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A few months ago, I tested the Bear Creek Arsenal's BC10, a budget-priced bolt-action AR chambered in .308/7.62x51. BCA is known for making budget-priced ARs and components, but also for cutting corners on QC and construction. My experience with my BC10 was a rough action that with a bolt that would lock up and groupings on target that looked like a novice shot them.
After I published the video, I received some helpful comments from BC10 owners on how to improve the action. Some said they had to cycle the bolt a 'couple hundred' times before it broke in. I didn't have that spare time or patience.
I stripped down the rifle, swabbed and cleaned the barrel, took apart the bolt, and cleaned all the moving parts with CLP. Following the same process as with the BCA BC15 I recently fixed, I carefully polished the bolt face lugs that engaged the star chamber. I was careful not to grind metal or round out the lugs. My goal was to mechanically simulate running the bolt hundreds of times, rubbing off the Parkerizing or whatever black finish BCA coats their parts with. After reassembly, the bolt no longer lock up, though the action still felt a bit rough. Next time I clean the bolt, I'll sand smooth the guide block on the top of the bolt. But for now, I wanted to test the lug tune-up.
In addition to my goal of fixing the bolt's action, I also wanted to see if this improved the BC10's shooting performance. I wanted to make sure the optic could reliably maintain zero, so I put in one of my most reliable scopes. I installed an ED-LHT 3-15x50 with a new heavy-duty DGSM mount.
At the range, the BC15's bolt was a significantly improved experience. The bolt cycled without locking through the first couple of cartridges failed to eject properly (possibly due to some buffing compound that might have stuck in the ejector?) It makes me wonder why BCA didn't polish the bolt lugs, at the factory, this would add perhaps 5 minutes of work on their part. A pittance that most users would have gladly paid an extra $25 in retail price. It seems short-sighted on BCA to leave it to users to fix their headache, which only reinforces negative feedback on their products.
Sadly, while my fix helped the action of the bolt, it did nothing for how the rifle shot. My groups were just as bad as my first test (and that rifle was straight out of the box with all of the packing grease!) I would get at least one random flyer in each 5-shot group, and the groups were over 3 MOA. This .308 bolt-action AR was grouping more like Mil-Spec 5.56 AR at 100 yards.
ORIGINAL TEST VIDEO