Better than Colt? - Cheap Delton 11.5-inch Upper

Good morning, everyone, this is John with gun.deals, and today we're going to be taking a look at a very inexpensive kind of retro-styled upper, this is a Delton11.5 5.56.

Full disclosure on the Delton 11.5 upper receiver, we have no relationship with Delton for this review, we picked this up with our own money, It's not a particularly expensive upper receiver, it's about a couple hundred dollars to a hundred dollars cheaper than like a Colt 11.5 and importantly, this one here did come with the bolt carrier group and charging handle, so again, this is a very inexpensive starter-style upper receiver.

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Getting into what exactly this is, this is an 11.5” 5.56 upper receiver, carbine hand-guard, standard mil-spec upper receiver bolt carrier group, and charging handle. Starting out with the barrel, they have two different versions of this upper, they have a chrome-lined version which will be phosphate chrome, and then, they have the standard nitride version which we have here. The nitride version is about a hundred dollars cheaper, so, for a chrome-lined barrel, you're probably better off just getting a nitride, nitride versus chrome lining, they're both very good coatings, chrome-lining is better and it is certainly more resilient, will give you an enhanced barrel life, it's more corrosion-resistant, more heat-resistant, it's much harder, and unless you're firing extremely high round counts in extremely arduous situations, nitride is going to do just fine.

Very interestingly on this barrel, this is a 4140 chrom-moly-vanadium steel, so, not 4150, which is a little bit not necessarily tougher, basically, just has a slightly higher carbon content than a 4140, but this one here is a heavy 4140 barrel 1:9 twist. 1:9 twist is not particularly popular anymore because most people are looking for 1:7 or 1:8 to give you more stability, In theory, with heavier loads being that you can go all the way up to 77, 80, 85 grains with a 5.56 and, in general you want a faster twist rate to give you more accuracy potential with those heavier loads.

It is a heavy barrel, so, this is actually a little bit heavier than the Colt 11.5 that we reviewed last week or so, so this is a little bit of a heavier barrel, so it does have a slight advantage, It's cheating a little bit in that regard versus comparing barrel to barrel, but this is actually going to be a fairly accurate upper receiver.

Also, on the barrel itself, you can see that we have a pinned A2 front sight post the pins on it, all looks good, the machining on everything is very nice, theA2 flash hider is perfectly fine. The plastic handguard on the Delton is a much thinner plastic handguard than what you'll get on a lot of other upper receivers, so this must be like a slim version or just kind of like an off-brand plastic handguard because it is noticeably slimmer and thinner than a lot of other handguards on the market, and actually, I tend to prefer this a little bit more than some of the bigger bulkier ones, as I tend to get my hands over a little bit more, I get a little bit more grip leverage, that sort of thing.

Moving back to the upper receiver, this is a standard mil-spec upper receiver, I'm not sure exactly who makes it, if they're having somebody make it for them in-house, anything like that, but it is just standard 7075 T6 aluminum, it is T-marked on top, and you have your standard forward assist and dust cover.

The charging handle is nothing special whatsoever, however, the bolt that is included, so this is their bolt that they shipped out with the upper receiver, is good and bad, so getting into the basics of it, this is a phosphate chrome bolt, so the bolt and carrier is all phosphate, and then you have on the inside of the bore is chrome-lined and as well as the gas key is also chrome-lined on the inside, that is the mil-spec style and that is perfectly acceptable, that is a very high-quality setup, it's going to work very well, phosphate does a good job of soaking up lubricant, so you lube it up and you kind of forget about it, and chrome is very hard, very lubricious, all those good things that we've already talked about.

Getting into the bolt itself on the included carrier, this is another area where they actually did a really good job with it. It is Carpenter 158, which is the true mil-spec material versus 9310. 9310 is technically stronger, it's also cheaper, which is why most manufacturers will use it. True Carpenter 158 is the mil-spec and, remember, strength, just on its own, the singular metric is not the only thing you're looking for when you're looking for a high-quality bolt, so this is using the true mil-spec Carpenter 158, on top of that, It's also high pressure tested and magnetically particle inspected for any sort of defects before hopefully coming out of the factory and getting to a customer. The bolt itself is fairly high quality.

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Getting into the rest of the carrier, we have true Grade 8 fasteners on top that are staked perfectly fine. Unfortunately, it is cut in the back, so this will not accept an auto sear, It won't trip an auto sear, if you happen to be an individual who has one of those or plans to acquire one in the future, this upper receiver, this bolt carrier group in general, will not work with that because, of course, they remove that extra material here, so that it cannot trip an auto sear .

Getting into the actual finish quality and the machining work on the bolt, this is where you can definitely tell that they saved some money. It has the grainiest, most grippy texture out of any bolt carrier group that I've ever seen. There is very noticeable machining marks on the gasket itself and on the bulk, like almost like they didn't do a finishing pass on it to kind of clean it up. It is very functional, but it is definitely… It's not a rough finish because it is even, but it is one of the least attractive finishes on a bolt carrier group that I've ever seen. Not really a big deal in terms of function because as we've been into, this upper actually functions very well, just something to note.

Getting into reliability with the upper receiver, at this point we have about six to eight hundred rounds, through it, mostly decent ammunition, but also some really crappy steel case ammo as well. The only issue that we had with it is the exact same issue that we've had with a lot of upper receivers recently, with a bad batch of steel case ammunition is I was getting the case rims ripped off, where they would kind of deform, so it was basically just a bad batch of steel case ammo, so I would get cases stuck in the chamber, I think it happened once or twice on the Delton, and it's happened two or three times on every other upper receiver that I've tried with that ammo because that batch of ammo was just bad. Other than that, reliability has been perfect, even with just mediocre quality ammunition, or just other steel case ammunition, It was also perfectly reliable.

Getting into the gassing on the upper receiver, as you'll see, most of the time while I was using it, I was actually using an H3 buffer in the back. With an H3 buffer it would eject full power military ammunition M193, so on and so forth, at about three o'clock, which is pretty decent. It is still going to be a little punchy, some of the shooting, you'll probably see me using a carbine buffer, and it'll eject it about two o'clock or so, which is a little bit over-gassed, but it cycled everything that we put through it, both low quality ammunition and high-power full-power ammunition, if you will, and it cycled everything just fine. For the best recoil impulse, I would use in H2 H3buffer, If you're going to be using a lot of full power ammunition and briefly comparing it to the Colt that we tested earlier, this is definitely a much smoother, much softer upper receiver, not the softest on the market, but for a very inexpensive upper, it's shot very well, I was very happy with how reliable it was, and then, on top of that, how soft shooting it was as well.

Getting into accuracy testing, this is another area where for such a cheap AR with not necessarily the highest quality features, It's not free-floated, pinned from sight block, all that sort of stuff, the accuracy that I was able to achieve out of it was actually just fine and I'll go ahead and let it speak for itself.

Other than a couple of the heavier loads, that the barrel didn't particularly like, it shot everything very well, I was very surprised with the Norma m193, it shot very well, coming in at right at 2 MOA with just a 55 grain ball, which I'm very happy with, it's probably optimized for a little bit lighter of a load with a 1:9 twist, however, it also shot some of the heavier loads as well, keeping everything under 2 MOA, and remember we're talking about a very inexpensive non-free-floated 11.5 5.56.

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Overall, while there are certainly loads that it doesn't like feeding it, even just decent ball ammo 2 MOA or under, I'm gonna be very, very happy with that, so at the end of the day, I am very pleasantly surprised with how well the upper receiver shot. It was very pleasantly gassed, so a proper ejection pattern is going to cycle anything you put through it without being terribly over-gassed, on top of that, It was very reliable, other than the crappy steel case ammunition that we had problems with, everything in and it was also fairly accurate.

There's always going to be loads that that 1:9 twist barrel doesn't like, but if you're shooting mostly ball ammo like most of us are for, training or plinking or what have you, then it's going to cycle those or shoot those very well, as long as it's a quality load.

The downside to buying a Delton is that you don't know if you're actually going to be getting a good one. The biggest problem that I've seen with them, that I've read and heard from other people is that they do have some QC issues, so I happen to get a very good one. If you go out, spend your hard-earned money on one, are you gonna get a good one, well, hopefully, and, you know, maybe there's a 90, 99% chance that you will, but it does seem that they do have some QC issues, and that is kind of par for the course with these lower-tiered cheaper builds, but if you get a good one, or if their customer service is at least competent, you should be able to get a decent upper receiver, a very good upper receiver for not that much money, so it will be a hesitant recommend from me.