I picked mine up (
308 Win/ComforTech plastic stock, #11778) on Friday last week. Here are some first impressions:
The rifle bits all display the same fit/finish of the M2; good machining and surface finish, plastic bits where appropriate but a lot of anodized aluminum in general. The rifle comes with all of the shims/etc. needed to adjust stock cast/drop, along with a five-screw-attachment Picatinney/MIL-STD-1913 rail. All the R1s are drilled at the factory for the optional iron sights; about my only complaint with the cosmetics / build quality is that the holes are plugged with cheezy plastic screws if the sights aren't factory-installed, and the plugs aren't flush with the barrel. (Yes, it's a tiny nit, but it's worth mentioning. How hard would it have been to spec the plugs 1mm shorter?) This is pretty much the package as shipped in the box (with the optional tall comb already installed by the time I thought to take the pic):
View attachment 978143
Assembling the rifle requires that you be pretty good with Ikea furniture; the thick manual is thick because it's printed in seven languages and not because it's very detailed in all areas. For example, there is no description of how to install the bolt into the barrel assembly (requires pulling the charging handle out of the bolt) before putting the barrel onto the receiver, so if you're not already pretty comfortable with mechanical assembly and how semiauto rifles operate - well, I can see how it may be a challenge. Another example - there is no reference in the manual for the need to push the plastic plugs in the scope base mounting holes out of the barrel hood prior to installing the barrel onto the receiver, but once you proudly get it all bolted together for the first time you'll quickly realize that you can't pry the plugs out from outside of the receiver/barrel and have to disassemble things again to either push them out from the inside or fish them out of the trigger pack if you mistakenly push them in from the outside. None of this is hard, but the manual doesn't present a lot of help in that regard. It probably took me 30min to go from in-the-box to fully set up with optic (but not not leveled or boresighted).
Since the receiver top (actually, technically it's an extended barrel hood) is solid, the rail scope base is well positioned to accommodate a pretty wide range of mounting needs, fore and aft. I used various Leupold Rifleman rings as a way to determine the proper height for my needs, and Talley one-piece mounts are now on order. Not that there's anything wrong with the rail and rings, but I prefer a one-piece mount. When assembled with the optional tall comb ($86!), a Vortex Razor HD LH 2x-10x plus base/rings but empty mag and no sling, the package weighed in at 8lb12oz. I didn't weight it without the base / rings / optic, but that's within expectations given the advertised weight for the rifle of 7.1lbs. That's not super-light, but not bad for a semiauto 308Win-to-338 WinMag class rifle.
To address a question regarding action length, the answer is..... Benelli runs one action length for all R1s, and uses blocked magazines and a removable bolt travel limiter for the short-action chamberings. It's actually a pretty clever system, in that it allows the shooter to convert from any offered short action to any offered long action. In my case, conversion to 30-06 would require a new barrel and magazine, and conversion to a WinMag chambering would require barrel / bolt head / magazine. As far as I can tell, a bolt head is shipped with every conversion barrel; no, the kit ain't cheap, but at least it's complete (minus the magazine, I assume). The magazine box itself (taking the block out of the picture) measures 3.360" wall-to-wall, so supported max OAL for any R1 in any chambering will be just under that.
View attachment 978141
View attachment 978142
View attachment 978144
Speaking of the magazine, so far the only mechanical nit that I have found is that the mag release on my example is super-tight and it's pretty hard for my poor arthritic fingers to depress the release far enough to get the magazine free. Hopefully, it'll loosen up a bit over time. It should also be noted that the bolt stop is linked to the magazine follower, as most are, but the bolt release can be used to hold the bolt back without the magazine inserted (just like an AR and unlike, for example, the Remington semiautos).
The rifle shoulders naturally (as you would expect for a rifle whose ergonomics are based on a shotgun) and the grip/forearm offer good grip and natural curves for hanging on. Carried in the hand around the house (there's snow on the ground, and being Texas that means that everything is shut down), the rifle feels narrow but tall; it doesn't settle quite as well in my hand as, say, the guppy belly of a Savage 99 or a O/U shotgun. On the other hand, it also doesn't have any protruding bits to get in the way of finding a good hand position, either. It's very flat and narrow, so it should carry well when slung or slipped into a scabbard. The balance point of the rifle-mit-optic is barely aft of the front receiver ring, as it were, and the mass is very centered - both the buttstock and barrel are pretty light. All in all, it should be decent to carry (which is my intended use).
Given the snowstorm and current temps (3F), I haven't been able to shoot it yet. I have a bunch of generic blasting ammo kicking around in an ammo can that I made some years back for the LR308s, and I'll see how the rifle performs as soon as things warm up a bit.
