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Plastic Fantastic - Aero Precision Classic 5.56 Upper Review W/ Magpul MOE SL
Updated
21 months ago
Good morning, everyone, this is John with gun.deals, and today we’re gonna be taking a look at the classic Aero Precision upper receiver.
Full disclosure on the upper receiver, I am actually a dealer for Aero Precision products, so I get a discount on their stuff. We paid wholesale price for this upper receiver, and I believe retail is somewhere around on that 300-350 dollar mark, depending on whether or not it’s on sale.
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Getting on into the specifics of this upper receiver, this is a 16-inch mid-length upper receiver with a pinned outside block, and this Magpul, this is their MOESL plastic handguard, which is actually, for a plastic handguard, super nice, we’ll get to that in just a minute, and then your standard forger upper receiver.
This one here did not come with a BCG or charging handle, and you probably have seen me use this in a couple of different ways, so this one here currently has a toolcraft nitride BCG, it’s a fairly basic upper receiver, and just your standard mil-spec charging handle.
All in all, you can probably do this setup for about 400-450 bucks, somewhere in that range, and for a complete upper receiver it’s a pretty good value.
Starting out with the barrel, which is gonna be the most important component on this upper receiver, 16-inch, mid-length, so you get a nice long sight radius as well, if you were to pair it with a rear sight of some sort. The mid-length gas system, I believe this is, I didn’t pin gauge it because I wanted to take off the pin front sight block, which is very nice.
I believe the gassing on this is fairly standard, so .076, if I had to guess, it will eject with standard carbine buffers and springs, it will eject brass M193 at about three o’clock, and then weaker, cheaper ammunition at about 3:30 to 4:00 o’clock, depending on ammunition.
For a little while I also did run it with an A2 stock in the back with rifle springs, rifle buffers, and that was definitely a little bit too soft with weak steel-cased ammunition, and then very nice, very soft shooting with full-power M193, so for its intended use case, unless you’re running it as a dedicated suppressed upper, it is gassed what I would consider to be appropriate. The barrel is in the black nitride, chambered in 5.56, but also has 1:7 twist.
One of the downsides of this upper receiver or really any upper receiver like this, depending on how you want to run it, is that with this handguard it is not pre-floated and it will cause some deflection or point of impact shift, depending on how much pressure you put on the handguard itself, as well as it will in general make it a little bit less accurate.
We might as well talk about accuracy now, I did test this with several different match loads, everything from just 55 grain ball all the way up to like 69 grain ADI, 77 grain Nosler, 75 grain Atomic, and a bunch of different loads as well, and overall, we weren’t really able to get better than 2 MOA out of the gun.
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2 MOA is perfectly acceptable for a fighting rifle, if you will, or just a general purpose AR, but if you’re looking for some sort of MOA or Sub-MOA upper receiver, this really isn’t going to be it. Inside of 500 yards probably won’t matter all that much, but just keep that in mind that with this sort of setup you’re not getting the maximum accuracy potential that you could out of a similar barrel that was free-floated.
The trade-off here, and one of the things I like about it is that this system is incredibly simple and lightweight as well as having that pinned front sight block and gas block combo, is incredibly durable so that is basically never going to shift on you. On top of that, if you were going to be running a backup iron sight you don’t need to spring the extra money on a front sight because you already have a fixed front sight post.
As I’m running it currently, I have the SIG Romeo 7, which is kind of a cope M4, if you will, on a 193 riser, and then I actually have the Northtac, their new 3x magnifier on a 193 riser as well, and it kind of gives it a little bit of a retro aesthetic, especially when I was using it with the A2 stock.
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Getting into the handguard itself, this is actually the first time that I’ve used the Magpul MOE SL handguard, and it’s actually very nice for being just a plastic handgurd, it’s really lightweight, it’s very simple, it gives you M-LOKs slot at the bottom, which I have a GrovTec angled foregrip, just something to kind of work as a hand stop for me, and then you have M-LOK on either side for mounting basically lights, so you can do basically everything you want with this handguard except for some sort of night vision device, so a laser aiming module or what have you on top because there is no way to mount anything on top.
This handguard does come with internal heat shields as well, which will keep your hands safe for long periods of time. I did get this upper receiver hot several times and it really never became uncomfortable to hold on to, and the plastic handguards are light, they’re very simple, they’re not the strongest or most robust things on market, especially if you have something that need to maintain zero, but for very simple, your foregrip, and your light, they’re gonna work just fine for that sort of thing, and they kind of look cool as well in a bit of a retro way.
This upper receiver doesn’t come with a bolt carrier group or charging handle, however, the charging handle is just a standard mil-spec charging handle that I threw in there, and then the BCG that I’m currently running, this is just a toolcraft nitride BCG. You can usually find these for around, if not, under 100 bucks and then I also ran it for a little while with a toolcraft nickel boron BCG, which is a nice shiny silver material, though this kind of fits the build a little bit better.
Getting into the reliability and shooting performance on the Aero Precision upper receiver, reliability was perfect, we did not have a single issue with anything that we tested it with, with carbine buffers, carbine springs, A2 stocks, what have you, it ran very well. On top of that, the shooting performance is also very good, it is what I would consider to be appropriately gassed, right out of the box, from the factory, with standard buffers and springs, it’s going to run anything that you put through it while not being punishingly over-gassed.
If you’re only running like M193 or really hot 5.56 ammo, then you might want to throw in an H1 or an H2 buffer to slow down that bolt velocity a little bit, but overall, the reliability was perfect so far at about five, 600 yards as this point, and the shooting performance is a very pleasant, very fast gun to shoot.
The trigger that we were running in here for the review is the Geissele G2S, which is their bottom-tier trigger, if you will. You can usually find them for the low 100 dollar range, which for a Geissele trigger is quite affordable, it’s nice two-stage trigger, has about 2.5-3-pound let-off, about 4.5-5-pound total pole, and for a two-stage trigger is fairly quick, and Geissele makes good stuff and the G2S, if you’re on a budget, is probably the best one to pick up from Geissele.
So, overall, for a very basic upper receiver with the plastic fantastic classic handguard up front, it performs very well.
The one main downside of this upper receiver is that it is notch pre-floated with this handguard and you’re not getting that maximum accuracy potential out of the barrel. This same barrel in a pre-floated upper receiver would probably perform at least a little bit better, though the performance that we got out of it is not what I would consider to be bad.
The handguard, if you need to mount more stuff on top, you’re gonna need a full pick rail on top and a different handguard, but if all you’re planning on doing is a grip and a light and the hanguard is perfect, very simple, very grippy, and it kind of does all the things that you need it to.
So, if you’re looking for something like this, is this something that I would recommend?
Absolutely!
