A friend of mine has recently started liquidating his collection and thankfully gave me a first crack at some of the items in there. I've purchased a handful now, but a few of the more notable items are a pair of early 90s Knight's Armament SR-25 Match RIfles, and a Colt Sporter Match HBAR. The Colt is pretty typical, and I'm turning it into my kind of interpretation of the Colt Delta Elite HBAR just with a repro Colt 4x carry handle optic with the cheekrest and bipod adapter arriving this week to complete the look, but the KACs are the really special pieces that I'm excited to have in the collection.

These were the first iteration of the SR-25 that Knight's created when Eugene Stoner came on board, with a heavy 24" barrel, fiberglass free float tube, and even some little quirks like a totally polymer rifle buffer, and some even having a threaded gas block (like the bottom one here) for the mounting of an early Knights suppressor before they came up with the gate lock system that is still in use today. These were guaranteed to be sub-MOA shooters with 168gr match ammo, and each rifle included a test target in the box. My friend ordered these directly from Knight's, talked to Eugene Stoner on the phone about them, and I even have much of the original paperwork and test targets that came with the rifles. The scope is a Leupold MK4 fixed 10-power scope with M1 turrets mounted in some very rare KAC rings, and my friend sent it off to Premier Reticles to have a very fine mil-dot reticle installed - high tech for the time.

Another quirk of the time was calculating dope; included with some of the paperwork were sheets faxed back from Nosler with dope charts for various ammo. It's kind of wild for me to think about receiving dope by fax as someone who lives and dies by my Kestrel at matches now.

I took them out for their first range day in many years today and had a great time. We have come so far in shooting technology and further refinement of these platforms beyond what Stoner created decades ago, but there's still much about these stepping stones to enjoy.

Interesting rifles. Looks like they'll shoot, too.

Did you have any difficulty seeing through that scope? Looks like it's mounted kinda low. I have quite a few Warne MSR height QD ring sets I'm going to list one of these days, if you're interested.

It might just be kind of an optical illusion with the large AR-10 receivers - I believe they're standard height and give me no issues getting behind the scope.

They're shooters for sure. The KAC might be sub-MOA but only just but I don't mind. I'll probably shoot a deer with one this fall and then just bring it out once in a while for a good friend at the range to enjoy.

The Colt 4x leaves a lot more to be desired; it's definitely a product of the times when it was developed, even with Brownell's optical improvements. But I'm not complaining on a fun gun.