Athena Rifle System By Drake Associates

[WillBrink]

Met the owner of this company the other day at the museum and supposedly getting really impressive accuracy from this new gun. Above my pay grade as to how legit that is etc, but thought some members may be interested and or had heard of Drake Associates. He did show pics of sub 1MOA groups (damn near holes in holes) from recent testing. Under what conditions, etc, I don't know. My understanding is they have been making chassis for competition shooters for some time. Apparently some orgs/groups with the $ for such things are taking a very close look at this system, which looks like a bolt action chassy mated to an AR upper to my (untrained) eye:

https://drakeassociates.us/

[Straight Shooter]

Will, looks to still be semi-auto, no?
I was surprised at the price, not bad at all for a full blown as advertised sniper rifle.

[WillBrink]

Will, looks to still be semi-auto, no?
I was surprised at the price, not bad at all for a full blown as advertised sniper rifle.

Yes, semi auto. That did seem like an unusually fair price for all that, so much in fact I read it several times thinking it was just for the chassis. If you look at their other stuff, it's not cheap.

[rero360]

Actually makes sense, the barrel, upper, optic are all free from stress imposed by the hand guard, only attached by the takedown pins. I can see how this would be more accurate than a traditional AR

[WillBrink]

Actually makes sense, the barrel, upper, optic are all free from stress imposed by the hand guard, only attached by the takedown pins. I can see how this would be more accurate than a traditional AR

It appears shooters using their systems won the US Army International Sniper Competition last 3 years running, so they must be doing something right with their designs and such.

[JoshNC]

Larue OBR solves this by attaching the fore end directly to the upper, without contacting the barrel or barrel nut. The issue I see with the Drake is that if there is any movement between the upper and lower at all, the top rail of the handguard is not useable for any sighting systems. And there are plenty of rifles using any number of more traditional free float fore ends that are very accurate. This seems a solution in search of a real problem to me.

[Tx_Aggie]

It looks like it's essentially a bolt action style chassis system adapted to an AR15 upper. I wonder if there's anything in the lower that adds tension to the upper receiver, or if they're just relying on tight tolerances to eliminate any upper-lower wiggle.

An interesting idea, at least.

[WillBrink]

It looks like it's essentially a bolt action style chassis system adapted to an AR15 upper. I wonder if there's anything in the lower that adds tension to the upper receiver, or if they're just relying on tight tolerances to eliminate any upper-lower wiggle.

An interesting idea, at least.

That's exactly what it is and bolt action guns is what they're known for it appears and this a new product from them.

[rero360]

It looks like it's essentially a bolt action style chassis system adapted to an AR15 upper. I wonder if there's anything in the lower that adds tension to the upper receiver, or if they're just relying on tight tolerances to eliminate any upper-lower wiggle.

An interesting idea, at least.

I just got thinking about trying to do a series of free body diagrams to figure out forces at different times to see if upper and lower fit matters. Instead I found a video from the slow mo guys where they shoot an AR SBR on full auto at something like 70,000 frames a second. It looks to me that the recoil doesn’t begin to act upon the rifle until after the bullet has left the barrel, or at least at the moment that it does. It looks like there are three recoil impulses per shot, the initial one, a second one as the BCG bottoms out the recoil spring, and then the final one when the bolt locks back up with the receiver extension.

This leads me to think that upper and lower fit doesn’t matter at all, at least in a setup like this, using optics.

If I didn’t live in Commiefornia and didn’t have a toddler to keep in diapers, I’d pick up one of their lowers to play with. Maybe a LR-10 one and toss a 6.5mm CM upper on it.

[GH41]

Looks like smoke and mirrors to me. It's all about marketing for the most part.