The good, the bad, and the ugly. - Faxon Firearms .223 Wylde Heavy Fluted AR-15 Rifle Barrel

The good: this barrel has a lot of the features I was looking for in a barrel that other brands simply don't have. It's black QPQ over stainless, fluted, 18", reasonably lightweight, was in stock, and as a (probably meaningless) bonus, had 5R rifling. Great. Less bullet distortion and all that jazz. My goal was to build a light-ish weight, match grade (1 MOA or better), MK12/SPR style rifle and I figured 5R would only help.

I actually had another brand's similar barrel on back order but after six months, OpPlan cancelled the order due to the backorder being extended again. Seems more barrels hadn't made it down the mountain in Washington as expected if you catch my drift. I wanted the Rainier Ultramatch barrel in case you didn't. So, rather than be patient, I took a chance on this barrel and all the glowing reviews that came with it. To Faxon's credit, they have them stocked and it shipped promptly.

The bad: This barrel doesn't group particularly well, and is certainly not "match" grade. I'm calling it a 1.25-1.5 MOA barrel with the right ammo, best case. That may be good enough for most people but, remember, I wanted a match grade gun. I consider "match" to mean at least 1 MOA, and I consider a 1 MOA gun one that I can shoot 1 MOA or better nearly every time I shoot a group from the bench. This does not mean I shoot 500 rounds and post a picture of that one clover leaf group and pretend that's indicative of its accuracy. Nearly any gun will shoot a sub MOA group if you shoot it enough. It needs to be consistently consistent. I've tried many types of ammo, from a sled with a Vortex PST Gen II 4-16x optic. I did all the other recommendations and best practices; let the barrel cool between strings, shot with and without my muzzle device installed, checked gas key alignment, torqued everything to spec, etc.

This gets to my core issue with the barrel, even more so than the "ugly" I'll discuss below. I've had TWO, yes, TWO 5-shot groups be sub MOA out of about the 50 or so groups I've fired thus far. And the best of those was .8" or thereabout. This is with factory match ammo AND many handload recipes. 77gr, 69gr, 55gr, even 80gr and 40gr. Nothing groups well or consistently. 77's seem to be the favorite of my barrel, but it isn't a real competitive category. Some 77gr groups will be 1.1" and some will be 1.6". Again, average is probably in the 1.4" range for my handloads and factory match ammo loaded with SMK's. M193's and PMC factory are about 2.5" groups, which is pretty normal for any barrel. If that's acceptable for your purposes, that's great. But there are plenty of cheaper alternatives that will give you similar results, or for not that much more coin, you can get a barrel that should be 1 MOA or better. Buy once, cry once, as they say. I always fail to remember that for some reason or another and now I've probably wasted more on ammo trying to find something it likes than a truly match barrel would have cost anyway.

Now we get to the ugly: As others have mentioned, the packaging and finish* are abysmal. For a nearly $300 barrel to be shipped loose in a box with other items, relying only on a plastic bag to protect it is beyond my comprehension. It arrived fairly beat up- many of the fluted corners were chipped through to the shiny stainless below. I had bought a bolt carrier group and several other metal parts which all shipped in the same box so you can imagine how that went... My handguard concealed most of these dings or else I would have returned it, but I mean come on, it's a relatively expensive barrel. I'm honestly a little disappointed that Optics Planet was ok with shipping it this way.

Moreover, the finish still on the barrel was not attractive at first glance. I work with QPQ parts all the time so I know they come back from processing with an oily film that can dry to look like rust/grime. I had to wipe the barrel with an oily rag for a few minutes just to get it polished to the point of looking new (minus the dings and scuffs). Eventually, it did look like the rich black color you would expect, but again, for a $250+ barrel, this should have been done before it went into the cheap plastic sleeve and into the tumbler that was my Optics Planet order.

If the barrel was shooting dimes, all of this would be forgiven. But if it doesn't shoot nice and doesn't even arrive looking nice, I can't say I would recommend this product to someone building a rifle with similar design parameters to mine. For general plinking/patrol/three gun type shooting, this is probably plenty adequate, but so is nearly any off the shelf AR15 barrel. Personally, if I could do it over, I'd spend another $50-150 more and get a barrel from a maker with a reputation for delivering 1 MOA or better precision.