New Ammunition from the Barnaul Cartridge Plant, Part 2 of 2

Marco Vorobiev was a member of the elite Soviet Spetsnaz in Afghanistan in the 1980s. He's a U.S. citizen now and conducts training courses that draw on his special forces training. He'll have a new installment every Wednesday.

As we toured the Barnaul Cartridge Plant during our recent trip to Russian, the good folk at there introduced several new additions to their product line bound for the American market. Last week I mentioned two new steel-cased loads for the.45 ACP that will become available stateside shortly.

Another new steel-case cartridge that would be bound shortly for our shores is the zinc-coated 9mm Kurz or .380. Though the new .380 cartridge was good news, especially in view of recent .380 ammo popularity with subcompact handguns and resulting ammo shortages, nothing was more exciting that to look at, touch and witness testing of steel-cased 6.5 Grendel ammunition. It was like witnessing a birth.

At last reasonably priced steel-cased 6.5 Grendel will be coming to the USA. I have to slow down a notch here as what we saw was pre-production prototypes. However, the Barnaul Testing Facility's personnel fired several rounds though the ballistic barrel stand. The accuracy at 100 meters was OK, but not what you would expect from the Grendel round, but it was still within Russian military set parameters. And as the development of the final production round continues, we should see reasonably priced high quality 6.5 Grendel ammo stateside very soon.