AI AE Mk I to 1,100yds/ .308Win: Practical Accuracy (US Optics B10 1.8-10)

This episode was brought to you by Slate Black Industries. For M-LOK grips and accessories, visit slateblackindustries.com. You gonna throw a 360 no scope in there to finish it out at 1100? Sure. All right, let's start it off at 200 precision rifle course. It's a nice easy hit to start things off. 300? Yes, sir. Impact. All right, we're on at 400. Impact. Center punch there. All right, I'm on at five. Impact. Center punch. Okay. All right, we are on at six, buddy. 600. Impact. Looks like it is on the right side. Yep. That's a very small target. Yeah. Is that a 2 MOA target? Yeah, that particular one, yes, it's a 2 MOA target. That's a small one. It's a 12 inch target, so it's a little bit larger than a head. All right, 700. Impact. All right, we're there at eight. Impact. Center punch. Okay. Yep, on at nine. Nothing. I'm gonna try zooming in a little bit here, see if we can see anything any better, but no, nothing. Impact. That looked like a center punch. What did you end up calling the wind at for that? Half mil. How much? 0.5. 0.5 mil. Yeah. All right, so everyone at home, we realized that our lovely camera decided to give out because I forgot to delete the memory from last time. So we've got to go back to how, what's the distance that we gave out on, Josh? I think we lost our 1,000 and 1,100 yard shots. Okay, all right. Okay. You ready? All right, I'm back at 1,000. Ugh. Impact. Okay, that wind shifted again. We're on at 1,100. Finish it tight. Impact. Oh, okay. Well, so previously we, I think we had one miss at 1,000 and one miss at 1,100. So two misses at 1,000 and one miss, same thing. Yeah, yeah, same, same. Okay. Well, anyways, we'll see you guys at the discussion shortly. The Accuracy International. It did not perform as well as the Remington 700 5R, and I'm just going to get to that. I don't think it's a fault of the rifle. I've spent a lot of time on the 700, my particular 700. I've used that scope a hell of a lot. I haven't used this entire system a whole lot because, quite frankly, ever since we bought it, I've, you know, I continue to say, ah, just give me some time before, just give me some time before. I think I've shot like 100 out of it. Yep. After I developed the load for it. Which, you know, it's a pretty standard TMK, 175 TMK load, as you would expect. It reaches about 1,200 or so, 1,200, 1,300 yards before it really drops off. So it's a capable load, but you can still see the cartridge really drop at the, what, 900 mark, I think? Yeah, I think as you start to pass 900, yeah, where the effects of the wind and the, if you want to call it the squirreliness of the wind. Today it was particularly strange because we kept on getting wind shifts from left to right and then straight from the front and then at one point from behind. So I don't particularly know what to think of it. That being said, it is a really cool system. Outwardly, it looks a lot like the L96 fixed stocks, but the inside chassis is different from the AWP because the AWP, it's actually bonded. So lack of better words, it's glued together. I think one of the first things that anyone would notice is how slick and how smooth the action really is. And it's not just that it's slick. It's also a shorter throw, i.e. the Remington, you may have to pull a full 90 degrees before you can open and close it because it's got the two lugs. This is a three lug system. So you've got a 60 degree throw. So you've got a shorter throw for your hand and you could, in theory, cycle it a lot faster. Now, when I was running it earlier, again, because I wasn't entirely familiar with it, I think what happened when I pulled it open with the next cartridge, where the neck was, where the shoulder was, it was bumping on the front at one point of the bolt right around here as the bolt was coming open. And it was so slick that you could just feel it slick and then it would stop at the shoulder. And I wasn't, I didn't anticipate that because, again, I haven't shot it a lot. So I didn't anticipate that. So I was trying to do a, I was trying to retain the casing like I would my 700. You catch the casing as it's coming out. And I just got stuck and I was like, what is that? What is that? And it turns out it's a shoulder. And the funny thing is it's because it's so slick, it's easy to perceive that slight. Yes. That being said, the Gen 1, the Mark 1AEs actually have some of the best barrels. I believe it's a Lothar Walther barrel. It's supposed to shoot hand loads and factory loads equally as well. The intent of issuing something like this to, say, like a police department or a military unit is also that you get a uniformly developed rifle, a factory rifle, that has characteristics of a match-tuned rifle. Yeah, sure. With a ruggedness. I mean, the interesting thing is if you look at it, it even has the Arctic flutes right here. Oh, so the action, I mean, the action is fluted then. On the very back, just to break ice if it gets frozen over. And that's an Arctic warfare feature. Got it. This particular model is, what, in the 90s? After the 90s. So the AE came in, I think, the early 2000s. OK. So when you look at that compared to what AI is doing today, I mean, I would say that the conceptual design features and the way an AI looks remains relatively unchanged, even with the addition of the folding stocks into the chassis, and maybe they do away with the thumb bolt. Well, the way you see this chassis, it's just a skin. It's just a plastic part. You unscrew it, and it just all falls out. The chassis inside is the new ATs are not like the AEs. The ATs are nicer. In fact, the ATs are really nice in a sense that you just unscrew a bolt in the front, and the barrel pops out, and you could pop a new barrel in. So re-barreling an AI at home is just unscrewing an Allen wrench. That's pretty crazy. Whereas this is still easy because all you need is a barrel block and then an action wrench, and you could torque the receiver off without a gunsmith. So, I mean, it's still relatively easy. It's not as easy as the AI ATs. The earlier ones had the Pocker Hale bipods, or some guys would use the Harris bipods with a sling swivel stud. This is not a standard item. The spigot mount there. Yeah, so I pushed, I mean, I specifically used this to push the bipod a little bit farther forward to get more stability with it. Sure. Talk us through the optic selection, because I would say that for what most people are used to, a 1.8 to 10 to shoot out to 1100 seems like it's probably on the low end of... Look, I'm not like, I don't know, I learned to shoot from some pretty old school guys, so I like 10x optics. It's just comfortable. It's a comfortable zone for me. If I had it my way, I would have put the fixed 10x on it, like the other, the Remington, because I enjoy shooting it like that. However, having it at 1.8 to 10, it does give you an advantage of zooming out. If you're observing an area, you could see more. Really, the downside of these AIs, they're pigs. It's a heavy pig. Really, I mean, if I were to go out, if I were to go out on a military mission, I would choose a Remington 700. Not just off of familiarity, but off of weight, too. Specifically, my 700, it's got the bottom metal adopted for AICS mags, so it's a mag fed 700. Back in the early 2000s, your semi-automatic rifles were not as accurate. I mean, unless it's a PSG1. Sure, okay. Come on, that's worth, what, like five of these? Back then, if you were a law enforcement officer, I see value in something like this, because you're not really traversing a long distance, like you said. I'm sorry, sorry. But if you're a military sniper, I do think that on the military side, that a lighter setup is nicer. Now, the downside to the 700s is that, back in the day, and this is the setup back in the day before chassis or anything for 700s, they were all bedded. You had to have custom work done to them for them to work. And if you rip them out of the bedding, you risk damaging it. Whereas the Accurus Internationals were not. It's a more, dare I say, rugged system than the 700. The bolt throw, although it's a faster throw, though, it does have a little bit more resistance. So I think that comes down to... Yeah, it's very smooth, but there is some resistance. You have resistance in different ways. It's sort of like when you learn how to shoot a Lee-Enfield, you fire and then you learn to slam it closed. I think, for me, running a Remington 700, I learned that there's low resistance moving the handle up, but there's a little more resistance on the bolt, whereas it's reverse on this thing. There's a little more resistance pushing your 60 degree bolt throw up, and then a lot less resistance pulling the bolt back. So in my mind... I agree with that completely. In my mind, it gets turned around a little bit. I mean, all in all, though, the rifle, it performed as we would thought a .308 precision rifle would do. Today was just... It was a horrendous situation. I mean, first of all, I didn't have the time, and I did the 700, but still, even with the... And when Henry's talking about time, guys, he's not saying, like, we rushed doing this. It's a matter of... Henry has years on that rifle, of shooting it at various distances, hunting with it, doing all of these various elements. So when we're talking about, we didn't have as much time to learn the system and feel for exactly what the rifle is going to do as you're shooting it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, is it my primary? Is it my first choice? No. It looks cool, though, man. It's a good-looking rifle. Well, I think that's a good... The brake, the chassis system, it's like it's in pop culture. Yeah, yeah. It's like anyone who grew up playing Counter-Strike. Talk to us about the accuracy differential. You know, this is obviously, you made the comment that this is designed to shoot hand loads as well as factory ammo exceptionally well. We've seen it shoot exceptionally well. So talk us through the difference between, say, how accurate a system like this is versus your 700, which is, you know, had work done to it and is a very good shooter. Okay, well, bottom line, system versus system at 100-yard no-wind range, AI is more accurate. Yeah. It's got a better barrel. It's got a better action. Better... Depending on who you are, you may like this trigger more because it's actually a two-stage trigger. I'm used to the Remington single-stage. That said, it may group tighter, but if I don't know the ballistics of it, I'm missing more precisely. That's the bottom line. If I run something more frequently, those targets pushing out to one kilometer, yeah, I can hit that no problem. I mean, it's just compensating for wind. That's well within a sub-MOA deviation with wind. But if I am unable to reference my library up here, and I'm unable to cope with wind conditions, which we shot in worse conditions for the 700, I won't be able to perform better even if it's a better rifle. Right. Even with the baseline knowledge of how a .308 performs in wind, there are little tiny intricacies when you're shooting at such small targets that make a difference. Because look at it. I'm shooting a system that is, by all means, supposed to have better potential accuracy. I'm shooting a projectile, a DMK, versus I was shooting SMKs because I've shot the SMK load for a decade and a half. I'm shooting a scope that is five times the price of a Super Sniper. Yeah. Every single thing about this. I wasn't shooting with a bipod. I wasn't shooting with an expensive bipod. I was shooting off of a Ruk. All right. So take all of that back then, and what does it tell us? That training matters. The training that you have is absolutely... You cannot buy performance. You can definitely supplement your own ability by buying nice gear, but you cannot buy skill or performance. Okay. But then some people take that to a new level, and they just say it's just as good. Right. Which... Also not the same thing. You can't take it to extremes. You need to look at getting equipment that's good enough for your use, and then spending the time and being able to spend the money to practice. Yeah. I mean, some people call it training. Some people call it practice. Yeah, it's the same thing. Or some people call it shooting soda cans at 500 yards. Well, cool. I think it was a good run. It was fun to call it. I know we had an issue with the camera, and then we had to go and reshoot two targets, but... Ah, but we smoked some noobs today, bro. Yeah. Boom. Hetch. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you know Doc got banned? Seriously? Furthermore, it's already separated into the different categories, so you can go back to your argument as quickly as possible. And whether you decide to support us via Patreon, subscription, or just a normal viewer, we thank you. Bye.