Carbine Class Pictures

[S Lance]

To keep the forum active, a few pics from last week.

[bigdaddy]

Nice, welcome back!

[Wlktheduk]

It looks like someone was having fun.

How did the red dot and magnifier scope combo work out?

Any complaints about the muzzle blast from the short barrel

[S Lance]

It looks like someone was having fun.

How did the red dot and magnifier scope combo work out?

Any complaints about the muzzle blast from the short barrel

It was a great time. I didn't get any complaints about the muzzle blast, but then again, the students to either side of me were experienced shooters. The novices in the class might not have fared as well.

Interestingly, I never noticed the muzzle blast when shooting inside.

I've written a draft of an after action report about the class. Since you asked about equipment, here is what I have so far:




Some thoughts on my equipment:

Peltor ComTac muffs worked great and were plenty durable.

A belt mounted kydex pouch in addition to a drop leg magazine carrier seemed to be ideal. The couple of students that started with chest type rigs quickly shed them.

Knee pads and elbow pads were very helpful as was a $12.00 foam mat. Gloves were nearly essential. Everyone without gloves had tape or Band-Aids on their hands by Friday.

A dump pouch wasn't essential, but was helpful to have.

Pmags worked great. There were failures of all other magazine types including U.S.G.I., Lancer, and Tango Down. The only rifle malfunction that I experienced was with another student's Tango Down magazine that we were trying to trouble shoot. From my experience, I have no intention of ever buying anything but pmags. They were 100% even when they were so dirty that you could shake sand from them and they caused no malfunctions when rested on the deck while shooting from prone.

Except for the above mentioned magazine issue, my rifle ran 100% with over 1200 rounds through the gun. Everything on my rifle held together just fine. My two point sling worked well, even for support side transitions. Another student ran the new Magpul sling plate and single point sling with good effect. Most students used 3 point slings which worked okay since transitions weren't mandatory.

My PWS muzzle brake worked like a champ and produced an acceptable amount of flash at night. It made close range double taps easy in conjunction with the CMC trigger.

The Surefire X300 worked like a champ. I could easily illuminate and shoot poppers at 100 yards. The light outperformed by a large margin another student's scout light and two other students M900's. Overall, I was VERY pleased with my choice of weapon light. I left it mounted the entire week and it held up fine. (The instructor's suppressed, PVS-18 equiped rifle however blew all the light equipped rifles away. I can see the appeal to night vision as hitting poppers at 100 yards with no light was a peace of cake with his rifle!)

I used an Aimpoint M4 and Aimpoint magnifier with decent effect. The dot on my M4 isn't perfectly round. (My M2 has a round dot so I know it isn't my eye.) I found the oblong shape really distracting for precision shooting while using the magnifier. I actually shot better groups at 200 yards without the magnifier! The magnifier was most helpful for medium range non-precise shooting (like poppers at 100 yards or steel silhouettes at 150-200. The magnifier also helped at night for shooting at poorly illuminated targets. Overall, if I took the exact class again, I'd probably use a 1-3 or 1-4 variable since precision shooting was a fairly large part of the class. The other carbine classes at Gunsite focus more on CQB fighting with the carbine, so for them, my setup is close to ideal, so I probably won't change anything. Needless to say, my Larue mounts worked great. As a side note, the rubber ocular ring for my magnifier fell off and was lost immediately the first day of class. Since it doesn't seem to actually do anything, this was no great loss. Rob's EOTech held up fine as did all the other optics in the class.