Bear Creek Arsenal Complete Uppers

[ported45]

There's been a lot of talk here about these short-throated barrels. I don't mean to lessen the importance of BCA's QC error, it is a big deal. I could imagine a weak case rupturing in a worst-case scenario. I hope that they can replace all the problem barrels before something like that happens.

But I'm not ready to write-off BCA. Of all the thousands of barrels they make a year it's likely that only a handful have the short throat; I've only heard of the 20" 6.5G 5R with the problem. Might have been only a short production run with the worn reamer, maybe a few hours, who knows? But they should have inspected them close enough to catch it.
I like the company enough that I hope they learn from their error, fix all the bad barrels and survive.

My first BCA upper had conventional rifling and was short throated, but not nearly as short as the second upper they sent with the 5R rifling. Third upper is back to the conventional rifling that I ordered and is not short throated.

However, my first run to the range resulted in a stuck bullet due to the bullets being inertia-pulled by the round chambering. I chambered and fired two rounds and then extracted the next round without firing to inspect. Bullet was PULLED ever so slightly. Chambered it up again and tried to extract it and that is when the bullet stuck in the beginning of the rifling and pulled from the cartridge. The rest of that story is being outlined in the Reloading Forum under "Neck Tension".

I went back a second time with crimped-in bullets with the Lee FCD and got just over an 1" groups with 8208 starting load and Nosler 120 BT and just over 2" with Nosler 129 ABLR. I need to figure out my neck tension crap and then I can tackle load development. Crimp was what I consider on the heavy side (looked like military crimps) before the bullets would not move forward out of the neck when being chambered. This could be part of the group size and the reason that I want to defeat this obstacle first.