Ruger's American Ranch In 6.5 Grendel Part I

Lobes and cams

All Ruger American Ranch Rifles have a full diameter body bolt, three lugs, a sliding ejector and a spring loaded plunger ejector. Lift is 70° and they lockup like a bank vault, enclosing the cartridge case head. The full diameter body fills the receiver bore and makes for a smooth bolt stroke.

Twin cocking cams provide increased mechanical advantage which eases effort required to cock the rifle. The Ruger American

Adjustable trigger and bedding V blocks

Ruger American Ranch Rifles produce exceptional sporting rifle accuracy. The heart of that performance is found in the stock bedding design. The Ruger Power Bedding System® utilizes the stability of the rifle’s synthetic stock to prevent rotational and longitudinal movement between the barreled action and stock. The rifle’s barrel floats in the barrel channel. Must be good as Ruger makes a commitment to sub one MOA accuracy for the Ranch rifle. Trigger pull weight is adjustable within a range of three to five pounds, adjustment is made with the stock removed.

The departure from the Ruger scope ring system to installed Picatinny rail is a little more flexible in ring placement and sight type accommodation. While the Ranch does not have an open sight option, it is certainly easy enough to mount a red dot for a fast brush gun set up, or a scope on models with reach… like the 6.5 Grendel.

Some Ruger American Ranch Rifle magazine system are modular to supports the use of AR or 30 Mini type magazines as seen on the 5.56 NATO, 6.5 Grendel, 300 Blackout, 7.62×39 versions, and 350 Legend versions. These have a side mag button release. The 450 Bushmaster  utilizes a self centering stacked box magazine with mag front release. Early 300 Blackout versions were also not modular, using a flush fitting, five round rotary type magazine.

No it’s not Hansel and Grendel

Far left, 50 Beowulf next to 6.5 Grendel. I never quite understood the Alexander Arms cartridge naming convention, at least in the context of their 50 Beowulf and 6.5 Grendel progeny. It is not like Grendel was Beowulf’s younger sibling who kept borrowing Beowulf’s car without asking permission, or who tried to use Beowulf’s driver’s license to buy beer.

In mythology, Beowulf was a human of normal proportions and Grendel was a huge ogre like monster. On size alone, the names should have been swapped with the Grendel being the big dog. Even then, the relationship defined by names between the two doesn’t work because Beowulf killed Grendel.

No, the Grendel is not a barn burner in terms of muzzle velocity, but it has an impressive 235 yard point blank range on a 3″ ordinate. Additionally, a factory 123 grain load holds onto 1000+ ft.lbs of kinetic energy beyond 400 yards and stays supersonic beyond 1000 yards. It is a very efficient 6.5mm cartridge. It is an eastern and western medium size game cartridge.

The 6.5 Grendel in the greater scheme of things

Cartridges pictured above, appear on the table top to bottom. So with all of larger 6.5 cartridges, why bother with the peep squeak? As a rifle for deer or similar size medium thin skinned game, the exterior ballistic table illustrates that the 6.5 Grendel is convincingly lethal and flat shooting out to 400 yards.

Yes, the others are even more powerful, but I would have to ask, how dead does the deer you’re hunting need to be? Especially when your collecting the benefits of low recoil, low report, high degree of accuracy, and a light and compact firearm.

For handloaders, there is greater potential to extract from applicable firearms. The case holds only modest amounts of power and primers are run of the mill small rifle type. The cartridge is easy to reload, easy on brass and easy on firearms and shooter.

With the exception of the 6.5 Grendel, 6.5 x 55 Swede and 264 Winchester Magnum, the others listed on the table were designed and developed for long range precision shooting, 800 yards to 1,000+ yards and adapted to hunting.

The 6.5 x 55 Swede, a Swedish military cartridge from 1894 and persisting in service for 100 years, became popular in North America when it arrived in the ’60s through ’80s in a flood of military surplus Mausers with tons of cheap ammunition. It is an excellent cartridge that can drop large thin skinned game, but is available in only a minuscule number of modern firearms.

The 264 Winchester Magnum, with us from 1968, is an excellent long range medium and big thin skinned game cartridge. It is loud, brash and tough on firearms and shooter. Because of the large powder charge and small bore cross section, they do best with a 26″ barrel. Great fun and a huge overkill for the deer hunter.

So where does that leave us…