LSA TX7 [Rem 700 PRS "Gamer" rifle] to 1,000yds: Practical Accuracy

This episode was sponsored by Slate Black Industries. For grips and accessories visit slateblackindustries.com So continuing the loadout from Josh's Gamer Gun series the TX7. It is, I will say, it is extremely smooth of a of a lockup. All right, let me know when you're ready. Yeah, I'm on it 100. Which guy? Just do the regular one. The regular one? Yeah, we're set on him. Yep. All right, the uh, your muzzle brake is helping me clear my sinuses very well. It's actually worse than my freaking TRG-42 Magnum muzzle brake. No way. Yes, it is. All right, I'm on a 200. That is 300. Oh, I shot the 300 one? You did. Oh, I'm so sorry. You also hit the 300. That is 300. Oh, I shot the 300 one? You did. Oh, I'm so sorry. You also hit the 300. I did hit it. Let's go back to 200. I'm sorry about that. That's okay. Nice. All right, I'm on it 300. That's called fratricide. Did you just uh... Did it break? It did. Uh, should I shoot the lollipop next to it instead? Probably. Okay. That's... Oh, I see what I did. I shot the bar on the lollipop, but it was still a hit. True. Because I decided not to come up on dope and just roll by, uh, Paris by night. Oh my god. So, not only did you miss, then you broke the target. I didn't miss. I hit the wrong guy. And then you broke the target on the next shot. It is incredible how little wind drift there is, Josh. Uh, yes. All right, I'm on it 400. This should be, uh, just under two mils have come up here. Okay, I am actually dialing one nine now, okay? All right, sounds good. Next to Cougar Town? Next. Yes, correct. All right, stand by. Henry's just in full rowdy mode at the moment. Yeah, dead center. Fire another. Nice. I mean, how are you not supposed to be in rowdy mode with this thing? All right, two eight for 500. That was favored left. It was on the left edge of the target. That was a little too favored to the left. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I'd hold dead based on that. I'll center it up. Yep. Fire and ready. Impact. One inch, maybe left the center. Nice. All right. Yep. Three eight. I'm on it. 600. Target on the left. All right. Is that a well-disciplined deer? What? Is that a well-disciplined deer? You're talking too much now. He's getting very close. I'm not super comfortable anymore. Oh, there's a fawn too. Yeah, let's not be. I mean, I'm not going to hit them. I know you wouldn't, but I would feel very bad. Yeah, you waited too long. You started talking and now I am not going to hit them. Requesting permission to take the shot, sir. Request denied. I could shoot the target behind them, but I still won't hit them. Unless they raise their head. Just let us take this one shot right before the air comes in. Those aren't my orders, Marine. Look, look, they're chilling. We could do this. We could do this, Josh. Wait, wait, wait, wait, sir. We won't tell anybody. 70 yards in front of the target. They're probably not that far in front of the target. I'm telling you, they're that far from the target. What difference does it make? If it doesn't make a difference. Josh is taking the responsible. Listen, like I said, you're full rowdy mode. We're just turning it down a little bit. They were just well-disciplined deer. Oh my gosh, what is he doing? He was moving, now he's like spooked by something out there. I could make him stop moving. This is not untrue. Oh, maybe he sees the buck. There's a buck. He's already away from my trajectory, sort of. The buck and the doe are just staring at each other. I know. They're just staring at each other. Are you getting all this on camera? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is like a little National Geographic episode. She's cleaning the baby, huh? Okay, I'm telling you, I can shoot the target behind it and I will not hit them. Is that sufficiently clear for you? Yeah, that's clear. Okay, 3.8 mils. Look who's coming in behind right now. Dead center. Upper chest shot. You can come off the elevation just a touch if you want based on that. Dead center. Nice shot. All right, next 700, 4.8. Oh, damn it. Yep. Go for the plate on the right. Okay. Impact. Oh, he saw it move. Impact, same spot. Nice. Oh, he runs away now. Back over to the 800. He detects that I'm going to the 800. Thank you. Oh my gosh. Fire and ready. Impact upper chest. I'll come down a little bit. Yep, just a touch. Dead center. Nice shot. Okay, awesome. I'm on at 9. We should be at about maybe about like 7.3. Okay, I've got 7.3 dialed. Okay. Favorite left here. The last one was pretty high though. Dead center. Stacked it up. Holy cow. Stacked 900 shots. Nice. Ready? Yep. Impact. Right side. Yep. Good elevation. Okay, I'm going to go all the way to the edge. Yep. Oh no. You didn't load up the match saver, Henry. No, it's because I dropped that one round on the freaking 300-yard target. That's right. Okay, yep. Just give it a bit more to the left. Same hold. A bit more to the left. Dead center. Nice. Let's go. Okay. Smoke show. All right, so that's a 20 for 20 right there. Let's um... 21 for 21, Henry. Shush, Josh. I'm gonna... Now we're dropping into the bonus round. For those who are unaware, anything that clears the course clean goes in the bonus round where we squeeze five rounds off on the thousand-yard target, one of the smaller plates, and we see how fast we can get how many hits. So I'm gonna load five rounds into the magazine. All right, I'm there. All right, holding slightly low. Okay, here we go on bonus. This I do not like. I'll back it out a little bit. Yeah, just because whenever I cycle, my hand hits the um... Yep. Ready? All right, I'm there. Fire when ready. Off the left. I see it. Impact. Nice. Okay, so first round hit off the left, and I adjusted the windage and then got it back on target. Four out of five hits. First shot as a sighter. I'll take that. Yeah. I'll take that. Elevation was pretty steady on all of those shots, honestly. It was just me doing the left and right. Once I isolated that my aiming box was on the bottom right, it was done. But Josh, this is currently now the top scorer of the entire course on precision rifles. Yep. Not particularly surprising since it's a full custom PRS rifle. It is very unfair. Like the rest are military rifles. However, alas, that does not detract the fact that it is a very capable rifle, which we've demonstrated. Yeah. Interestingly too, to be fair, it is chambered in 6.5, not in 6mm. So quote unquote, not actually all the game. Well, yeah. I mean, I guess this was like a 2009, 2019 gamer. Yeah. 2019 gamer gun. But still, you know, like a very fast, very effective cartridge going all the way out. Very low recall. Being able to spot your own targets is a major, major deal with PRS. Now, what is not usually a big deal on PRS is the effect on target. So you don't have to, let's say, deliver a certain ballistic package onto your meet target on the other end. So with that out of the equation, you're able to optimize purely on performance. And quite frankly, that pure performance with the zero to 1000 is very, very comfortable in my opinion. Yeah. I mean, again, the guys at LSA make absolutely banger rifles. Again, I was sponsored by them back in the day. This was not a sponsored gun. This was a full purchase gun from the guys up there. So I mean, this is just a demonstration on like when you look at what these PRS rigs, what these gamer rigs are able to do. Or rather, I mean, it's a nasty term calling it a gamer rig in my opinion. This is the tip of the spear with your development towards a pure accuracy driven platform and not throwing anything like it has to meet certain rugged criteria for military employment. You don't have to meet certain Arctic employment for a military employment. And when you throw all of those out of the equation, you have an extremely capable rifle for a fraction of the cost of what the military would be paying for, let's say, like an Arctic warfare, which is you could also rebarrel on Arctic warfare to do the same. But the cost is significantly higher to something like this. And this is no slouch. This is not a cheap rifle by any means. Premium glass, 5.25 Nightforce, premium action. And you're talking about, I believe they use Bartline? Yeah, Bartlines and Hawk Hills. Yeah. So I mean, I think that one's actually a Hawk. Okay. So yeah, like Hawk Hill, Bartline, like these are premium brands. Some of the best rifles you could get. And so you see where the money goes. Not saying that a bone stock Remington 700 is unable to do this. It's just this is where the money does it easier. Yeah, it does it easier. All right. Well, let's take this over to the debrief. I want to talk more about how some of the features and attributes that we see in these guns, how they are translatable or not into some of what we see military grade weapons or military weapons utilizing, especially utilizing moving forward. Because again, what we know about competition is that in many cases, it is a precursor to what you see being adopted. Yeah, for sure. And so it'll be interesting to see how much of these things have or do become adopted. So let's go to the debrief. Well, one thing I want to throw out there before we go to the debrief. Interesting thing, Josh brings that up because the lineage of the Accuracy International, of course, is Malcolm Cooper as a world class shooter, having Dave Walls, the two Daves spin his rifles up for him to use in competitions. And then that getting caught by the eye of the SAS to develop a military rifle based on competition rifles. This, in turn, is very similar to what we see of what military guys are, one, shooting in competition. And two, what the military starts to look at when it starts to redo any of its rifles that it has in inventory. Namely, one thing that is most attractive to the military, especially the army, is that we had a lot of M24s with long actions. And so without changing any of the serials or the property books, you could take that action and drop it into a chassis similar to this, not the same, because the action is most certainly worked on by LSA a lot. Barrel is very nice. But for the military, you've got that option when it comes to anything Remington 700 based. But we're talking a little bit too much right here. I just thought that was something interesting I'd like to bring up. Anything else? We'll see you guys at the debrief. Oh, well, hello there. I didn't see you. You must have stumbled upon me enjoying the sunshine of the days as I was birdwatching with my M24 sniper weapon system. Now, I hope you're enjoying the content thus far, because content like this is made possible not only by Slate Black Industries, but by the patrons of Patreon. That's true. They are our main support financially. Intellectually, most importantly, emotionally. They make content like this possible. And I'd like to invite you to come along, become one of the patrons of Patreon, along our journey of exploration of firearms technology and what we can do with these weapons systems. And if not, it's okay. But that's enough with this. Let's get on with the show. Welcome into the debrief. And Henry, to nobody's surprise whatsoever, the hyper-customized, ultra-accurate, gamified precision rifle aced the course when shot in a nice, comfortable, slow-fire prone position. What's interesting about this one is that this is actually probably a good representation of a—and I'm not a PRS shooter or a, what is it, NRL hunter series guy, so I don't actually know all the intricate rules between those two different sports and what the divisions are, but I think that this is probably a good representation of a rifle that you would see dominating in that space in, like, the 2017 era. It is a Lone Star Armory TX7, which is LSA's, like, sort of custom bolt gun. It is in an MPA chassis, which was, I think, all the rage and hotness at that period in time. It's still also considered, I think, one of the go-to options, but there's a bunch of other ones, I think, that are around now. And yeah, it's gamified. It's ultra-heavy, extremely, extremely heavy, has a mutton-dough muzzle brake, and has a super-expensive piece of glass on it, a custom action, and one of the best barrels that you can buy. So, yeah, it is maximized. For me, if I've got a range day where I'm taking somebody out who hasn't really shot long range before, and I want to give them the most enjoyable, fun experience of being able to listen to what I'm telling them and then put that into practice with a gun that's going to allow them to put a round exactly where they're holding it, this is the gun I'm grabbing, even today. This is the one that I would be like, yes, light recoiling, light felt recoil, and it's based off of the weight of the system, the round it's shooting, which is 6.5, which is a little bit of a departure from some of the 6mm stuff. We'll get into that in a second. And it has a muzzle brake on it that, as the shooter, you don't really feel that bad. Obviously, people around you get rocked, but as a shooter, you're getting as little impact as possible, little movement, and the rifle's a tack driver. It's, you know, well under three-quarter MOA. I would imagine it's even less than that if you put somebody who's really focused on dropping rounds into a single hole behind it. That's with rack-grade Hornady ammo, which is what I've been shooting out of. I was about to say, I mean, that's highly ammunition-dependent with some rifles. Yeah, this is just factory, granted, match ammo, but factory ammo, and it's, I mean, three-quarters is probably me being generous on where it is, but this is basically stacking rounds on top of each other, even after, you know, it's probably got like 500 plus through it at the moment, which isn't actually that much, but you know how it goes when it comes to bolt guns like this, so. So, Josh, you have your Gamer Rifle. I, you know, previously did not have the barrel back on, but now I also have my 6.5 Gamer Rifle. But Gamer Rifles, as we're getting into this topic, a lot of people poo-poo on them. Despite a lot of things that we see in current military rifles deriving from the experimentation that gamers bring to the field. I'm kind of curious. This is going to be really interesting because we can kind of look back at this time capsule and see which part of these, like, peak performance items really became a thing in even, you know, currently developed military and law enforcement style rifles. Because if you look out at their specifically, even with law enforcement snipers, you'll see that their rifles sometimes look more gamer a la 2017 versus, let's say, like 10 years ago, their rifles would probably look more like this. So let's look at what makes up the TX7, what part of it is a gamer, and then kind of like, let's do like a time travel to current day and see what aged well. Let's just start at the front, right? Muzzle brakes are nothing new. Muzzle brake suppressor interchangeability. I think on most guys who are shooting competition aren't running suppressors. I know some do, but as I understand it, most of the guys are really looking for being ultra flat during the recoiling process so that they can spot because they're, again, generally, they're trying to self spot. And so they need the gun to be as still as possible coming through the recoil right back on target. That's probably a little bit different, I would imagine, when we look at the military space where I think more things are probably going to be suppressed in the role of a sniper as opposed to not. I would say when the firearm becomes very, very big, then you start using more muzzle brakes. And ultimately, when it becomes ginormous, as in the 155 millimeter variety, they all have muzzle brakes on field artillery. But regardless, I mean, dealing with recoil is a real thing. I mean, that is a real thing. Field artillery suppressors evidently existed in the past. I'll put a photo right here. But with suppressors, you also deal with like heat issues. You also you have some very variables that may help with your accuracy, but then also variables come with suppressor use, like even when it comes down to I didn't tighten it hard enough. So, you know, if you have a muzzle brake, that's one variable that you take out when you're shooting competition. If we look at the barrel and the action, this is as we talked about earlier, this is a Remington 700 pattern. The stiller precision or stiller actions, which is what this action is, who it's made by for LSA was previously part of the military's contracts. This was for the Mark 13 platform, right? The older platform. Not the new Mark 22 program. And this is interesting because this goes into a much wider conversation that you and I were going to get into probably later in this session. This is more in line with take a custom match grade barrel, put it in a custom match grade action, put that into a chassis, and then you have a complete package of sorts. And we've seen the military go away from this, have we not? Yeah, yeah. Honestly, the first biggest move was the British military. You know, prior to that, they were all using hand-fitted number fours to turn into L42s, which is the 308 sniper rifle built off of the Lee-Enfield system. Then Parker Hale was trying to compete for the next generation sniper rifle with a very traditional style sniper rifle, something that is closer to what we use as the M24 and M40 systems back then. But Accuracy International came about and really shattered that mold. But then Accuracy International also came back with the AICS chassis system, and that actually re-brought this whole thing, re-kind of kick-started the whole conversation on whether you want a ready-built sniper system, which is kind of like the AW, the Arctic Warfare style rifle, or do you want a chassis that integrates some older platforms into using new stuff? Now, this goes into this disgusting cycle of, oh, I upgraded the chassis, maybe I should upgrade the receiver. And then when you upgrade the chassis and the receiver, you're like, why didn't you just buy the whole thing at once? Now, money is a thing. We don't have infinite amounts of money. And the same thing could come to certain governmental departments. I can confidently say that the GWAT-era DoD was not one of those entities that had money issues for a long time. So I think it more so came down to a bureaucratic issue. Because remember, the Army was using M24s with long-action shooting .308. And the idea behind that is, oh, we'll adopt a long-action right now and try to usher in a new sniper ammunition in .300 Win Mag, and bada-bing, bada-boom, we'll have a great shooting rifle. But that .300 Win Mag ammunition never became a very general-issue item. So then you have things like the M24 shooting a long-action with a short barrel. What I'm trying to say is, a lot of times when people go into, like, purchasing, it's easier to buy a small component and swap it out. Basically do it one piece at a time. Financially... That's how this came to be. I didn't do it all at once. I had the chassis from another project that was sitting around for years, or two years. And then I finally was like, I guess I'll get the barreled action for it. And then later, I got the optic for it. It was not, as you said, it was not a singular purchase. Yeah, and so for a lot of people, especially in the sporting arena, I mean, you know from shooting three-gun, it's easy to do that because you look at what's newest, which is why modularity is such a big thing, because then you could switch things out. An aftermarket system built around a style of rifle is economically very profitable. So essentially, if we're looking at, let's say, the stiller action, being a more accurized system built with tighter tolerances, right? And you're saying you can take this and get a better lockup than a Remington 700 system. And that drop-in would increase or decrease the tolerances between the lockup and give you a more consistent, but greater consistency down the range. And that would increase your performance. That is not a bad thing to spend, what, a thousand? Especially if you have your own tools to do gunsmithing, or gunsmithing isn't expensive, which it's not for stuff like this. Specifically, if you're dropping it into a chassis and you don't have to rebed the system, that is not bad at all, right? So there's this duality of build versus buy. And the build versus buy was such a big question back in the 2015 through 2019 time frame, I feel like, that it gave way to a lot of action makers. It's not just stiller. You've got Curtis. You've got Alamo Precision guys. They have a whole different series. Defiance is another action that they use. And then you progress into making three lug, 60 degree bolt throws, which that's a different topic because Pete over at Impact Shooting, and I talk about this a lot, PRS shooters sometimes will prefer the 90 degree bolt throw because there's less resistance and they can throw the bolt faster that way. Whereas sometimes a lot of military shooters, we like the 60 degree bolt throw because it's for a military shooters, it's faster. So there's also different theories that bring things about on this way. What I'm trying to say is it's easier to sell components to a standardized system, a la the Remington 700 system versus selling an entire giant platform for like $8,000, $9,000 to $10,000 at Arctic War of Accuracy International. Especially because everybody prefers like, well, I like my grip slightly like this, or to your point, I want this exact bolt throw and with this exact barrel with this exact optic, and they want to piecemeal it all together. I did that for years in three gun because I felt like I was getting them the hyper specialized thing for me, with all of the things that are going to give me personally the biggest advantage. So that's most certainly something that goes into, honestly, the heart of this rifle is its ability to interchange, like you could work on this stuff at home on your workbench and get things swapped out very rapidly. I think one of the easiest examples here would be like, if I decided I wanted to change the chassis system, it would be a swipe of a credit card and a few screws. Right. And then I have a different chassis system from a different manufacturer if I wanted to. You know what I mean? It's that type of thing. Which for me, my legacy Arctic Warfare is glued on, the chassis is glued onto the receiver, so I don't have that option. But honestly, that is a thing that is a huge draw for guys in competition, is to be able to stay at the tip of technology, stay at the tip of development, because that is what they're experimenting with to use different techniques. Let's use that to talk about ARCA. Yeah. Right. Because this system has one of the, what I think is one of the more original or first versions of a quick change ARCA system that was built into a chassis where it was called the RAT, right? Rapid Adjustment Technology. It basically is just a sliding ARCA piece that moves up and down this dovetail. And at the time, I don't know that there was, you know, there was like some basic versions of it, but there wasn't a ton of this stuff going around. There wasn't any of the real standardization that has sort of started to happen. Yeah. ARCA lock did not exist back then. It was just dovetail, right? Yeah. Again, as far as I understand. Yeah. So as a baseline, ARCA is the system that you use to attach cameras to a tripod. It's a 22 millimeter system that attaches cameras to tripods. Now with cameras, you have a quick detach system, but you don't have to deal with recoil or you're not really switching between different lengths for cameras. Yeah. In some certain circumstances, yes. But 99.99999% that's not an issue, that switching locations. But the thing is, with rifles, rifles started adapting to that 22 mil system because people started to use camera tripods in shooting techniques. And so people started initially, it was just pick rails, that QD pick rails that adopted to camera tripods. And then you started getting things like the hog saddle, which is actually still relevant because that's a universal clamp that clamps onto anything. But for very specialized use, you started getting systems like the rat, which by switching it, you could quickly push your tripod to the front or you could switch it to interface with a camera tripod, sorry, a bipod to the front. Or you could switch it really quick to use a camera tripod. But then I was actually curious when you bought this system because I was curious to use it because at that point, we were talking about the FR-F1 and FR-F2 system having tripods really close to the back. So you could have really steep angle adjustments that the European mountain troops would favor. And then how that would play into using different obstacles. But then it was almost as quickly as the rat system was rolled out shortly thereafter. So you were saying RRS, Really Right Stuff, was the first one to really make a lot of Swiss Arca stuff. But then Area 419 was the one who started putting teeth on the side to make the Arca lock system, which is kind of de facto turned into the M-lock of Arca. I definitely see more standardization of that where it's being utilized through some major manufacturers have it now on their rifles and their rail systems are coming with it. Yeah, so that whole system of having a channel underneath to adjust your tripod was certainly not new though. Because as I was trying to bring this out, you remember I have an Anschutz rail down here. So the Europeans for a long time, they were already using the Anschutz rail as an adjustability system. But the big thing here that we're talking about really is being able to slide something out really fast to get a nice, stable platform or slide it in real fast to adjust to whatever kind of obstacle you're dealing with, which is what PRS shooters typically have to negotiate are obstacles and how do you stabilize yourself on that obstacle? One of the pieces I wanted to sort of ask you here as we wrap up this conversation is like from a shootability perspective, how was this shooting it? Was this one of the easiest runs you've done? Yeah. I mean, okay, so here's the time frame of the run. So very earlier, we did the Desertech SRSM2. We did it in 300 Win Mag and then like a year later, we shot it in 338, the big boy. And with that, we run through these cycles to where we get focused on a topic and then we jump back into a different topic. So we've been focused on service rifles and DMRs for a while. Then we jump back into precision rifles, which is similar, much more similar than jumping into shooting pistols. But still, I had to focus my mindset a little bit because especially when you're running bolt actions, you really need to be in tune with what you're doing. There's a lot more movement. There's a lot more input that you have to put into the rifle in order to squeeze the most out of it. So especially when I was adopting to a bullpup style of bolt action, I was a little clunky and getting into it, I was a little clunky. So then jumping straight into something like this, I mean, yes, by all means, it was easy mode. But I felt that I was being a little gingerly at first when I was shooting the SSG 3000 because for whatever reason, I felt that there were things that I wasn't doing 110%. But then when it jumped into the TX7, I was very comfortable. I don't know if you could tell, I was very... I was honestly probably over comfortable when I was shooting the TX7 because a lot of that echoed back to the Remington 700 that I had really pushed myself hard on years ago. So the bolt throw and everything feels very, very at home to me. So there's a lot of familiarity. Yes. And it's just like familiarity, but with all of the cheat codes built in wherever you could build them in, right? Yeah. So it was really interesting seeing that come about because when I'm working all the other variety of bolt actions, because it's easy to say, oh, bolt actions is the same thing. It's not. It really isn't. An SSG 3000, SSG 69, and a bullpup bolt action that Desertech makes is absolutely a different animal from a Remington 700. That said, because I spent a lot of time on the Remington 700 before, once I jumped back into this, I mean, it was like running an M16A2 for me. Gang, thanks as always for hanging out to the end of these sessions. If you're still here, do all the good YouTube stuff. Like, comment, subscribe, drop a comment down below. And no, until next time, we'll see you on the range. Green, green. Over. 10-7-1-6, roger. Over. 1-6, 15-9-2, 1 Victor, 2 Facts, recon 1, over.