After taking photos of the Micor Leader 50 bullpup for a couple of years, I finally got around to shooting it. Since Charles St.George, the designer, didn’t have a scope with it, I mounted a 2.5x Konus shotgun scope kindly provided to me by Primary Arms for use on a kid’s .22 rifle. At under $60, that scope isn’t the kind of robust optic normally picked for 50BMG, but at least it had long eye relief.
So I sat down behind the improvised bench, wadded a jacket over my shoulder to reduce the recoil and fired the first round. What a let-down — there was no recoil! I went to all that effort to protect my shoulder, only to discover that the kick was less than that of an AR10 in .308 and closer to .243. I took all subsequent shots with less trepidation but with a scarf around my lower face — the air movement from the muzzle brake was felt all the way up my sinuses. Fortunately, Charles is going to design his muzzle brake to replace the stock Armalite design. We found a way to reduce the air flow to the shooter considerably.
The scope held up just fine to the twenty five or so rounds we fired. I think it speaks volumes to the low recoil of the lightweight (17lbs) 50BMG rifle.
The gun now uses a standard Barrett magazine. I am really looking forward to the production version coming early summer. I didn’t do video, but some was taken last week showing a quick mag dump. Another, better quality video, shows more test firing.
Great shots. I’m looking forward to a review of the production model. BTW great choice of bipod. The Atlas is my favorite.
Who is the lady in the top photo? I think her fingers are longer than mine! She shouldn’t have trouble reaching the trigger on anything. And she sure looks happy with her rifle.
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What about the overpressure? I read that people who fire such rifles for a living may get health issues from that..
The massive muzzle break seen here redirects the wave backwards somewhat..
I’ve read that Soviet 122 howitzers had very low recoil for their size, for example, but such design couldn’t be used by Western armies due to risk of damage from the overpressure.. and that Soviets themselves preferred to fire them remotely, which slowed down the rate of fire..
Oh crap.
Muzzle brake, not “break”, in the above post.
I put all of one round through that beast, and while the recoil was not bad, I immediately came away feeling like someone had just tried to inflate a balloon in my sinuses. I am not sure if it was the short barrel, the particular muzzle brake, or both, but the overpressure was… interesting.
I could swear I had a comment here…
Anyway, the shorter the rifle and the more effective the muzzle brake, the more felt overpressure.
The thing is, to really reduce recoil you need to vent the gases not just to the sides, but backwards so they push against the recoil.
That exacerbates the overpressure. Firing Browning M2 is far more comfortable. If you look around google results for .50 BMG and sinus .. seems that plenty of people have issues firing non-bullpup rifles in that caliber, with quite modest muzzle brakes..
Seems no one’s tried designing a rifle with muzzle brake channelled into some sort of lightweight, backward pointing tubing..
This one… could use a suppressor or something like it, they reduce recoil too. Which seems to be in the works, judging by the comments..
A suppressor is coming. I’ll wait for it before I shoot much more. On the other hand, I also designed a muzzle brake that doesn’t have this problem nearly as badly.
Hmm.. interesting. Do you have a drawing or diagram of it?
Yes, but it goes to the patent office first.