We are embarking upon a journey. You've probably seen these $300 Freedom kits from PSA, and you thought to yourself, how good are they? Are they worth it?
Are they combat ready? Are they worth my cold, hard-earned cash? Today on Grantham, we'll be testing this thing to the utmost, using precise science, analytics, and an Asian in order to get the correct data that we need in order to tell you how good is a $300 AR. Before we get into it, we of course have to thank the biggest sponsor of the channel, Send and Take Images. The Sonoran Desert Institute, if you're looking to get your start in gunsmithing, they are the people to go to.
They fund our science. They fund the crazy stuff that we do. They are a gunsmithing school accredited.
Go and check them out. We love them so much. And Micah. who can we not forget?
Primary Arms, and I'm kind of sad we don't have one of their optics on the rifle to abuse it as well. Yeah. But, I mean, you can get your own.
Just use discount code KEVINISLAME and just there you go. And, of course, if you... want to get better at shooting Mantis.
So it allows you to dry fire when usually people would freak out. Your home, parking lot. So Mantis is a device that will turn your weapon into a dry fire machine.
Allows you to get that trigger reset and practice well. We love them. And of course, a big thank you to AAC Ammunition.
They, of course, sponsor our ammo. It's all 77 grain serum hatching. So what we do have to say is that AAC is a subsidiary of PSA.
We are obviously going pretty in-depth on a PSA upper. So there is the question of the fact that we're getting ammunition and we're doing a review on one of their uppers. What is the conflict of interest there?
So here at Grand Thumb, we're never told to give good reviews. We're never paid to give good reviews. We don't do that.
We are always as non-biased as we can possibly be. If this sucks, it's going to suck. And that's just the way it is.
But it should be noted, of course, that we want to be completely transparent as to the fact that we're not going to give you good reviews. that we do receive ammunition from AAC although nothing directly from PSA. So with all that being said let's get into the test. Not once has PSA asked us to be non-binary with their product so thank you PSA. Now we are not documenting every single round that we're firing we're doing a lot of training with this rifle so understand that this the point of this is not to burn the rifle down we're not that's not what we're trying to do now we are trying to do accelerated wear and we're doing that with suppressors.
is a flow through so there's less you know back pressure compared to like a normal baffle suppressor and we're running an auto which is going to massively increase the amount of wear on both the bolt and the system in general and if we wanted we could just run mag after mag until this thing burned out and every AR will fail around the 900 round mark if you just do them back to back to back that's not the point we're not trying to swatch the gas to blow up that's what's gonna happen we're trying to document for you in extremely hard usage how long will this $300 rifle last? How, what is, what is the wear pattern going to be like? If we're running this thing like a straight up duty gun, like we would a URGI, how does it compare to like a thousand dollar gun? How does it compare to a $4,000 gun?
These are questions. I want the answer to because I'm really interested. It's only $300 for this upper. Can it really hang with other uppers that cost Four six eight times that price Interested to find out The PSA $300 upper is now at 2k rounds. We have just grouped it.
I would say this is past the break-in point for a barrel. 2k for sure. So Mike, you, well I mean we're also firing this on really fast aka auto.
So Mike. you just grouped it uh with 77 grain aec go ahead all right take it away so i was a little nervous using an acog you know just reticle and all that good stuff but for the viewers out there this is a one moa square so i mean if we were to put that up We would be I would call that either an MOA or just under an MOA. A smidge under.
And then obviously I did have a flyer. This was my first shot. You're a little nervous.
A little nervous boy. Yeah. So I don't know.
Yeah. I'm pretty blown away. Not only the fact that it's a $300 upper.
The fact that that was with an ACOG. If that doesn't say that it's capable, I don't know. 100% capable, man.
And we'll shoot it at 600 now to show you that it's capable of making the long shots as well. So I feel like as a data point we should probably run her back one more time. I mean this was our first Let's do another legitimate group another group shoot her long and then burn it continue to burn it down because fuck this upper, right? As the first one Honestly, dude, so you have that first round that was that so this these three would be like an MOA That would make it like one point one two and then the flyer was people be like, but it's a five-round group It's a two of my gun still awesome we're gonna be shooting at 550 580 so what you have to realize about the combat accuracy of a rifle is the general effective range of 556 depending on the barrel length, especially like 14.5 or 16 in this case, is about 500. So we're pushing this what I would consider to be past the effective range.
You can of course shoot 5.56 quite far after about 800 depending on elevation. But our point here is we have a $300 upper that is delivering pretty good performance. So we're going to show you the combat capability of the rifle to make shots at the edge of the effective range of 5.56. So without further ado, let's go and shoot. So we are shooting 77 grains which are most suited to these longer range.
All right, so once we got our hold, ACOG, it was at the 6, just holding right over it. 77 grain, you're going to see a little bit more drop. The reticle is calibrated for a 62 grain M855 compared to the 77 we have here, which accounts for the discrepancy.
that's a lot of words point is as you can see the rifle is more than capable of making a 550 yard shot which i would consider pretty damn good for what we have and we're at 2k rounds right now and the rifle has no problem doing it so i would say we have nothing else to do other than continue to burn this little bitch down So we have been shooting this gun both auto and suppressed. This is going to massively increase the amount of heat that the rifle is seeing especially compared to semi. So As a consequence as we near a thousand rounds, well three thousand total, we're starting to get very low on lubrication So it needs a little bit more so we're gonna be hitting it with a little bit of lube So this is a this is an old trick right?
So to see if the gas rings are still good on your I think those are fucking worn my dude. Okay, right here we have a bolt from an SR-15. So an SR-15 is a very high-end rifle, close to 4K. NATO death squads use them, a lot of high-end military forces use them. We have the bolt from this guy, closer to, I'd say about 7K rounds on this guy.
And that supports the weight. Um, so I would definitely say that we're seeing quicker wear on the PSA compared to the Knights. Okay, we are at 3k total so we're gonna go ahead and group her now.
We'll see how she does. Okay, we are at the 3000 round update. We're going to print for groups and we're gonna actually use a magfight optic.
So we have a Knight Force. What is this a two 0.5 to 20 and we're going to group at 100 with 77 grains here match king made by AAC and We will see how we do and so as per usual we've been having Micah group on this particular test So Micah you're up buddy. Yep.
You have nothing to mag Okay. Dude, do you want to do one more group at the bottom? Yeah, we can do another one. Alright, go to the bottom.
That was clean. So, I didn't pull those. Really? Yeah, that was the group for sure. Okay.
I felt very, very confident. That last one was pretty significantly high left of where I broke. Really?
All right, take a look at your groups, man. So, first group, that was definitely an MOA or less. Oh yeah, for sure. Incredible, very good. Down here, was it this shot that flew for you?
It was this shot. shot and I don't really think it was me. I'm going to be completely honest.
I'd say like this is where they tend to go. One shot went here. Yeah so measuring this would be about 2.5.
Here's a group I printed right after that. Looks about a 1.5, 1.6. One consistently is doing about 1.5 at this point after 3k. Well it looks like it's still printing great.
Let's continue to burn it down. We're at uh... Today...
Started at 3k. We are now at... We fired... What is it, 15 mags?
15 fucking mags dude. And like... I didn't clean her for the last time either.
I mean just like... with Charles. Um, she's running.
And we were shooting at 720. We're definitely seeing some limits of accuracy at 720, but I mean, that's beyond kind of the typical range most people are shooting. Pretty impressive. This bitch is hot. Holy shit.
BANG! Poor gun dude, we've been running it so hard. Okay, so we are now at...
God that's hot! We are at... What, 990?
Yeah, we're at 990. Well, we also grouped with it. So, over a thousand. So we're at 4k and we're gonna let it cool off. We're gonna regroup and see where it's at. We're gonna go ahead, we're gonna group the rifle now.
We're at over 4,000 rounds. See how it does. What? That's barely, that's 1.1 Alright So, the gun gooped really f- Good so we were getting making sure they were on with this.
I think we accidentally only sent four on this one. Yeah, but oh well We're making sure cuz we rebound to the optic. This was the actual five round group.
We're at 1.1 on that site group man She getting dry. Alright, we got a failure to feed right there. See how dry the bolt is. Okay, we're at single shot now, so See if it's mag related you got some bigger problem Semi I Guess you on this guy right here.
Did you tend to agree Charles? Yeah, I think so Those shitty tan followers, that's probably what it was. Let's see if I can get multiple impacts.
Okay, Industries. I would say she's probably dirty as fuck. Yeah.
Okay, that guy was super dirty. We fired about 1500 rounds that were suppressed full-auto and without cleaning it. We started having stoppages. We cleaned out the bolt, just kind of a quick field clean and We're gonna see how she runs. She feels a lot smoother.
What's up, Mike? See the super inconsistent ejection? Yeah. I would say we're probably getting close to the ejector being worn out.
We're just at about 5k right now so that makes sense we're at 4,800 or excuse me 4,900. We're a couple mags shy of 5k so that makes sense. sense to me um this is about especially at the firing schedule we're doing seeing uh a degradation in the extractor that's par for the course dude bolts are a replaceable item so um i think this is as simple as replacing the the extractor and continuing the test.
This isn't favoring the weapon, extractors are cheap and we usually get them on our kit anyhow because extractors wear out guys. So, after we had that little failure there, what we did is we took the gun into our friend's stockpile defense. And I was fairly certain that what actually did happen was that we had an extractor spring failure or an extractor failure.
Now this isn't uncommon at the round count that we were seeing, especially firing suppressors. pressed in full auto, which if you don't already know, is significantly harder on a firearm than just regular semi-auto, and that's due to the amount of heat buildup. So in the case of this particular bolt, what we had was the extractor spring had worn out. Again, well within the kind of failure rate of a bolt, of a part within the bolt.
You have to realize, again, everything is going to fail. some point but the bolt overall seems to be good so we're gonna continue the test but before we do we are now at 5,000 rounds on this rifle Mike are you excited very excited have we grouped it we're going to group it in just a second but before we do we have a very special guest, our very own Asian, Asian Phil. Asian Phil, get over here.
Hey, thanks for coming on, man. Hey, nice to have you. Hey, what company are you with? Bear Arms, spelled B-X-A-R, in San Antonio, Texas.
Hey, thanks for coming out. I understand that you have a severe amount of autism when it comes to the AR-15, so we wanted to have you out to take a look at the wear patterns that we're seeing on this rifle to see if there's anything that is abnormal at that point. Yes, for sure. And so, before we start, obviously you're not affiliated with PSA in any way.
way so do you swear before god and your witnesses here that you will be true and faithful you will be uh unbiased and that you will give your most accurate data possible oh for sure okay perfect awesome man so go ahead and walk us through what you're seeing on this particular rifle take it apart do whatever you want and uh get it get it going for you yeah sure so like i said i'm from san antonio so i'm not used to this weather so it's bundled up right now it's a little cold so the most wear we see on the carrier is typically these top two rails right along here and the same on the other side and that's from the carrier being biased towards the top of the upper receiver from the actual hammer is pressing up against the bottom of the carrier so if you can imagine the carrier reciprocating that right here is where it starts cocking the hammer and that spring pressure is pushing up on the carrier biasing it towards the top of the receiver which is why you see them most aware at these top rails. But if you look here... Really interestingly, we don't see a very even wear pattern on these top rails.
So you see wear at the front and then a little bit more at the top. And then back here behind the scallop, a lot of wear or more wear really at the very top of this rail. And it really looks like it's not touching at the bottom of the rail.
So let's show a quick comparison. So right here we do have an SR-15 bolt. So this is from our Knight's Armament SR-15.
This is like a $3,000 to $4,000 rifle. Generally considered to be... high quality rifle.
Gucci baby. A Gucci. So if you take a look at those rails and the type of wear that we're seeing if you want to compare and contrast that.
Yeah let's just double check to make sure that we're a little bit clean and you can see here already this entire front area of this carrier of this rail is pretty evenly worn and then the same thing back here we're seeing not a very strong strong indication that we have uneven wear at this top rail. And then here on the other side of the PSA rail, kind of the same thing. At the very front, we see more wear. And then interestingly, compared to the other side, we see more wear at the very bottom of this rail.
Whereas if we look at the opposite side, we see wear at the top, which is very unusual. So what is that indicative of? Is this an out-of-spec carrier or is this something with the upper receiver?
Could be either. could be both. Typically if everything is perfectly round you would see a more even pattern or closer to round so depending on whether the carrier rails were not ground perfectly round or the upper receiver was not machined perfectly round could be part of the problem.
Okay so we're seeing that is this going to be an issue I guess for the rifle? That's a great question and I think it really depends if your rifle runs it's not an issue if it doesn't run it could be it is psa spec if it runs it runs but no this is always so moving back from the wear that we're seeing here what else are you seeing on the car like is the gas key staked correctly is it all looking good yeah so gas key actually looks like it's staked really well and what we mean by staking is these uh these indents at the sides of these fasteners it's the physical displacement of material from the gas key to touch the fastening screws and that is to help prevent those screws from loosening under shooting vibration and funny enough staking isn't even enough sometimes if the fasteners aren't torqued correctly and then you stake over that it it could still come loose you would maybe be surprised at how many carriers I tear apart that have very loose gas keys even after being staked interesting now from those gas keys what else should we be looking for For the BCG that is going to be significant before we move on to other parts of the rifle. Yeah, so overall length of the carrier.
This controls a couple of things, but there is a spec for that. We're going to check for, after you shoot it a little bit more, we're going to check. a leak between the gas key and the carrier.
We're going to check the bore diameters of the gas key itself, the bolt shoulder support, the gas ring run, the gas ring run, and the bolt tail seal. And we're also going to check the bolt tail seal for how round it is. Have you seen like the mathematical equations?
It's flying by my head. So thus far, are we seeing better consistency from like the Knights, for example, which we're kind of doing a comparison with? Right.
From the external wear patterns, which is really only the rails at this point, the Knights does look much better, much more even surface engagement between the rails and the upper receiver, a lot less wear on the side of the gas key. It's pretty obvious to me that this, at least this combination, of carrier and upper receiver is made better. So going from the BCG, we do have the bolt and like the cam pin.
I know these are common areas of wear that can show problems. Like especially if you have anything that's abnormal, like on bolts, for example, we've cracked so many, sheared so many lugs off bolts. So what I mean by that guys is, well, let's use the firing pin right here.
So these little lugs right here, these are a weak point on the bolt. And oftentimes as you're shooting, really hard, you're getting the gun really hot, these will shear off. Especially right around the the extractor right here, this is extremely common. I've sheared every single bolt you can imagine, from SR-15 to Daniel Defense to Colt to of course, you know, PSA as well.
So you know, that's always something that I'm concerned about with a bolt. It's something that I take a look at every time I clean them. I'm looking for those little micro fractures and if it's questionable, swap it out.
Yeah, yeah. So a lot of people maybe don't think about it this way, but I consider bolts a consumable item. Oh yeah, 100%. If you get over 5,000 rounds on a bolt, you're doing pretty well. And so it might be time to think about getting a replacement or swapping a new one.
Especially on the Mark 18. Mark 18s are famous for shearing bolts around the 5K mark. Right. They're tough on components, just a lot of gas. They're cycling really fast, full auto.
The shorter the gun, the harder it's going to be on parts. So like bolts and stuff on a Mark 18. Well, not actually necessarily. Really?
OK, interesting. It's the shorter the gas system. Yeah.
Okay, there we have it. Short of the gas system. Thank you, Agent Phil.
Oh, you're welcome, white mic. Yeah, so we're seeing somewhere on the bolt where we would typically see wear. So at the bolt tail, where it interfaces with the seal, in the carrier itself, it's going to rub. Yes. So we see wear.
The belt on the bolt itself, we are seeing wear, and it looks very even, which is good. Good. But we're also seeing like an interesting discoloration. Coloration all over the body of this bolt, which is is it due to a shitty cutting or is it?
I don't know I don't know. It's weird. I really don't see this that often but it's whatever finish was applied is Hey, man, they got us to save money somewhere So doing one of the down and dirty checks you can insert the cam pin into the barrel or into the bolt all the way and give it a little wiggle.
This one, if you can see, got a decent amount of play in it and that could be indicative of the actual cam pin hole on this bolt stretching. It's pretty impossible to know for sure because we didn't check with these components when these parts were brand new. It could also be that this hole was machined too large from the factory, that the actual barrel portion of the cam pin was too small, a combination of those of both or it could be stretching and then we can also check the ejector plunger spring and and movement so we're just we're just using our improvised punch we're just going to give this a good feel and it feels pretty good yeah the ejector didn't feel too bad for 5k of auto suppress and it's moving freely so we're not getting any like binding or anything like that some sometimes you can get burrs in any machine part you can you can find burrs in places and this spring can wear out for the ejector but typically as long as you're using a reasonably okay spring your bolt is probably going to break around the same time you would need to replace the spring. Here's the extractor for you.
Right, so this is the original extractor. We can see pretty clearly where it was touching the bolt originally. You can see that kind of moon-shaped discoloration and just from the the general feel test my hands are very numb but I can feel it catching my finger, the actual claw portion.
If I was more high speed I'd be able to actually check the width of this cutout for for rim stuff but for rim dimensions and but generally speaking this extractor looks very serviceable are you saying just pop the old extractor in there? Yeah, probably. So more than likely I think we determined the extractor spring was the portion that was worn on this guy.
Okay so we've talked about a lot of the part where they were seen we're gonna do more measurements after this but I think it's time to group it we're at 5k let's see how it's printing and then put another file on it. Sounds good. Let's go. Okay.
Yep. Not so bad so far. Nah, pretty good.
Open it up a bit. That's not too bad. Yeah, will you print me another group low? Yep, got you.
Thanks boss. These all feel good man, they're just not really going where I'm aiming. Yeah, that was a flyer. Interesting. There I'm gonna group one.
Yep. Those all felt good to me man but I saw two flyers out right. That's kind of how I felt but I mean you guys were shooting it long and you kind of felt the same thing.
Yeah so I do want to talk about that for a second. So we were shooting at 720 and we'll set up here and shoot it at 720 but we saw Pretty good accuracy at the beginning, out to about 3K rounds. And then when we hit this 5K, we started having some issues at 720. So I do think the barrel is starting to get a little worn.
We're starting to get these groups opening up, which the barrel. should not be doing this at 5k i i do want to say like a barrel should last even on the firing schedule it should last longer than than 5k okay um so here's micah's first group pretty good we're gonna have phil measure that in just a second here's micah's second group we started to see it open up as the barrel heated up here's my group right here um these two felt good and i did feel them kind of open up which you were feeling that as well micah this was what we were seeing when we were shooting far as a barrel getting heat at this wear point um we started to see these rounds just not impacting where they should have in a very similar fashion to what we're seeing right here so I do think this is indicative of what we're seeing which is where let's go ahead let's have Phil measure these and we'll go on from there okay our Asian has calculated this which is hysterical and what did you get looking at one and a half just a little bit over one and a half MOA okay so that first group that's great that's that's very acceptable accuracy out of an AR-15 let's see what it opened up to which I see which I would say is probably more indicative of the actual accuracy that we're getting out of the rifle right now. Alright, so we've measured Micah's group right here and what was the measurement we got? We got 2.227 MOA. Hey, you know what?
It kind of looks shitty but at the same time that's well within military specs for the M4 right there. Mine was a little larger. I'd say mine's closer to about 3. That's not as big of a deal. We're going with a shooter that has been shooting this this entire time. So we'll say about 2.3 I'd say is the actual accuracy and precision that we're getting from the weapon.
Would you tend to agree, Micah? I would. I mean, I was...
I was actually very surprised with the top groove. Yeah, so was I. I mean, the shots felt good, but the shots also felt good right there, and they just kind of opened up.
All right. We are now at... Dude, you know what those glasses kind of remind me of?
What? Did you ever see Spy Kids? God damn it, dude. Okay. Thank you, Magpul.
Thank you. I look like an idiot. Damn it, dude.
Okay, so we fired two mags. That puts us at five. 5,000 and 60 yep yep we're at 560 so let's go ahead and commence oh man oh no This is the same thing that was happening to it before. Yeah, you're under gas.
So it's a bolt over brass. If you can show the camera that. So you can see the, it's trying to feed, but it looks like the bolt didn't get all the way back behind the brass. So that's indicative of under gas.
Same thing, looks like the gun is a little bit under gas right now. Double check, yeah, bolt over brass. Oh, didn't do it. It's inconsistent. I would definitely say that those gas rings ain't helping it at all.
But, she's gone, dude. So, to compare against the PSA, we have an extremely nice rifle right here. This is a Mark 12-ish build from Micah Mayfield.
It's got a Centurion Mark 12 barrel, and the rest is kind of a hodgepodge. Centurion barrels are awesome. Headspace bolt, all that good stuff. So, this is a much more expensive rifle, and the point of this is to show... I believe the barrel on this rifle is more than the entire rifle of the PSA.
Yes, 100%. It's a very nice build, very expensive. She can shoot...
that there is a performance difference just as a quick note you couldn't even put the targets up straight charlie there's circles good group dude great group man okay ready yep come down low Fucking great, dude. If not for that flyer, you would have had like a.3 ammo. I'm genuinely bummed out because that's the round that I had that safety problem with, but holy crap, that's one, two, three, four. That I legit do not count.
I think we would have been all within here, and that would have been like a half. I count it. Fair enough, we count it. You ready to measure?
Love you, Nike, man. 0.88 MOA with the flyers 0.88. Point is you can see with a much more expensive brand and head spacing and matching everything up really nice and spending a lot more money. How much did that cost you? Oh man, well over two thousand dollars, probably closer.
to three with with oh with the scope i mean okay okay okay anyhow point is much more expensive rifle way more than probably seven times the price but here's the thing we definitely got much better groups better consistency however the The PSA is also working quite well. It's printing from about 1.5 to 2 right now. And it also makes those shots at 720 no problem. It's well within the operational envelope for the M4. So, yes, you can get better.
Does it matter? That's going to be the point of the video. Let's find out. Thanks for Now, 6,020 rounds.
We group it and we send it back to the... We're going to let this baby cool. We're going to group it.
And then we're going to give our final thoughts here, guys. Because this is getting a little ridiculous at the moment. She's done. Yeah, she's done. yeah this barrel's done it's done all right so i think we're at the end of the life of the barrel of this psa right here so here's my group um pretty bad and then plus with size of the group the entire size of the pacey don't even need to say yeah it's that bad micah didn't have any flyers is looked a little bit better but still outside of m4 spec so um barrel's done okay real talk how did you think it was going to do as far as measurements uh so So I thought it would be way worse than what I found.
There are obviously some spots that are not so great, but overall, hilariously acceptable. So the things that I inspected on the carrier itself was the overall length of the carrier, the bolt shoulder support, gas ring run, bolt tail seal, bolt tail seal roundness, and the gas key inner diameter. Overall length, 6.6740, which is good.
Bolt shoulder support, 0.5315, okay. The gas ring chamber was not great on this. So it gauged larger than 0.501 which is, I don't have pin gauges bigger than that so it could it could have been even bigger than that.
And what could be some of the problems that could be run into from that? Just since that is the surface that the gas ring on the the gas rings on the bolt actually seal against if it's too big you could start seeing gas leak around the gas rings sooner as as they wear out with time. That's going to allow more gas into the receivers then?
It can, and just it won't allow the, because the bolt is the piston and the AR. And so it won't allow the action to exert as much force to cycle the weapon. Probably why we were seeing those bolt over brass malfunctions. Quite possibly, yeah. And on top of that, I brought the bore scope out to take a look at some things.
I took a look at the gas ring chamber in the carrier as well. as well with the bore scope, and it is exceptionally rough. So you can see very obvious machining marks on the inside of the gas ring chamber in the carrier.
And as the bolt moves in and out in the carrier, the gas rings obviously you have to go over that, and they reciprocate in that bore. And so the rougher that bore is, the faster your gas rings could wear out. Interesting.
Which could explain why the gas rings on the PSA are worn out and the gas rings on the Knights are still okay. Interesting, okay. Awesome. similar because even though they have similar round counts on them. Interesting.
Okay. Uh, not only that, but, uh, the, the one spot I, I was for sure that the PSA bolt carrier would fail is the roundness test of the bolt tail seal itself. Uh, the bolt tail seal itself measured at 0.2, uh, 0.252, which is good. Uh, and the roundness.
So if you, if you consider the pin gauge that, that I've been using as a true reference of round and you you stick the largest pin gauge you can fit in there and then shine a light through the front of the BCG and look at it. If you can see light around the pin gauge, and if we assume that the pin gauge is round, light around the pin gauge means that the carrier is not round or the carrier seal is not round. We did see a little bit of light, but not to the point where it was excessive. And interestingly enough, I've seen a lot of high-end BCGs fail that test.
PSA let's go. You know we could have gotten lucky with with our one example but this this one that checked out and that's that's very impressive to me. On the bolt itself we measured the the shoulder the the shoulder belt area on the bolt 0.52695 which is small and in my personal opinion that's smaller than can just be accounted by wear. So that can let the bolt kind of rock in the carrier. maybe a little bit more than it really should.
Now again, obviously, y'all shot the piss out of this and it was running, so. Kind of, it was definitely having trouble towards the end. But I think that's definitely a gas efficiency issue where a new gas tube and new gas rings would solve that, in my opinion.
Interesting, okay. The tail OD on the actual bolt itself is.2494, which is a fail as well. That's, if we look at the specs which I brought if we if we look at the if we look at the TDP spec bolt tail diameter is 0.2503 plus minus two tenths and so to be machined we want to be no smaller than 0.2501 and so this is this was in the two fours what was it two four nine four so pretty small pretty small And again, I'd be the problems from that.
So if, if we consider, if we consider my hand as the carrier seal and my finger as a bolt tail, you're getting Charlie excited right now. The bolts, the bolts reciprocate back and forth and they interface with each other. If that seal, if that seal is very tight, you get less gas leakage around that area.
And if you think about it, it's, it's pointed right at your. your face and i'm i have a very distinct feeling that you'll get excessive uh gas blowing into the action and like the the mark on your face uh that you see and then also excessive fouling in the receivers itself i know you mentioned the disconnector getting dirty very dirty it we don't know for sure but it's possible that bad seals in in those areas that can allow gas into the receivers can potentially contribute to fouling parts. that you really don't want to get fouled faster than faster than necessary other than that and then the firing pin protrusion we measured was actually very good point zero three one five if I'm not mistaken mil spec is point zero two eight two point zero three six so we're like right in the middle of that, which is awesome. So obviously we know where the accuracy stands, but what is the chamber looking like?
So took the bore scope to the barrel as well. The chamber isn't looking great. You can see some very clear machining marks.
Yeah, so right now, in case the audio quality is different, we're recording on a phone, but we're able to get a bore scope with video recording features, and right now you can see the chamber. That's not great. Pretty rough.
You can see all these machining marks. Then we're stepping into the throat and the rifling. You can see the it this kind of like alligator skin kind of looking.
texture. There we go. That's fire cracking and that's per typical. Barrels will do that just from use. You can see quite a bit of carbon fouling, but the rifling, you can still see the rifling.
Some, a lot of copper on the that though, but we're gonna keep on going down and if I lined up this borescope right we should hit the gas port at some point. So, keep on going. There we go.
And our gas port. And so you can see at the top of the screen is towards the chamber and at the bottom of the screen is towards the muzzle. And you can see a tiny bit of gas port erosion towards the muzzle end, but that's really nothing. You're always going to get some gas port erosion after shooting, especially because these were shot full auto. Gets hotter, but that's normal.
Ain't nothing wrong with that. We're going to keep on going, see if we can't get a little bit of the crown. Going in. I think we're hitting the crown soon.
There we go. And so crown, the veg is not perfect, but... Yeah, not bad.
That's about it. That's uh, some more on this thing. Well, let's continue then.
Alright, 6,000 rounds plus and I would say the gun is done. So let's talk about the gun. about what happened kind of do a post-mortem and then talk about what this rifle is good for so a couple notes is that the rifle is now um not gassed correctly the both the gas tube and the gas rings are quite worn this is leading to a lot of cycling issues We had quite a few issues when you were trying to zero this thing where it just wasn't feeding.
We've been having these issues kind of begin to creep up since about 5,000 rounds, I would say. The biggest issue, I would say, is that the barrel is completely done. So at 6K, I do understand that we are firing auto.
We are only doing three mags. It's not getting it too hot. And then we're allowing it to cool down to ambient temperature, which it's quite cold right now, about 32 to 40. degrees and I know the the edit makes it look like we were just rapid firing the thing but in reality it was three mags cool to ambient another three mags it's been quite cold and we've been doing this so the gun really hasn't gotten all that hot 6k is very premature when it comes to barrel wear and it's something that you should not see on a working rifle like a rifle you would use to you know to defend your life or something like that that being said up through around 5k we did see good accuracy from from it.
It functioned fairly well, but then when it died, it died fairly quick. Yeah, she went downhill very rapidly. I think right after about the 4,000 round mark, we started to see some pretty serious degradation.
Yeah, we saw some degradation. We felt good for a second because at like 5,400, we were like, we went to shoot it at 720 and it was making impacts. We're like, okay, maybe this is going to hold it together. But it looks like that barrel was just barely clinging to life and just kind of gave up the ghost after. that.
So, you know, we have a rifle. If you get the entire rifle from PSA, obviously we're not running a PSA lower right now. You're looking at a little bit north of 400 to 400, depending if you get a blend, if you just get the upper anywhere from 300 to 400. for a freedom kit right here. These are very cheap rifles so what are they good for? This is something that I would recommend to somebody who isn't serious about shooting so if somebody is like hey I really want something and I don't have much money to spend.
I get it, right? Airfittings can be expensive at $1,000. That's a lot of time that you have to work to make that money.
So this is something I'd recommend to people who aren't going to be training with it extensively or anything like that. And I get it, not Not everyone's going to be training to the level that I believe our audience trains to. Sometimes you just got to mag dump some trash. Yeah, sometimes you got to mag dump trash, just have a good time. If you're just out playing with the boys and shooting with an AR-15, I mean, you're going to be firing on such a slow schedule.
Generally, when it comes to our crew, me, Micah, Charlie, if you want a good combat-grade rifle at the lowest price point, we're typically going to recommend something like a BCM. It's a great all-around rifle. They're going to run, QC's good, and they do very well. And then obviously, as you go up to better rifles, like we love to run LMTs, we love Geissele rifles. These rifles are better, but the price point continues to climb very steeply for very small incremental improvements in capability and reliability and stuff.
So when you go the opposite direction, the opposite happens. Getting down to the 300, 400 mark, you definitely have a big degradation in terms of the ability of the rifle to take a large amount of rounds. That's just life.
There's no free lunch. I do want to say that I definitely appreciate where PSA is coming from and making such a cheap upper Easily available and fairly good for what it is. Well, I guess one thing that should be noted is our rifle is now shot out Yeah, we can simply call Palmetto State Armory true send it in and They will send it back with a new barrel a new bolt and all new parts and It's gonna go for free and then you continue to go so it definitely has to be noted that that's awesome But again, if you're looking for something something for the end of the world where PSA no longer exists and you can't send it in, that's not going to work.
If you're just screwing around and you want something to plank with, to shoot with, to have fun with, I really don't see a problem with this rifle. Again, everything has a place. Everything can be made to work based on your situation.
So this isn't us just saying this is a bad rifle. It's just to say, understand that this is going to wear out faster than a rifle that is made for work, that is made for combat. PSA is not.
to be very clear. However, I was definitely very impressed with the accuracy that we got out of this rifle going up through the four or five K mark. And I think it's very good for the price that you're getting and for the customer support that you're getting from PSA. Now, with all that being said, you've seen the measurements from Phil, you know what you're looking at.
You're not quite in spec, you are in PSA spec. This is good, baby. With everything, guys, what's going to be very important is training. So if we're talking in context, of what do you have money for. I understand the economy sucks right now.
Money's tight, jobs suck. If it was a choice between buying a BCM and no ammo or buying this and buying a couple thousand rounds, 100% buy those couple thousand rounds. Actually train with your rifle because I'm going to be way more scared of the guy who trains with this than a guy who doesn't train with his BCM. Point is, guys, everything has a place.
Get out there, train. We love you guys. Thank you so much for watching.
And as always, we got nothing else for you guys. final thing for you guys come here Phil we got dad advice with Phil Phil doesn't have any children that we know of no not that I know except for the people of Korea what's your dad advice for these people uh let's see oh god on the spot um you know I think being kind is underrated in situations where it's it you would be you would it would be fair to not be nice to people uh for instance my local post office the USPS I'm very nice to them if there's ever a problem they helped me out so much and other people just scream at them and it and it's not it's not these people's fault so you know just even if you'd be right to be angry just be nice and you will get farther away. Being nice is definitely underrated we like being nice around here.
Alright guys that's it.