The 223 Long Range Practical Rifle Project

Many moons ago when New Zealand had great firearms law I had a keen interest in competing in practical field shooting with an AR15 with a fast 1:8 twist to shoot heavy .224 projectiles. I spent a bunch of money putting together a rifle for this exact job and unfortunately my knowledge at the time wasn’t quite up to setting it up properly to take advantage of the fast twist barrel or build data properly. The rifle ended up in the back of the safe in favour of a 6.5 Creedmoor, big surprise haha.

Fast forward several years and this rifle was  crushed by police during the 2019 government mandated firearms confiscation, but the idea of shooting long range and field shooting with 223 stuck around and several years later I finally decided to make it happen.

So what did we put together to get this done? Well I gave the team at Outdoor Sports LTD a call to see what we could put together for a demo rifle and they came through for me big time. The heart of the project is a Howa 1500 short action chambered in 223 with a stainless steel 24” long 1:8 twist barrel with a Varmint contour. Its no secret i’m a fan of the Howa short action and I personally own several of them. This stainless 223 version preformed exactly as i’ve come to expect from Howa over the years and I had no issues getting it to preform. The two stage trigger is good and I even stuck with the factory internal magazine for this project and it feed well with no hiccups. This was a slight handicap when being used in competition, but there is several solutions for those who wish to convert these to detachable box magazine feed.

The chassis is the very modern styled GRS Warg, this is a combination of the older Bifrost stock with a modern AR15 style forend (fitting ha?) This chassis has a very unique style in a world of long range that is fast becoming awash with aluminium and FDE paint. The original Bifrost features gives you the moulded pistol grip, adjustable comb height and length of pull plus the added bonus of being able to tilt the butted to suit the shooters holder pocket adds another nice feature. The new aluminium forend is M-LOK compatible so you can add on whatever accessories or rails you want giving the Warg much more modularity then previous offerings from GRS.

The behemoth of a bipod is the brand new GRS Bipod and it pairs perfectly with the Warg stock and the spigot mount adaptor clips strait on top of the wargs forend and because I know you will ask, yes you can still see through the scope with the bipod mounted in this fashion, you can only notice it when on 6x zoom and even then it dose not interfere with using the optic.

Suppressor is a Aimsport Tritoin-42 , as you can imagine there wasn’t a lot of recoil to tame on this project but this can did a great job reducing what little muzzle rise the setup has when the muzzle is bare. As I was shooting this system a lot at my home range, I was conscious of the noise I made around stock and the few neighbours I have that can hear me shooting so a suppressor was a must. The Triton did a good job in reducing the sharp 223 crack down to something more akin to a 22 mag.

The optic is the new Zeiss Conquest V4 6-24x50 MOA SFP, we went with this option to take advantage of the ability to use the second focal plane reticle at lower powers and gain more elevation I n the reticle for longer shots out past 1km, more on that in a later article.

I’ll be doing individual reviews on each of the major components so in this article I’ll concentrate on how they worked together as a system and how the cartridge preformed in field conditions.

When the big box of parts arrived I quickly got to work putting it all together and started testing out various factory ammo options with heavy projectiles in the 69-77gr weight range, I soon settled on the Belmont Ammunition loaded 77gr Lapua Scenar ammunition. None was available for sale at the time but a friend had bought several thousand rounds and was good enough to donate several hundred for me to shoot. The 77 Lapua Scenar is leaving the barrel with an average speed of 2,855 fps with an extream spread of 25fps, not bad for factory loaded ammunition that comes in at around 0.60 cents a round when pursued in bulk.

Time to shoot some steel.

I went about setting up a ballistic program for this rifle/scope/cartridge combination on the StrelokPro App after having measured the velocity on my LabRadar. This is normally a good way of getting data but its an good idea to validate said data in the real world. Now I only have targets out to 600m here at TLRS HQ so the first session was just confirming the data from StrelokPro out to 600m. To be honest this was boringly easy to get done even with a little bit of wind blowing the little 77gr pills around.

Unfortunately 600m is not enough distance to accurately true the data on your chosen ballistic app, the widely accepted minimum distance is 800m if you have access to it. I’m lucky enough that I do although it’s a 40 minute drive away (I know, poor me). Instead of 800m I just went strait out to 1,000 meters as that particular target has a very good dusty backstop and is easy (ish) to spot the splash from little 22 cal projectiles.

 
Competitive Practical Field Shooting with the 223, can it hold its own against the modern 6.5mm and 6mm cartridges in competition? Well, yes and no.

I shot day two of the 2020 GPRE Hautupu Practical Rifle Match in the Practical Class with the 223 setup and while I had a good day and shot a theoretically competitive score (scores for day two didn’t count as I’d shot the previous day) if my wind call was of and I had a bad trigger press there was nearly zero chance of spotting the splash from the missed shot. The distances were out to approximately 700 meters so nothing to crazy but certainly a challenge for the little 223 in practical field conditions. Plus the obvious disadvantage of the small 77gr projectiles asides form no splash is the wind affecting the projectile far more than the bigger cartridges that are very popular in this style of competitive shooting.

The obvious advantages are the extremely low recoil especially when setup in a reasonably heavy setup like this rifle is. This comes into its own not just for (hopefully) spotting your own shots but controlling recoil on props or in awkward terrain where your position might not be ideal.

The setup as a hole worked great for practical shooting and I wouldn’t heisted using it in another match if my 6 or 6.5 was out of action. One thing I would possibly look at adding on if I owned the rifle is a ARCA rail under the forend (these are available as an extra from GRS) this would be handy as more and more tripod shooting is becoming a reality in precision shooting.

So in conclusion, Dose it work? Well yes but there are quite obviously better cartridges for precision long range shooting in the 6 and 6.5 variants, but it would be an excellent choice for smaller framed shooters though and ammunition is significantly cheaper than its larger cousins.

Will it make you a better shooter? I think so, bad wind calls will punish you with those little cartridge so learning how to use this in windy conditions and then swapping back to a 6.5 is going to be childs play. Everyone preaches 308 for practice but I think 223 is a good choice also, 308 has the advantage of more recoil (allowing you to practice recoil management) but the disadvantage of more ammunition costs for practice. Most of all it is fun, challenging yourself and your dope with cartridges that struggle at distance is great fun, yes I could just shoot a 338LM and shoot long range far easier then the 223 but I say “why not shoot both!

Thank you to Outdoor Sports LTD for lending me all the components for this project, they have been a supporter of mine for several years now and without companies like them helping out I would not be able to do what I do.

All the parts in this project are available at essentially every single retailer in NZ, just ask and they will get them in for you.