Equipment

I’ve been doing a lot of swapping of accessories and optics lately, and it occurred to me that one of the most useful things I have in my toolkit is a compact torque wrench. Consistency is accuracy, and this is an overview of what I think are the best torque wrenches for your rifleman kit.

While zeroing a new optic at the range recently, I fell down a rabbit hole of finding the “best” zero for a 22lr precision rifle. My determination: 35 yards, but how did I come to that conclusion, and is it actually right for you?

The AR-15 is the most popular rifle in the country. This guide discusses a good first rifle configuration, and provides some technical info to back it up.

This is a review of the Lynx Defense discreet rifle bag known as, “The Bronx.” It’s designed for a 16″ AR-15 rifle fully assembled and avoids giving anyone the impression “I’ve got a gun!.” The bag is high quality and completely made in the USA using American-sourced materials. So what do I think about it?

This post continues our look at load carriage by focusing on more traditional load bearing equipment. Before we get into my personal setups, I want to talk a little bit about how load carrying gear evolved over time.

The Oryx Chassis is a great starting point for an entry-level precision rifle chassis. It’s beefy, stiff, and you can buy it for one of the widest variety of actions I’ve ever seen. But it’s not without its tradeoffs to reach it’s budget-friendly price point.

A review of a lighter on a shooting blog? Yeah, we’re going there. I’m not here to shill a product, but rather talk about what I think is probably the best lighter you can buy and add to your kit. We’ll also talk about why you should keep a lighter with you all of the time anyway, even if you’re a nonsmoker like me.

This post summarizes just about everything I’ve learned about rifle barrels in general, and specifically the AR-15. Barrels are an important topic, so settle in for some details.

The Vortex Strike Eagle 5-25×56 is the first entry of the Strike Eagle line into long range optics, and it seems as though it was purpose-built for the precision rimfire market. Vortex managed to stuff many of the desirable features of their more expensive Razor line, ubiquitous in Precision Rifle Series (PRS) matches, into a more affordable package for the everyday shooter.

I’d like to throw a shout out to a fellow blogger, and community member, who did a great writeup on waterproofing a pack. I’ve got a bit of experience here, but given his background I think it’s best to just hear it from his mouth.

This post continues what I started in my introduction to load carriage. In that article, I talked about the ongoing battle between weight and capability. It turns out that up until very recently, the average weight carried by soldiers remained shockingly stable. When it comes time to fight, the recommendation is to stay less than 30% of your lean body mass or about 50 lbs for the average person.

This review has been a long time coming. It’s no secret at this point that I’ve been spending a lot of time with the Tikka T1x MTR in 22lr, as it served as the basis for my “Noisy Cricket” precision 22LR project. In my write up of the project, I laid out all of the choices that I made but mentioned that reviews of each major component would be forthcoming.

Well, here we are.