Well, it finally was range day for the new BCA upper, and it ran flawlessly for its initial 20 rounds. I shot five rounds of 41 grains of 296 under the Hornady 225-grain FTX at 50 yards to zero the Vortex Strike Eagle 1-6X scope. Then I moved out to 100 yards and shot another five-round group with the 41-grain 296 load, making a scope adjustment. Next, I fired a five-shot group of the same Hornady 225 over 42.0 grains of 296, and then another of 43.0 grains. This hardly constitutes a ladder, which I will do next time, but the 42-grain load gave me a wonderful group of about 3/8 center to center, with a called pulled shot an inch to the left. Dang, if I had known this thing would be this accurate, I would have taken more time -- and will next range session, and will bring the chronograph. Pretty jazzed with this 18-inch upper, 1:24 twist, and my first right-hand charger. I had an Atheris upper in .458 SOCOM a couple of years ago that seemed to punch me significantly harder than the Bushmaster, but that was with the 300-grain Barnes TTSX SOCOM. With the lighter bullets, the .450 is a very pleasant round to shoot.
There were a lot of nay-sayers in the AR community when Bear Creek first started challenging price points several years back with their no-frills products and I was extremely skeptical about them. But there were a few regular shooters at my old NM shooting range whose skills and experience I respected, and when they started showing up with one Bear Creek upper, then another based on very good range performance, I changed my mind. When Bear Creek had this upper on sale on Black Friday for $239, I decided to try one and am glad I did.
My lower consists of Colfax Tactical receiver, MagPul furniture and LaRue Tactical MBT2S trigger fitted by dpcd when he built me a Grendel. The LaRue trigger is no Geissele, but it's a good one for $90.

Nice results in an interesting caliber

Glad to see your results. I purchased a complete rifle for under 400 but haven’t had time or weather to shoot it yet. Thanks for posting. Cheers. Luke

Jeff, I bought it because I have moved to pig country.
Luke, hope yours runs as well.
I have a post over on castboolits.com asking if anyone is running powder-coated cast bullets from the Lee 452-255 RF or the RCBS 45-270 SAA molds, and whether they feed. If they do, shooting the Bushie just got a lot cheaper.

Do not insert a bore scope past the Bbl extension or muzzle device.

A mill bastard file will have a smoother finish.

Local's BCA 458Socom would peel the jackets off cup/core bullets before leaving the muzzle device & the bore resembled a 1/2" copper pipe.

Good Luck

Dan, thanks for the heads up. I was going to mount a Kaw Valley linear comp in place of the BCA flash hider anyway.

quote:

Originally posted by Bill/Oregon:
Dan, thanks for the heads up. I was going to mount a Kaw Valley linear comp in place of the BCA flash hider anyway.

I LOVE linear comps - but i don't care about recoil much