POF's P-15 Base Rifle: Delivering New Level of AR-15

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People don’t understand just how much things have changed in the firearms market in a relatively short period of time. The “War on Terror” started in 2001, which was not that long ago, but at the time there were truly only a handful of AR-15 manufacturers. Colt was the big name, and owned the military contracts and LE market, but they weren’t putting out anything innovative, because they didn’t have to. The other AR companies in existence at the time, or that sprung up shortly afterward, had to make a name for themselves making different or better products. POF USA, started in 2002, is one of those companies.

POF History

Patriot Ordnance Factory, founded by Frank DeSomma, manufactured its own unique design of gas-piston-operated ARs, and it is the success of their gas piston guns which has kept them a household name in the AR industry for over twenty years. This article is about their new BASE rifle. It isn’t their first direct gas impingement rifle, but the BASE is built to be a “price point” rifle, giving you everything you need and nothing you don’t, at an affordable price, from a well-known, established, proven manufacturer. And it features a number of unique parts POF has designed/developed over the years to enhance reliability and durability.

The most popular AR-15 variant in the U.S. currently is a carbine version of the original 20-inch-barreled rifle design—it usually has a collapsible stock and roughly 16-inch barrel free-floating inside some type of aluminum handguard, for a short, light, and handy rifle, and that’s exactly what you get with the POF P-15 BASE. The 16.5-inch barrel has a 5.56 x 45mm NATO chamber, is 4150 CrMoV steel with 5R rifling, has a 1:8" twist, mid-length gas system, and a black nitride finish. It also has POF’s E2 fluted chamber, which I’ll get to later.

If you’re new to the AR market, let me dive into those barrel details, as POF has made some smart decisions. While the military currently uses a 1:7" twist, the 1:8 is thought to be the best all-around twist choice, allowing you to accurately shoot everything from the lightest to the heaviest bullets. Originally, 16-inch barreled carbines used the seven-inch carbine-length gas system developed for 10- to 11.5-inch SBRs, but in the past decade or so we’ve seen a move away from that toward the nine-inch mid-length gas system. This slightly reduces the speed of the gas working the action, giving you a softer recoil impulse, and a slower bolt speed tends to increase bolt life.

The muzzle is threaded the standard ½"x 28, and tipped with an A2 flash hider. The barrel has a medium-slender profile, which helps to keep the weight down. Unloaded, this rifle tips the scales at 6 lbs., 2 oz, and with the stock fully extended balances at the forward takedown pin. For a rifle this length, it is very light, which I think is great—no unnecessary weight.

Handguard

Tucked under the handguard is a low-profile gas block with a nitrided finish. The gas block is secured in place via two set screws that are set into dimples machined into the barrel, then aggressively staked so that they physically can’t back out. I’ve seen staked gas block screws before, but I’ve never seen them staked this aggressively, and I like it—there is zero chance this gas block is going to migrate. This is also important—if your AR is going to malfunction, chances are it will be due to a problem with the gas system, and chances are that’s due to a problem with the gas block out of position. Running a rifle with a gas block that absolutely physically can’t migrate eliminates the potential for that problem.

The barrel free floats inside a 15-inch lightweight aluminum handguard. It has M-LOK accessory slots at 3, 6, and 9 o’clock which allow you to quickly and easily mount any accessories you desire—lights, foregrips, rail covers for looks/traction/heat insulation, etc. There are dimples machined into the handguard which add looks but also, a tiny bit, improve the grippability of the handguard.

There is a continuous MIL STD 1913 “Picatinny” rail along the top of the handguard, as well as the upper receiver, so you have no shortage of space to mount iron sights, optics, lasers, or anything else. Width of the handguard is 1.6-inches, and it is two inches tall from the bottom to the top of the rail. That puts this about on average with the usual “narrow” AR handguards, which feel great under your hand, but put your hand closer to the gas block. After a fast magazine or two, you’ll start to feel the heat. Hand stops, foregrips, and rail covers all help to protect your support hand or move it away from the heat and add a touch of style and personalization to your rifle.

Personally, I don’t use vertical foregrips as such but rather as hand stops, and a great tool to push/pull against a barrier to stabilize the rifle while shooting, and reduce and/or eliminate recoil, depending on how much weight you’re putting into the gun. As for rail covers, my current favorite are the HTP (polymer) models from RailScales, which are offered in several different colors and texture patterns.

Upper/Lower Receiver

The upper and lower receiver are billet forged aluminum, standard MilSpec design, with a black anodized finish. They have all the expected features and controls—single-sided selector, magazine release, forward assist, and brass deflector. The bolt catch features an enlarged and serrated lower section to make it a bit easier to lock the bolt back. The charging handle is a standard GI design.

The magazine well is standard GI on the outside, but on the interior has more of an aggressive bevel to ease your reloads. The lower receiver also sports a standard GI trigger guard and A2 pistol grip. Both of these are easy to swap out if you prefer something different, and that’s the great thing about the AR-15 design in general and the BASE specifically—this is a great base rifle (hence the name), and if and when you decide you want to change/upgrade/add things, it’s generally quick and easy.

The AR-15 is like LEGOs for men—you can swap out every part on the gun using simple hand tools, and when accessorizing them you usually won’t need anything other than a screwdriver or Allen wrench. Its modularity, ease of personalization and upgrade, is one of the reasons it is the most popular rifle in America over sixty years after its introduction, and still the main battle rifle of our military. The others are that it is light, handy, reliable, and has very little recoil. The POF USA logo is proudly machined into the left side of the lower receiver, where you’ll see that this rifle, like all of POF’s products, was made in Arizona. I like the clean robust logo as well as the pictograph markings for the selector.

A quick note about the controls—ambidextrous/bilateral controls are popular with a certain crowd of people, and you can find all sorts of “upgraded” controls like 45- (instead of 90-) degree selectors on the market. They can be useful, to a certain degree, but I grew up with standard Mil-Spec ARs and even when I’m testing a gun with ambi controls I never use them. You’re not missing anything by not having them as a general rule. The only specific upgrade I always recommend to GI-style controls is an oversize charging handle, but then again, I’m a picky, snobby gunwriter with a competition shooting background.

Reliability Starts with "E2"

On the left side of the upper receiver, you’ll see a lowercase E surrounded in white, POF’s logo for their E2 (E-squared) chamber fluting, which is really interesting. POF’s “E2 dual-extraction technology” is a fancy name for a fluted chamber. To aid extraction, four small channels are cut into the chamber. That allows a small amount of gas from the fired case to come back against the neck, breaking any potential seal against the chamber and pushing backward at the same time. This drastically reduces the load on the extractor.

Fluted chambers are nothing new; anyone who has ever examined a case fired out of an HK 91 or clone and seen the black stripes down the side has seen the results of a fluted chamber. However, fluted chambers in the AR world are not common at all. Considering the 5.56 NATO is a small, high-pressure cartridge, and inexpensive steel-cased ammo which tends to stick in chambers is very popular, fluting an AR chamber seems like a smart move, and a nice extra in an inexpensive AR-15.

Gas-piston ARs were cool, new, and hot after POF entered the market, then fell out of fashion, now are back in fashion (HK’s 416, SIG’s MCX, etc.) simply because that piston operation keeps gas out of the user’s face when running a suppressor, and most elite units these days are doing everything with suppressed rifles. When it came to gas piston ARs, POF was leading the way, and they learned a few lessons, from which this rifle has benefitted.

With a standard AR-15, the gas comes back into the receiver and pushes against the carrier. With a piston gun, it is the piston which moves the carrier, and that piston action was found to be a little harder/more abrupt on the action/bolt carrier, and caused the carrier to tilt down at the rear. POF redesigned the carrier a bit to reduce tilt potential, and also developed a new cam pin, which you’ll see in the BASE. POF’s improved cam pin is an NP3 roller design which reduces friction and drag in the action—again, a nice and unexpected upgrade on a “price-point” gun.

Behind the bolt carrier is a standard carbine buffer and spring inside a six-position buffer tube that POF didn’t source from a supplier but rather manufactured themselves, as they do almost all the parts on this gun. This is POF’s Anti-Tilt Buffer Tube which is extended a small distance at the bottom front, inside the lower receiver. It is designed to ensure that the bolt carrier is always supported by the buffer tube even when the carrier is fully forward, designed originally for their piston guns. It also features three drain holes at the bottom rear.

Other than the improved roller cam pin the bolt carrier group is built to meet Mil-Spec, with a nitride coating, and you’ll see the gas key is properly staked. Inside the lower receiver is a GI-style trigger group. POF says it is a Mil-Spec trigger group, and I know what they mean, but that description is not technically accurate—there is no Mil-Spec for a semi-auto AR trigger group. All the military trigger groups are select-fire. What they mean is this trigger group follows the basic design, and provides the standard single-stage trigger pull.

Trigger

GI-style trigger pulls are generally five to seven pounds, with a long single-stage pull that you can only hope isn’t gritty. They will lighten and smooth over time. Luckily, commercial rifles like the POF are more accurate and have better trigger pulls than the rifles being supplied to our military. The trigger pull on the BASE was relatively smooth, with a rolling break, total pull weight 6.0 lbs, although it felt lighter than that. It wasn’t until I cracked open the gun that I saw the lower receiver was fitted with two Teflon screws which can be adjusted to eliminate rattle between the upper and lower receivers. Again, a nice extra that you don’t expect and generally don’t see on inexpensive/base/entry level ARs.

The castle nut is properly staked. The stock supplied on the rifle is Mission First Tactical’s (MFT) Battlelink Minimalist stock. When it was introduced, it was the lightest AR stock on the market at under six ounces, although I’m not sure it still holds that title. It features a rubber buttpad and slots for a sling, and one QD socket tucked out of sight on the underside. A lot of people like it because it isn’t just light and feature-rich but quite strong for how skeletonized it is.

Features and Rifle Setup

To go along with the MFT stock, the rifle is supplied with one 30-round MFT magazine. I have very minimal experience with the MFT magazines, but this one worked fine during testing. If you’re going to buy extra magazines (and you should, you can never have too many, why don’t you have more AR magazines, don’t you love your mother? Don’t you love freedom and America?) I recommend GI-contract aluminum magazines with Magpul followers, or Magpul Gen M2 and M3 magazines. While those are all very good, the Magpul Gen M3 magazines are now considered the standard for reliability, and if your gun doesn’t work with one of them, the problem is your gun.

The BASE does not come with any iron sights or optic, and I don’t feel a defensive rifle deserves the name unless it has some sort of sighting system on it that will work even if your batteries are dead, whether that’s backup iron sights or an optic with something other than a dot reticle. For all of my shooting but accuracy testing I topped the BASE with an EOTECH EXPS3, and if this was my rifle, I’d pair that with flip-up irons so that I had something to aim with when (not if) my optic’s batteries died.

The above is one reason why I prefer Magpul pistol grips to the provided A2 pistol grip on this rifle. In addition to the annoying finger groove on the A2 grip, which fits almost no one, the Magpul grip has an interior storage area. I like to put spare batteries (inside a Ziploc, for water resistance) inside the grip. If at some point you want to swap out the pistol grip on your AR, all you’ll need is an Allen wrench (or a flathead screwdriver, depending on the type of screw they used).

I’ve got an acquaintance who thinks no rifle meant for defensive/social use is complete until it wears a sling and a white light. I don’t necessarily agree, but gratefully the “slingers” are incrementally more rational than the guys who think everyone should be carrying a tourniquet and screeching that “your car isn’t a holster,” usually while appendix-carrying a loaded gun that is pointed at their reproductive organs. But I digress.

If you do decide to mount a sling or light to the BASE the problem isn’t a lack of choices, it honestly might be that there are too many, especially if you’re new to AR ownership. Look around, surf the retailers, maybe watch a few videos, and talk to people (friends, gun store employees, whatever) about types and brands they recommend. It’s hard to go wrong no matter which sling you choose. Simple two-point slings got us through World War II. As for lights, Surefire and Streamlight are the two biggest names, and ModLite is making a name for themselves, but all of those are expensive purchases. If you’re on a budget, buy a handheld flashlight with a 1-inch diameter body (Surefire G2 or similar), put it in an inexpensive VTAC mount, and you’re good to go, out the door, for maybe $75.

Range Report

When heading to the range I was expecting no surprises, and that’s exactly what I got. It’s not 1985 anymore, when unless it was a Colt you weren’t sure your AR was going to run reliably. These days, if an AR isn’t 100% reliable, there’s something wrong with it. Or you’re using garbage magazines. Here’s a tip—no ProMag magazines, and no AR magazines that have bodies you can see through unless they’re Lancer AWMs or the new Magpul T-Mag—and that’s just an assumption on the Magpul, as they’re new and I haven’t actually been able to test one yet.

The first opportunity I had to shoot this rifle was during the photoshoot for the cover of this magazine. This is not precision shooting—you strike a heroic pose, trying not to look sad because they won’t let you wear your favorite Hawaiian shirt, suck in your gut, flex your biceps, and then mag-dump into a berm while the photographer (in this case the ultra-talented Andy Grossman) runs the camera and tries to capture flying brass and muzzle flash and your manly, steely-eyed gaze. I immediately noticed one thing, and Andy picked up on it too—the BASE had amazingly consistent ejection. Every case heading out the ejection port landed darn near in the same spot, at about two o’clock of my position and five feet away. I could have put down a bucket and caught all of the cases. Consistency is good, it means every part in the rifle is doing the same thing each time. It was also, I presume, a tribute to quality ammo, which in this case was American Eagle 55-grain FMJ, which gave its life so I could look cool killing dirt.

The rifle was very flat shooting, with very minimal recoil. Some of this is due to the mid-length gas system, but it also shows that the BASE is a well-balanced product. For the photo shoot and for fun later at the range, banging steel and perforating silhouettes near and far, working on my presentations, target transitions, and speed at “extended urban” distances, I topped the rifle with the EOTech EXPS3-DCR reticle (EOTechInc.com). The DCR—Danger Close Reticle—removes the bottom portion of the circle in the circle/dot reticle and replaces it with a chevron, which you use as your aiming point at seven yards and in. I’m aware of the irony (or maybe a stronger word) of topping a $999 rifle with a $789 optic.

This rifle is set up for defensive/tactical purposes more than anything else, and you’ll be hard pressed to find any police department in the country that shoots their rifles out past 50 yards during training, in part because it’s very hard to justify defensive use beyond those distances. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t practice at distance, at least just to see how your rifle groups. And to understand your drop. And improve your confidence—if you know you can hit something 300 yards away, a 40-yard shot is a gimmee. With a 50-yard zero, depending on your ammo choice, you’ll be within a couple inches of point of aim/point of impact out to 250 yards or so. Or, at least, you should be. But until you shoot out that far you don’t know for sure.

With a non-magnified red dot and a good, supported position and just an averagely-accurate AR you can hammer silhouettes out to and beyond 300 yards all day long, but it’s much easier to see, and thus do tighter groups, with some magnification. So, I used a big Leupold 3-18X scope when doing all of my accuracy testing, and when I stretched the BASE out to 200 yards. I tested the two most accurate loads—Black Hills’ 77-grain TMK and Federal’s 62-grain Fusion—at 200 yards. There was only a slight increase in MOA at that distance and that was probably due to the wind gusts I was having to deal with that day.

It’s a rare commercial AR that won’t do 1–2 MOA with ammo it likes, and my sample BASE was significantly more accurate than that with nearly half the loads I tested. POF’s BASE model seems to be more than an entry-level AR in every way but name.

PATRIOT ORDNANCE FACTORY’S P-15 BASE RIFLE SPECS

• Caliber: 5.56 NATO
• Weight: 6 lbs., 2 oz.
• Overall Length: 33.0 in. (stock collapsed), 36.25 in. (stock extended)
• Receiver: Forged aluminum
• Finish: Black anodized
• Barrel: 16.5 in. CRMOV, 1/8 in., mid-length gas system
• Gas Block: Low profile, staked
• BCG: Mil-Spec, roller cam pin, nitride coated
• Muzzle Device: A2, threaded 1/2x28
• Stock: MFT Minimalist Stock
• Pistol Grip: A2
• Handguard: 15 in. M-LOK compatible
• Charging Handle: GI
• Trigger: Single stage, 6.0 lbs. (as tested)
• Sights: None
• Accessories: 30-round MFT magazine
• MSRP: $999.00
• Contact: (623) 561-9572, POF-USA.com

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