Hello all,
I had a couple questions regarding Pinned and intergral MOA rails.
I'm thinking about building a rem 700 base 12" SBR 8.6 blackout rifle. It'll be served as a sub 250 yard rifle while shooting suppressed. Now, I've been doing a little research on what action I want to use and such but it seems as though most custom actions are standard 20 MOA rails, would I have trouble sighting in my scope if so? I'd prefer 0 moa rail since it's a short range rifle.
Would you guys buy a stock Rem SA .308BF action over a custom on a build like this?
Im considering saving the extra funds for a custom action for 6.5 PRC mid-longer range build as well.
Man you and I are on the same wavelength. I've spent the past few months figuring out this exact build, with the slight nuance being that mine is going to be setup for 300BLK initially with the ability to quick swap bolt heads and barrels to 8.6BLK later on since I have the 300BLK suppressor in hand versus my 8.6BLK can which is still in jail. This is going to be a longer post, but hang with me. I've spend three months pinging some of who I consider the sharper minds in my ecosystem for advice on exactly what you're also trying to do here so hopefully I can pass off everything I've learned in a much quicker and succinct way then how I went about aggregating it.
To start with, a friend of mine put together a 300BLK subsonic bolt gun in a Cadex Dual Strike Chassis and chopped a barreled Rem700 action, direct threaded the suppressor and called it a day. This was a couple years ago and while I had always liked how it looked, I only recently got to shoot it and it was then that I had the idea for doing a 2.0 version of his build if you will. I wanted to stick with the same Cadex Dual Strike chassis and liked the barrel length to pair with a Sig SRD762 Ti Direct Thread tucked inside the handguard, but I quickly found out a couple months ago that not only are Remington 700 actions hard to find in stock right now, even if you can find one, the affordability of clone actions like the Zermatt Origin and ARC CDG, combined with how bad the quality on new production (RR serial number) Remington actions is, makes going the clone action route make way more sense.
Given I want the ability to be able to easily swap from 300BLK to 8.6BLK when my 8.6-intended suppressor clears, this ruled out the Remington action as it doesn't have swappable bolt heads, nor are you able to buy prefit barrels for them (since the tolerances aren't held to a tight enough spec). I haven't purchased an action for this build yet, but have ultimately settled on the Zermatt/Bighorn Origin. The reality is you're not going to shoot out a 300BLK or 8.6BLK bolt gun barrel, so an integral lug isn't a huge deal when you compare the Zermatt Origin to their more expensive TL3. The ARC CDG has an integral top rail which while often desired by most compared to a screwed or pin rail, made it a dealbreaker for me since the Cadex chassis I'm planning to use has a monolithic top rail that runs the length of the forend and action. The other thing about the CDG that I wasn't crazy about was the trigger hanger, but that's purely personal preference; so is the straight bolt handle of the CDG vs the Rem700 style swept bolt handle of the Origin vs the straight bolt handle of the TL3. It should also be mentioned that the TL3 is DLC coated (slightly harder and smoother technically) versus the Origin which is nitrided (still good but academically not as great as DLC). The CDG is DLC like the TL3.
Ultimately, on paper you're getting more bang for your buck with the ARC CDG vs the Zermatt Origin, with features like an integral recoil lug, integral top rail and trigger hanger, but in my case these were all things that I didn't want so my personal use case here steered me towards the Origin. This is a great example of why user-intended purpose is so important when shopping for things like an action. I was sold on using the CDG at first, but further research about what I specifically needed led me to the Origin. This isn't a huge deal, but the Origin has also been around for much longer than the CDG and has been validated by hundreds of thousands of rounds to be an extremely dependable action versus the CDG which is a newer product.
Hope this helps and the wall of text was worth reading. Super curious to see what you come up with. Here's a couple pics of my buddies setup (in 300BLK) that inspired my build.