Looking for NR "black rifle" or Green
- Thread starter 1bigrn
- Start date
I'll agree except you don't need a magwell that lets you run AR mags. I've owned three SL8's and they were all very accurate and reliable but they are a precision semi auto with a Lothar Walther match grade barrel not an assault rifle. For the cost of a magwell you can buy a few magazines and bunch of ammo.
The HK magazine design is better than any STANAG magazine. They are more durable and reliable and switching just to be able to run pistol mags or Beowulf mags is silly in a rifle like this. When you're shooting a rifle that is capable of putting rounds exactly where you point them why risk your barrel running high volume or rapid firing it.
The HERA Arms lower was my favorite between the factory lower and the G36 lower. The G36 looked cooler and was lighter but you couldn't get a good cheek weld when using optics.
In my opinion if someone wants a precision semi auto 223 the HK SL8 is the best choice and it's also fairly reasonable for price until you start buying all the stuff to dress it up trying to turn it into something else. It is a rifle built for slow aimed shots off a bipod or bags not a run and gun rifle. It may have the same operating system as a G36 but think of it like the DMR model.
Of course that's just my opinion and you or anyone else is free to do whatever they want.
Yes, but for what? I understand wanting to use the same magazines in all your rifles but for the cost of the magwell you can buy a lot of ammo. If you're predator hunting with it five rounds should be enough to drop two or three dogs and the only time I can see it really being an advantage is for varmint hunting but the beauty of gopher hunting it that if you're quiet for three minutes while reloading your magazines they all come back up.
The HK design magazines are more durable and reliable just like Swiss Arms mags. STANAG magazines are garbage in comparison, I do have a huge pile of pmags for my AR's and ACR but with Speer making mags for the SL8 you can get an affordable quality magazine that will feed the HK more reliably. I've had a quality magwell conversion for two of the SL8's I owned and always went back to running the stock magwell because there was always a loss of reliability or the bolt catch quit working with the adapter to run STANAG magazines.
That's just my experience and opinion but I just don't see the point in running 10 round mags in an SL8, I never wanted to risk getting the barrel hot and risk losing the accuracy that it produced. With handloads I could get 1moa pretty easily with a 60gr Nosler Varmageddon and CFE223. For high volume or fast shooting I'll grab one of my rifles with a cheaper barrel that I don't care about as much.
Agree 100%, I just don't see the point in a rifle as accurate as an SL8 with a barrel as expensive as it has. When every shot goes where it's supposed to I've never seen the need for volume when you have to sacrifice reliability. It's just not an ideal rifle for high volume getting it hot treating it like an assault rifle. I use the LAR and Beowulf mags in my rifles with cheaper barrels and rifles I would do 3-gun with.
I suppose if you could only have one rifle and the SL8 was it this would make more sense but ive never been one for only having one rifle.
Just remember that barrels like this don't like getting hot and shooting high volume and that barrel will cost you close to $1000 to replace. My SL8's always ran mostly handloads since it's actually accurate enough to benefit from quality ammo.
In the end it's your rifle and you can do whatever you want with it, it's just not how I use my HK's.
I do sometimes use my SL8 for CQB type stuff with our club. The Hera lower make it much more manageable as a run and gun type thing. Yeah, I have other AR's that are a helluva lot lighter, but I alternate them to stay current on the operation of all of them. I'm also getting too old to remember which mags are for which gun... Either way, it's a great gun and very accurate.
Lol, maybe I need to thin my collection before I start forgetting things as well.
The Hera lower is definitely my favorite setup on the SL8, I should have kept that one.
