Lead Star Arms Grunt - The Fastest AR Out of The Box for 1K
Updated
44 months ago
Good morning, everyone, hope you’re all having a wonderful day today. Today we’re going to be talking about Lead Star Arms Grunt 3 complete AR-15.
Wikiarms.com Search Engine Results
Want to see your products here? Click this
link.
Powered by Wikiarms.com
Full disclosure on the Lead Star Arms Grunt 3, this was actually sent to us by Palmetto State Armory, which is a company that, of course, carries these as well, so while we did not get this directly from Lead Star Arms we did get this for free. That being said we have no relationship with Lead Star Arms whatsoever. Lead Star Arms is a smaller company that’s sort of local to Palmetto State Armory, I believe, so Palmetto State Armory also carries their rifles and they sell sort of competition oriented-ish mid-range or sort of budget ARs. I wouldn’t really call them budget ARs because this Lead Star Arms Grunt 3 as it sits right now is around a thousand dollars for the complete rifle. That’s not outrageously expensive, especially for the features that you’re getting in this. That’s gonna put you in the same area as the Sig Treads or the Ruger SR556 or your Springfield, whatever else. They’re kind of budget mid-tier ARs like a Smith & Wesson sport 2 or something like that. It’s going to be right in that same price point, maybe a little bit higher but again you are gonna be getting some nicer features on this AR and this is a little bit more of a competition-oriented AR-15.
The muzzle
Let’s go ahead and get into some of the specifics. The most noticeable thing on this gun is going to be the 17 inch hand guard which is already a very, very long hand guard and the 16 inch barrel. This is set up to perfectly fit in with their two port muzzle brake. We’ll get into details on the muzzle brake, but basically this is setup to run like this. You shouldn’t really be switching out the muzzle device or anything else like that because it’s really design to be working with their included muzzle device. If you like that, good, if you like no recoil on your AR-15, awesome, however, if you are looking for more of a duty rifle or something you can put on a flash hider and a suppressor. With this muzzle device and hand guard you’re not obviously gonna be able to do that. For competition or a very, very fast fun gut to shoot absolutely but, again, if you’re already looking for like a duty oriented this is not really going to fit that niche for you.
The hand guard has the mostly chopped of Picatinny rail section on top, you have a little bit here in the back by the barrel nut and, of course, a little bit at the end for say your iron sights and that’s about all the room you’ll gonna get. That being said, you do, of course, have M-LOK at the 3, 6 and 9, all the way up and down this rail so, there is still a ton of rail space. Than, at the end of a hand guard you have two cutie points which is quite nice if you like to run your slings that far out but me personally I like to have mine a little bit further back which is why they also have two at the back of the hand guard as well.
All that is all well and good. This is 60-61 T6 aluminum hard coat anodize. At the back here the mounting solution is, of course, a steel barrel nut which is good, we like to see steel barrel nuts in general. It also has two very small anti-rotation tabs that fit on either side of your upper receiver to help lock it down in place and then our mounting system is actually quite nice. So, on the left side here we have a steel locking block and then we have two bolts that fit into that locking block and then torque down.
I like to see straight up large locking blocks like this versus just a steel bolt into aluminum treads. I am much more comfortable with steel on steel versus steel on aluminum because, of course, that aluminum is always going to give first and what this means is you’re able to get one a lot more torque on the hand guard itself, but also more concentric pressure because, of course, it’s torqueing down across this entire locking block versus just two points on your hand guard.
In terms of the hand guard design for a competition style build it’s actually very, very good, I like it a lot. It’s a little bit long, of course, because it’s blocking off the muzzle device If you want to swap out the muzzle device, but that’s just something you’re gonna be getting into with this gun in general. The lock up is very, very good so, if you did have something all the way out here that needed to maintain zero you would have a very good chance of that holding zero.
Getting into the muzzle brake itself, this is, of course, as I mentioned a two port brake and on a 5 5 6 gun with a muzzle device of this size it is incredibly effective, it is made out of, I believe, 41-40 chrome moly- vanadium steel which is a very strong very tough steel, all good there. On top of that, all of theirs come pre-drilled for a pendant weld so, if say, you had a 14 inch or 14 a half inch barrel with a 15 inch hand guard you could pin and weld and then it would be a legal 16 inch. For me, for a competition gun, I would rather see a 16 or an 18 inch barrel anyways, but it is a nice feature to have on your muzzle devices. It is, of course, timed with a crash washer and something really nice that I like about it is that it’s a sort of a tunable muzzle brake so, at the front of it, here on the top of it, I should say. You have all of these little dimples that are like half way drilled out. That is for you to tune the amount of vertical recoil control with your specific ammunition and buffers.
Me personally, I prefer neutral, I prefer if there’s going to be any recoil on a gun I want it to be up and down because that is the easiest to control. I want it to naturally recoil up and then as the bolt slams back forward and pick up around it should come right back down. If you like the gun to not move whatsoever you could probably drill out, you know, two to four of those and if you like a little bit of downward pressure and you feel like that’s easier for you to fire faster , then you can drill out more. That is the feature I don’t think a lot people are going to take advantage of but it is something very nice to see, especially at this price point and if they were all drilled out from the factory I think it would be a less pleasurable shooting experience. For me personally, when you start to have a lot of top mounted holes on a muzzle brake or on some sort of recoil reduction device, it does tend to drive the front end of the gun down and I prefer neutral, just like it is. So, overall, they did do a very good job on the muzzle device and again it can be a little bit tuned if you want to.
The Barrel
The barrel profile, this is another thing that they did right, this is a 41-50 chrome moly-vanadium barrel that is nitride. This is what I consider to be a middleweight profile. They claim that it’s an A2 profile, what that means to me is you do have a little bit thicker of a profile than you would on a government in the back and then you have as straight taper that’s same profile towards the end of the muzzle device. You, of course, have a 0.750 gas block journal and then a slight taper down to the profile that it is the back and so you have a very, not a heavy barrel but definitely heavier than some other profiles on the market, a lot better than like M4 or even a government because, of course, you do have that extra material in the back here as well for more rigidity so this is a little bit more tuned to be a little bit more accurate and a little bit heavier because, again, in a competition sort of sense you’re not worried about ounces because every ounce that you add onto the gun in the right places, of course, is going to give you a softer shooting gun because, of course, that weight is going to be absorbing that recoil.
On top of this, this is a 2 2 3 wild chambering which is a hybrid chambering between 5 5 6 and 2 2 3, designed to be able to handle the pressures of 5 5 6 and take advantage of the accuracy characteristics of 2 2 3. So, again for a competition not like a hard duty use 50 000 round gun, 2 2 3 wild chambering is the proper chambering as well as the twist rate of 1 in 8. You can debate whether 1 in 7 or 1 in 8 is better. Generally speaking, with a 1 in 8 you will get a much wider accuracy curve with different loads where 1 in 7 might perfectly optimized for say 70 grains and up. A 1 in 8, generally speaking, this is gonna be different from barrel to barrel and ammunition to ammunition, a 1 in 8 in general will give you a very wide, very soft accuracy curve with a wide variety of bullet weights. So, 1 in 8, for a competition style of gun where you might not only be shooting 77 grain OTMs all the time, you might be shooting wide mix of ammunition, so if there’s especially on a short range stage, you might only be shooting 55 grains because those are gonna recoil very, very soft. So, 2 2 3 wild, 1 in 8 twist, 16 inch barrel threaded one half by 28, of course, at the end, proper material choice, proper night-ride coating looks really good.
The one downside that I will say about this barrel and one of the biggest knocks about this gun overall is that they did not dimple the barrel and the gas block screws are actually protruding about 1 to 2 threads from the bottom of the gas block. I’m not sure if they’re just using gas block screws that are too long but a barrel itself, I did take off the gas block to check, it is not dimpled so it’s just the pressure of those two gas block screws at like, you know, 25 or 30 inch pounds pushing up against that barrel steel so theoretically that is not a very solid lock up. Again, it’s not a duty gun and I did not have any issues with the rifle whatsoever, but I like to see dimpling at least and then, of course, pinning is like the top tier echelon of durability. Not really needed on a competition gun, but I would at least like to see it dimpled and actually on this gas block, you’ll see it in one of the slow-mo shots, there I got a little bit of gas blow-by on the gas block which means that for whatever reason, just in the initial, you know, 500 rounds or so that we’ve tested on it so far, the lock up between the gas block journal and the gas itself is not quite perfect so some of that gas was escaping out of the sides and actually burned a hole in one of my gloves and you should be able to see that in the slow-mo. So, not a huge deal and, you know, every now and again you’re going to get a slightly sloppy fit between a specific barrel and a specific gas block. Probably the only an issue with this specific gun, but I still would like to them all dimpled because I believe none of them are dimpled so I would like to see them dimpled.
A nice touch is that they do have a black night-ride gas tube. Again, it’s just a nice touch, it looks nice, that’s about it, it does look a little bit better than like a standard stainless. In terms or performance you’re never going to notice a performance difference between a black night-ride and a just straight up stainless steel gas tube. So, a little bit of a visual improvement, but other than that nothing special.
Moving back, the BCG is also a fairly standard affair. We do have a very nice black night-ride, the machining is done very, very well, the carrier itself is 86 20, the bolt is Carpenter 158 which is the standard mil-spec material choice, it’s a good material, you can argue between 93 10 and Carpenter 158 but at the end of the day as long as both are done to spec they’re both going to be very, very good choices. Now, we did check the extractor on there and it is powered with a Viton O-ring enhanced or just an o-ring enhanced not, I’m not sure if it’s a Viton O-ring, but basically that just means that you are going to be getting really good extraction force on top of that. It ran really, really well, no issues with it whatsoever. The bolt itself is MPI tested, which is good. So, it’s a magnetic particle and tested for any sort of imperfections cracks that you obviously can’t see, that are in the material itself.
The bolt while nothing special or the bolt carrier group isn’t really anything special. It is definitely something that is going to get the job done. So, not necessarily a massive improvement, it is a standard M4 profile or M16 profile BCG, four assist cuts, again very, very standard.
One very nice touch on the Grunt 3 is they do have this very aggressive, very, very oversized charging handle on the Grunt 3. It is nicely knurled up front. It has a lot of grip surface on it. It is extremely easy to just grip and rip if you have a malfunction, a dead primer or something else like that, you can very quickly, very easily, even with gloves on, just get up there, rip it out and you’re good to go. The upper receiver itself is a standard mil-spec affair which is a lot of what’s going on here is gonna be fairly standard mil-spec sort of stuff. It is a 70-75 T6 aluminum upper receiver. It is forged not billet which preferable for me for weight and cost. It is not T-marked on top, if you care. It does, of course, have the Grunt 3 logo on the side which is not engraved at some sort of painting or stenciling that’s on. It looks fine and it does, of course, separate a little bit so you can tell what it is right out of the box. Lower receiver is also a very standard mil-spec fair. It is, of course, a Lead Star Arms mil-spec up lower receiver it doesn’t really have much of a flared magwell. That is something that I would have liked to see on more a competition oriented gun.
The Trigger
When it comes to the trigger grip, stock and end plate, I think that they did a very good job here. My specific Grunt 3 shipped with the Hiperfire EDT trigger which is their enhanced duty trigger. At least I believe that’s the model. It feels exactly like my other EDT trigger and so what that means is you get a mil-spec feeling trigger, it breaks at about 5 pounds so it’s already about 1 to 2 pounds lighter than a standard mil-spec, but it has basically no take-up and a very, very nice break. Very nice thing about EDT trigger as well is that it has a very positive reset so it really pushes your finger forward, which is very nice and has that no take-up whatsoever. The tiniest bit of rolling brake like a 5 pound brake and then again, of course, a very nice, very positive audible tactile reset. So, the trigger on here, well, nothing crazy like a competition trigger. For me, I was able to run it very, very quickly. The reset to me having a very positive, very forced tactile reset that helps me the most when it comes to just raw splits and so with this gun, with the virtual zero recoil I was able to get very, very quick with it.
Wikiarms.com Search Engine Results
Want to see your products here? Click this
link.
See more results
for Hiperfire EDT Trigger on Wikiarms.com
Powered by Wikiarms.com
The Grip
Moving back to the grip, we have a very nice over-molded rubberized grip, some people like rubberized some people like just the hard polymer grips. Personally, I think this is very, very comfortable, very grippy in my hands. It does have kind of a standard A2 angle without the bump, of course, but it works quite well, it’s very, very comfortable. If I haven’t mentioned it already, the safety is just your standard AR 15 mil-spec safety, nothing special although you don’t really need anything special even in a competition-oriented sense. The stock, they did a very good job with it. We are running a carbine buffer tube, carbine buffer, carbine spring as well, so everything is just standard in the back, which is very nicely tuned for the way that this is gas which we’ll talk about in just a second, but it is a six position, lightweight, polymer stock with a rubber pad on the back, very, very nicely done. I is lightweight, it’s very smooth, does not have too much wobble in it. One thing that I do like about it is it again has QD cups in two different places so depending on how you like to run your slings it has all the QD points you could ever want.
On the end plate as well you also have another QD point, so however you like to run your slings, out of the box this is setup for however you want to do it. The castle nut, while it is torque down properly, it’s not staked. A properly castle nut shouldn’t come loose, but I still like to see staking on everything because that is, again, just an additional bit of security. So, that about does it for the basics about what is actually the Grunt 3 rifle, but as you’ll hopefully be able to tell from the footage, the intro and everything else that I’m rolling in, this is a very fast rifle. It is gassed, this is a mid-length gas system on a 16-inch barrel, which is the proper gas length on a 16 inch barrel. We are getting ejection with brass like SDIM193 at about 3 30-ish and then steel about again 3 30 to 40 o’clock depending on the brand of ammunition and the temperature outside. There were times when we were testing this in freezing temperatures, zero malfunctions, everything very strong extraction, very good ejection, no problems whatsoever and all the other magazines that I’ve tested it with. This is just a very, very flat, very, very fast AR-15 and a lot of that is going to come down to the very well-tuned and designed muzzle brake, the proper gas system length and gas port size and the very good trigger.
You don’t need anything special on an AR-15 to make it run fast, you know, put in a decent trigger even a decent mil-spec trigger, you can be very, very fast, very accurate with. Put on a decent muzzle brake you don’t need to go all overboard and put on some insanely oversized muzzle brake just a decent muzzle brake like this with a proper gas system length and setting is going to be very, very quick. So, out of the box, this has been 100% reliable and has been incredibly smooth, incredibly fast, probably currently the fastest Ar-15 that I own.
That being said, this isn’t like uber expensive competition rifle. So, this is kind of bridging the gap between like a standard Ar-15 for say five, six, seven hundred bucks. This is going to be a little bit more expensive than that, but it’s certainly not going to be like a JP or something where it starts at like 2 000$. And for that 1000$ or so you are getting a very nicely designed hand guard for its intended use case application, you are getting a very well thought out muzzle brake, a properly gassed and tuned barrel, of course, you’re getting a very good trigger and the rest of it is fairly mil-spec, decent stock, decent charging handle and that’s about it.
The Accuracy
In terms of accuracy on it, we did do some accuracy testing at 100 yards. Unfortunately, the loads that I had on hand were just not all that varied and not good, not all that good to begin with. We did shoot, of course, just some M193 through it and it did about 2 and a half to 3 inches, which is pretty average for that ammunition and every gun that I’ve tested it in. We did some frontier 68 grain with Hornady bullets. That’s really bad ammunition, really inconsistent ammunition, does not perform well and basically anything that I tested and of top of it of what we also tried some ADI 69 grain match. I wasn’t really able to get any great groups out of it, but I didn’t have any great ammunition on hand to test. With all the distances that I was shooting at, including taking this gun out to 500 yards with just a red dot, it performed very, very well. I was able to hit whatever it is that I was aiming at, no problem.
Wikiarms.com Search Engine Results
Want to see your products here? Click this
link.
Powered by Wikiarms.com
I have no doubt, if you access to a lot of high quality loads and we’re able to tune this gun or tune a load for this specific gun. With this barrel you’re going to be getting very, very good accuracy. However, again, in my personal testing with the ammunitions that I had on hand, I couldn’t really get anything under like an inch and a half or so. But, if you’re looking for a factory gun, can you spend less and get more? Well, that I actually not too sure about. If you know a specific gun at a specific price point, that will do the same or better than this at like say seven to eight hundred bucks.
Absolutely let me know in the comments down below and I would love to check that out and compare it against the Lead Star Arms Grunt 3. So, again, if you have a suggestion or something to compare this to, for similar price point or, of course, a little bit less as well, let me know in the comments down below.
That being said, I do think that Lead Star Arms still could increase or do a couple of things a little bit nicer for around the same price. So, first off I would, of course, dimple the barrel, I like to see that, I like to see that as a gas block that’s not going to move whatsoever. I would hopefully, it might be a little bit more expensive, but I would like to see a little bit of a flared magwell for a competition-oriented gun, something that makes reloads a little bit faster, a little bit easier, and I would also like to see an extended magazine or, sorry, bolt release. I think those are very nice and something a little bit bigger and longer like even the strike industries quick latch. That one there allows you to hit it very, very quickly and be a little bit less precise, which again helps you be a little bit faster and focused on getting back the gun.
So, overall, again, I do think this is a very good value if you’re looking for an out of the box competition gun, a factory competition gun that doesn’t cost you two, two and a half grand, but if you are an AR builder and all you do is build ARs then this probably isn’t going to be something that interest you.
Now, for me personally, I, of course, build ARs, that’s kind of what I do, so I personally probably wouldn’t buy a Lead Star Arms Grunt 3 but I do recognize that a lot of people just like to buy pre-built stuff, they don’t want to mess with it, they just want something out of the box that just runs, and out of the box it ran and it ran very, very quickly.
