By his second design and then the final i really loved where he was going with it. I wish i had half his talent for artwork but I will have to settle for my mechanical abilities. 

His design pulls all that I think is important in the Valkyrie including the 800 series bolt face. It also grabs the eye and will give good brand recognition in my opinion.

So lets all give Uriah a big hand for a great job with the 7mm Valkyrie AR logo.

thanks for reading
Bruce Finnegan

By Bruce Finnegan

This week I will go over how the 7mm Valkyrie came to be.

The Valkyrie is a group project from 15 of us on Facebook. I originally asked on the 68forum what calibers would be a good idea to put in the 270AR case the 2 overwhelming choices were .25 and 7mm. I did the 25 first with the .257 Bobcat and the results were way better than expected. I did some research and there really wasn't very many 7mm for the AR15. So i decided to give it a go. I wanted this round to be one of the ultimate hunting rounds for the AR15.

I did a rough design in Quick Design and made a couple dummy rounds. Quick load predictions were very respectable. I then started talking with Craig Black on FB about my ideas. He was really interested in the 7mm also. By now i had the first design pretty much down. Craig had the idea to go about sourcing funds for the reamers by bringing it up on fb and see if there were 15 or so guys willing to put up 100 each to get it rolling faster. We posted the idea and predictions and in no time we had the slots filled.

We called these guys the founders. The founders gave ideas and input. We all agreed the round was going to be geared toward hunting and one of the most powerful rounds to fit in the ar15 for hunting. Some of the founders sent sample bullets for me to put in dummy rounds. By now I was finding I needed to make a few changes to the case to allow it to run more bullets so I pushed the shoulder back some and trimmed the neck .010. This left about 42.5 grains case capacity and velocity predictions were still very good. More input was given and we decided to run with it.

Reamers were ordered and the first test blank was ordered from X-Caliber barrels. When the reamers arrived my smith and I chambered the first 7mm Valkyrie in a savage. It is easier and faster to build a savage barrel than the AR barrels. I made this one 26" because my plan was when done testing I would deep chamber it to fit the full length 6.5x47 Lapua case just necked up. In the mean time i also ordered 3 profiled blanks from X-Caliber a 24" semi bull for me and a 16.5 and 20" for Rick to start testing.

By now the data I was getting from the savage was meeting the predictions and surpassing some of them. I was finding it was going to shoot the 160 class of bullets very well which was a happy surprise because it was designed around the 140's. The AR barrels came in and were chambered more testing and we decided the chamber was good as it stands 10 more barrels were ordered for the founders that wanted to be testers and that brings us up to now. The tester barrels are shipping this week a little behind schedule but better late than never.

That is how The Valkyrie or as we call it the 7 VAR came to be. I have big hopes of it catching on but I am realistic that making this wildcat is a little harder than some so not everyone will want the challenge or work. I think of it this way for performance in anything you have to pay to play as in we pay some time to make the brass for it but when done we have a round that is a legitimate big game round to 500 yards or farther in an AR15 platform. With 140 and 160 class bullets it has 1000 ftlbs of engery to 750 yards so medium and under game caliber to 750 yards. 

thank you for reading

By Bruce Finnegan
Here is my ultimate AR15 build. Since the 7mm Valkyrie is my second wildcat I have designed I wanted to build a rifle to show it off. There was a lot of behind the scenes work to get all the parts.

The first part was the custom engraved Side charging upper from Eisenach Arms with their Nib carrier and custom 7VAR laser engraved charge knob.  Jared and Josh Eisenach are in the Valkyrie founders group so I asked them if they could get the logos on the uppers and they were all for it. In a matter of weeks they put together a group buy and many of the founders got the custom uppers. A big thanks to both of them.

Next custom part that I just received is the billet lower receiver from Brandon Sneed at www.southtexasarms.net Brandon was putting on a group buy for his lowers at a great price so I contacted him to see if I could get the logo engraved on the lower and he said sure. Customer service like this is awesome and it is great there are 2 companies that will cater to us crazy guys that build guns. I ordered 2 of the lowers from Brandon and will be assembling a twin to this rifle in black with a tungsten coated barrel to sell in a few months.

The rest of the rifle is a collection of parts that I just like. Here is a list:

24” 4140 cmv X-Caliber barrel rifle gas in 7mm Valkyrie AR   manganese phosphate by my local smith, semi bull with .975 to gas block, .936 gas block and .812 to the muzzle not light but it is a shooter.

17” rail – from Johnathan Whitney

Syrac adjustable gas block with rifle gas tube

Cmmg lower parts kit from Brandon 

Geissele 2 Stage (G2S) Trigger

Ergo grip

Rifle buffer tube, spring and buffer from Brownells

Luth AR stock

Economy charge handle to fill the spot.

All Cerekote in Burnt Bronze.

I think all the parts came together vary well I have a few little accents I want to put on like black rail covers just to make things pop and a sling of some sort just haven't decided.