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AR break-in tips by Wirecutter

A couple weeks back you had a post from a guy asking for help with an 18″ upper chambered in Wylde that he’d bought from Palmetto State Armory (PSA). IIRC, he was having issues with the accuracy of the upper. Your commenters provided some great information, so I thought I’d throw a little into the mix.
I bought one of those 18″ Wylde uppers from PSA, and as I’ve generally had great experience with them, I wanted to give some positive feedback on their products. The photos show the groups I was getting while zeroing the scope. As you can see, the 5-shot group is pretty tight, about 1″. I’m no marksman; but this Wylde upper groups as well as any other rifle I own.
Here is what I did to make sure my Wylde performed well, based on the comments from your other posters.

  1. Cleaned the barrel before I shot it. This took about 3 nights worth of work, as the factory grime needed some time to soak in Hoppes 9. I finally got some clean patches, then lightly oiled the bore and put it away until time to shoot.
  2. After reading the post, I checked the muzzle for burrs, but did not find any. I did not check the tightness of the barrel to the receiver.
  3. On range day, I shot 5 rounds and then cleaned with Hoppes 9 until patches were pretty clean, then shot 5 more rounds and repeated. I did 6 cycles of shooting and cleaning, then shot the rest of the cartridges I had for a total of 52 rounds. The pic of the upper and lower shows some of the patches from my 2nd or 3rd cycle.
  4. After getting the scope on paper at 25 yards, I was able to hit targets about 125 yards away. The Wylde upper was definitely consistent.
  5. The cartridges were reloads with Hornady 55 gr SPP bullets on top of 23.4 gr of Hogdon H335. As an aside, either these loads are too light for the upper, or the buffer spring in the lower needs to be weaker to accommodate the full length gas system on the Wylde upper. That will take a little research and testing. I hope the buffer spring will solve the issue, as I already loaded another 150 cartridges like the ones I was shooting on range day.

Hope this information was helpful. Feel free to use the text and photos, if you think this is something you want to post.
Jackdaddy63

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