Help me find/pick a 16" barrel

[LRRPF52]

In all fairness to banned vendor, he has gotten a bad rap for a few questionable decisions he has made.

1. He got severely ripped off when a mailman dropped off a large order of barrels at a community mailbox at multiple unit housing complex that were stolen. He is a small business man that can't take that big of a hit to the pocket book

2. He has always had a problem with the 6.5Grendel. The 264 LBC came before the 6.5Grendel and for all purposes is the same cartridge. The designer of the 264 LBC did not have the financial backing that the 6.5Grendel did and in his opinion the 264 LBC designer was railroaded.

A man is entitled to his opinion and you are entitled to spend your money as you see fit. I do think that a lot you read on the internet concerning his Barrels is regurgitated information. That's not to say some of you have bad experiences with banned vendor. I live in California and have bought several barrels (.223, 6.5 Grendel and 6.8SPC) from him with no issues. They have been the most accurate best finished barrels I have used, all under $200.

My thoughts...

1. If I was running a shipping company, I would offer insurance for people who ship high value items in case something like this happens. Oh wait....

2. There is no such chamber as a "264 LBC". There is such a chamber as a .264 LBC-AR, which came years after 6.5 Grendel. "LBC" stands for Les Baer Custom. Les Baer was one of the first companies to license 6.5 Grendel reamers from Alexander Arms, where AA would order the reamers, run them through an optical comparator to make sure they were held to a tight standard, then ship them to companies that wanted to license the design before it gained SAAMI acceptance. Les Baer didn't want his reamer flow bottle-necked that way, so he spec'd his own ammo and went to a chamber design that has a tighter neck at .295", with a freebore and leade set up for the 123gr SMK. Black Hills made the ammo for him, and it was a higher pressure load.

You might be thinking about 6.5 PPC and 6.5 CSS, which were Arne Brennan's wildcats off the PPC case, necked up from 6mm PPC to 6.5mm. You can clearly see the difference between 6.5 Grendel, 6.5 PPC, and 6.5x39:



Bill Alexander worked with Janne P. from Lapua to develop the brass for 6.5 Grendel rather than modifying PPC cases, so that the neck thickness, walls, and shoulder datum would all provide the performance he was looking for.

He also spent over $11,500 in a multitude of reamer designs trying to find a chamber that would shoot all the ogive shapes well, which was a major challenge with the wide range of 6.5mm projectiles available on the market even back then.