If there’s one product that’s made a huge leap from “rarely seen” to “enormously popular” — it’s the pistol red dot sight. It used to be you would sometimes see them in classes, but they were really more for competition shooters and handgun hunters. Now it’s not just normal to see them on the firing line, it’s common to see them mounted to people’s EDC (EveryDay Carry) guns and used for everything imaginable. In this video review, SuperSetCA takes a look at the Holosun 509T RDS (red dot sight).

Holosun 509T Details

Over the years, Holosun has gotten far better brand recognition and made a name for themselves for reasonably priced sights that perform well (always a good thing). In 2020, Holosun launched the 509T. It is a reflex sight with a titanium housing, making it more durable, and what they claim is a battery life of up to 50,000 hours. Various features include a multi-reticle system, Solar Failsafe, and Shake Awake, the latter of which is very nice to have on a carry gun. The RDS ships with an RMR adaptor — because we all know how many RMR-footprints there are on the pistol and RDS market — and uses a CR1632 battery.

How do the 509T’s profile and features compare to the older 508T features?

Paul of SuperSetCA goes into some details:

“Let’s talk about this in profile, first. Dimensionally, it’s the same as the 508T — it’s a little bit shorter in length, it’s a little bit wider at the base [508T dimensions are 1.78 x 1.15 x 1.15, and 509 T dimensions are 1.60 x 1.16 x 1.13] and the window size is a little bit wider, although looking at it you can’t tell.

“However, construction-wise, it’s the same as the 508T in that the battery tray is the same, the solar panel on top is the same. But, on the left side, the brightness controls…they’ve changed a little bit, post-Trijicon, but we’ll talk about that more [later]. And height-wise, like the 508T, it’s a little bit taller…like the Vortex Venom or one of the SwampFox [ones]…but you still shouldn’t have any trouble fitting it to any outside the waistband holsters.

“…weight-wise, I really think it’s surprising, even with the added glass panel and some additional titanium at the top it’s very close in weight, still, to the 508T. …even though it looks like it’s big…you really don’t feel it when you’re swinging your hand around.”

Check out the video to see what else Paul has to say about the Holosun 509T:

 

Why do you want a Red Dot Sight?

There are quite a few good reasons to get some trigger time with an RDS like the Holosun 509T. Yes, it’s a new operating platform to get used to, but it’s a lot easier than you might believe. Reasons to mount a red dot sight to your carry gun include:

• •Rapid target acquisition
• •Faster follow-up shots
• •Improved accuracy
• •Easier on many shooter’s eyes than iron sights
• •Work well in the dark

If you can’t decide whether or not to try one out, I definitely encourage you to give one a shot (pun intended). In the meantime, watch this SuperSetCA review of the popular Holosun 509T.

Do you use red dots on your carry guns? Why or why not? Tell us in the comments below.

Grey Birch Solutions is new to the firearms game, by name only. The company is made up of several people from the Canadian gun industry and it’s continually expanding as it grows. Their main goal is to create high-quality and exceptionally accurate .22lr firearms and parts. The company is currently focusing on the 10/22 platform and is only a few parts away from making all the parts themselves. Today we will talk about the Foundation Chassis.

Gray Birch Foundation Chassis

When Grey Birch first started, they released a few receiver sets and carbon fiber-wrapped barrels. The receivers and barrels still used the Ruger V-Block system, which can be finicky when it comes to squeezing out as much accuracy as possible from the platform. We have used the original barrel and receiver sets from Grey Birch for almost a year with exceptional accuracy in our sample.

But the company is working on more improvements. Instead of accepting the V-Block just being part of the platform, they went back to the drawing board and decided to ditch it for a threaded barrel and barrel nut. We will have more on their Fusion Receiver and Barrel in a future article. We just wanted to mention this and show how they killed an entire product line that has been working excellently to get something even better.

Why settle right?

The purpose of this article is to give our American readers a heads up about another name in the 10/22 game heading to them soon, along with talking about their Foundation Chassis.

The Foundation Chassis is a modular chassis system for the ever-popular Ruger 10/22 style of .22lr rifle. The Foundation consists of a forend, the main body of the chassis, and an adjustable stock. You can use the chassis on its own for a 10/22 pistol build (following all appropriate laws). If you want to make a super lightweight build you can attach just the stock to the chassis and skip the forend, or just build up the full chassis.

The forend of the rifle was built with modularity in mind.

The forend is 6″ long and when it’s attached to the chassis, it extends the chassis by around 5″. It has two M-LOK slots on each of the sides and bottom for accessory mounting. Along with this Grey Birch machine an ARCA rail to the bottom of the forend to allow for it to be mounted on tripods or the various ARCA compatible bipods like the MDT CKYE-POD like we have mounted on ours.

The 6″ long forend currently offered doesn’t allow for the bipod to be slid off the front, sadly. However, the upcoming 10″ long one does allow for this. The foundation forend has exceptional clearance so free-floating even the chunkiest barrel will be a breeze. The forend itself mounts to the chassis using the small 3-slot Picatinny rail at the bottom front of the chassis.

Speaking of that Picatinny rail, if you choose not to use the forend on your build you could attach a vertical grip here.

If you absolutely needed to you could attach a bipod here. However, movements at the stock end of the rifle get closer to a 1:1 ratio the closer a bipod is toward the center part of the rifle. The further the pivot point gets away from you/the center of the rifle, larger movements of the stock are needed in order to elevate the barrel. All that said, you can absolutely attach a bipod here if you wanted to. I mean I have seen bipods on revolvers so nothing is out of the question when it comes to firearms.

The main part of the chassis has your normal magazine slot as you would expect and a Picatinny rail at the rear for all the stocks that use that method of mounting, like their lightweight stock system for the Foundation.

The Foundation takes AR-15 grips. So far we have tried the Magpul MOE K Grip as well as Rifles Refined Black Walnut Vertical Grip with Finger Grooves. Both were really comfortable. 55Six Media out of New Zealand posted a picture of it with the Magpul MOE Grip on their build and it looks pretty awesome.

The last major feature of the main body of the chassis is the hole above the pistol grip. This hole is threaded to allow for a set screw to be put pushing down on the rear tang on the trigger group. This helps add another point of consistent contact in the receiver group since normally the receiver only mounts with the one screw at the front and that tang sits in a pocket.

The Foundation Stock keeps it minimal in size while including some adjustability.

The adjustable polymer cheek rest adjusts up and down using a clamping screw and two aluminum rods. You also have three positions you can adjust the cheek rest forward or aft utilizing the four holes in the top of it. The buttpad is adjustable for LOP only operating on the same clamping mechanism as the cheek rest.

It has a polymer buttpad with angled grooves giving it a sleek aesthetic. In order to match our black walnut grip from Rifles Refined we later swapped out the polymer on the rifle for even more wood goodness. We will have a whole article down the line talking about what Rifles Refined does at a later point in time but check out their Instagram for lots of pictures. Black walnut combined with the clear hard anodizing on the aluminum parts of the Foundation Chassis adds a touch of pinky out class.

Grey Birch Solutions were the ones who put me onto Rifles Refined and will be offering some models in the future with wooden goodness as an option which is pretty cool to see. The stock also features a QD sling swivel socket on each side, giving you a way to carry your new blaster in the woods. This would go well with their RDR Fusion receiver which has a cutout in the top for mounting red dots—making for a fun varmint gun.

Shooting with the Gray Birch Foundation Chassis System 

I have done a fair amount of accuracy testing with the older gen Grey Birch Solutions barrel and receiver housed in a Magpul Hunter X-22 stock. I always found that stock, much like their bipod, had some pitfalls that I just couldn’t get over. The buttpad was super low once I got a scope I wanted to use mounted. That said, my groups were pretty damn good having plenty of .5 MOA groups at 50m with RWS Rifle Match. The issue was when I was going for 10 shot groups I found they opened up a bit just because of the awkwardness of the Magpul stock.

The Foundation Chassis has a much better height for the buttpad and doesn’t require an aftermarket purchase of a higher cheek rest. The adjustments are easy using a bit from the AR-15 Fix It Sticks kit I have in my shooting bag and have held on with no need to retighten since. This has led to far fewer fliers due to me not having to focus on how I am making the stock work, along with the fundamentals.

The pistol grip mates up with the trigger area very comfortably with no annoying sharp edges, which is great as I prefer pistol grips on firearms over a more traditional stock.

The forend held the MDT CKYE-Pod well, although, as we mentioned above, you need to fully undo the clamp instead of sliding it off the front. I am looking forward to picking up their longer forend which will give a bit more options in bipod positioning since we plan to use this rifle in rimfire competitions both prone and PRS style. Small bullets are great practice for wind reading—something I badly need to improve. That said, when I eventually build up my RDR receiver set the short forend will be perfect.

Currently, you can order the Foundation Chassis and other Grey Birch Solutions products directly from the company, but rumor has it that real soon you won’t have to deal with any cross-border nonsense as Brownells plans to carry their products.

I started trying to do an article on weird military guns from around the world and kept finding myself looking at firearms developed by Russia. So much so that I quickly found that I could cut out the rest of the world and do an entire article on weird Russian guns.

There may be some salutary geopolitical lesson in there.

The World of Weird Russian Guns

Even deciding on Russki firearms proved to be too wide of a field. I had to establish rules because the Russians developed dozens of guns that never made it to the production table. I needed to dial it in.

Thus, my rules for weird Russian firearms meant they had to be..

A. a production firearm and 

B. a weapon issued to some element of their military, police, or other “security” forces.

With that in mind, I set out to find ten. But I still ended up with eleven weird Russian firearms.

1. Stechkin Automatic Pistol

God, I love machine pistols. Why are they so stinking cool? I don’t know, but I adore them. The Soviets wanted a PDW for non-infantry troops, and the Stechkin would fill that gap. Mortar crews, truck drivers, tankers, and the like could be armed with a Stechkin over an AK and have a lighter overall weapon that’s fitted with a stock and capable of automatic fire.

The Stechkin is a straight blowback, select-fire, box-fed pistol that fires the classic 9x18mm Makarov cartridge. It feeds from a twenty-round magazine, and that magazine would empty in seconds with the pistols 750 rounds per minute rate of fire.

As far as weird Russian firearms go, this has proven to be one of the more successful models and has been issued since 1951 to various troops, including special ops.

2. AS VAL

Say what you want about the Soviets and the filth of communism, but their small arms were ahead of the time. I feel like America arrives at the same conclusion as the Russians twenty years later. For example, we turned to the 300 Blackout to provide an effective, suppressed, short-barreled rifle. The Russian made the AS VAL more than two decades prior to the 300 Blackout to serve the same purpose.

This series of subsonic, hard-hitting, suppressed Russian firearms fire the 9x39mm cartridge. This heavy-hitting round provides a suppressed weapon option for low visibility operations. The little rifle features an integral suppressor for a suppressed platform, a hair longer than an M4 and weighing only 5.5 pounds.

It could even be broken down into a specialized case for discreet operations.

3. Shak 12

Those pesky Russians invented their own version of the 50 Beowulf in 2011 with the 12.7 x 55mm round. This powerhouse of a cartridge fits into the Shak 12. The Shak 12 utilizes a bullpup layout for a very short overall length.

The mysterious FSB uses the Shak 12 for urban combat operations where they want to maximize short-range killing power.

The Shak 12 not only kills enemies dead but has a limited range compared to a traditional rifle round, reportedly to minimize potential civilian casualties.

The hefty rifle utilizes a short recoil operation and a massive 20 round magazine for close-quarters fights. This is an example of modern Russian firearms that we rarely see in use. It’s an unusual weapon even by unusual weapon standards, rarely caught on video or camera, and clearly, a purpose-built niche option for urban combat.

4. APS Underwater Rifle

The 1970s were a weird time for warfare theory. A lot of people in the head sheds of both Western and Russian militaries thought lots of battles would be fought by frogmen. As such, both sides designed ‘underwater firearms’.

The Russians utilized the APS Underwater rifle, which fired a 120mm long 5.66mm steel dart through a gas actuated action. The barrel lacked rifling, and the projectile was stabilized via hydrodynamic effects.

This might be the weirdest of the Russian Firearms, but also one of the coolest.

Imagine a Tom Clancy-esque operation involving frogmen gunfights with each side’s respective underwater rifles. Luckily, for frogmen everywhere, these weapons were never used in combat…that we know of.

5. SPP-1 Underwater Pistol

Since we’re are on the subject of underwater frogman fights, let’s not forget that in the armories of Russian firearms we also see an underwater pistol. The SPP-1 gave Soviet frogmen a sidearm in case their main weapon failed to kill the invading Navy SEALs.

The SPP-1 fired a 4.5 mm steel dart that was 115mm long.

Like the rifle, this pistol provided more penetration than a spear gun and offered Soviet frogmen an effective range of about 11 meters when below 20 meters of water.

It was a close-range fighting tool, but I imagine it’d be more comforting than a trident and hard words.

6. OTs-38 Stechkin Silent Revolver

Russia has a real habit of making political opposition disappear. When you kill a dissident in a foreign country, you want to leave behind as little evidence as possible and hopefully remain unnoticed.

You know how the old assassin saying goes, “Take only lives, leave only nothing”.

The OTs-38 Stechkin SIlent Revolver did just that. There is no silencer on this gun. Instead, it uses a 7.62x41mm SP-1 silent round.

The round works by using a combustive charge to drive a piston. The piston propels the bullet forward and forms a gas seal as it operates. In a revolver, this prevents the gap between cylinder and barrel from releasing gas or noise. The effective range is roughly 25 meters. With a revolver, no casings are left behind, and the gun delivers double-action performance for enhanced reliability with the SP-1 round.

Of all the weird Russian firearms out there, I want this one the most.

7. NRS-2

Okay, maybe I lied with the above statement, but can a knife be considered a part of the Russian guns collective? When does a gun become a knife and a knife become a gun?

When the Spetznaz went shopping for a new knife, they knew one thing, they wanted it to also be a gun. The NRS-2 utilizes the same 7.62x41mm SP-1 round as the OTs-38.

The NRS-2 fires a single round of ammo before the Soviet Soldier is left to fend for himself with a knife. The purpose of a knife that fires a single round is inherently silly but also inherently awesome.

8. PP-90

Remember that Magpul folding gun thing they showed once a decade ago and then brought back this year as a Glock format pistol? Well, the Russians thought of it first and gave us the PP-90. This 9mm Makarov folding submachine gun came to be in 1990 and was designed for the MVD.

It’s a submachine gun that could be used in situations that require an SMG but make getting an SMG into action difficult. This covert weapon offered a lot of firepower in a square folding design. Beyond the high-tech folding design, it’s a relatively simple blowback submachine gun with rudimentary sights and controls.

9. MTs255

As a shotgun nerd, I can finally get to my favorite type of Russian guns. Russian shotgun development went a different way from the United States. They embraced numerous designs, one being the MTs255.

The MTs255 is a shotgun that features a double-action mechanism and a five-shot revolver cylinder. The MTs255 was designed for law enforcement and security personnel and utilized black polymer furniture, and the sporting model utilizes wooden furniture.

You get a rather rapid-fire shotgun that doesn’t require a complicated semi-auto action. In harsh winter weather, the double-action design allowed for manual cycling of the hammer.

The MTs255 is one of the weirder Russian guns, but it’s certainly a product of its environment. In that context, it makes sense.

10. KS-23

The KS-23 is a unit of a pump-action shotgun. It has a 26mm bore, making it essentially a 6.27 gauge shotgun. The barrels come from 23mm anti-aircraft guns that were rejected from service anti-air guns. The KS-23 came in several models. Only the KS-23M was adopted, and it featured a folding wire stock, a 16-inch barrel, and has a 3 round capacity.

The KS-23 was originally designed for prison riot use. It came ready to function with heavy loads of less-lethal buckshot. Over time, buckshot, barricade buster, a flashbang, and CS rounds were developed for us.

The KS-23 is the large bore shotgun currently in use, you know, over there.

11. BS-1 Tishina

Let’s say you want an under-barrel grenade launcher, but lots of your operations require stealth. What are you to do? Well, if you are in the Russian Firearms world, you develop the BS-1 Tishina silent grenade launcher. T

he BS-1 Tishina utilized a bolt action that cycled a blank round into place. The blank round fires and ignites the grenade propellant, launching the grenade in a fashion that reduces the signature and report of the grenadier.

Grenades explode with a good, loud bang, so you hardly notice the pop that propelled the grenade. This silent grenade launcher was developed for the Spetsnaz and saw action in their numerous little wars in which silent grenades were a necessity.

I’m pretty sure this is the only silent grenade launcher to ever be fielded.

Weird Guns from…Where Else?

I’m only one man and can only do so much research. As such, I know I’ve had to miss some very cool guns from the eastern front. As such, let’s turn it over to the community.

What weird Russian guns did I miss?

In fact, beyond the Russian guns, what sorta weird guns (of any kind) from around the world tickle your fancy?

Let me know below.

 

Ever look at a pistol, fall in love and then see the price and wonder if it’s worth it? Well, the gents over at SuperSetCA took on that exact question with the 2021 Staccato P DPO 2011 duty pistol. With the price tag over $2K, many people may really wonder if the juice is worth the squeeze.

While you may not be super familiar with the Staccato name, you may be more familiar with their former name — STI Firearms. They refocused their attention to duty pistols and rebranded to match. The P DPO pistol is their 1911 type optic-ready version billed as the world’s best shooting duty pistol.

The video breaks down their impressions of the pistol according to these categories:

•Designs/Profile
•Controls/Handling
•Sights/Trigger
•Final Verdict

Take a watch:

 

Paul starts with the design, saying that the pistol is overall aesthetically beautiful with a DLC (diamond-like coating) finish. The Staccato P DPO is slightly larger than an M&P but smaller than other 1911 pistols. It has a Dawson toolless guide rod with 13lb recoil springs.

Coming out of the box it has three stainless steel double stack magazines. It has been designed to keep the magazines from being inserted too far and causing issues that way. It has a tactical advantage mag well for easy reloading. During testing, the magazines show no problem of failure or issues. The only issue they do encounter is that they can’t find a holster off the shelf to match the pistol, the closest they get is the Safariland GSL if an optic isn’t installed.

In talking about the controls and handling, Paul states the pistol boasts large C2 version grips. The safety is in the grip and Paul says it blends with the frame nicely and has the right pressure to deactivate it. It also has a recessed slide release which is nice to prevent accidental release, but the position is hard to reach without long thumbs. To round out the controls and handling, he states that if you’re used to a 1911 type pistol, then you shouldn’t have problems running the Staccato.

Paul then turns his review to the sights and trigger. It has a direct mount optic option but with certain aftermarket ones, you will need different base plates for mounting. They test the P DPO with the Dawson iron sights that has a rear adjustable plate and a front fiber optic, which they really like. During the testing, they see that the pistol returns to neutral quickly and shoots pretty flat with good groupings at 25 yards. With a light trigger pull it is great to shoot out of the box.

Paul finishes up the review with his final verdict. When compared with other service pistols, it is reliable with no real failures in function. But is this Staccato duty pistol worth the premium pricing? Paul says you get what you pay for and in his opinion, it’s worth it.