Nobody cares why you haven't shot your Lilja yet. The fact that you didn't means you don't know how it shoots, end of story. Lilja certainly makes better barrels than PSA, but beyond that you're just guessing.
And what does engraving have to do with whether someone uses a PSA upper? Most of us aren't dumb enough to engrave the upper, we engrave the lower so you can swap around whatever uppers we want.
You sure have a lot of opinions, but they don't seem to be based on much besides assumptions and whatever you read on the internet. You're free to express your opinion same as anybody, but I think most of us here are more interested in actual results and experiences than in how much you've spent or how many doodads you can hang on your rifle.
Whatever. I made my point. Thanks for the ad hominem attack though, appreciate it. OP didn't get the POS PSA, he got a Krieger, a step up from mine if you ask me. Haven't shot it either, but I'd suspect it to be on par if not better than mine. I TRIED to get a cut rifle, couldn't get one. I'm sure when you learn more about barrels and the mfg.'s and their processes that you'll see where the rest of us are coming from on that.
As for engraving, regardless of which part you engrave, WHY register a lower for a POS upper? Makes no sense. And yes, I've engraved uppers before, it's advantageous in some instances. But yeah, with AR's mostly lowers get that.
Appreciate everyone’s input. The choice of the Grendel has been made. Mark at Precision Firearms was able to hook me up with a Kreiger 12.25 inch barrel. Also had a nice experience with Craddock Precision too. Wish I could have bought from both of them. At the end of the day I just feel better using a cut rifled barrel as that’s what most all of my other rifles are except the 300 which I don’t know what it is.
This will be my first upper build so I want to try and make it a little special and didn’t want to skimp. I think all of the offerings from PSA and other guys are perfectly acceptable but I want this perform as well as possible even though it’s an SBR in less than optimal length for caliber. Kind of like my TL3 that’s right bolt and left port. I’m doing this for me and not for resale or anything else.
So I’m going with LH side charging upper from Gibbz, 10.5 inch lightweight guard from Midwest industries, superlative arms adj gas block, Maxim bolt and yet to be found LH bcg.
You couldn't have chosen a better barrel and I wish they had that when I got mine as I prefer cut rifling. Lilja was the best around and they are the best at button rifling I understand, so hey, I'm good. Can't wait to get it to the range though, pretty excited to see how it performs at longer range.
Don't worry about it being "less than optimal". Bill A. told me once that with the Grendel, "Go long or go short" meaning squeeze all the performance out of it or else make it compact as possible. His reasoning made sense, I won't go into here but a shorty Grendel still has some nice numbers as I recall.
I can't guarantee the Nosler BT 120's will perform best out of these shorter barrels like it does my Satern and it may be one off, but what I've learned about Grendel is they seem to have a narrow sweet spot where they deliver the best performance. Though Bill A. stood by this bullet in general. I'd try a few powders and projectiles, I can give you the info I have or you can look up AA and he has info on there, or he did anyway. If you load, PM me and I can give you some info to start with as well as my magic load that works in that Satern. Quality brass ain't cheap and others say they do well with Hornady brass but the Lapua brass has always done me better (AA brass USED to be Lapua, not it's Hornady I think). There is a difference, more than you'd think actually.
I was thinking, hoping actually, that these shorter ones will work well with the 107SMK's, but we'll see. The velocity drop going to a 12.5 isn't significant enough to render it weak and the high BC ensures it retains some of that velocity downrange. That more people, rather high end mfg.'s, are willing to make SBR Grendel barrels must illustrate something.
Good luck, and if you ever want someone to shoot shit about Grendel, hit me up. I'd like to swap stories on how yours does compared to mine, there's only a few of us on here with shorty Grendels. I plan on ordering the Dillon parts soon so I should have some ammo in a month or so and some time to go test it out before my surgery dates.
