Grey Birch Solutions is new to the firearms game, by name only. The company is made up of several people from the Canadian gun industry and it’s continually expanding as it grows. Their main goal is to create high-quality and exceptionally accurate .22lr firearms and parts. The company is currently focusing on the 10/22 platform and is only a few parts away from making all the parts themselves. We first talked about the Foundation Chassis a few weeks ago. In this update we’ll expand on that a bit!
Gray Birch Foundation Chassis
When Grey Birch first started, they released a few receiver sets and carbon fiber-wrapped barrels. The receivers and barrels still used the Ruger V-Block system, which can be finicky when it comes to squeezing out as much accuracy as possible from the platform. We have used the original barrel and receiver sets from Grey Birch for almost a year with exceptional accuracy in our sample.
But the company is working on more improvements. Instead of accepting the V-Block just being part of the platform, they went back to the drawing board and decided to ditch it for a threaded barrel and barrel nut. We will have more on their Fusion Receiver and Barrel in a future article. We just wanted to mention this and show how they killed an entire product line that has been working excellently to get something even better.
Why settle right?
The purpose of this article is to give our American readers a heads up about another name in the 10/22 game heading to them soon, along with talking about their Foundation Chassis.
The Foundation Chassis is a modular chassis system for the ever-popular Ruger 10/22 style of .22lr rifle. The Foundation consists of a forend, the main body of the chassis, and an adjustable stock. You can use the chassis on its own for a 10/22 pistol build (following all appropriate laws). If you want to make a super lightweight build you can attach just the stock to the chassis and skip the forend, or just build up the full chassis.
The forend of the rifle was built with modularity in mind.
The forend is 6″ long and when it’s attached to the chassis, it extends the chassis by around 5″. It has two M-LOK slots on each of the sides and bottom for accessory mounting. Along with this Grey Birch machine an ARCA rail to the bottom of the forend to allow for it to be mounted on tripods or the various ARCA compatible bipods like the MDT CKYE-POD like we have mounted on ours.
The 6″ long forend currently offered doesn’t allow for the bipod to be slid off the front, sadly. However, the upcoming 10″ long one does allow for this. The foundation forend has exceptional clearance so free-floating even the chunkiest barrel will be a breeze. The forend itself mounts to the chassis using the small 3-slot Picatinny rail at the bottom front of the chassis.
Speaking of that Picatinny rail, if you choose not to use the forend on your build you could attach a vertical grip here.
If you absolutely needed to you could attach a bipod here. However, movements at the stock end of the rifle get closer to a 1:1 ratio the closer a bipod is toward the center part of the rifle. The further the pivot point gets away from you/the center of the rifle, larger movements of the stock are needed in order to elevate the barrel. All that said, you can absolutely attach a bipod here if you wanted to. I mean I have seen bipods on revolvers so nothing is out of the question when it comes to firearms.
The main part of the chassis has your normal magazine slot as you would expect and a Picatinny rail at the rear for all the stocks that use that method of mounting, like their lightweight stock system for the Foundation.
The Foundation takes AR-15 grips. So far we have tried the Magpul MOE K Grip as well as Rifles Refined Black Walnut Vertical Grip with Finger Grooves. Both were really comfortable. 55Six Media out of New Zealand posted a picture of it with the Magpul MOE Grip on their build and it looks pretty awesome.
The last major feature of the main body of the chassis is the hole above the pistol grip. This hole is threaded to allow for a set screw to be put pushing down on the rear tang on the trigger group. This helps add another point of consistent contact in the receiver group since normally the receiver only mounts with the one screw at the front and that tang sits in a pocket.
The Foundation Stock keeps it minimal in size while including some adjustability.
The adjustable polymer cheek rest adjusts up and down using a clamping screw and two aluminum rods. You also have three positions you can adjust the cheek rest forward or aft utilizing the four holes in the top of it. The buttpad is adjustable for LOP only operating on the same clamping mechanism as the cheek rest.
It has a polymer buttpad with angled grooves giving it a sleek aesthetic. In order to match our black walnut grip from Rifles Refined we later swapped out the polymer on the rifle for even more wood goodness. We will have a whole article down the line talking about what Rifles Refined does at a later point in time but check out their Instagram for lots of pictures. Black walnut combined with the clear hard anodizing on the aluminum parts of the Foundation Chassis adds a touch of pinky out class.
Grey Birch Solutions were the ones who put me onto Rifles Refined and will be offering some models in the future with wooden goodness as an option which is pretty cool to see. The stock also features a QD sling swivel socket on each side, giving you a way to carry your new blaster in the woods. This would go well with their RDR Fusion receiver which has a cutout in the top for mounting red dots—making for a fun varmint gun.
Shooting with the Gray Birch Foundation Chassis System
I have done a fair amount of accuracy testing with the older gen Grey Birch Solutions barrel and receiver housed in a Magpul Hunter X-22 stock. I always found that stock, much like their bipod, had some pitfalls that I just couldn’t get over. The buttpad was super low once I got a scope I wanted to use mounted. That said, my groups were pretty damn good having plenty of .5 MOA groups at 50m with RWS Rifle Match. The issue was when I was going for 10 shot groups I found they opened up a bit just because of the awkwardness of the Magpul stock.
The Foundation Chassis has a much better height for the buttpad and doesn’t require an aftermarket purchase of a higher cheek rest. The adjustments are easy using a bit from the AR-15 Fix It Sticks kit I have in my shooting bag and have held on with no need to retighten since. This has led to far fewer fliers due to me not having to focus on how I am making the stock work, along with the fundamentals.
The pistol grip mates up with the trigger area very comfortably with no annoying sharp edges, which is great as I prefer pistol grips on firearms over a more traditional stock.
The forend held the MDT CKYE-Pod well, although, as we mentioned above, you need to fully undo the clamp instead of sliding it off the front. I am looking forward to picking up their longer forend which will give a bit more options in bipod positioning since we plan to use this rifle in rimfire competitions both prone and PRS style. Small bullets are great practice for wind reading—something I badly need to improve. That said, when I eventually build up my RDR receiver set the short forend will be perfect.
Currently, you can order the Foundation Chassis and other Grey Birch Solutions products directly from the company, but rumor has it that real soon you won’t have to deal with any cross-border nonsense as Brownells plans to carry their products.
Update
We finally got our hands on the longer 10″ Forend that Grey Birch started shipping with rifles and Foundation Chassis sets. It now has 4 M-LOK slots on it and a sling swivel QD mount.
We were really impressed with the overall size of the folding mechanism that Grey Birch came up with for their stock system. It adds next to no length of pull and locks neatly in place.
We aren’t done with perfecting this rifle build just yet. Soon we get rid of the V Block but that’s for another article.
