Springfield M1A

I have shot the SOCOM carbines and they are pretty blasty and you won't get Match grade accuracy but the few I have shot all functioned just fine.

I have owned an 18" BUSH rifle since 1990.
It has served me well enough and I have shot it enough that I have had it rebarrelled, twice and not because the first two barrels did not shoot well.

For five years it was mated to a SAGE SEAL stock and shot like a Match Gun.
It also weighed as much as a machinegun.
Recently I returned it to the USGI fiberglass stock.
Much much nicer rifle for an old guy to tote around and accuracy did not suffer nearly as much as I feared it may.

I have an M1A Loaded in a Walnut stock (used to be in a Troy MCS with optics, but got rid of that because I wanted to build an AR15) that shoots 1.5 MOA with handloads pretty consistently. Not talking about 3 round groups, but 10 round groups. It's pretty handy even with it's weight but I'll echo what others have said here. The biggest disadvantage to a SOCOM16 is that barrel length and overall accuracy. I would not buy one. I have yet to see one shoot well (2 MOA or less with handloads) and while I'm sure they exist, they are not the norm. My buddy's was a solid 3 MOA gun with handloads.

I'll also agree that the synthetic stocks that SAI ships with their rifles suck. That's why I went with the Walnut stock. It fits well and has good, tight lockup and good fore end draw tension on it without any bedding compound. I'm eyeing, heavily, the AG Composites carbon fiber stock for it. It's lighter, and it's stiffer. That means tighter action fit and better fore end draw for improved accuracy!

Scoping the M1A platform is a bit of a bear, but not impossible. Certainly not as intuitive as an 308 AR is, but then again, the M1A has character and soul, a 308 AR doesn't. It's a tool.

On reliability, I'm sitting at about 3500 rounds through this M1A loaded in 7 months. Most of it handloads, but a large chunk of it is M80 ball (mostly for the brass, but because it's cheap). It cycles just fine and I have yet to have issues with it. The single most common SAI issue I see over on M14 Forums is the extractors. If they are really an issue, you can always buy a USGI one for not much and replace it when the SAI one fails.

Heck, from 28" down to 16.5" doesnt even see a 300fps difference. I'll take the utility of a 16" carbine over a 22" tent pole anyday.

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A lot of people justify a significant expense on shooting 300 Win Mag instead of 30-06 for an extra ~300 FPS. For similar bullet weights, the velocity difference between 9mm and 357 Sig is less than 300 FPS.

A 16" barreled battle rifle claiming better handling is like putting Camry tires on a F-350 and claiming it handles better. It's sacrificing utility, not gaining utility.

Losing 300 FPS from a 2800 FPS 150 grain 308 costs nearly 600 ftlbs. It loses around 20% of it's energy.

We live in a free country, so everyone can do what they want.

If you hand load then you can build a 2800 FPS 150gr load for the SOCOM and it will perform exactly like it would if you fired a 2800 FPS 150gr load from a 22" barrel...it can be done so you can get around the problem of velocity/energy loss (yes, it can be done safely but it would be a top end powder charge).

But realistically we know that most people will simply buy commercial 150gr ammo and shoot it in the SOCOM so lets talk about that reality.

While the shorter barrel will cause a reduced muzzle velocity compared to a longer barrel (which also reduces energy), to imply that the short barrel doesn't produce enough energy to be useful is unrealistic. For a 150gr bullet with a muzzle velocity of 2800 FPS in a 22" barrel the muzzle energy is around 2612 Ft-Lbs while the SOCOM's 16.25" barrel will produce about 2244 Ft-Lbs (that's a loss of 367 Ft-Lbs at the muzzle, not 600 Ft-Lbs), regardless, both are still deadly energies. As the range increases the difference between the energy losses gets smaller, at 800 yards there is only about 66 Ft-Lbs difference between bullets fired in the two barrel lengths.

The real issue isn't how much energy is lost but how much is retained and what amount of energy is needed to do what you want to do with the bullets you are using.

Tactical targets are usually pretty soft compared to game animals so it takes less energy (according to some experts, about 80 Ft-Lbs if the round is placed correctly) to do the job. For large game animals most recommend something over 1000 Ft-Lbs. That means that if you are a tactical shooter you can drop your target at longer ranges because it takes less energy to do it. While the SOCOM's energy numbers are less than a longer barrel (using the same ammo), it produces enough energy to drop anything at real-world distances that you would normally use a .308 for. Assuming that your sighting system allows it, a soft target can be taken out well past any realistic range (at least the military's standard 600 yards) with the SOCOM but I have a personal limit of 300 yards for large game animals (elk, moose, etc). My 168gr TTSX hand loads in my SOCOM produce almost 1300 Ft-Lbs of energy at that range and is more than enough energy to produce a clean kill on an elk. Admittedly my 22" barreled rifle will produce the same amount of energy out to 400 yards but the SOCOM will still have over 1000 Ft-Lbs of energy at 400 yards. Shooting game past 300 yards is pretty tough to do unless you fire from a prone position and that's not the kind of situation I usually find myself in when I get a shot.

The small loss of energy in the short barrel doesn't have any real negative impact on the effectiveness of the weapon in the real world. It's like saying that owning a car that will do 200 MPH is better than owning one that will do 180, in the real world it doesn't make any difference because you can't use that power anyways.

As for accuracy, if you tune the rifle, ammo, and shooter then the rifle is definitely capable of far better than 3 MOA. 3 MOA is what a lot of people see when they simply grab some ammo off the shelf and start popping rounds without trying to improve anything. If you choose the right ammo and spend a little time learning to shoot the big Ghost style sights you can expect under 2 MOA.

With my tuned up SOCOM firing my hand loaded 110gr Vmax cartridges I can average right about 1 MOA, 5 shot groups pretty regularly.

These are a series of tests with different powder charges using the 110gr Vmax bullet.

Macgrumpy,

I've loaded a bunch of 125g AMAX and Speer TNT for a pdog hunt that I did last summer but that's as light as I've shot out of my M1A. I bet that load was really mild on recoil.

(as an aside, the M1A proved to be a real pdog slayer. I was hitting them out to 425-ish yards with regularity)

How did you pick 4198 as your powder? It falls off the top of my acceptable burn rates for the M1A as being too fast.

Nature Boy said:

Macgrumpy,

I've loaded a bunch of 125g AMAX and Speer TNT for a pdog hunt that I did last summer but that's as light as I've shot out of my M1A. I bet that load was really mild on recoil.

(as an aside, the M1A proved to be a real pdog slayer. I was hitting them out to 425-ish yards with regularity)

How did you pick 4198 as your powder? It falls off the top of my acceptable burn rates for the M1A as being too fast.

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Using QuickLoad as a development tool has led me to conclude that there are far more powders that are usable in the M1A rifle than most people realize. I think that the last time I checked I found something like 15 or 20 powders that would work although some were only useful for specific bullet weights and not for others. The average person that claims that a powder is too fast or too slow can't really tell you what data he uses to come to that conclusion, usually it's based on something that they have read or something that was told to them by some other person. A lot of shooters assume that the powders that have traditionally been used in competition are the only safe powders, which isn't true. Most competition shooters choose a powder because the military used that particular powder. A lot of people assume that the military picked the best and safest powder for a specific cartridge but in reality the military chooses powders based on the current contractors samples, not necessarily the entire range of all the powders that exist. Further, the military chooses it's powders based on performance data, not brand name. Also, the powder they use is canister grade powder that may or may not have an equivalent commercial version.

Using QuickLoad I look at barrel times, pressure rise times, and pressure at the bullet's base when it's in the area of the gas port and compare those numbers to those specified for the M14. For the short barrel you need a faster powder to make the bullet perform like it does in a longer barrel, faster powder builds pressure quicker which produces higher muzzle velocities. But as the bullets get heavier you have to use so much powder that the max pressure exceeds the safe limit of the rifle's design. The lighter the bullet the easier it is to make it go fast. I usually like IMR powders for my M1A although there are others brands that I like too, but I usually start with IMR powders and since it proved to work well I didn't bother trying any other powder.

That 110gr load is very similar to Hornady's 110gr TAP load and I can actually push the bullet up to about 3300 FPS out of the short barrel (I actually limit it to 3000 FPS because of my fear of eroding the throat too quickly). I used that load for coyote hunting in Utah but now I'm living in the mountains of Montana and I've developed a 168gr load for elk and deer and I use it most of the time.

That's great info.

You're correct. Without tools like QL, we left with published data and conventional wisdom to determine what powder to use. Kudos for your deep dive into details to come up with what works for your rifle.