carbon fiber Archives

Introduction

I am not new to Christensen Arms rifles, I’ve been lucky to play with several of them over the last couple years. But today we are looking at a new to me rifle; the Christensen Arms MPR 6.5 Creedmoor.

The Modern Precision Rifle (MPR) is Christensen’s version of a light-weight sharp-shooting rifle. Whether it’s used for competition shooting or as a sniper rifle, the MPR brings some very modern touches to the precision rifle market. But are those features worthy of praise?

The MPR

Christensen’s MPR is based around their stainless steel action, a two-lug action very similar to the very popular Remington 700 like many other modern actions. The rifle tested here is chambered in 6.5 Creedmoor, using a short action bolt. Like most Christensen rifles, the MPR is heavily reliant on carbon fiber.

Its carbon-wrapped match-grade barrel is largely responsible for the rifle’s lightweight, as are other parts of the chassis. At the end of the barrel it is threaded 5/8-24 and is fit with a matching muzzle brake for additional recoil reduction.

At the heart of the chassis is an aluminum block where the action is mounted. And the handguard is bolted on to the front and is made from a carbon fiber shaped tube. The MPR uses the very popular AICS pattern magazines and they feed nicely into the magwell of the rifle. Inspecting the grip looks to be a basic AR-15 type pistol grip, this is a nice feature as you can install whichever one suits your fancy.

The folding stock hinges just behind the tang of the action, I really like the way they designed the hinge mechanism. It’s quite tight and locks up as if there was no hinge at all. Just be careful to keep skin away from the area while folding or you may bleed a bit.

Fortunately the butt stock of the MPR is completely adjustable, which makes it very nice to adapt to each individual shooter. The whole thing is pretty handsome and put together very nicely.

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Rifle Setup

Surely I was going to need a good scope and at least a bipod to shoot this rifle well. I installed a Primary Arms ACSS Apollo 6-30X56 riflescope in a ZRO Delta Mount . To simplify I went with a Harris 6-9 bipod attached to the pic-rail on the bottom of the MPR handguard. For ammunition I brought along a few boxes of Hornady 140 grain match ammo. With everything put together, leveled and balanced I adjusted the rifle to fit me, and headed out for the range.

First Impressions

The Christensen Arms MPR 6.5 Creedmoor was plenty comfortable to shoot. It weighed so little compared to other similar rifles I have. As I sat behind it on a bench I ran the bolt a few times and felt the break of the trigger just to familiarize myself with it. Its bolt was easy to lift and snap shut, and the Trigger Tech trigger as usual felt outstanding.

I loaded the magazine and closed the bolt. As I broke the trigger everything felt right, the recoil was quite modest and running the bolt for round two sent the empty case flying. The M16 style extractor of the MPR does a great job getting brass out of the way for the next round.

I fired a few more shots and adjusted my scope to get a proper zero. At that point I tried to settle down as best I could and shoot a few good groups using both the Hornady and some Federal 130 grain match. I felt quite good about my shooting but I was not super excited about the grouping downrange, the first three groups of five-shots measured right around an inch. I tried again with my other ammo selection and got very similar results, my only hope is that perhaps this rifle doesn’t like what I feed it. And maybe there is something out there it will shoot better.

Into the snow

We decided to take the rifle for a hiking trip into the snow-covered Rocky Mountains, and I brought another type of Hornady ammunition to see if perhaps it faired better. With all my gear stowed on my back, my son and I headed into the cold.

The open country where we live makes an excellent place to hunt and shoot. Here in these breezy canyons I wanted to see how the MPR shot. Mainly to see how it would perform at longer distances and real-world shooting scenarios.

Normally this time of year I shoot at tiny snow patches in the dirt. But due to winter part 2, I was instead shooting at little dirt patches in the snow. The first target was about a three-inch muddy spot surrounded by white snow. I figured it would be easy to spot the impact and judge the shot.

After loading the rifle I steadied it and focused on my point of aim nearly four hundred yards away. I pressed the trigger and the suppressed gust of pressure echoed across the canyon. I’d added my Yankee Hill Machine R9 suppressor just to see if it helped the performance of the rifle.

The contrast of dark splattered dirt across the snow, and my hit was close enough to call it good in my opinion. So I continued my search for additional targets. We repeated the process until I had exhausted my curiosity and ammunition supply.

christensen arms MPR 6.5 Creedmoor — We also shot the MPR suppressed with the **YHM R9 suppressor**

Pros and Cons

I’ll be honest up front, I wasn’t exactly sold on the aesthetics of this rifle when I first saw it. I couldn’t exactly say what I didn’t like about it. But it has certainly grown on me a bit over the last few weeks. Everybody else thought it looked great so I’ll assume its just my weird taste.

I was really hoping this rifle would shoot better than it did. To be fair it is not a new rifle so its possible that it has been rode hard and put away wet too many times. But a rifle like this should shoot half-MOA groups all day. I just couldn’t get it to reliably do that.

On the plus side, I really appreciated many of the rifles other qualities. The light weight is always appreciated. And its comfortable and adjustable chassis made shooting it very pleasant. Little features like the folding mechanism, great trigger, awesome cycling and threaded barrel made adapting the rifle to my purposes easy. And of course improved my shooting experience.

Click here to see more about the MPR

Conclusion

I must say that I liked this rifle more than I expected to. And yet I’m torn because I am simply uninterested in rifles that won’t shoot reliably sub MOA. I’m lucky to have rifles ranging from discount economy models under four hundred dollars up to production sniper rifles that cost seven thousand dollars. And even the cheap ones I can typically get to shoot consistently sub MOA and often 1/2 MOA.

The Christensen Arms MPR 6.5 Creedmoor surely could be an outstanding rifle, I’ve heard of others that shoot outstanding and accurately. If this one did, I think I’d be hard pressed to let it go. But with a street price just under twenty-four hundred dollars, I’d need more convincing.

If you like this carbon fiber rifle, check out this custom one the 257 Blackjack

Background

You may have read my piece on the 25 Creedmoor from a while back, if you haven’t then make sure you go read it after this. In that article about the 25 Creedmoor, I detailed how my nascency in precision rifle shooting began with a twenty-five caliber rifle. And that I had returned again to the quarter-bore. There’s more to that story, and today I bring you The 257 Blackjack.

One of the main reasons I quit shooting that old twenty-five 0’six, was because there was never a good bullet selection for it. The biggest bullets available were one hundred twenty grain, and they were hardly long-range bullets. They featured ballistic coefficients not much better than anything else designed in the sixties.

That was all about to change, and change for the better. I couldn’t have known how far down the quarter-bore hole I was going to fall when I first made contact with Blackjack Bullets.

The 257 Blackjack next to its larger parent, the 6.5 SAUM

The Blackjack 131 Ace

That first conversation I had was with Miles Johnson, the brains behind Blackjack Bullets. Like me he had often hungered for a better bullet for twenty-five caliber cartridges. But he had the intellect and drive to do something about it.

Miles is a smooth-talking guy, with very unequivocal purpose in conversation. The kind of guy you could sit around a fire with a bottle of whiskey and watch the stars. Before you know it he might be talking so deep about drag and aerodynamics that you have to start reading the bottle to find words you understand.

Our initial contact began my twenty-five Creedmoor project, Miles’ company Blackjack Bullets was producing the 131 Grain Ace bullet. I intended to make it the crown jewel of the project. Which has been an extremely superior performer for me lo these short two years, it leaves its six-point-five cousin in the dust.

The Birth of a New Cartridge

But Blackjack had been working all along on something even more threatening and treacherous. It was their own cartridge that was purpose-designed to make the 131 Ace sing a tune that nobody could touch. That project was the Two-fifty-seven Blackjack, a short action magnum cartridge based on the SAUM case.

It would fit in short action rifles, feed from AI patterned magazines. Pushing the Ace beyond thirty-two-hundred feet per second. It falls somewhere between the old 25WSSM and the 25SAUM wildcat.

The 131 Ace has an advertised G7 BC of .330. My personal experience and testing led me to believe that number is a tad conservative and that the number is more like .340. With an immaculate profile like that, the Ace when launched at these speeds is as flat as most available cartridges you can get. These bullets cheat the wind from its deviant influence.

Since the twenty-five Creedmoor had been such an outstanding success, I decided that I must indeed have the two-fifty-seven Blackjack as well. I figured it would be an amazing Rocky Mountain hunting rifle. So as soon as Miles had a reamer, we got started on the project.

The Pit Boss. Sporting a 24 inch Proof Research carbon wrapped barrel, and a YHM suppressor adorns the muzzle.

Building the rifle

With weight in mind, I decided I would spend the extra cheddar and get a Proof Research carbon fiber barrel with a 7.5 twist. My 25 Creedmoor is a 7 twist, but with the much faster Blackjack I needed a slightly less agressive twist. It was matched to a lightweight carbon fiber stock from Iota Outdoors.

Both would be connected with a simple Remington 700 short action. I swapped the factory trigger for a superior one from Trigger Tech, this has been a pretty standard practice for me. On top I mounted my US Optics TS 20X, which I think is perfect comapnion for this lightweight but long range hunting rifle. That said, I have a USO Foundation 25X on the way that might go for a ride on the Blackjack as well.

Trigger and magwell detail, all a perfect fit.

Next, it was time to start load development. Which requires making brass from something else, the easiest seemed to be Hornady 6.5 4S cases, they were cut, sized, annealed, then cut again, sized again, turned, and annealed. The finished product is a beautiful fat and short little case, it looks like the X47 after an all you can eat 24 hr buffet.

The Loading

Mine is only the third rifle chambered in the Two-Fifty-Seven Blackjack so load data was based entirely from what Blackjack bullets had tried in theirs. I tried several different powders, including H4350, H4831SC, but I ended up getting the best velocity with Alliant RL 26. With 56 grains of powder, I was getting just shy of 3300 feet per second.

Fireforming these fat little cases gave some slight variation in velocity, but that didn’t surprise me. I did quite a bit of testing with loads back and forth, which is a tedious process with such a limited supply of brass in which I was so heavily invested. Magnum primers seemed to give the cartridge too much of a pressure spike, and excessive wear to the cases. This forced me to back down to just a Large Rifle primer, which significantly softened the blow.

This change still gave me adequate velocity, but also saved my brass from being ruined prematurely. An added benifit that eased in extraction from the chamber. The Ace likes to run right around 3200FPS from the Blackjack, and that’s just fine with me.

Shooting the 257 Blackjack

With no shortage of space here in the Rockies, I decided to get the Blackjack out to some significant ranges. I wanted to see how well my projections panned out, and see how close the trajectory lined up with my ballistic computer Trasol.

My first distance conquered was 1025, this after confirming a fairly rough zero in the dirt at 150 yards. From there I dialed the indicated 5.3 MRAD, and closed the bolt. One of my favorite things about shooting that far, is the nice delay you have to get a good clear sight picture to watch the impact. The first impact was a touch low, so I corrected the .2 and fired again, making perfect elevation on impact. I then shot it at 1250 yards where it was slightly ahead of the predicted dope, and I had to dial back down half a MIl to get on target.

I then stretched it out to just a few hundred feet shy of a mile. 12.8 MRAD was just the ticket for that range. For the naysayers, that is two MIL’s ahead of the 220 grain 300 RUM I was testing a few months back. And at 1600 yards, the Blackjack is 300FPS faster than the RUM. With only 60 pounds of energy less than the RUM. These are of course estimations made by my ballistic calculator. But they appear to be spot on based on the data I’ve shot to within a reasonable margin of error.

Shooting these 25 caliber heaters through this carbon wrapped barrel can heat it up quick. This rifle was purpose-built to be a hunting rifle, so barrel heat is of little concern. Rare is the occasion that I shoot more than a couple shots. So the weight savings are far more valuable to me in a hunting rifle.

Reliability of the Blackjack

The recoil on the Blackjack is not bad at all, but for a short action I would call it sharp. Obviously, there is going to be some kick from something this spicy. Its certainly not bad though, I would compare it to a heavy 308 load, keeping in mind the eleven-pound rifle weight.

One of the many concerns I am hearing from people about this project is the old “barrel burner” comment.
Yep, its gonna get roasted. If it gets to 1200 rounds I’ll consider myself lucky, and then I’ll get another barrel cut and threaded and screw it on in too. That is if I haven’t found something even sharper than the Blackjack by then.

Another concern I have heard from many is about feeding. Short and fat cartridges tend to have feeding issues, especially with steep shoulders like the Blackjack. But to my gratification, I have yet to have a single malfunction. It smoothly feeds from an old beater AICS magazine, which will hold seven of these handsome dandies.

Whether the first, or last round from the mag, these hop right into the chamber without any hangups. And single feeding is no problem either, if you just toss them in with a bit of forward motion. So long as they clear the blunt breach of the barrel, the bolt closes smoothly.

Bolt knob detail. The 257 Blackjack was initially to be called the 257 Pit Boss, I decided to honor the original name by memorializing it here.

A Wildcat cartridge

A wildcat cartridge is an adventure wrapped in hundred dollar bills, but it is not without its fun and excitement. I am not even close to being done with the 257 Blackjack. Hunting season is just around the corner, and I fully intend on putting the Blackjack’s talents to work.

With both deer and elk to harvest this fall and winter. The downrange energy, and resistance to wind this lightweight but potent little rifle is a perfect candidate for these rugged Rocky Mountains that have become my winter range.

With any luck, brass will be commercially available within the next few months from at least one reputable manufacturer. Reamers and dies will also soon be available from Blackjack Bullets website, so it may not be too long before this little cartridge is made an honest one.

The Pit Boss has since received its scope upgrade, the US Optics F25X

Looking into the future

In the meantime, I will continue to prepare and practice for the hunting season waiting for the next best thing. Miles may have some mad scientist things going on at the Blackjack Lab somewhere in the hills of Oklahoma. The best news of all perhaps is that big names like Berger and Hornady are following the lead, coming out with better bullets for the quarter bore fans like myself. So the future of the 257 Blackjack, as well as my 25 Creedmoor, and any fast twist 25 caliber cartridge will be bright and long-lived.

-CBM