We spent our week at Shot Show fairly busy manning our booths and interacting with customers and potential customers and were surprised about the buzz around this new caliber. Thus we didn’t get a whole lot of time to cruise the show and see cool new stuff. But one thing we did see was the new 8.6 BLK platform joint venture between Q and our friends at Faxon.
We were getting requests for quotes on 7, 10, and 12 inch AR10 handguards in the weeks leading up to the show. We wondered who was building ultra-short .308 pistols. Well, it came out that this is the new thing.
8.6 BLK
The 8.6 BLK is built on the AR10 platform. It is the big brother to the .300 BO. The new round will be available in both supersonic and subsonic variants and is made to be suppressed.
Specifications
It is .338 diameter bullet with weights from 200 to 300 grains. And has excellent reported ballistics. Loaded with a 210 grain Barnes TTSX reporting 2450fps from a 12.5 inch barrel. With only 1.4 more inches of drop at 300 yards than a typical .308 with a 168 grain bullet but with 300 more foot lbs. of energy at the target, this thing looks pretty impressive.
I am still researching this application and I tend to not jump on calibers until well proven in the marketplace. (I don’t like to invest a lot into a gun to have the cartridge fizzle out and not be available for ammo purchases at normal prices.) This caliber certainly seems optimized for big game hunting however.
Stay tuned for more info as we hear it or get it.
Are the pics/ images not working for this article?
thanks for pointing this out. something has gone amiss
Well, I’ve fully committed to the build exactly to the same primary parts used outside of the reciever set and handgueard. I just finally got the Faxon barrel ordered on the way from Midway USA in 12”and have had the Thunderbeast gen 2 Ultra 338 bought about a month and a half ago waiting on my eform to go though with the ATF, running Faxon BCG (I prefer JP but that’s their recommendation) and throwing it together on a Forged Aero upper/lower and haven’t decided yet on handguard or stock, Superlative bleed off Gas Block and my preferred Hauge Grip. Hoping it ends up as awesome as the hunting videos I watched in Africa with it. I just returned from a Safari so it got me fired up and looking forward to seeing f it’s the real deal or not.
Why not just chamber a barrel for 358 win?…