So I bought a PWS 216 after talking extensively with Stacy at PWS. I had some things come up and couldn't buy a second MK212 upper as well. I finally got the rifle the optics it deserved, a Vortex PST Gen 2 3-15x44, mounted in a bobro mount. I put a Harris bipod on it out front and threaded on my dead air brake and can.
I will get a full review as I get more range time, but this rifle isn't what I expected. When I first got it I was frankly disappointed. It's HUGE and HEAVY, especially with the optics and bipod. I still want a light weight .308 AR with a short barrel for hunting and I do t think PWS is the ticket for that on the basis of weight alone. For a pack gun in south texas my .300BLK SBR, or a Ruger American Rifle makes more sense from size and weight as well as performance on the relatively small thin skinned local game.
That being said, after a few range trips and getting this dialed, I LOVE THIS GUN.
Its nutty accurate with the right ammo. If I do my job it LOVES 175 SMKs, and 155 Hornadys. It was printing 1/2 MOA within the first 200 rounds consistently.
HOWEVER as many of you know shooting a 308 AR is a bit trickier than shooting a bolt gun. I am an experienced AR15 shooter so the form wasn't an issue. I am not used to shooting of a bipod, but that learning curve is easy, not overloading the bipod is key for not opening up groups even on a free floated barrel. Underloading the bipod made follow up shots slow. The biggest issue I encountered was heat in two ways, the first was stringing, as the barrel heated, which was easy to do by firing 5 shots groups in short timeframes, caused near perfect vertical stringing. As I calmed down and slowed down and put 5-8 seconds between shots the groups tightened right up. The second was the suppressor. It didn't take much more than 10 rounds for mirage to occur, and while staying cool enough to remove by hand after a few minutes of cooling, by the second 5 round group the mirage was bad and caused the group to open up.
Other suppressor owners know that they add a whole new wrinkle to shooting accurately. They throw off heat, weight, back pressure and barrel harmonics. I love and hate suppressors. My Dead Air Sandman is great on sound and back pressure and as many other dead air owners have reported they do help tighten groups and have next to no POI shift for on/off. I did notice the groups were tighter with the can, but where harder to replicate over and over again becuase I wasn't patient enough to let the can fully cool.
The gas adjustment system was FLAWLESS, FREAKING GENIUS. Easy to operate particularly compared to many AR15 adjustable gas blocks, perfectly consistent. I really liked this feature. It was easy to adjust on the fly and didn't change as round count increased, unlike other adjustable gas blocks I have used. Switching between suppressed and unsuppressed was easy and fast, something I was never able to do on a DI AR.
Finally the gun was SUPER SOFT shooting. Way softer than any other semi-automatic I have ever fired, I attribute this to piston system. The recoil impulse was particularly soft suppressed becuase of the can muffling the noise and the reduced back pressure.
Overall I like it and I would buy again, but for a DMR role not a pack/hunting rifle or carbine role, certainly not with these optics, but seeing what it can do, I am thinking about getting even higher power glass on this rifle.