Good morning, everyone, this is John with gun.deals, and today we're going to be taking a look at one of the highest value or at least least inexpensive rifles on the market, this is the Davidson Defense Journeyman.
Getting into full disclosure on the Davidson Defense Journeyman rifle, this rifle was sent out to me for review so I did not pay for whatsoever, I have had it for a considerable chunk of time at this point, probably just under a year at this point, and I put about 16-1700 rounds to it in that time. There have been a lot of ups and downs with the rifle, I have a full video of it on my personal channel which goes into all the issues that I've had with it, some of the simple fixes, so on and so forth, but today we're going to finish off the review once and for all with quite a bit of time ammunition spent on this rifle, going through everything that it does well, some of the failure points, and updating a few things along the way.
Getting into the basic parts list, this is an incredibly basic rifle, but it is a complete rifle that Davidson Defense sells for 550 dollars, it comes with a set of iron sights, the iron sights were never very good so I really didn't use them all that much, but it does come as a complete rifle with bags, laying, so on and so forth, for five hundred and fifty dollars. That is just about the cheapest rifle out there, you might be able to go a little bit cheaper with like Bear Creek Arsenal or Palmetto State Armory, but for a complete rifle this is definitely in the lowest tier, very, very, entry level in terms of its price.
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Bear Creek Arsenal BC-15 Semi-Automatic Centerfire Rifle - 368415
$399.99
MidwayUSA
CR496N-556CM41618SS-15M3
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Bear Creek Arsenal BC-15 Semi-Automatic Centerfire Rifle 5.56x45mm NATO 16" Barrel Stainless and Black Pistol Grip
$399.99
MidwayUSA
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Palmetto State Armory Forged Nutmeg Triangle Side Folder AK47 Rifle W/ Cheese Grater Handguard
$949.99
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PSAK-GF3 Triangle Side Folder
005165492092
PALMETTO STATE ARMORY Defense PA15 AR15 Rifle USED GUNS
$949.99
Guns.com Used Guns
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ECOM00203107
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Fortunately, the part selection and the individual parts performance is decent enough, especially when we talk about its price to performance ratio. The only issues that I've had with it were in terms of the assembly, the parts themselves are all fairly good, especially when we're considering the money, but the main issue that I've had with it was the assembly, which they have supposedly gone through and updated a lot of their assembly processes to make sure that these issues that I had with my rifle don't happen to other people who buy it. Anytime you're talking about cheap stuff usually you're going to have more issue with one quality control on the parts themselves and also on the assembly, those two are going to be very, very important in dictating whether you get a good 550$ rifle or whether you get a terrible 550$ rifle with issues with some of the parts or issues with some of the assembly, that QC needs to be done well enough, and if it is for 550$ we're going to go through why this is going to be a good value if you get one that performs as well as this one does after a few minor fixes.
Starting off with the barrel, this is a 16-inch, mid-length barrel with a 4150 Chrome Moly Vanadium steel, we have a one in eight twist and a 5.56 chambering. This is a black Nitron finish, as I mentioned, the finish has held up fairly well, I've used this in snow, rain, so on and so forth, and where the engraving is on the barrel there was a tiny bit of rust where they engraved it, so they probably made the barrel, nitride at the barrel and then engraved as a final process, so that engraving probably cut down a little bit below the nitriting and so you get a little bit of rust where the actual engraving is here on the barrel.
The barrel profile is definitely a middle weight profile, so you have a straight taper in the back up to a gas block journal shoulder, and then you have a straight 0.750 taper to the end of the barrel. Incredibly simple, not a lightweight profile by any means, but definitely a middle weight profile and in terms of accuracy combined with the one and eight twist, which is very good at stabilizing a wide variety of loads, this does end up being a very accurate rifle, especially when we consider its price tags.
Moving back to the BCG, all of these parts on the build are going to be rebranded, meaning that they're not really what they say they are on the website, so I think it says like a ‘United Defense BCG’, that's not a real company, that's just a rebranding of somebody else's part. What we have is a black nitride BCG, a 9310 bolt, 8620 carrier, it is a 4130 gas key, and I believe this one here has the appropriate grade 8 fasteners on it. This one here does have the appropriate grade 8 fasteners on the gas key, which is something that I do like to see, and on top of that, the bolt is magnetically particle inspected. Overall, the BCG is nothing special, it might be a little rough in a couple places, but it has held up fairly well under 2 000 rounds.
Moving on to the upper receiver and hand guard, because they kind of go together, these are, unfortunately, the 6061 Billet upper receivers, these are very inexpensive, I believe White Label Armory is the actual OEM on these, they're very inexpensive and they're also 6061 versus 7075, 7075 like on a mil-spec upper is going to be about twice the strength to weight ratio and 6061 Billet slick side so you do not have a forward assist. If you're somebody who likes to see one you're going to pass on this, but if you don't care, most people probably don't care all that much, you don't have a forward assist on this side. That being said, the 6061 Billet, there is a little bit thicker in some places than the 7075 mil-spec uppers will be, so in terms of overall strength it might be very similar, though the strength to weight ratio is going to be lower and it is going to be one or two ounces heavier just because there Is a lot more material here.
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Moving onto the hand guard itself, the hand guard is perfectly fine if you're not planning on attaching any sort of like laser-aiming module or whatnot on the end, it is M-LOK, which is nice, 15 inches long, you have M-LOK up to 3, 6 and 9 o'clock, and full length Picatinny on top. In terms of the lockup you have just a simple clamp on the back with a steel barrel nut, I believe it's a steel barrel nut on here. The two bolts at the clamp definitely have a little bit of corrosion on them, I'm not particularly kind to any of my guns, so just keep that in mind that the finish on them is not particularly corrosion-resistance, though I also was not very kind to them.
The clamp style lockup, I believe I have these torqued down to 40-inch pounds with some blue Loctite, clamp lockups are not great on their own, they don't actually make contact with the barrel nut and they don't apply a terribly concentric force to the barrel nut, so if you apply enough force, enough rotational force, on the hand guard, you can get them to shift, which is why I wouldn't necessarily recommend putting a two thousand dollar pack at the end of a 15-inch hand guard with a not perfect lockup, even though the hand guard has held up very well, it's been dropped multiple times without much issue, it's still not the most confidence inspiring. It's perfectly fine, I believe the OEM on this is going to be somebody like White Label Armory. You see a lot of very, very similar rails floating around on the market, for the money, it's perfectly fine, it's definitely a lot nicer than like just a simple plastic hand guard, does give you a very nice long rail M-LOK, all the Picatinny you could want, if you did want to mount something out there.
Talking briefly about the gas block and the A2 flash hider, I believe they're both just phosphate coated, they both have a little bit of corrosion starting on them as well. The gas block, I believe, is a Timber Creek’s gas block, perfectly fine. The seal between the barrel and the gas block was not particularly great, pretty loose tolerances there, and that's kind of standard for really inexpensive parts, you have thousands of gas blocks and thousands of barrels floating around out there, some of them aren't going to fit together all that tight, after about the first thousand rounds it did seal up quite a bit and start to drive the system a little bit harder because some of that gas was not escaping. It still cycled perfectly fine, but for that first thousand rounds it was definitely towards the edge of reliability because the gas block was being not particularly efficient in its seal. As far as the upper receiver goes, there's nothing really special about it, the hand guard is fine for the money, the upper receiver is fine for the money the, BCG is fine for the money. The barrel is actually fairly nice, it's properly gassed and very accurate, so that's one of the components that I actually really like, everything else on the upper receiver is just perfectly fine.
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Going to the lower receiver, this is somewhere where I think everything on it is just fine, so it is a mil-spec 7075 T6 Aluminum lower receiver, perfectly fine, we have a mil-spec set of controls, mil-spec trigger, mil-spec magazine release and safety, really nothing special about it whatsoever. The trigger on it, it is mil-spec, but fairly nice, it has a rolling break and then a final pull of about five-six pounds, somewhere in that range. For a mil-spec trigger it feels really good, it's not gritty whatsoever, we also have a very forced reset, very short, Aero triggers are very good to begin with, and then five-six pounds on the pull feels very nice.
One issue that we did have with this is that during one of our initial drop tests with it I did bend a buffer tube. That's not necessarily a problem with the buffer tube itself, it could have been just the way that it happened to hit, not necessarily that it was a bad buffer tube, it is the only buffer tube that I've ever bent during a drop test, but the original buffer tube did break, it might have been an issue with the buffer tube, it might have been a random fluke, I really can't say.
The grip is one of those Ergo grips, it feels nice, it's very rubberized, it's very grippy, so if you like that sort of thing you're gonna like this, I believe it's based off of the LMT grip, and then in the back we have an adaptive tactical stock, which has this huge rubber pad on the back, which is comfy, but you don't really need it for an AR-15, it's a little bigger, a little heavier, not quite tight on the buffer tube, and it adds a little bit of weight, you don't really need it, but it is nice, some people will like it. It does nicely, though have a QD point for a sling, which is something that I appreciate as I do run slings, basically all of my slings are run on the right side of the stock, so all good there, the lower, there's nothing special about it, but for the money it does everything fairly well, I haven't had an issue with anything. The original buffer tube did break, I can't really tell you if that was an issue with the buffer tube or just the way that I happen to drop the gun during that specific drop test.
Getting into performance, what it was like to actually shoot this, in the back, I should mention, that we are just using a carbine buffer/carbine spring, so no issues there, in terms of running the system you're not going to need anything special like an H1, H2, H3 buffer, heavier spring, so on and so forth, and that is because the barrel is gassed properly. I believe it is a 0.076 gas port size, which is perfectly fine for a mid-length 16-inch gun that is going to give you about 3-3.30 ejection with M193. Keep in mind that this is not a standard upper receiver, so your ejection pattern does not translate between this upper receiver and a mil-spec upper receiver with a mil-spec brass deflector, so this ejection pattern is kind of nonsense, so if you see it ejecting at like 4 or 4.30 it's like “Oh, that must be the softest gun in the world!”, not necessarily, it doesn't really have almost any brass deflector whatsoever, you can tell that casings are kind of barely hitting the edge of it here and that's why they're kind of heading straight to the rear as what happens on most slick side uppers.
Getting into the accuracy, this is one of those areas where the Davidson Defense Journeyman actually performed very, very well. In terms of just raw accuracy that I was able to get out of it with five-shot groups, but I was able to get very, very close to 1 MOA with match ammunition and around 2-2.5 MAO with just ball ammunition. That is something that I am very happy with, especially for a barrel that is inexpensive, but it's properly gassed and it also is very accurate. It's accurate enough to be very consistent at 5-600 yards, even with just ball ammunition, I believe I was using it with a Primary Arms 4-14, and in that setup it was very accurate, very easy to use, the accuracy that I was able to get out of the barrel I am very happy with, you really can't ask much more, even for high-end Ars, getting 1 MOA or a little bit less than 1 MOA, perfectly fine, not really something you can complain about.
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Radical Firearms 7.62x39mm Barreled AR-15 Upper - 16" - Primary Arms Exclusive
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As far as all that goes, very nice, so we have a very inexpensive rifle that is gassed properly, fairly accurate and was mostly reliable. We did have a couple issues with assembly, so the biggest issue that I had with assembly was that the barrel nut was not torqued down properly and became loose during firing, I believe after the first few hundred rounds the barrel nut itself had worked loose and so the hand guard was just rotating because the hand guard just clamps onto the barrel nut, so the hand guard was moving freely left and right and I was like “Oh, that's not a good sign!”. On top of that, from the factory, the hand guard was not torqued down properly, so the hand guard just started to walk off at one point, the gas block screws came loose. There were just some issues with assembly, things were not torqued down properly and that's a really big issue when it comes to budget stuff, even if you're using budget components, if you have proper assembly, you can get the most possible performance out of those components, however, if you don't have proper assembly then you're not going to get any performance out of the them.
That is also true if you have much more expensive components, terrible assembly can make really good components performed terribly and really good assembly can make poor components or cheap components perform as good as they can. When this rifle is performing as good as it can, it was very reliable, it didn't have any sort of issues with good ammunition, it was cycling very well for about 16-17- 1800 rounds, so I definitely didn't have any parts issues. The parts, when they're set up properly, are performing very well, all of the issues that I experienced were with Davidson Defense’s assembly. Since then initial video that I posted on my channel they went through and tightened up some of their QC, some of their processes on assembly, to make sure that that doesn't happen again, I haven't heard from a lot of people, one way or the other, if they're having any more issues with them, those were the issues that I had.
On this rifle, as you know, I kind of had to reassemble it myself, after reassembly in another 500 rounds, it's been perfectly flawless, no issues whatsoever, it's very soft to shoot, it's very accurate. So, while the part selection is not the best, when it's assembled properly, it's going to give you good performance, especially when we bring it back to that price, for a price out of the box of 550 dollars. If you get one that's assembled properly or if you go through and perform a little bit of your own QC, you're going to get a rifle that does what you need it to do on a budget.
If you have a lot more money should you buy a better base rifle?
Yeah, probably, if you want something that's just a little bit better, better parts, better BCG, so on and so forth, better rail, you should probably spend some more money to get that right out of the box versus buying this for 500 and then spending another 500 dollars on upgrades you, should probably just start with something that's a little bit better to begin with. However, that's not what this is for, this is definitely a entry level gun to get people into the AR-15 platform for under 600 dollars. For that side of sort of application you're looking for your first AR, what's the best I can get for under 600 bucks. This is very good when it's assembled properly, it's accurate, it's gassed properly, so on and so forth, the issues that I've had with it were all in an assembly that has supposedly, theoretically, been fixed since my initial video, so now you should be getting a 550$ gun that's assembled well from the factory.
That being said I'm sure that you're still going to run into more QC issues with parts and assembly than say if you're buying like a BCM or something like that, but not everybody has that much money to drop on a gun. When I first got into ARs I bought the absolute cheapest things that I could and hoped that they ran, if they didn't run I kind of had to learn on the fly how to fix things and that's kind of how I got to the point where I'm at now and if you're in that boat this is not a terrible starting point and in fact might be one of the better ones on the market. Your really only other options I think are like Bear Creek Arsenal or Palmetto State Armory, which can be hit and miss on their QC as well, but they also can be good value if you get one that's put together properly and the parts work as intended. This is just another one of those options to consider.
The accuracy, the reliability that I was able to get out of this after I went in and fixed some of the assembly issues, has been very good, it's a very fun gun to shoot, it's very pleasant to shoot, it's very accurate, as I mentioned several times, so as this point I don't really have any problems with this, especially when we talk about a 550$ rifle, your mileage may vary.
