The Loadout Blog

Firearms|Rifles

Last week, at Shot Show Q and Faxon Firearms introduced their joint venture on Q’s 8.6 Blackout cartridge. This cartridge was designed, developed, and tested internal by Q with Faxon Firearms providing barrels for the project. This new cartridge has been in R&D for years by Q. Now, Q is finally ready to unleash 8.6 Blackout to the world. Let’s take a closer look at Q’s deadly and innovative 8.6 Blackout cartridge.

Meet .300 Blackout Big Brother

The best way to describe Q’s 8.6 Blackout is to think of it as .300 Blackout’s big brother or .300 blackout on steroids. The new 8.6 Blackout is a .300 blackout that is moving faster, can shoot farther, impacts harder and was designed to shoot suppressed from the ground up. The new cartridge from Q has been designed to shoot out of Remington 700 bolt actions and the AR-10 platform.

Q’s 8.6 Blackout cartridge is a .338 caliber cartridge with the same head dimensions and overall length of .308 casing. This allows for the 8.6 Blackout to be fired out of AR-10 magazines without any need of magazine modification to do so. Which is a big benefit to Q’s 8.6 cartridge.

Just like it’s little brother .300 Blackout, 8.6 Blackout was designed to shoot suppressed. Even so, Q has designed both supersonic and subsonic rounds for the 8.6 Blackout as well. On, range day Q showed off supersonic and subsonic rounds being shot out of Q Fix rifle.

Faxon’s Barrels

One of the things that makes Q’s 8.6 cartridge interesting is the barrel. As, mentioned earlier Faxon will be making the barrels for Q’s new cartridge. At, Shot Show Faxon Firearms showed off their barrels and various 8.6 Blackout rounds on the show floor.

That Twist Rate Though

What makes these 8.6 Blackout barrels by Faxon so interesting are there twists rates. The normal twist rate for your average .300 Blackout barrel will be 1:7 or 1:8 RH twist. That’s pretty much industry standard for 5.56/.300 BLK barrel. The twist rate for these Faxon barrels are a staggering 1:3 RH twist! Which is absolutely insane. That for every 3” of barrel that round is making one complete revolution. The reason for the high twist rate is to properly stabilize the heavy 300-grain subsonic .338 cartridge. If not for this 1:3 twist Q would not have been able to consistently stabilize those subsonic rounds.

Faxon will be offering their barrels chambered in 8.6 Blackout for Remington 700 actions and AR-10 rifles. The barrels for both platforms will be available in 8”, 12”, 16” length options. For more on 8.6 Blackout and the collaboration between Q and Faxon, click here.

What are your initial thoughts on 8.6 Blackout? Let us know in the comments below.

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