Cut Barrel or OTB Suppressor

[elkhunter505]

Hey everyone, I got my first suppressor this year (Omega 36M) and I absolutely love the suppressed game. However, I am thinking about ways to make the OAL shorter for my rifle. The rifle is a 6.5 PRC with a 20” barrel so it is already pretty short. I have been debating on this for next year, whether to chop the barrel back to 16” or to get a OTB suppressor like the AB raptor to lower the length. The rifle is not unwieldy with the omega per se but being a smaller guy, it does stick up over my head a considerable amount when attached to my pack. This has made jaunts through the timber and deadfall when you need your hands a bit more difficult than when the rifle was shorter. I was debating on cutting the rifle to 16 and then getting a Scythe to where the barrel length basically washed out to what the length is now with the ASR brake. I am fairly new to the rifle hunting game given it was hard to draw tags in my home state, but now that I am in a state that general tags exist I have gotten much more into rifle hunting. The other consideration is I will be shooting copper ammunition because personally I’d rather keep lead out of the environment. Given that I’ll probably be shooting light for caliber bullets and trying to push them at a considerable speed. With all this poorly laid out information, what do some of you more experienced shooters think would be the best route to go here? Should I just suck up the OAL since it works and that is the cheapest option? Thanks for any thoughts!!

 

[pender1]

I'm going down this path with my Tikka right now so I'll share my thought process. I have a 22" barrel with a suppressor hanging off the end, so it's quite long. It's going to depend on your use case. Your general range that you are taking shots and your ammo of choice are going to tell you ballistically what you can get away with on barrel length. My general opportunities for shots are <250 yards on whitetail deer with a 7mm-08. Using the known data on my ammo I can do the math on velocities and energy numbers to figure out my effective range based on barrel length. I've personally figured out that cutting my barrel down from 22" to 18" will still leave me enough of a margin of error where I am comfortable shooting deer out to ~350 yards with enough energy to make an ethical kill. If I were shooting mule-deer at 600 yards, the math would be entirely different. Taking that amount of barrel off will not get my back to the stock length of the rifle, but will make the gun considerably easier to manage climbing deer stands and will move the center of mass back considerably.

So my conclusion for my chambering and usage is that I can go to 18" and not sacrifice anything that I actually use the rifle for. This isn't a 1000yd gun, so I'm not worried about anything beyond the shots that I am able to and comfortable taking.

So I guess all that to say: See if you can cut down your barrel enough to get you where you want to be. If not, then a reflex is your better option.