The title is not clickbait. Indeed, MDT, the company behind the TAC21 rifle, built the world’s longest rifle though the world’s longest rifle though it hasn’t been certified by Guinness World Records yet just watching the video already got us convinced. But from the world’s longest rifle MDT will cut the barrel in the pursuit of the perfect barrel length.

According to The Firearm Blog, the MDT team built a bolt action rifle with a 6-foot long barrel. With a .308 Win, they try to find the effect of the barrel length of the rifle on the round by cutting it down to different lengths. It is indeed curious experiment that piqued our interest:

What is the perfect barrel length, and how long is “too long”?

If you’ve been with us for any length of time, you know that burning questions like this don’t last long unanswered at MDT, but as usual, how do we take this to the extreme?

After some initial discussions with friends and colleagues, we teamed up with Bob Jury over at Jury Barrels, and our own Engineering Team to create something that, well, you need to see for yourself. Check out the video above where we cut this build down inch by inch keeping track of velocity along the way, the results were not what we had expected.

P.S. Note the folding buttstock, to keep it “compact” ?

The muzzle velocity decreases as the barrel is shortened as we usually know that when all things equal, longer barrels usually provide higher velocities. In airsoft we also experience that as well and we sometimes use mock suppressors as extended barrels.

If you have no scheduled airsoft event this weekend, you might want to watch this and try it in airsoft. But you’ll need to find away to make a longer inner barrel first unless you own your own airsoft company.