GUN TESTS GRADE: A

$1895

The barrel on the Seekins grabs your eyes right off the bat. All five of our test rifles did different things to help keep weight down. The Havak Pro Hunter 2 uses six deep spiral flutes to cut down on weight and increase cooling surface area while maintaining the stiffness needed for an accurate barrel. The PH2’s barrel is a 24-inch 5R 416 stainless tube with a 1-in-8-inch twist. The free-floated barrel has a medium contour measuring about 1.2 inches at the receiver and 0.70 inches at the muzzle. The Seekins barrel is threaded for a muzzle brake or a suppressor, but only the thread protector (5/8×24) is provided. If you want to knock down the recoil some, it is up to you on how you prefer to do it.

The action is housed in the company’s newly designed charcoal-grey composite stock. There isn’t any checkering per se, but rather raised X-shapes at the forend and the pistol grip. Those didn’t provide quite as much purchase as we prefer, but that was about the only thing that less than optimal for us on the stock. The forend is almost flat from just in front of the protruding magazine to the muzzle end, making a very stable platform for shooting off bench or bag. In contrast to the traditional pistol grips on our other rifles, the Seekins stock has a much more vertical grip we really like.

Not only does the shooter get a grip angle easily used for position shooting, but the grip proper has substantial palm swells that do a great job of positioning the hand for strong-side-thumb shooting. The buttstock has a comb that is raised to the point where a small groove was cut in the comb to allow the bolt to travel fully to the rear. The forend sports a front sling-swivel stud and then a quick-detach mount just to the rear as well as a QD mount on the buttstock. The PH2 stock ends with a wide, thick, soft pad that does a great job of attenuating recoil.

Like the barrel, the action is built from a brushed-finish stainless steel. Action screws are inserted through pillars. The action proper is hand bedded at both action screws and the recoil lug. The trigger is a Timney Hunter Elite, theoretically set at 2.5 pounds. Our sample measured 2.45 pounds (pretty dang close) with virtually no take up and very little overtravel. The Timney has adjustment screws for weight of pull as well as overtravel. Those, however, are located on the front of the trigger body, so the action must be removed from the stock before they can be accessed. The bolt uses a full-diameter body with four lugs and a removable head — that option could provide a great deal of flexibility if the owner ever decides to rebarrel to a different caliber. The extractor is an M16 style, and the ejector is spring loaded. There is a groove down most of the length of the left side of the bolt in which a stud on the bolt release rides. Make sure to depress the bolt release (left side of the receiver) before trying to reinsert the bolt. The safety is a two-position rocker switch immediately behind the bolt. The rifle ships with a 20-minute-of-angle Picatinny rail attached with five 8-32 screws. The entire bolt assembly and Pic rail are black, in nice contrast to the bead-blasted stainless action/barrel and the charcoal-gray stock.

The bottom metal on the Seekins is alloy and helps secure the detachable carbon-fiber (that’s right, not metal) three-round magazine. Spare magazines are available from SeekinsPrecision.com. The release is a lever using a series of ridges inside the trigger guard. Release was simple and not prone to an inadvertent mag drop.

Standard SAAMI Cartridge Overall Length (C.O.A.L.) in the 6.5 PRC is set at 2.95 inches. Seekins claims its magazine is slightly over length, and our handy dandy Hornady digital caliper confirmed the mag’s internal dimension at 3.14 inches long. We were of the belief coming into this test that just as with the 6.5 Creedmoor, many rifles chambered in 6.5 PRC would lend themselves to reloading. The extra length in the magazine might allow a custom reloader to seat a very long, high-BC bullet in a case destined for the Seekins and still not have the bearing surface of the bullet extend past the bottom of the case neck. Without delving into the depths of precision-rifle reloading technique, that is a very desirable feature.

Our Team Said: The PH2 showed excellent accuracy with the factory Hornady 147 ELD-M, averaging a mere 0.59-inches per three-shot group. We loved the vertical pistol grip and the comb height.