DOW ARMS

Marked as a Dow rifle, the lower was made by Mega Machine, a first-class maker of lowers. Then Dow built it into a rifle.

Not every one walks to the beat of the same drum. At Dow Arms, Bruce Dow makes ARs the way he wants to. I noticed the Dow Arms booth at one of the SHOT shows, and the first thing I noticed about the Dow Arms AR was that the stock and forearm were wood. The second thing I noticed, when my editor dragged me back, was that it was a 6.8 Remington SPC. The DOW FAL-15 uses an FAL front sight assembly with the top machined to accept an M1 Garand or M-14 front sight blade. Although FAL on the outside, it still has a standard AR gas system underneath the handguards. On the upper, the rear of the upper receiver where the charging handle would be is plugged, and the carrier has a side handle to cycle the bolt. The new charging handle does not reciprocate with the carrier. The upper is also octagonal, partly so the left side has room for the charging handle and components, and to stiffen the upper. The flat top has picatinny rail slots in it.

The rear of the octagonal upper is closed off, since the side-handle charging handle doesn’t need it.

The Dow FAL-15 proved easy to handle, soft in recoil and very much fun to shoot.

The lower is marked as a Dow with caliber and serial number, but the trigger mechanism sideplate has the machining makers name on it: Mega Machine. No matter. Dow is not alone in having someone with an expensive investment in CNC milling stations do the actual lower fabrication. The resulting A2 lower is excellent in all details.

The stock is walnut, with the hole for the buffer tube bored through a blank and then the rest profiled to be an AR stock. The forearms are re-shaped FAL handguards, and very comfortable. I recall seeing a few ARs back in the old days with wood stocks. Usually, what they were was someone’s attempt at laminating wood veneers onto standard stocks. Depending on the skill of the person doing the work, it could look anywhere from pretty good to simply awful. Dow Arms gets around that by doing it right: by making them out of solid wood. The barrel, as mentioned, is in 6.8 Remington SPC, and lacked a flash hider. Bruce Dow makes precision rifles. Sniper rifles, to be precise, and he felt that the 6.8 doesn’t have enough flash to worry about, and didn’t want to have anything interfere with accuracy. As-shipped, the FAL-15 came with an IOR Valdada combat scope on it, and PRI magazines. The flat top will accommodate any optic that will clamp to a picatinny rail, and you can use either PRI or CProducts 6.8 magazines without any problems.

Too bad the Hornady V-Max arrived too late to let us test it in the Dow.

Now I only had a chance to test the Dow FAL-15 for a short time period. I managed to get it from Bruce in-between other testers, so I had little choice about range time or ammo. At the time, only the Remington ammunition was available, and we’ve since learned that the early lots of Remington ammo were, shall we say, casual in accuracy. Later Hornady V-Max and boattail ammunition is much more accurate. Combine that with the IOR low-power optic, and I had my work cut out for me. Still, I was able to punch two-inch groups from the bench, at 100 yards. Considering the cold and wind, the ammo, and my un-benchrest-like shooting skills, that was pretty good.

The FAL front sight housing is there for the sight, not the gas system.

The handguards are solid, no veneers, and do a good job of protecting your hands.

As a custom maker with his own name on the lowers, Dow can make pretty much whatever you want, but like all gunsmiths prefers to work within an area of comfort and performance. Do not expect him to be slapping together a rifle at the lowest cost for you to go out and blast ammo at the local shooting pit. He builds extremely accurate rifles that perform. I wish I’d had a chance to try the FAL-15 with a Leupold scope with more magnification on it, and with Hornady ammo. I’m sure we’d have seen some real eye-popping groups.

Two inches, in the cold, in the wind, with the low-power scope and the ammo? Pretty darned good, I’d say.