#308winchester

I’ve had the Ruger SFAR in my possession for a n umber of months now. This rifle is one of those highly anticipated by many of people including myself. It’s an affordable lightweight .308 AR style rifle that’s half the price of competitors. I picked this rifle up from Brownells and my first range session, it performed relatively well despite some gas regulation issues which were to be expected. Ruger states a break in period of 100-200 rounds, so I wasn’t going to complain until I put at least 100 rounds through it. The gas regulation issues that it was experiencing were common to other Ruger SFAR owners as well. The gas system has multiple settings. You should be able to run most .308 ammo on setting 2 and suppressed on setting 1. In my experience, I needed gas setting 2 for suppressed and setting 3 for unsuppressed. The higher gas settings allow more gas through the gas block to cycle the action. Without the right amount of gas, you’ll experience short stroking and no lock back on the last round.

Knowing what I knew to be true in regards to the gas settings issue, my second range session was uneventful. I did run suppressed the entire time with my Rugged Suppressors Radiant 7.62 suppressor and ran the rifle on gas setting 2. It was noticeably over gassed while running suppressed and using setting number 2. Brass was being thrown pretty abusively at the 1-2 O’clock position relative to the ejection port. Typical rifles when properly gassed should eject spent brass in the 3-4 O’clock position. My next range session I brought with me a couple hundred rounds of varying manufacturer’s ammunition to run through the rifle testing both suppressed and unsuppressed on various gas regulator settings. Again I was experiencing issues while running unsuppressed on setting 2, needing to run setting 3. While running suppressed, I was successfully able to run the gas regulator on setting 1, but started to experience some weird malfunctions of the rifle. Spent shell casings were stovepiping in the ejection port and I even had spent brass jamming up the next round being fed from the magazine. These failures started to increase in number. I applied some gun lube and shot some more and noticed very lethargic ejection patterns of the spent brass. At this point I knew there was something else causing my issues and it wasn’t gas system related, so I packed up and went home to do a complete inspection.

What I found during my field stripping was one of the 2 ejectors on the bolt face was stuck depressed. This was obviously the cause of my weak ejection and stovepiping. I reached out to Ruger’s customer service the following day to see what I could do to get replacement ejector parts and to discuss some of my issues with the gas regulator. They were very easy to deal with and immediately decided to send out an updated gas regulator and replacement ejector parts. Once I receive the replacement parts I’ll re-visit the range and see what progress I can make. I will say that I do enjoy the rifle, but so far I will have a hard time recommending it to others unless they fully understand some inherent issues they can expect.