20” lightweight barrel?

[lazyengineer]

Lol, not in my experience.
I get about 6 MOA from the faxon group buy barrel I’ve got. The old AR Performance barreled SPR does 2 MOA with the same ammo (wolf)

Experiences differ, and I think FAXON can at times be better than others. I will say, in my experience and opinion, I consider them one of the better BBL's out there for the money. I like their engineering, and think they do a nice job of balancing weight to performance with a pretty thoughtful design. They also have a freakishly polished bored (extremely smooth when examined under a scope, compared to most), and I like that they Malonite all their BBLs, and stress relieve. I will say, a FAXON 2020's LW barrel in 5.56 with a pencil front end, has given me 1 MOA level performance with no zero-shift when heated up. A performance undreamed of 20 years ago - due to metallurgical, machining, and stress relief processing I personally think. All for pretty cheap. I'm kind of a big FAXON fan. That said, they do botch things too, they made a bad batch of BBL's for Desert Tech MDR that have very rough chambers and caused many nightmare problems, that should have never happened. And I did get one once that had a very none-centered chamber (where one side of the lands starts 1/8" earlier in the throat than the other, due to being non-centered. Which btw, is WAY more common than people think.

To OP's question, the PSA 20" 1/8 Grendel BBL is actually pretty light. Mine didn't really shoot that great (others have happier experiences), so I replaced it with a TEAM Monster BBL, shown in this comparison - which was a good bit heavier. To be honest, I couldn't ever get it to shoot as well as I wanted either (probably my fault), so eventually sold it too, and went with an Alexander Arms 20" in 1/9 twist HBAR (not shown), and all of a sudden my groups got a lot tighter. Just my experience.


MONSTER 20" BBL and PSA 20" BBL


With regards to your 14.5" project, good luck. For whatever reason, nobody commercially offers one, which is a shame. So I took a 3000 round shot-out PSA 20" 6.5 Creedmoor BBL, had a friend turn it down and rechambered recrowned, and tapped and plugged the original gas-port, into this BBL. Which I absolutely love and shoots like a dream. For 14.5", 1/8 is a good twist.

FWIW, I'm not a fan of it in 20", and prefer 1/9 in a 20". I'm the only one on the forum who actually thinks that, and lots of guys with more experience than I are happy with 1/8 - I'm not. But then, I'm also the one guy on the forum who prefers Hornady brass over Lapua/Starline.



Custom 14.5" BBL (made from a recovered 6.5 CM HBAR a barstock)


Pin and Weld to keep it legal


Final light weight field usage gun configuration, running on a Magnesium lower, for weight savings there too. (ultimate general purpose gun you can get, IMHO)